“We’ve been tracing spam back to them for at least over a year, ” said Pirate Bay Administrator brokep. “We’ve tried talking to MD for quite a while. Finally they called back yesterday but was not willing to talk about us having to report their clients to the police for breaking the laws they’ve broken. Now we see no other alternative but to report these incidents, as they don’t seem to stop and as they are really serious crimes they commit.”

He also gives a nod to the huge community of fan out there, “we’ve had help from irc’ers going through all the emails from MD.” It seems that the Pirate Bay, should be called the ‘Hydra Bay’, as each time it takes a hit, it comes back stronger than before. The ten companies reported to the police, are:

• Atari Nordic AB
• Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (Uk) Ltd
• Emi Music Sweden AB
• Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB
• Sony Bmg Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB
• Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB
• Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB
• Ubisoft Sweden AB
• Universal Music Group Sweden AB
• Universal Pictures Nordic AB

Just more ongoing revelations that have resulted from what we quite rightly called “The biggest Ever BitTorrent Leak”…

Source: PirateBay Fires a Broadside of Complaints to Police

The BitTorrent community is growing at an almost alarming rate, its popularity is surging and more people than ever before are discovering its wonders. The mighty Suprnova captured the imagination of millions around the world, giving huge momentum to this file-sharing phenomenon, collecting millions of daily hits before its demise.

Today, sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay are enjoying unprecedented levels of interest. Mininova served up 1 billion torrents in their first 2 years of operations, then stormed to 2 billion in just a further 6 months whilst capturing almost double the daily traffic of Suprnova in its prime.

The Pirate Bay almost needs no introduction, such is its size and comparable infamy. A jaw-dropping BitTorrent behemoth, gathering thousands of visitors each day who between them download 4 million torrents. Its vistors make 86 searches per second, its servers handle 1150 requests in the same timeframe and it tracks 50% of the world’s torrents.

That’s 50% of ALL public torrents. That is a dangerously high number of eggs in a basket that’s frequently coming under an attack of one form or another.

With the authorities always looking to take the biggest scalps to grab the headlines, sites such as LokiTorrent and EliteTorrents stood no chance, especially considering the huge financial implications of residing in the USA. Major BitTorrent site admins realized this and mainly moved their operations to the Netherlands, a location which is now looking less of a safe haven. The Dutch situation is of particular concern – there are dozens of strategically important torrent sites hosted there.

So what is the solution? brokep of The Pirate Bay has some thoughts that I happen to completely agree with.

“There are too few sites and trackers right now” he said, “things have been to concentrated to the big sites and that really sucks!”

Although it’s great initially for the mainstream to have visible big ‘brands’ such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova and TorrentSpy, it’s a precarious situation to have such a top heavy structure to the BitTorrent community. It’s great having a ‘multi-headed hydra’ but not so great when just one of those heads carries half of all the public torrents. This situation must be addressed. Resources need to be spread around in a manner which ensures that a few ‘big bombs’ are unable to dismantle major parts of the infrastructure.

There is a solution, as brokep says, “I really love the small specialized sites, I hope to see more of them. I would love to help out with starting up more, but it’s also important that we who already run sites do not start more of them.”

He’s right. The more sites like The Pirate Bay provide what the BitTorrent community want, the less likely it is that people will venture out on their own to create their own sites. In the current environment, the hydra needs thousands of heads which are resource-hungry to target, not just a dozen juicy fat ones which stay nice and still, with the authorities just waiting for a subtle change in, or interpretation of, the law. A change which is inevitable, in both Sweden and the Netherlands.

TorrentFreak asked the admin of a US-based tracker how they manage to stay alive, despite having 20,000 members. “People are too hung up on MPAA and RIAA content. There’s an enormous library of material out there which you can track and no-one bothers you. We’ve got over 4000 torrents and we’ve had just two or three informal takedown requests in the last couple of years. If people want to start a tracker, indexing non-RIAA/MPAA content and specializing in something else is a great way to start building a community, even when you’re hosted in the States”

brokep gets the last words. Very wise words;

“So public message to people – start up your own torrent sites, make the internet the hydra it is and needs to be. If there’s hundreds of sites, they can’t all be shut down. And well, if they shut down the few that are today, there will be hundreds of sites, I’m sure, but let’s start them before so we can spread the word of them easier.”

Source: BitTorrent Survival: The Way of the Hydra

TorrentFreak talked to a representative of the League of Noble Peers who said: “It’s been about a year since we finished the first film, and it’s given us a lot of time to reflect. It’s safe to say that this film is more reflective, and we have really been trying to get to grips with some of the questions the first film raised. We realized that to go forwards, we had to go back, people may be a bit surprised about *how far* back.”

As a TorrentFreak representative, I was fortunate enough to be present when the STF crew interviewed Brokep from The Pirate Bay and Erik from Mininova, and experienced first hand how dedicated they are to turn this project into a great film, that we’ll all want to “steal”.

And there is more, as one of the producers of the film explains: “We can reveal that a certain Mr. Cohen, is in the film. as well as some other big names. In short it’s an interesting moment for us. We have all this material and all these ideas, and we’re working hard to make a film that will be a small part of the conversation in the coming months.”

But the film needs your help, a documentary about P2P and piracy wouldn’t be complete without input from you, the peers. So, if you are interested in doing some voice-overs, or want to record your personal message for the content owners, join the League of Noble Peers:

“Express yourself to the full extent of your capabilities, using costume, mask or avatar, from Second Life or ‘real’ life, whether you’re young or old, drunk or sober — you are a Peer and we want to hear from you. Use a Camcorder, a Webcam or a Microphone — record the statement in the best quality you can.”

So do you want to be in the Steal This Film II? Hurry up and get your 15 frames of fame now!

Source: Steal This Film II Needs Your Help

Several people are interviewed in the documentary including Lawrence Lessig from Creative Commons, Tiamo and Anakata from The Pirate Bay, mashup artist Danger Mouse, a Russian street pirate, and many others.

Even MPAA CEO Dan Glickman makes an appearance, he briefly comments on their involvement with the raid on The Pirate Bay last year. Glickman also says that he knows that the MPAA will never stop piracy, but that they are trying to make it as difficult and tedious as possible.

We’ve included some short clips from the documentary in this post but I recommend everyone to download the real thing, it’s worth it. Feel free to donate something to the makers of the documentary if you enjoy watching it.

Source: Documentary: Good Copy Bad Copy

Soon after the raid several sources reported that the MPAA initiated the attack. Apparently they directly influencing Swedish authorities to intervene in this specific case, which is considered illegal in Sweden (the term is “minister rule”).

To make it even worse, it turned out that the US had threatened to put Sweden on WTO’s black list because they didn’t take the Pirate Bay down. This threat should have have made the Swedish government move even quicker. It is assumed that Swedish authorities hinted to the prosecutor to take action, and even though the prosecutor wrote a PM a before the raid in which he stated that it was impossible to convict the Pirate Bay, the letters from the MPAA probably changed his mind.

It later became public that John Malcolm, Executive Vice President of the MPAA wrote (PDF) to Sweden’s State Secretary in which he stated, “It is certainly not in Sweden’s best interests to earn a reputation among other nations and trading partners as a place where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated.”

Following the raid the Swedish pirate party got thousands of new members in a matter of weeks. Suddenly, they were the largest party without parliament seats. This success has also led to pirate parties forming in a number of other countries: France, Italy, USA, Belgium, Austria, and very recently also Germany, Spain and Russian. There is also one forming in the UK. Together, they have founded PP-International, which is an international collaboration forum/group to exchange experiences, ideas and such, and Sweden has a very important role here.

In August 2006, three months after the raid the documentary “Steal This Film” was published. This excellent documentary gives some more insight in the events that took place May 31, 2006, In this documentary The Piratebay admins tell how the raid went down, what happened after the raid, how the MPAA was involved, how the US had threatened to put Sweden on WTO’s black list, the Pirate demonstration, and how they were harassed by police officers and more.

Up until now the servers of The Pirate Bay are still in custody, and prosecutor HÃ¥kan Roswall announced earlier this month that he will press charges against the Pirate Bay admins. However, The Pirate Bay said it’s not impressed by the announced prosecution, and according to a leak within the Swedish police, they don’t have much to be afraid of.

Source: The Pirate Bay: One year After the Raid

“ISPs often advertise music as a benefit of signing up to their service, but facilitate the illegal swapping on copyright infringing music on a grand scale.”

It’s kind of a strange statement, what is copyright infringing music anyway? As far as I know music in itself cannot infringe copyright. Apart from this (and other speling errors), their point just doesn’t make any sense. Sure, ISPs advertise their high speed connection with phrases like “download as much music as you want”, but they never say “download as much copyrighted music as you want”. I guess the IFPI doesn’t know that there are plenty of legal services available where you can download music for free, such as Jamendo.

To make it even more funny, the IFPI also takes on The Pirate Bay by stating:

“Pirate Bay, one of the flagships of the anti-copyright movement, makes thousands of euros from advertising on its site, while maintaining its anti-establishment “free music” rhetoric.”

First of all, they probably mean advertisements, but even then their statement doesn’t make sense. Sure, The Pirate Bay generates revenue from the ads on their site, but most of it is used to pay the 20+ servers they need to keep the site up and running and the bandwidth bills. And even if they were millionaires, that doesn’t make the music less free does it?.

Those are not the only “inconvenient truths” that don’t make sense, there are a whole bunch of them. The “truth” that piracy doesn’t create jobs, tax revenues and economic growth for example, as far as I know it does. What about all the high speed internet connections pirates use, those are not free. Or iPods, harddrives, CDs and DVDs pirates use to store all their pirated stuff? There are plenty examples I can come up with that show that piracy is creating a lot of Jobs, tax revenues, and even economic growth.

The only thing that’s inconvenient about the inconvenient truths summed up by the IFPI is the fact that they’re not true.

Source: ISPs Facilitate Filesharing according to the IFPI

This is not the first time that The Pirate Bay is rebranding their site to piss off content owners. When Apple’s OSX x86 leaked. in July 2005, they renamed the site to the Pear Bay, and linked to the leaked torrent. Back in July 2005 The Pirate Bay put up a logo inspired on Grand Theft Auto for the release of their new website, the Grand Theft Bay. Apart from being creative with their logo’s TPB is known for their hilarious responses to copyright owners who request takedowns.

This pirate attitude is picked up by more mainstream media, and as a result the TPB admins have a chance to ventilate their opinions in the Sunday Times, Vanity Fair, and Forbes to name a few. The Pirate Bay fares well thanks to all this publicity and is currently tracking over 4 Million torrents. Moreover, it is estimated that approximately 50% of the public .torrent files are now tracked by TPB trackers.

Arrr.

Source: Pirates of the Internet: At Intellectual Property’s End

Btswarm.org

Btswarm.org is a fast and clean BitTorrent site that is available in 5 different languages. The site currently indexes 107,907 torrents, which represents over 80TB of data. Btswarm supports search based RSS feeds, a great feature that every site should have in my opinion.

SumoTorrent.com

SumoTorrent who recently partnered with FileSoup, one of the oldest BitTorrent communities, collects the BitTorrent stats for our monthly stats post. But, they also serve torrents and offer not only .torrent links but also Azureus magnet links, and DHT links.

One of the things about SumoTorrent that I particularly like is that they have their own tracker, something more BitTorrent sites should do. At the moment 50% of all the torrents on public trackers are tracked by The Pirate Bay All hell would break loose if they were taken down.

FlixFlux.co.uk

FlixFlux is a BitTorrent site that focuses on movie releases. On the frontpage they list the US box office charts, DVD rental charts, and the UK box office charts. If you register you can also keep track of your favorite movies on the site. FlixFlux has a description for every film including the IMDB rating and plans to add movie trailers and for their torrents soon, which is an interesting feature.

A similar site also dedicated to movies torrents is Superfundo, they focus mainly on Scene and aXXo movie releases.

TorrentTAB.com

TorrentTAB is a new BitTorrent meta-search engine that displays the search results in a tabbed view. Personally I’m not a big fan of meta-search engines, but I know others like it. The tabbed searching works quite well. TorrentTAB site currently searches Isohunt, Mininova, Torrentz, BTjunkie, Meganova, and Torrentspy.

JunkNova.com

JunkNova is a torrent review site that keeps you up to date on all the stuff that’s available on BitTorrent, similar to sites like rlslog and hypoh. JunkNova is brought to you by the makers of TorrentScoop, a Google-powered BitTorent search engine.

MicroTor.org

The last site in our list is Microtor, a site that only indexes TV torrents. MicroTor allows you to browse through the available shows and seasons and they also have a brief plot outline for every TV show.

Do you know any new BitTorrent sites that are worth a visit? Feel free to leave a comment!

Source: New and Promising Torrent Sites

The police and prosecutor HÃ¥kan Roswall desperately tried to find something they could use against the Pirate Bay crew, but it now seems that they have very little to go on. Brokep, one of the Pirate Bay admins writes on his blog:

“I talk to alot of people that are somehow connected to other interesting people – one of them told me that the police officer in charge of the case against The Pirate Bay actually has _nothing_ to give the District Attorney. Still he’s pressing charges.”

Last December, the district court decided that the servers, including some servers of The Pirate Bay’s ISP, PRQ, that have nothing to do with the BitTorrent tracker, would remain in custody till June 1, 2007. Time is running out guys.

In hindsight, the raid was highly unsuccessful. TPB was only down for a couple of days before they returned in full force, even stronger than before, thanks to the widespread media attention.

Source: Police Has No Evidence Against The Pirate Bay

Up until now, we weren’t completely sure if this was going to be the YouTube killer that TPB fans everywhere have been talking about. But a statement published today on The Pirate Bay Blog outright confirms it:

“YES – we’re going to do a video streaming site. It’s true. It’s in the works being done right now and as usual we put a bit of Pirate Bay mentality behind every project we do.”

And it’s exactly that “Pirate Bay mentality” that, in our opinion, is going to make this site a winner. Think YouTube without Google constantly pulling down copyrighted videos.

Some clever TorrentFreak readers and TPB fans managed to locate the URL of the upcoming YouTube competitor. It is: thevideobay.org. All you can see on the site is a plain page with two lines of text:

only open for beta- and dev-testers.
some is live, most is not. we will open for public when done.

Stay tuned!

Source: The Pirate Bay to Launch YouTube Competitor

Unfortunately, several popular torrent sites carried advertising for these bad clients but thankfully, sites like The Pirate Bay saw the damage these things can cause and removed the adverts. TPB’s brokep wrote, “We’re getting a lot of email about people downloading torrent clients that are advertised on the site. Do not download them! We have put a ban for the ad companies to sell ads for these clients on our site.” Mininova and Snarf-it also blocked the adverts.

In February, we reported on yet another client, TorrentQ after a tip-off from the owner of BT-Junkie. Of course, this wasn’t a new client but the old one with a new name.

In April, in order to try to save unsuspecting file-sharers from installing malware, we ran Google Adword campaigns on the BitRoll, Torrent101 and TorrentQ websites, informing people of just how bad these clients are. Google apparantly doesn’t like to be associated with bad news and a few days later, Adsense adverts disappeared from the sites.

Disappointingly, we are now exposed to yet another ‘new’ bad torrent client. Get-Torrent is the latest in a sequence of malware-laden torrent clients, cloned from the same infected DNA as BitRoll, Torrent101 and TorrentQ. As can be seen from the client’s ‘skinning’ pages, these products are identical;

As we promised in our earlier posts, every time a bad client appears we will do our best to let the BitTorrent community know about it. Anyone thinking of installing a BitTorrent client should stay away from these products and install a free, clean client, such as uTorrent.

Source: Malicious BitTorrent Clients: New Coat of Paint, Same Bad Story

A post by brokep on the Pirate Bay blog reveals that the site has had some unwanted visitors and not very pleasant ones at that. These people, whose identities have already been discovered by TPB crew, exploited a vulnerability in the site’s blogging software to take a copy of the site’s user database, “That is, your username and passwords” says brokep.

But the site’s members have nothing to fear, brokep continues;

“the passwords are stored encrypted, so it’s not a big deal, but it’s still very sad that it’s out there. All e-mails are for instance encrypted as well, they will most likely not be able to decrypt them either (they are _very_ encrypted).”

The advice for Pirate Bay members is to change their passwords as soon as they can and if they use the same passwords on other sites, they should change those too.

“Sorry for the mess, but we are all human and we miss something sometimes.”

True, we all miss things. Personally, i’m hoping to miss something tommorow evening but i’m worried I may be forced to catch up at a later date. Thanks a lot.

Source: Booty Plundered from Pirate Bay is Useless

The explanation for this sponsorship has nothing to do with politics though, it was simply because one of the Pirate Bay’s admins worked at Rix Telecom.

As Pirate Bay admin Brokep puts it.

“It’s called guilt by association – one of our previous ISPs (with clients like The Red Cross, Save the Children foundation etc) gave us cheap bandwidth since one of the guys in TPB worked there; and one of the owners have a bad rumor for his political opinions. That does NOT make us in any way associated to what political views anyone else might or might not have.”

He continues:

“IFPI and the other antipirates cannot stop us with legal actions so they’re trying to make us look bad instead. A couple of years ago they tried with calling us left-winged, now it’s right-winged. Come on, make up your minds? The Pirate Bay itself has one political opinion – share your files, your culture. It’s about technology that gives you your freedom.”

On a sidenote, Bert Karlsson, the host of the Swedish talkshow owns a record label and is believed to be a right-wing extremist, perhaps not the most objective person.

Let’s move (sail) on people…

Source: Pirate Bay Politics for Dummies

Now, it appears that Roswall, who compared The Pirate Bay and the Bureau of Piracy (Piratbyrån) with terrorists last year, does not want to give up just yet. Roswall said that he is determined to prosecute The Pirate Bay admins for breaches of copyright law, for helping others break copyright law, and conspiring to break copyright law.

Swedish news agency The Local talked to Tobias Andersson from The Pirate Bay, who said:

“We expected this, and of course we don’t think they will succeed. I think they feel they have to do it. It would look bad otherwise since they had 20 to 30 police officers involved in the raid”.

The Pirate Bay raid caused quite some controversy in Sweden after several sources reported that the MPAA initiated the attack by directly influencing the Ministry of Justice to intervene in this specific case, which is considered illegal in Sweden.

Source: The Pirate Bay Not Impressed by Announced Prosecution

Apparently hacking is not a problem for the Prince of Sealand, and Gary McKinnon is welcome to come in even though the United States is accusing him of perpetrating the “biggest military computer hack of all time.” This extraordinary news was made public earlier this week on the Infosec security conference where Mckinnon was one of the members of a ‘hackers panel’.

It is absurd of course, especially because Sealand’s webhosting company HavenCo has no no regulations concerning copyright, while malicious hacking is explicitly prohibited. Perhaps they’re just trying to get some more publicity?

In other news, The Pirate bay is finalizing it’s search for their very own Pirate island, and we will hear more about this in the next weeks. It’s not going to be Sealand, but who wants that pile of rust and concrete anyway?

Source: Sealand Prefers Hacker to The Pirate Bay

So excuse me when I get excited when I see a post like this from Brokep, one of the Pirate Bay admins.

.. maybe less than two weeks. or something like that. Yes. maybe. a couple of days. It's coming.

Of course we asked Brokep for an explanation. He said:

"The past, the present and the future. It's all the same, but one thing's for sure, we will radiate for weeks"

His answer immediately put an end to all speculation, it (no it’s not about Sealand) really is coming! Excellent! Just 2 weeks, and the BitTorrent community will change for good!

Stay tuned!

Source: The Pirate Bay: “It’s Coming!”

Of course these campaigns were just for “fun”. It was nice to turn their advertising strategy against them, and help some naive BitTorrent users along the way. However, the downside of it all is that they now make money off my ads, which allows them to advertise their crappy BitTorrent clients on other websites, so it’s not really an optimal solution.

Here’s an example of the TorrentFreak ad on the Torrent101 website. If people clicked the link, they were directed to this post about Torrent101.

Luckily, most BitTorrent site admins don’t allow ads for these shady clients on their sites. Brokep from The Pirate Bay said earlier “We’re getting a lot of email about people downloading torrent clients that are advertised on the site. Do not download them! We have put a ban for the ad companies to sell ads for these clients on our site.”, and the admins of mininova and btjunkie also banned all ads for these BitTorrent clients on their websites.

People need to be aware that these clients can seriously mess-up up your computer, and the Google adwords campaigns were a fun way to do this. I’m happy to see that Google search is giving a helping hand as well, for free.

Source: Using Adsense to Fight Malicious BitTorrent Clients

The project turned out to be a great success, over 100.000 votes were casted in less than three weeks. It is not sure if there will be another OscarTorrents night next year, if it is up to the OscarTorrents team, there wont be.

On the site we read” “to the MPAA and Big Hollywood. We hope we won’t have to do this again next year. Hopefully you’ll do it for us”

But that’s probably not going to happen. The list of all the OscarTorrent winners can be found over here.

Source: BitTorrent Oscars: Pan’s Labyrinth Big Winner

01.Australia
Favorite Site: Mininova

02. Romania
Favorite Site: Mininova

03. Greece
Favorite Site: Mininova

04. Netherlands
Favorite Site: Mininova

05. Canada
Favorite Site: Torrentspy

06. United Kingdom
Favorite Site: Torrentspy

07. Sweden
Favorite Site: The Pirate Bay

08. Slovakia
Favorite Site: Torrentz

09. Malaysia
Favorite Site: Mininova

10. France
Favorite Site: Mininova

–

12 Unites States
Favorite Site: Torrentspy

It is remarkable to see that there are some clear differences in the origin of the visitors among BitTorrent sites. Mininova is the most popular BitTorrent site in Australia, Torrentspy in Canada, and perhaps less surprising, The Pirate Bay rules Sweden.

The numbers below show how popular these sites are. 59 for Australia means that mininova ranks 59th in the list of most visited sites in Australia.

Mininova
59. Australia
78. Romania
78. Greece
81. France
92. Netherlands

Torrentspy
63. Canada
68. Australia
77. United Kingdom
77. Croatia
84. United Arab Emirates

The Pirate Bay
17. Sweden
34. Norway
61. Denmark
64. Finland
127. The Netherlands

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is quite dubious. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.

Source: BitTorrent Most Popular in Australia

The raid on the Pirate Bay, and the rise of the Pirate Party clearly left their mark on Sweden’s political climate. The extremely fast resurrection of the Pirate Bay was a slap in the face of the IIPA, MPAA, and other anti-piracy organizations. In the report we read:

Sweden also is the host country to ThePirateBay.org, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker and one of Sweden’s largest web sites. Operators of the site proudly flaunt their role in facilitating infringements, often taking pot shots at rights holders from whom they receive notices of infringing activity. ThePirateBay was raided in mid-2006 by the Swedish police, and although the site is back up and running, it is expected that its prosecution will take place in the middle of 2007

The IIPA can not yet see an end to the widespread piracy in Sweden. According to the organization, 490 000 movies were downloaded during the third quarter last year, an increase from 468 000 movies the year before, the report says, not specifying any source.

The situation is further complicated, according to the organization, by the fact that Swedes are tolerant towards piracy, something that according to the report is evident in media and in public opinion. The politicians are not thought of as having understood the extent of the file sharing problem. The organization however claims to be looking forward to cooperating with the new government in finding new ways in the struggle against piracy.

Source: Sweden: A Safe Haven for Pirates

He then goes on to talk about one of the most popular torrent sites of them all, The Pirate Bay. While talking about the Neij & Gottfrid, the owners of the site, the author doesn’t make them out to be something they’re not. His description is honest. And yet, the The Pirate Bay pair come out looking cool.

If Svartholm and Neij’s experience sounds like something out of a generic mid-90s cyber-thriller, neither of them is exactly leading-man material. Neij, a 28-year-old who is the more gregarious of the pair, is a scruffy, impish type who regards his outlaw status with wry detachment; Svartholm is a sad-eyed 22-year-old with wispy hair and near-translucent skin that positively scream out “Dungeons and Dragons Master.”

So, when did server admins turn into superstars? Well, it’s been a long time coming. The Pirate Bay is possibly one of the most well known sites on the Internet. And even though “mininova” was one of the most googled words of 2006, The Pirate Bay is better known to the press. The site’s name personifies BitTorrent and movie “piracy” better than anything else can ever hope to. And each attempt to take them down only makes them more popular.

The Vanity Fair piece is lengthy and covers a lot of things, including the MPAA’s struggle to stamp out piracy, the increasing losses of Hollywood, and how the “heartfelt testimony of of Ben Affleck, a man who was paid $12.5 million to star in Gigli,” didn’t help one bit. It’s definitely worth a read.

Source: The Pirate Bay, Featured in Vanity Fair

Bitroll and Torrent101 still advertise on a handful of other torrent sites through contextual advertising networks like Adbrite. However, they have been successfully blocked by Mininova and Snarf-it, and I expect that they will be banned from other sites as well in the near future.

It is good to see that at least some BitTorrent site admins take responsibility and remove these ads from there site. However, they are not all that concerned about their users. Torrentspy and Torrentscan still advertise for these malware clients, and the worst thing is that they integrate the ads into their design.

Money corrupts… sometimes.

Source: The Pirate Bay Sinks Ads for Malicious Torrent Clients

Gottfrid: We don’t do any polls of the morals of our users, so it’s hard to say.

Peter: It’s not very interesting either. It is all about spread what you want to spread, and then it’s up to each and everyone to have their own moral values.

Gottfrid: It would only come out wrong if we tried to shove any particular set of moral down the throats of our users.

Christian S asks: How much money do the Pirate Bay make per month from ads, and what happens to that money?

Peter: I don’t know exactly how much money we get. A separate company runs all the ad sales for us. It’s enough for hardware and bandwidth. We invest quite a bit in new hardware so there’s not much left.

Gottfrid: We must have a buffer to be able to handle when people steal our servers and stuff like that [laugh]. I would wish we got rich off of it, but we don’t.

Peter: What we would like to do is o hire someone full-time. But as things are now, this is still a hobby project. There are of course pros and cons to this.

Economicon asks: How much profit did the Pirate Bay make in 2006?

Peter: That is a good question. I have no idea. I think we made a lot of loss.

Gottfrid: Something like that.

CS asks: Why won’t you answer questions about your profits?

Peter: It feels like a cheap way to make us look like hipocrits. We would rather have people focusing on the issues of copyright.

Gottfrid: We are not involved in the financing part ourselves. We simply don’t have the time, the energy or the market know-how ourselves, instead we want to be able to focus on the technical stuff. In the childhood of the Pirate Bay, just before we got ourselves out of the stage where we were just a bunch of old second-hand computer gear in a closet, and needed more money than we could put in ourselves or get through donations, I was the one handling the ads. It was very stressful and didn’t work very well, with cynical ad buyers and low incomes as a result. It was really very relieving to be able to hand this part over to professionals.

CS asks: How much does your most expensive ad-package cost?

Peter: I have no idea. It’s very different depending on who and what it is. There are guys that works with this stuff full-time.

CS asks: Who are running your finances?

Peter: An external company called Random Media who are based on the British Virgin Islands. We do not run that company.

CS asks: Who is behind that company?

Peter: I don’t think we want to go there. We are not responsible for their business.

CS asks:
There have been earlier claims that you had ad incomes exceeding a million crowns a week only in Sweden during 2006. Is that figure correct, exaggerated or an understatement?

Peter: The person who spilled this figure was probably fired afterwards. It was Eastpoint, an ad company selling for the Pirate Bay.

Gottfrid: He had, of course, an interest to make Eastpoint look like a company that is great at selling ads. There is a certain self interest in taking figures out of thin air.

CS asks: So that is an incorrect figure?

Gottfrid: I would the figure was correct, but it’s not.

CS asks: Many seems to sympathize with you as anti-copyright fighters. Do you think that the public opinion would change if people realized that you actually made money on what you are doing?

Peter: If it was in fact true that there were huge money involved we would have hired people and made bigger things, and we haven’t. I don’t think people are complaining on Amnesty for making money either. I don’t want to compare us to them, but the resemblance is striking.

Gottfrid: It is really completely irrelevant to the debate how awful we are as individuals. Even if my basement at home were full of kidnapped children it wouldn’t make our arguments less valid.

Christian S asks: How will you finance your court expenses with lawyers and so on if there is a trial?

Gottfrid: The state will pay our lawyers. It will be a public defender, just like in any other case.

Peter: We’re not in the US.

Mr. Groovah asks: While I am deeply respectful to how you propagate against the absurd laws that runs our all too controlled society, I wonder why you want to make the scene available to everyone? I remember the golden years with BBSes when file sharing was done by a dedicated minority with a vast interest in the scene. The losses for the developers were minimal and everyone was happy.

Peter: I was also part of the BBS movement, but personally I see it as hypocritical. Why should some but allowed to copy and others not?

Gottfrid: I agree, I also have a background in the BBS movement. It is also worth pointing out that before file sharing were so widely spread, there were hardly any debate heard about copyright and piracy. Pirate Bay, as a site, has no political aims, but one of my personal goals is that all of this will create a debate on those questions.

Andreas Ek asks: Are you as much against copy protection as you pro piracy? I believe the media businesses have themselves to blame since they haven’t done enough to stop piracy, but shouldn’t they be allowed to stop copying at all?

Peter: Absolutely not. DRM is really scary and absolutely the wrong path. You have to be free to use what you have bought. For me it is very strange to buy something that is still owned by someone else.

Gottfrid: Legal service with good quality beats file sharing any day. One can never be sure that the quality is good and it might be complicated. The legal services that do exist, for example iTunes, have become very popular despite their flaws. Financing through ads is, of course, another alternative.

Christian S asks: You had planned to launch a new, highly anticipated, site for release material only, called “The Black Pearl”. Are those plans completely canceled?

Peter: I don’t know if they are canceled. It’s something we would like to to do, but haven’t had time for. It’s just the sort of jobs we don’t have time for.

Gottfrid: There are other things that are more important, our television department, for example.

Peter: There is some code, but nothing is set. There is no active work put down on it.

Anton asks: Is it only the Pirate Bay’s servers that is still in police custody, or are other companies still waiting to get their servers back?

Gottfrid: There is a lot of stuff still in police custody. They did a total of 180 seizes of equipment, and only 40 or 50 have been canceled. Everything isn’t servers, there are also other things there. A lot of papers and memory cards and so on.

CS asks: How did the customers of PRQ react on the raid?

Gottfrid: I haven’t received any complaints at all from our customers. A couple have moved, but it has never been anything personal, only business.

Anton asks: You will probably not be able to buy the “country” Sealand. What will you do with all the money you have received in donations? Will you keep them now?

Peter: No. We will buy an island with them if we can’t buy Sealand.

Gottfrid: There are almost always islands for sale on various places in the world. I guess we’ll have to announce our independence on one of those instead. But we’ll have to deal with that after the budget is done.

Peter: The idea is that when we’re done talking to Sealand, and then I would like to point out that we are still negotiating, is that we decide on what we want to buy. Then we will get money for that island specifically.

CS asks: Wasn’t the Sealand deal more of a fun thing rather than a serious project?

Peter: It was a fun project from the start, but there are serious thoughts behind it. It will be another signal to the authorities about the absurdities of what they are doing.

CS asks: So it’s not just a PR coup to get a lot of money?

Peter: No. Of course, there is PR behind it – we’ve received a lot of attention. But this is something we think is funy and very interesting. The money will go to buying an island.

Anton asks: What operative system is the Pirate Bay running? Linux or a pirate Windows version?

Gottfrid: Slackware Linux, and we’re running Solaris on one of the computers.

Anton asks: What party would you have voted on if the Pirate Party didn’t exist?

Peter: To the best of my knowledge, nobody on the Pirate Bay voted for the Pirate Party. I am a Finnish citizen and didn’t vote at all.

Gottfrid: I will keep it to myself. It was one of the smaller parties, but not the Pirate Party and not the Swedish Democrats.

XXander asks: What will you have in your country?

Peter: First and foremost we want a place to be [laugh]. Secondly we’ll see what we’ll have their. We will try to involve others than ourselves.

Gottfrid: There have been discussions on the forum about running various forms of activities there.

Tommy Sköld asks: How do you think software companies should make their money? By forcing ads on the users, like the Pirate Bay does?

Peter: I don’t believe it’s our job to provide solutions for their problems. We’re not economists or marketers.

Gottfrid: I worked as a software developer before the Pirate Bay started. Back then we made money on adaption, consulting and installation, instead of on the software itself.

Per Erik asks: There are many attempts to spread trojans and viruses via the Pirate Bay. What are your routines against this?

Peter: We have a number of moderators that will check on complaints. We will include a new system to vote off things that should be taken off because the description is incorrect. It is important to point out that we don’t delete controversial stuff, only stuff that is described incorrectly. If someone says, “This is a virus”, it stays on the site.

Gottfrid: We have some spam filters as well, to get rid of comment spam. But that’s more like hygiene than anything else.

Per Erik asks: What responsibility do the Pirate Bay believe to have in fighting viruses?

Gottfrid: Our users have to do their own thinking. We are doing what we can, but the Pirate Bay is only the medium.

Script Girl asks: Can’t you quit your anti-copyright bullshit and just admit you’re really only in it for the money?

Peter: We can’t, because it’s not true.

Gottfrid: it would be a very bad project to be in it to make money, concidering how great the risks are. The Pirate Bay was running on a zero budget for a long time.

Peter: We also have our background in the Bureau of Piracy originally. There were ideology there. If we didn’t believe in this, we wouldn’t have done it.

Jejeetegg asks: Do you plan to start with encrypted torrents?

Gottfrid: It’s the question of a new protocol and nothing that can be done with BitTorrent today. To do this, one have to re-write the protocol from scratch to not only protect the data but also the sender. Even if you encrypt the transmission, it has to be decrypted and nothing stops the anti-piracy bureau from doing that . Therefor, anonymizing technologies are needed.

Totte Alm asks: The Pirate bay is defending file sharing with the argument that artists makes their money on live performances, and actors on ticket sales, and that home users and poor students never would buy Photoshop anyway. But, what is forgotten is that file sharing in reality strikes against the small developer.

As you can see, piracy strikes against the small developers, not the big ones. The small die and the big gets bigger. Have you ever concidered that you help big business by evaporating their competition?

Gottfrid: Again, The Pirate Bay as a unit has no opinions in any question. My personal opinion is that you’ll have to find other ways to make money than selling licenses. I have this background myself, so I am aware of the problems. One have to find ways around them instead of calling for more police and harder controlling methods.

Peter: Perhaps that market model doesn’t work anymore? One have to look at other alternatives.

LinZorzor3r asks: You became famous for your answers to media company lawyers when they sent complaints on what is distributed on the Pirate Bay. But since the raid this spring there has not been one new letter on the site. What happened? Have you lost your attitude?

Gottfrid: There hasn’t been anything new that is funny enough to answer. I feel there has to be something new to make it worth the effort.

CS asks: So there’s no other reason? Are you scared?

Gottfrid: Hardly. Very few are stupid stupid enough to send such mails to the Pirate Bay. They know what will happen when we reply.

Gottfrid: One example of a little more unusual threat was when I had a snail mail from someone complaining that a torrent had a collection of fonts that their clients owned. He claimed the fonts were copyright protected. We sent a snail mail in reply, using all the fonts he had complained about.

Lisa asks: Why is the pirate world so masculine?

Peter: It’s really sad that this is how it is portraited, but it’s not so. Just like in media in general, women aren’t as visible as men. There are very many women using the Pirate Bay and there are very many women who are members of the Bureau of Piracy. It’s only sad that they aren’t promoted enough.

Gottfrid: And of course, the computer world in general is quite masculine. The modern piracy movement comes from the computer world, and so this problem has followed.

LinZorzor3r asks: If I have understood everything correctly you never take off anything that has been distributed on the Pirate Bay, instead you point to the responsibility of the users and the decisions of authorities. Is there any line beyond which you could not accept yourselves? How would it feel, for example, to indirectly add to the spread of child pornography, even if you had the chance to stop it?

Gottfrid: If someone was stupid enough to spread child porn through the Pirate Bay that would actually be a good thing. Then everyone could check who is spreading it.

Peter: We do not censor anything. Again, it is the responsibility of the user.

Source: The Pirate Bay in the Hot Seat

Even worse is the fact that they advertise these malware clients on several torrent sites, using phrases like “Download Torrents using Torrent101 for high speed downloads”. Torrentspy and Torrentscan are two reputable sites that knowingly advertise for these clients. They go so far as to integrate the ads into their design. Experienced BitTorrent users will probably not fall into this trap, but I bet many newcomers will.

You might wonder why respectable BitTorrent site admins advertise for these clients. Well the answer to that is simple: MONEY. The developers pay a lot of cash to these admins, who get paid for installing malware on their turn.

The ads also appear on The Pirate Bay and several other sites through contextual ad-services like Adbrite and Targetpoint (screenshot). They they tried to get on mininova as well, but the site admins rejected the ad proposal on Adbrite, and blocked ads from these malicious clients via Targetpoint.

Another site that was recently infected is Snarf-it. One of the junior admins accidentally made a deal with Torrent101, something that goes completely against the ‘safe ads’ policy of one of the cleanest BitTorrent sites on the net. The contract was canceled as soon as possible, and Rafe, the site admin later apologized for the mistake.

So watch out! And avoid these malicious clients.

Source: Malicious BitTorrent Clients: Torrent101 & Bitroll

On buysealand.com we read, “With the help of all the kopimists on Internets, we want to buy Sealand. Donate money and you will become a citizen and nobleman. It should be a great place for everybody, with high-speed Internets access, no copyright laws and vip accounts to The Pirate Bay.”

Worth a donation!

If they don’t raise enough money to buy Sealand they will try to buy another small island, and claim it as their own country.

Earlier this year, The Pirate Bay supported ACFI’s war against Ladonia, a micronation located in the south of Sweden.

Source: The Pirate Bay Wants to Buy Sealand

All three websites continued to grow in 2006, especially in the first half of the year. The graph below shows that they all entered the Alexa top 500 this spring, which means that they are among the 500 most visited websites on the Internet.

Over the past 6 months the traffic ranks began to stabilize. Here’s a graph of the traffic rank of October, November and December. As you can see, the traffic is quite stable in this period, apart from the returning spikes in the weekends.

Other BitTorrent sites that made it to the 1000 most popular sites on the Web in 2006 are:

329. Isohunt.com
454. Demonoid
642. Torrentz.com
962. Puretna.com (adult content)

The award for the most effective advertising campaign goes to BTjunkie. Overnight they jumped from a traffic rank of 20,000 to a spot among the 2,000 most visited sites, and they managed to keep the people in.

We reported before that BitTorrent sites are slowly taking over the Internet. And it is not only the larger search engines and trackers that continue to grow. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of torrent sites in Alexa’s top 1000 doubles in 2007. Let’s see what the new year brings.

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is quite dubious. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.

Source: Torrentspy Most Popular BitTorrent Site of 2006

It’s interesting how BitTorrent Inc’s focus has shifted to include DRM and be restricted to only legal content. The initial goal of BitTorrent.com was to index all the various movies, music, TV shows and other files available over BitTorrent. Wired News reported in 2005 on the upcoming launch of the site that was going to be “an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download.”

We recently wrote about how BitTorrent.com was helping game developers distribute demos. In that article we profiled the strategy game Disciples II: Dark Prophecy. It was only a demo. But if you type “Disciples” into the search box on BitTorrent.com, you’ll find both the demo and a pirated version of the full game. Or try searching for “Prison Break” and see what you find. Each one of the 29 results you get is a copyrighted file. How exactly do these “filters” work?

How does BitTorrent.com get all this illegal content? It obviously doesn’t have an active uploading community like The Pirate Bay or Torrentspy. Instead, it indexes other torrent sites like The Pirate Bay, Meganova, Torrent Portal and TorrentReactor.

So, our question is, How is BitTorrent.com different from any other so-called illegal torrent site that indexes copyrighted content? Btmon.com does exactly the same thing! Sure, BitTorrent.com’s frontpage is full of game demos, legal music downloads and movie trailers, but one little search query away is just about every popular movie, TV show, music album and computer game.

In our minds, and according to US law, what BitTorrent.com is doing is not illegal. The DMCA clearly states that websites are only required to take down files if the copyright holder or a representative files a complaint. But why does the MPAA sue sites like Isohunt and Torrentspy (who also respect the DCMA), while they’re in bed with BitTorrent?

Dan Glickman (MPAA) and Bram Cohen (BitTorrent)

Source: BitTorrent Inc: We Don’t Index Illegal Torrents

“We made a premature decision and deviated from our mission. I regret this. The management agree with our new chairman of the board that limiting access to content on the Internet is not within the scope of our business”, says Fredrik Winbladh, CEO of Perspektiv Bredband, in a press release.

“It is of great importance that we, as a telecom and Internet provider, focus on transmitting information. Our standpoint could be questioned if one looks at the position we took, something we cannot risk. The company and its management has learned a lot from the debate that has taken place”, says new chairman of the board, Mikael Paulsson.

It is a Christmas present in advance, one might say, that proves that Internet activism can pay off. Even though I believe that Perspektiv might have made an honest mistake and reconsidered it, they say openly that it is the debate surrounding this affair (i.e. the attention it has gotten from those that have highlighted it in various ways), and thus the actions of The Pirate Bay and Piratbyrån that they have learned their lesson from.

Source: Swedish ISP backs down: Allofmp3.com No Longer Blocked

Now, attorney HÃ¥kan Roswall has applied to have the custody decision prolonged to June 1, 2007, and the district court is on his side (Swedish link). According to an initial decision, the servers, not yet returned, will remain in custody. This is despite the fact that the “offending” data that needs to be analyzed has already been copied.

The attorney writes in his application.

All the servers in custody has been mirrored, but because of the vast technical complexity, the analysis has proved more time consuming than expected.”

The fact that the servers have been mirrored, means that complete copies of all content on servers are already in the hands of the police.

“They do this only to destroy,” says Fredrik Neij, one of the owners of PRQ and The Pirate Bay. “If he doesn’t trust the copies taken by the police, he shouldn’t trust their investigation either.”

According to Fredrik Neij, around 40 out of 180 servers once in custody have been returned. “Most of those who have gotten their servers back are companies with judicial contact, that has been treated differently than the others,” he says.

The suspects in the case against The Pirate Bay now have just under a week to appeal against the decision before it is definite. HÃ¥kan Roswall was not available to comment.

Source: PirateBay Servers Still Remain in Custody