The lawsuit was issued against Cadare Information Technology Ltd, a company which controls the iPlay.com.br site.

iPlay distributed a piece of popular P2P file-sharing software known as K-Lite Nitro, which allows users to download from several P2P networks including Gnutella, OpenFT and Ares.

In February this year a judge decided that rather than force iPlay to remove K-Lite Nitro from its site, the software should have a copyright filter implemented instead, to block sharing of unauthorized music. The anti-piracy groups promptly provided a list of 4 million tracks to be filtered.

However, the ruling fell flat since iPlay are not the developers of the software and have no control over it, so the case headed back to court.

Following a trial on August 25th, on Monday this week the 6th Civil Chamber of the Court of Paraná in southern Brazil handed down an unprecedented ruling.

The judge came to the conclusion that since the proposed K-Lite Nitro filtering mechanism was ineffective, he had no alternative than to issue a complete ban on the software instead, saying that the website offering it would be assisting the copyright infringements of its users.

He went on to suggest that any website offering the software alongside advertising (i.e, trying to profit from offering it) would be committing a crime, punishable by between two and four years in jail.

“By this logic, virtually any site in Brazil that offers P2P clients would be subject to accountability, to have their business threatened by the alleged illegality of the act of hosting certain types of software,” said Omar Kaminski, author of attorney Internet Legal, a blog specializing in IT law.

Announcing that Cadare Information Technology will appeal the decision, Nelson Cadare Luciano, owner of iPlay said: “We will defend ourselves because we always had the feeling that it [K-Lite Nitro] is not illegal since you can use it to share legal content as well.”

APCM said that the ruling is “important for the future of the digital music market in Brazil.”

Currently K-Lite Nitro has been removed from the iPlay site, but can be obtained from a number of other sources.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Now, thanks to intense lobbying from the music and movie industries, the government is considering giving Ofcom these powers more quickly.

Business Secretary Lord Mandelson, the man being touted among his Labour party voters as the successor to Prime Minister Brown, is said this morning to have been “persuaded by the argument for tough laws to curb illegal file-sharing.”

But what could’ve prompted this renewed aggressive anti-piracy stance from Mandelson? According to a report today, the Business Secretary’s intervention comes after he and David Geffen – the billionaire producer who co-founded the DreamWorks studio with Steven Spielberg – had dinner with members of the Rothschild banking dynasty at the family’s holiday villa on the Greek island of Corfu.

The consultation document on Government’s latest plans – which could be included in the Queen’s Speech later this year – could mean the criminalizing up to 7 million British citizens including Internet restrictions and fines of up to £50,000.

UK Pirate Party leader Andrew Robinson is naturally against these draconian fines. “You’re branding a huge percentage of this population criminals for doing something that doesn’t have any proven implications,” he said this week. “It’s a ridiculous state of affairs. People who copy a movie are lumped in with people who steal cars.”

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Sure, we could make fun of these people. Or we could help them with an easy way to download torrents without having to know about the pros and cons of enabling DHT in uTorrent. Littleshoot decided to try the latter approach with a new BitTorrent browser plug-in that is being unveiled today.

Littleshoot’s BitTorrent plug-in has been in the making for quite some time now. The company behind it was founded by the former Limewire developer Adam Fisk who initially set out to develop an application for sharing data within a circle of friends. Littleshoot eventually changed directions towards general purpose, browser-based P2P and finally launched last November, albeit without BitTorrent integration.

The plug-in’s first iteration looked a little like a solution that didn’t really know which problem it wanted to solve. Littleshoot offered Gnutella downloads through your browser as well as the capability of publishing data on a separate P2P network that is based on the open source SIP protocol. Both were great in theory, but people hardly shared any data via Littleshoot, and when it comes to media sharing Gnutella isn’t exactly the first choice anymore either.

Enter BitTorrent. Fisk teamed up with Julian Cain for this release, who previously developed the Mac torrent client BitRocket as well as Kazaa’s never-released OS X client and who has also been involved in a bunch of other P2P projects over the years. Their ambitious goal is to transform Littleshoot into something like the Flash player of the BitTorrent world. Install it once, then forget about it, and it will work with any content, on any site.

I’ve had a chance to test multiple builds of the client over the last couple of weeks, and I must say Littleshoot has come a long way towards achieving this goal. Install the client, visit any torrent site, click on a torrent download link – and Littleshoot starts do download the files in question right within your browser on a Web 2.0-ish download page. The client even automatically starts a Flash-based audio player if you download an MP3 file, and files can be easily forwarded through Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.

It also offers a search page that makes it possible to simultaneously search isoHunt, Youtube, Flickr, Yahoo Video and the Littleshoot P2P network, or any subset of these services. This search page may not be that useful to advanced users that prefer sites other than Isohunt, but again, it’s a great feature for beginners.

Littleshoot doesn’t come with any configurable options at this time. All data is saved in a default download directory, and the client seeds files indefinitely. However, Fisk told me that future versions of Littleshoot will offer the option to shut down the client after a certain ratio is reached. The current download page already offers details about your ratio as well as your up-and download rates. Speaking of future changes: Littleshoot is still clearly in beta stage. The Windows version seemed especially rocky in earlier builds that I got to test, but most things seem to be working when it comes to the final version that has been made available today.

So what’s the final verdict? Littleshoot may still have some room for improvement, but it’s definitely promising. Not only because this is the first BitTorrent client your mom will be able to use, but also because the Littleshoot team definitely has its eyes set on bigger goals.

One of the plans for future releases is an SDK that will make it possible for website owners to offload the distribution of any file to Littleshoot. Just drop a few lines of Javascript in your blog, and your MP3 file will be available as a P2P download. Says Fisk: “If a site relies on P2P services, they’ll display an “install plugin” window, just like the user sees when they don’t have Flash on sites that require it.” Kinda makes you wonder how long it will take for a torrent site to integrate something like this for all of its files.

The new version of Littleshoot is currently available on this beta page and will launch on the Littleshoot home page later today.

—

Guest author Janko Roettgers is a Los Angeles-based journalist. He is also the editor of P2P Blog.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

This cuts to the crux of public consultations. Conclusions can only be as good as the data these consultations receive. We have seen many times how companies are willing to lie repeatedly when it comes to P2P, in order to maintain their positions. From Comcast and their ‘Sandvining’, the incorrect accusations of lawyers, MediaDefender and their entire business model, to anti-piracy agencies pushing their unique version of events to get the police to conduct raids. In an area where the people with the money and influence are well known for avoiding the truth on occasion, will the BERR release all documents to allow public scrutiny and thus ensure accuracy?

The answer, in a nutshell, is no. TorrentFreak contacted the BERR and pointed out that confidential submissions are as likely to be marked as such to cover lies and diversions from the truth as confidential business practices, and wondered how this was going to be handled. Also, as the BERR likely doesn’t contain experts that have the depth in knowledge of this subject as our readers, will they be able to spot errors without the public assistance that publishing would bring? Clare Keen at the BERR press office responded saying:

On the issue of standards of evidence, all responses received are considered on their merit. We expect there to be differences in opinions and in information respondents choose to submit in support of their position. However we do not rely solely on such submissions or a single information source when deciding policy. We use a range of sources to enable us to cross check and investigate claims to develop our own understanding and arrive at our own conclusions.

On your second point, in our experience the main reason why a company requests that their response be kept confidential is because their submission has included details of their own commercial business/contracts or operations – information they do not wish their rivals and competitors to have access to.

We would always seek to collaborate or cross-check key points of information. Additionally if a party deliberately provided false information they would risk losing all credibility within Government on future consultations or discussions.

However, it may be a moot point. The Guardian newspaper reported on the consultation saying that a proposal by Ingenious Media was getting serious consideration. The company, a London based consulting and venture capital firm, has reportedly proposed making broadband providers legally liable for copyright infringement by their customers. In return they get a small sum every time a legal download of a song or film happens. Where the money for this will come from, or what will qualify (such as Jamendo or other CC music tracks) for the payment isn’t mentioned. Also not mentioned is how an ISP is supposed to be able to regulate the actions of their customers, without using highly invasive methods, worse than the DPI methods that have already been protested.

The BERR finally published the non-confidential recommendations today, and the BERR has told TorrentFreak that the number of confidential and partially confidential responses were ‘a small number’. In a nutshell, though, the only respondents that wanted a co-regulatory approach, were rights holders. Everyone else expressed no desire for it, and significant concerns were raised over transparency and privacy issues. We’ll have a more detailed look at responses later.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The big advantage NiN and Radiohead have, of course, is that they already have a huge fanbase. From a standing start it would be difficult for relatively unknown bands to give their music away, and it would be much harder to get people to donate. To see if this would indeed be the case, and to get an impression of how much revenue an artist can generate from the donation model, we decided to crunch the numbers from Jamendo.

Jamendo is one of the largest music sharing sites where users have the option to donate to artists they would like to support. Since the site launched in June 2005, close to half a million users have signed up. In three years, the site has turned into one of the largest music sharing communities. However, it seems like the donate buttons are gathering dust.

Before we go into detail, we want to make it clear that Jamendo is one of the best free music services on the Internet, as it brings together artists and fans. This post is not an attempt to write about how Jamendo failed, because the site is much more than a ‘download and donate’ platform. What we want to show, however, is that donation based music models are not money magnets for the average artist.

We decided to examine the total number of donations up until October 25, 2008, and the results are quite revealing. Of the 423968 users, 1650 have donated something, little under 0.5%. In total, these users were good for 2712 donations adding up to just over $36,000. This translates into an average of little over $10 per donation. The largest donation on Jamendo thus far was 200 Euros ($250), impressive, but not as impressive as the $5000 NiN’s Trent Reznor donated when he downloaded his ‘free copy’ of Radiohead’s album.

The top grossing artist on Jamendo is Rob Costlow, with just over $1000 in donations over three years. On Jamendo, his two albums were downloaded more than 50,000 times, and over half a million people have streamed his music on the site. Jamendo currently has close to 10,000 artists (not all of them accept donations), and 648 of those received at least one donation. To some this all sounds quite disappointing, but does this mean that artists shouldn’t use donation based services such as Jamendo?

The answer to this question is simple. If their goal is to make thousands of dollars from it, probably not. However, that is not what most artists intend to do. They want their music to be heard, create an audience and pick up some fans here and there. The people who download their music for free, and like it, are potentially the people who visit their gigs, buy merchandising, and tell their friends about this great band they discovered. Lesser known artists will never be able to generate a decent income from donations, but making their music available for free sure is part of a viable business model.

Update: In the title of the article we used “NiN’s Donation Model”, this is not completely accurate. Radiohead had more of a donation model than NiN.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Since then, we’ve seen a couple of dozen reports, all with a totally different outcome. Some estimate that P2P traffic represents approximately 50% of the total traffic, while others go as high as 85%, or as low as 20%. The overall consensus seems to be that there is little consensus, or is there?

We think we might have spotted a trend, not so much in the data, but in the companies that publish these reports. Most Internet traffic research is conducted by companies that offer traffic shaping and broadband management solutions. Cachelogic, Ipoque, Sandvine, they all sell (or sold) products that help ISPs to manage their traffic.

Consequently, it is not a big surprise that their presentation of the results is often a little biased. After all, it is in their best interests to overestimate the devastating effects P2P traffic has, and convince ISPs that they need to throttle these awful bandwidth hogs.

Or as Sandvine co-founder Dave Caputo puts it: “Bulk bandwidth applications like P2P are on all day, everyday and are unaffected by changes to network utilization. This reinforces the importance of protecting real-time applications that are sensitive to jitter and latency during times of peak usage.”

In Sandvine’s report we see that P2P represents less than a quarter of all downstream traffic, and even less during peak times. Web traffic is most dominant and online media streaming sites take up nearly 16%.

On the upstream side, P2P traffic takes up 61% of all traffic (the black makes it even more scary), followed by web-browsing, tunneling and VoIP traffic.

Interestingly, the amount of bandwidth that is transferred on the Internet has more than quadrupled since the first reports came out a few years ago, and it is likely to quadruple again in only a few years. Unlike Sandvine suggests, throttling is not the solution. Investing in the network is.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

It must have felt like an attack from behind when the RIAA heard that they lost its only major court victory, with a mistrial being declared in Capitol V Thomas. Making things worse, the Department of Justice, viewed by some to be the bully’s trusted lieutenant, turned on the content industries by soundly criticizing a bill aiming to increase copyright and patent enforcement powers.

The Thomas case is now a proverbial millstone around the neck of the RIAA. At first it looks impressive, and gives a frightening impression to anyone that thinks to challenge them, but now it’s starting to drag them down. Not only was the decision in the case thrown out, the statement by the judge in support of the mistrial reads like a critique of the legal arguments put forward by the RIAA over the last 5 years.

Yet, the millstone around the neck is not just in the refuting of legal arguments. It also extends to the excessive damages that were awarded in the first trial. The $9250 per infringement has been argued to be so far past constitutional restrictions on excessive punishments, that it has brought it into public attention. Because of this, it may end up reducing the maximum amount of damages and fines that can be awarded, which may also undermine the settlement encouragement (or ‘pay instead of fight’) strategy. The end of the judge’s order says it all:

While the Court does not discount Plaintiffs’ claim that, cumulatively, illegal downloading has far-reaching effects on their businesses, the damages awarded in this case are wholly disproportionate to the damages suffered by Plaintiffs. Thomas allegedly infringed on the copyrights of 24 songs – the equivalent of approximately three CDs, costing less than $54, and yet the total damages awarded is $222,000 – more than five hundred times the cost of buying 24 separate CDs and more than four thousand times the cost of three CDs. While the Copyright Act was intended to permit statutory damages that are larger than the simple cost of the infringed works in order to make infringing a far less attractive alternative than legitimately purchasing the songs, surely damages that are more than one hundred times the cost of the works would serve as a sufficient deterrent.

While 24 songs is more like two CDs (than the three the court states), that damages should go from 4000x losses (assuming 3CDs) to 100x, means that the $222,000 would be more like $5,550. That’s quite a difference. The same could be applied to amounts demanded in pre-trial settlements, where the RIAA has often asked too much. The court’s math is far more reasonable, despite being calculated using retail CD prices, which have all manner of mark-ups and distribution costs that are not relevant to digital music included. A digital download doesn’t have to pay for the CD blank and doesn’t have to pay for transportation to the store. There are no printing costs or middlemen profit. The court gives an estimated cost of $2.25 per track, the actual cost for a download is more than seven times less than that.

Of course, other arguments, ranging from definition semantics, to trying to use criminal law as precedent, were denied as well. Some of these arguments were novel, others seemed like desperation.

The other news from Wednesday didn’t help either, especially in the muddling of civil and criminal enforcement of copyright. The Department of Justice sent a letter to Senators Leahy and Specter over the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act (EIPRA) of 2008, which passed through the Senate judiciary committee last week. It stated that the Departments of Justice and Commerce had ’strong and significant concerns’ with portions of the act. In short, they said they didn’t want to be used as free lawyers for the entertainment industry, and also felt that the position of an ‘Anti-Piracy Czar’ would be, surprisingly, unconstitutional. When even the US Justice department, which has seemed indifferent to the US Constitution in recent years, uses it as an excuse to oppose new powers, it could be likened to rats leaving a sinking ship.

Of course, the past week hasn’t been only bad news for the RIAA and its members, it’s been bad press for them too. On Monday, they elected to proceed to a jury trial in Maverick V Harper, with a date set for November. The RIAA were unwilling to accept a $200/infringement settlement offered by the judge. In taking the offer, they would have had a win, but at a lower amount, and left the potential for innocent infringement defenses. However, with the Thomas mistrial ruling two days later, negating any precedent they hoped to point to, and undermining some of the possible defenses, it may seem they have gambled on a treble-or-nothing bet.

The case in question centers around 38 songs, although only 6 were downloaded by MediaSentry. What can make this case interesting is that MediaSentry may be in violation of the law, regarding Texas based investigators, and that the age of the defendant – Whitney Harper was 16 when the infringements allegedly occurred – make an innocent infringement defence possible. Attacking a young girl for actions in her teens may not play well with a jury.

All in all, a bad week for the RIAA, and it may only be the first of many. We may never know if the article written by New York based attorney Ray Backerman did anything to to bring about a closer examination of the RIAA’s cases. Nor can it be overlooked that Wednesdays are not the RIAA’s best days – exactly a week before the Thomas and DOJ setbacks, they set themselves up as targets of ridicule by suing Beckerman. They accused him of allegedly doing what they have been repeatedly accused of doing – irony indeed. Many people are doubtless wondering what excitement October 1st will bring.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

There is no need to register, everyone can search for, and play as many tracks as they like. There is even a queue feature in place for those who want to play more than one song. Registration is free, and offers several benefits, as it enables users to create playlists, add favorites, download tracks, and includes all of the other features Grooveshark offers. This is when it gets even more interesting.

TinySong is linked to Grooveshark, which is best defined as an online version of iTunes, including a store where you can buy songs and a social network where you can connect with other users. Grooveshark allows users to import their music library, which they can then access from any computer with an Internet connection. Users also have unlimited access to streaming music they don’t have in their own library – for free.

Perhaps one of the more interesting features of Grooveshark, for TorrentFreak at least, is that it is a P2P based service. Users who upload their local music library to the site will make it available to all other users. Users are rewarded for every song they share and receive “song credits”, which they can use to buy new tracks. The end result is one of the largest P2P music libraries around with millions of tracks in the collection.

There is also a commercial aspect to the site of course, as Grooveshark offers paid downloads. The downloads are available in different formats, high quality and DRM-free. Individual songs cost 99cents, and can be downloaded to a local computer once purchased. “FLAC, OGG, MP3, anything that’s available online will eventually be in our catalog,” Grooveshark’s Josh Bonnain told TorrentFreak. “We’re currently the only music company, or media company for that matter, that could easily one day offer a selection of over 50 million files.”

Grooveshark has potential, as it’s basically iTunes “in the cloud”, powered by P2P and with a social network on top of that (yes, a lot of buzzwords). All you need is an Internet connection, and you’re hooked up to one of the largest music libraries in the world. Josh told us that there are no deals with any of the major record labels yet, but they are working on it. They do pay royalties though.

“Due to the fact that all content which enters Grooveshark is monetized and made legal to purchase, we will in actuality be able to collect most every song in the world in due time,” Josh told us. “Many members like this, as they don’t need to store music locally, and can listen to all of the live, rare, unreleased, lossless and so forth content which there was no access to before.”

In sum I would say that TinySong is one of the easiest ways to share single tracks with your friends. The Grooveshark service is promising as well, and a great way to access your music library (and more) if you’re not at home. The paid downloads are still too expensive though, even though they offer high quality and DRM-free songs. Getting the labels behind it will be a challenging endeavor, as we already spotted some prerelease tracks (and the Beatles), that made their way from BitTorrent to Grooveshark.

TinySong Search (gotta love BuckCherry)

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

At the moment, the top three BitTorrent sites host are handling the majority of all BitTorrent users, and even worse, The Pirate Bay tracks well over 50% of all public torrent files. BitTorrent has welcomed many new users over the past three years, and we are now in the uncomfortable situation where the downtime of one of the larger sites may cause problem for the others, simply because they can’t handle the traffic.

This is exactly what happened last month when Mininova was offline for a day due to a hardware problem. Mininova has well over three million visitors a day, these people went to other sites while Mininova was down, and this increase in traffic got some sites in serious trouble. The question is: Is there an alternative?

The answer to this question is yes and no. A solution to the tracker problem that works pretty well is DHT, or “trackerless torrents”. With DHT you can still connect to other people who are downloading the same file, even when the tracker for that torent is not working properly. Thanks to DHT, people were able to download torrents that were tracked by Demonoid.com, up to six months after the tracker went down. The downside of DHT (the mainline version) is that not all clients support it, and that it is maintained by one company, BitTorrent Inc.

Replacing BitTorrent sites is even more complex. How do you find torrents when there are no BitTorrent search engines that store them? A possible solution to this problem comes from researchers of Cornell University, who developed an Azureus plugin named Cubit. The Cubit plugin allows you to find torrents, and doesn’t require a centralized server as BitTorrent sites do. You basically search for torrent files among other peers, similar to Kazaa and Limewire. An interesting concept, but unfortunately, this also has a lot of downsides.

Cubit opens the gates for floods of spam, because it misses one key feature: moderation. Since BitTorrent has become so popular, anti-piracy organizations like MediaDefender and BayTSP are constantly uploading fake files, and scammers are uploading malware and spyware, often wrapped in fake media players.

To most people is goes unnoticed, but sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay have a dedicated team of moderators that remove hundreds of fake and scammy torrents a day. Together these moderators remove more than a thousand torrents per site, day in and day out. In addition, most BitTorrent sites also use IP-filters to prevent known scammers and anti-piracy outfits from uploading their content again.

So, for now, Cubit is not yet going to replace BitTorrent sites, as they need to address the lack of moderation first. Tribler, another application that is developing a BitTorrent site replacement that seems to be far ahead of Cubit, already implemented such moderation features and spam filtering. Branded as the “social” BitTorrent client, is also has community features that many people appreciate.

In sum, I think it is safe to conclude that BitTorrent as it is has some weak spots that could cause problems in the future. The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt – the top three BitTorrent sites – are all involved in a court case. Depending on the outcome of these cases, the need for alternative search technologies may become more apparent. For now, however, we need BitTorrent sites, and in particular their moderators.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of May 27, 2008…

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

A few months we already reported that uTorrent overtook Azureus’ position as the most installed BitTorrent application, and this trend continues. LimeWire’s popularity on the other hand is declining worldwide. Nonetheless, it is still by far the most installed filesharing application.

LimeWire going down, uTorrent on the rise

From December 2006 to December 2007 LimeWire lost approximately 25% of its user base. By the end of 2007, 17% of all PCs in the United States had LimeWire installed, compared to 23.3% last year. Similar drops occurred in Europe, Latin America, and the rest of the world. The most loyal LimeWire users come from Australia, where the install rate is 27%, only a slight decrease compared to the 30.4% in 2006.

The uTorrent user base on the other hand is rapidly growing. uTorrent installs more than doubled in nearly every part of the world in the last 12 months. The BitTorrent client is most popular in Europe (11.6%), as can be seen from the graph below.

As a result of uTorrent’s growth, other BitTorrent clients such as Azureus and BitComet are going downhill. Azureus and BitComet now have an average install rate of 1.4% and 1.7% respectively.

Regional Differences

The regional differences in popularity of p2p applications are also worth mentioning. The data show that uTorrent is far more popular in Europe (11.6%) than in the United States (5.1%). Limewire on the other hand is well-liked among Aussies (27.0%) and Canadians (27.2%), but has less followers in Latin America.

Emule is still very popular in Latin America, where 16% of the PCs have the application installed compared to only 1% in the United States and 3% in Europe.

Home vs. Business PCs

Unsurprisingly, P2P applications are more frequently installed on home computers versus PCs at the workplace. Nevertheless, almost one out of five PCs at work (18%) have at least one P2P application installed. For home computer this is little over 1 in three (36%)

P2P Market share 2008

We also compiled a pie chart of the market share of the different P2P applications as of January 1st 2008. Please note that the data is a bit skewed since most of the data comes from participants who were based in the United States. LimeWire is without a doubt the winner here.

Finally, we want to make it clear though that install rates do not equal usage. The fact that someone installed a P2P client does not mean that they actually use it.

Based on the amount of traffic that is generated by each P2P application, uTorrent would be the absolute winner.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

TMF said it will use the information to signal trends and target their audience.

Initially, TMF announced that it would count downloads from file-sharing networks for their new Superchart, as more people download music than buy it. However, they canceled this plan last week after protests from the music industry, who said it would send out the wrong message.

TMF, however, now say that they will use data from filesharing services as one of the sources for their playlist selection.

Wouter Rutten, the spokesman for the Dutch IFPI said he doesn’t see the use of P2P data as problematic as long as they don’t explicitly use it for their music charts or advertise it in any other way.

The negative reaction from the music industry on the pirate chart was to be expected, but also a little hypocrital. Last year we reported that Interscope Records, and probably other record companies, use P2P data as a marketing tool. They determine which tracks they will release as their next single, based on what people are downloading.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“This is a visit from the prevalent Piro virus! Stop P2P! If you don’t I’ll tell the police!” it exclaimed, while another message threatened: “Ah, I see you are using P2P again……if you don’t stop within 0.5 seconds, I’m going to kill you!”

Graham Cluley, a consultant for Sophos said of the virus: “This is one of the most bizarre pieces of malware we have seen in our labs for quite some time, but it’s data-destroying payload is no laughing matter.”

Now, the Japanese police say that they have apprehended the three man gang responsible for the creation and distribution of the virus. One man wrote the code, they say, and the others placed it on file-sharing network, Winny.

However, due to Japanese law, it’s going to be tricky for the police to nail someone for creating the malware. They have a trick up their sleeve though, explains Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos: “It isn’t illegal to write viruses in Japan, so the author of the Trojan horse has been arrested for breaching copyright because he used cartoon graphics without permission in his malware.”

The virus creator is a a 24 year old graduate student from Izumisano City in Osaka. It’s claimed he illegally used copyrighted images from an anime television show to create the virus.

The other two members of the group – a 39 year old man from Osaka and a 35 year old man from Hyogo – were also arrested for copyright offenses, unrelated to the virus. The men are suspected of uploading anime episodes onto the Winny network.

One of the images from the virus includes a song about fish-shaped pancakes stuffed with jam, which makes about as much sense as arresting a virus creator for copyright infringement. But hey, this is the 21st century – what did you expect?

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

A group of musicians calling themselves ‘The Overdub Tampering Committee’ (TOTC) have just made a rather unusual announcement. For the last 3 years TOTC have been downloading newly-leaked albums from the internet and using them to create new versions of the tracks. They added their own instruments, and used additional production techniques in the style of the original recording, to create a subtle remix of the original.

Within hours, they then re-released the slightly modified albums back onto file-sharing networks and BitTorrent sites such as OiNK and The Pirate Bay. “If you illegally download music on the internet the chances that our work is in your collection is very, very likely! In fact, you might have a whole lot of us!”, they claim. In fact, ‘Polluting’ P2P networks with this music didn’t end the spread. TOTC have seen their works spread as far as radio stations. No prizes for guessing where they got it from.

It all started around 4 years ago, a member of TOTC downloaded an album only to hear that someone had tampered with it in the middle. This got them thinking: “What if this problem got more insidious, subtle, and widespread? What if there was a network of musicians who got a hold of albums right as they leaked, added subtle yet very much additional overdubs all over the album, and then re-leaked it to the internet?” That’s exactly what they have been doing for the past few years.

Even though the group seem to want to ‘pollute’ P2P networks with these ‘remixes’, they also dislike the music industry:

Attempting to police and punish “illegal downloaders” with lawsuits and fines is misguided and, in our opinion, a waste of time. This model treats the music fans as criminals. That’s an insane business model. But we expect nothing less than insanity from large, crumbling corporations. We do not know how the music industry will change in the next few years and we don’t know how a method will arise to ensure that musicians are properly paid for their recorded work. We have no solutions.

TOTC, who are all members of other active bands, say they have even released tampered versions of their own songs, and uploaded them to the Internet. “That was particularly fun for us.” they said. But what is the group’s opinion on file-sharing itself? They say they don’t think it’s wrong and download stuff themselves to test before buying on physical media.

So what was their motivation to do this?

“All we wanted to do was fuck with the treasure everyone’s hunting for to realign everyone’s perspective.”

We contacted TOTC for some additional information, but they haven’t replied so far. The Overdub Tampering Committee manifesto can be found here. (via Idolator)

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“I own a certain CD, but it got scratched. So I borrow the same CD from the library and rip it to my computer.”

He then asks the public whether they think it’s wrong or not. Normally the more extreme the examples are, the more hands are raised, but when he spoke to an audience of 500 college students, something different happened.

Finally, with mock exasperation, I said, “O.K., let’s try one that’s a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album. You don’t want to pay for it. So you download it.” There it was: the bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating factors whatsoever. “Who thinks that might be wrong?” Two hands out of 500.

Pogue was blown away by this response, and he realized that there is a clear generation gap when it comes to copyright morals. Indeed there is, but what else do you expect from a generation grew up with iPods, CD-burners and the biggest copying machine ever invented (the Internet) at their fingertips. There’s a whole industry built around filesharing, take the 160GB iPod for example, any idea how much it costs to fill that with legally purchased songs?

Computers and the Internet made it easier than ever to reproduce and share files, and it is virtually impossible to stop people from sharing and copying music and videos online. I’m not talking about copying movies for profit here, just for personal use. Besides, sharing files is not as bad as most anti-piracy lobbies want people to believe.

A recent study has shown that people don’t buy less CDs when they download songs, instead, they discover music they otherwise wouldn’t have listened to, and buy more CDs than people who don’t download. On top of this, research continues to show less popular artists actually profit from piracy simply because it allows people to try new music.

From people who missed an episode of their favorite TV-show I often get the question whether it is legal for them to download these off BitTorrent. For them, the only way to see that show is to download it, again, they don’t make any money off it, they just want to see an episode they missed. Is that immoral?

Personally I think it is all about alternatives. Movie, TV and music companies should put their content online and make it available in high quality for a reasonable price without restrictions such as DRM. At the moment there are often no products online that can compete with their pirated counterparts in quality. Sure, there are ways to download (some) music and movies online, but apart from the ridiculous prices, these products are often offered in a low quality format and restricted through DRM.

The thing is, the entertainment industry should learn how to embrace technology and compete with piracy, instead of fighting its customers. The rise of illegal downloading is a signal that customers want something that is not available through other channels, it’s more about availability than the fact that it’s free, as illustrated by the missed TV-show example.

Honestly, the real problem isn’t so much about protecting the rights of the artist, but about protecting the revenue stream for the big media companies. The people who actually create the movies and music want their content to be shared, only the large corporations behind it are too afraid to move on. Lobby groups such as the MPAA and the RIAA represent the distributors of movies and music, NOT the creators. They even pay politicians to support their cause by voting for or against laws so that legislation is made with their interests in mind. Is that moral?

The main reason why these corporations are hesitant to go online is because they are trying to make most of their money of something that can easily done by the public – distribution. They are striving to preserve outdated business models because that’s how they make their money. I’m not proposing that everyone should just pirate everything, but I suggest that the movie and movie industry make their content available online for a reasonable price.

The Internet and filesharing technologies make it possible to make production (of the copies) and distribution costs disappear, yet the prices still don’t change. Why? Because they cling onto their old business models.

So should sharing copyrighted material be legalized? Not per se, but the entertainment industry should focus on monetizing filesharing networks instead of bringing them down. Sharing is a good thing and there are tons of possibilities to profit from it.

What do you think?

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The survey – carried out online and financed and operated by a trio of industry organizations, similar to their well-known US counterparts – RIAJ (music), the Japanese MPAA and ACC (software) – concluded that the number of internet users sharing authorized media climbed from 3.5 per cent in June 2006, to 9.6 per cent by September 2007, a near 180% increase.

The numbers of files downloaded increased by a large amount too. June 2006 saw an average of 194 files downloaded per user which increased to 481 by September this year. Audio files topped the download charts with 211 per user with video coming in next with 183. People downloaded an average of 43 images, 33 documents and 14 pieces of software.

The survey found that the favorite P2P sharing application in Japan is still Winny with 27 percent. LimeWire, which is very popular in the West took 18.8 per cent of the vote with WinMX sitting at 15 per cent.

BitTorrent, which is incredibly popular all over the world with tens of millions of users, ranked just 6th with 7.4 per cent.

Japan hit the file-sharing news headlines earlier this year when a bizarre virus on the Winny network attacked files and displayed strange messages.

TorrentFreak looks forward to being able to report a dramatic growth in Japanese BitTorrent users next year.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“Never work with children or animals” said WC Fields. TorrentFreak takes a chance:

TF. Hi Hannah! How old are you?

- I’m 10 in 12 days

TF. What sort of music are you listening to right now?

Sean Kingstone, Shayne Ward and High School Musical 2

TF. Where did you first get into music?

- On the music channels, on MTV.

TF. When did you get a PC?

- People had computers but I couldn’t go on them but my Dad bought me one last year. I have internet.

TF. What do you do on the internet?

- MSN, talking to friends and cousins, games and dressing-up games [dolls]

TF. When did you first start using the internet to get music?

- My cousin showed me YouTube and then LimeWire and I was like “whoa cool!”

TF. What was cool about it?

- Because you can put anything in and it will come up and you don’t actually pay for it. Well you have to pay for the internet and LimeWire comes with the internet but you have to pay for that so LimeWire isn’t really free.

TF. Ok…I see….Do you get music from anywhere else?

- My cousin gets it from BEBO. She copies it from other people’s pages and puts it on her own.

TF. Do you think it’s ok to copy the music?

- Yes it’s ok because she only does it to make her page better.

TF. So you’re sure that it’s ok to copy it? What do you think about copying?

- I suppose it’s not ok to copy but people copied it off her site so she just copies theirs. It’s like, you’re copying my t-shirt so i’m copying you on shoes.

TF. Ok, so a bit like copying school work?….Hmm….ok, let’s talk about copying on the computer again. When you started using LimeWire, did anyone ever mention that if you did certain things you might be breaking some laws?

- Why would they put it [music] on the internet and invent mp3 players if it was against the law?

TF. Confusing isn’t it?….You mentioned you like Sean Kingstone – what if I told you that Sean Kingstone’s boss might send you a letter asking for money because you shared his album on LimeWire? What would you say to him?

- W.E! [whatever!]

TF. Come on, play along with me. What would you say if he did?

- I’d say “tooooo strict!” and anyway he can’t make me do anything. He’s not the boss of me, he’s the boss of Sean Kingstone.

TF. What do you think might happen if you didn’t pay him?

- Nothing. I’m too young to be charged by the government so he can’t charge me.

TF. Would you carry on using LimeWire after he sent the letter?

- Yeah!

TF. Why?

- Because you can get good albums off there. Duh!! My CD’s don’t work in my mp3 player so LimeWire is the only way to do it. I bought High School Musical 2 on CD but it won’t go on my mp3 [player]

TF. How would you make LimeWire better?

- To speak to the person sending the music to make sure they send the right one, sometimes they send stuff that doesn’t even play.

TF. Do you know what a pirate is?

- They have parrots [effects 'arrrrr']

TF. Do you think its legal or illegal to copy a CD or DVD?

- Some men right, they sell you a DVD at the market but when you get home it doesn’t play, that’s illegal.

TF. Why is it illegal?

- Duh!! Because they tell you it works and when you get it home it’s rubbish and jumps in the middle and its a waste of money!

TF. Do you think you should be paying for stuff off LimeWire? You have to buy CD’s from the shop…

- You have to pay for CD’s because they’re actually on a disc not on the computer. My cousin, right, she uses LimeWire when she doesn’t have any money for CDs.

TF. Did you ever download anything by anybody and then go to see them?

- I got stuff by Lee Ryan and Simon Webbe and then I went to see Blue. Why don’t you ask me what my favorite hobby is?

TF. Ok, what’s your favorite hobby?

- Dancing to music, it’s fun!!

Thankyou, Hannah. That’s it! Have a nice birthday!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In this specific case Interscope asked MediaDefender to check whether one of “Pussycat Doll” Nicole Scherzinger’s leaked singles is getting some traction on P2P networks. Her first single “Whatever U Like” isn’t selling well and they want to find out if pushing the track “Baby Love” is a good idea. Valuable information for them apparently, and it shows that P2P is not all bad, it’s a tool.

Here’s a quote from an internal MediaDefender email that was leaked on BitTorrent:

Nicole from pussy cat dolls has a single called “whatever u like”. It’s not selling well on itunes or playing that great on radio. A song called “Baby Love” just leaked (I don’t know how long ago). Interscope wants to know if Baby Love is picking up steam on p2p. They need to make a decision by early next week on whether they should switch to this song as the single. Please get me a score comparison on Monday for these two tracks. Also, please put beyonces, fergie, gwen, and nelly furtado singles as comparisons.

So, while the RIAA is suing the heck out of downloaders claiming that they lose them money, their monitoring of P2P itself is providing a rich source of information that businesses love. It enables the label to gauge the mood of the pay market in advance – a glimpse into the future – to ensure that they don’t alienate their customer base by giving them stuff they don’t want. In a business, this type of market foresight can be invaluable. Nearly always leading to more profits, customers feel happier and more satisfied with the products they are offered, leading to greater loyalty longer-term.

MediaDefender checks how popular the song is, produces some nice graphs, and Interscope releases the single if it’s popular enough, saving the label money and pleasing their customers more as they do so.

Long live P2P!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Ipoque reports in a preview of their 2007 P2P survey that BitTorrent is generating between 50-75% of all P2P traffic. P2P traffic is responsible for 50%-90% of all Internet traffic which means that BitTorrent traffic is generating somewhere between 25% and 65% of all Internet traffic.

However, there is quite a bit of regional variance in the use of P2P applications according to Ipoque: “eDonkey exhibits a regionally varying popularity with shares between 5-50% of all P2P. In certain regions, other protocols have gained a significant importance. In the Baltic States, for instance, DirectConnect has a proportion of about 30% of all P2P traffic”

Ipoque reports that all P2P traffic is still growing. Joost is not yet posing a threat to ISPs, but media streaming services and VoIP applications show significant growth. For example, Ipoque reports that Skype generates up to 2% of the overall traffic in certain networks.

It is probably good to know that this Internet traffic research is often conducted by companies that offer broadband management and optimization solutions. It is in their best interest to overestimate these figures because they design the traffic shaping applications that help ISPs to manage their precious bandwidth.

The 2007 P2P survey will be presented at Technology Review’s Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT, more details later.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The Harvard project is all about a fresh new approach. To be honest, have we seen a new trick since eMule and Bittorrent started? Things have clearly slowed down in the last years.

The Harvard researchers are currently working on one of hardest P2P problems, ensuring uploads. P2P dies or thrives depending on how much upload people donate. By introducing electronic “currency” for uploads they think they can make P2P HDTV Video on Demand possible. With the minor detail that we all have to switch to their client…

The latest version of Tribler enhances the standard tit-for-tat BitTorrent algorithms with something they call the give-to-get algorithm (PDF article). This new algorithm allows their users to benefit from a good ratio without using a central server like private BitTorrent trackers do.

Tribler users can still join every BitTorrent swarm and play the tit-for-tat game with old-school BitTorrent users. But, when they meet another Tribler peer they switch to give-to-get mode where the currency meter is running. This turns the Tribler network into a private Tracker network without the central server. This basically means, the more you share, the faster your downloads will go.

Every Tribler client keeps an eye on MByte counts of fellow peers. They gossip around about who is a leecher and who is a top dog, without the details of which Hollywood movie it was. The only information displayed about this in the GUI is a list in your profile of the “Top 10 Tribler Uploaders”. For the next version of Tribler they plan to turn that list of top dog uploaders into a decentralized trust system and enable users to correct typos and add tags to the content. In short, BitTorrent would go “2.0″.

But let’s first see if they can really handle network pollution and spam without a central server. It will be quite tricky to get such “Google PageRank” trust algorithms working in P2P.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.