After praising previous successes, such as the shutdown of Megaupload and the prosecution of several IMAGiNE members, Bitkower explained the evolving challenges copyright holders are dealing with.

From illegal piano rolls in the early 1900s to floppy disks a century later, new technologies have presented new threats, he argued. With the rise of broadband access this process has worsened and the most recent challenge is combating illegal streaming services.

“One new challenge confronting copyright owners and law enforcement authorities is the rise of Internet ‘streaming’ as the dominant means of disseminating many types of copyrighted content online. This activity also derives from advances in technology: in this case, the growth in availability of high-speed Internet to the average consumer,” Bitkower said.

The problem for the Department of Justice and copyright holders is that these services are harder to prosecute. Technically, streaming doesn’t count as distribution but as a public performance, which can only be charged as a misdemeanor.

The administration tried to remedy this in 2012, by implementing the SOPA and PIPA bills, but these were shelved after public outrage. Many people feared that uploading copyrighted YouTube videos could possibly land them in jail and took their concerns to the streets.

However, fast forward a few years and the same plan is back on the table.

“The Administration recommends that Congress amend the law to create a felony penalty for unauthorized Internet streaming. Specifically, we recommend the creation of legislation to establish a felony charge for infringement through unauthorized public performances conducted for commercial advantage or private financial gain,” Bitkower explained.

“It would emphasize the seriousness of the threat that unauthorized streaming poses to legitimate copyright holders, clarify the scope of conduct deemed to be illegal in order to deter potential infringers, and provide the Department with an important tool to prosecute and deter illicit Internet streaming.”

In addition to criminalizing illicit streaming, Bitkower also called for persistent funds to support its international operations. In recent years the DoJ has educated police forces abroad to deal with copyright infringement. This apparently includes training on very basic skills, such as how to connect to the Internet in the first place.

“The program has realized numerous successes, including a Ukrainian police officer who, after receiving training, was able to use a dial-up Internet connection from his home computer to bring down the largest illegal file sharing service in his country,” Bitkower said.

The international program helped to shut down Megaupload, but could also target The Pirate Bay through tools such as “diplomatic and trade-based pressure.” Worryingly, the United States has trouble getting the facts rights, as it believes that the political Pirate Party is connected to The Pirate Bay.

“In addition to the Mega Conspiracy described above, we have seen The Pirate Bay start as a file sharing site for unauthorized copies of works in Sweden, expand to other countries, and even develop its own political party in Europe,” Bitkower noted.

Mistakes aside, it’s clear that the Obama administration hasn’t lost its focus on copyright infringement.

All recommendations are aimed at more prosecutions, more international pressure and tougher punishments for pirates. Time will tell whether they can get Congress to agree this time around.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The site operates from .sh and .info domains and has enjoyed steady growth since its launch in 2010.

However, out of nowhere, visitors were welcomed by a rather shocking notice on the site’s homepage this morning. Apparently, Megashare has plans to shut down due to trouble with its video hosting provider.

“Because there are problems with video hosting company, MEGASHARE is closing and not updaing new movies in future. Thank you for your support!” the announcement reads.

The abrupt decision comes as a surprise, and seems illogical for a site of its nature. Megashare doesn’t host any of the videos itself but relies on files from third-party sites such as Google, Putlocker and Sockshare.

Interestingly, a few days ago we published an article which revealed that Megashare was one of the streaming portals that used Google as video hosting provider. Whether this is related to the “video hosting troubles” is unknown.

In any case, users are not happy with the site’s decision and the site’s Facebook page and Twitter are filling up with people begging the site not to throw in the towel. Whether this will have any effect remains to be seen.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Often referred to as copyright trolls, these companies place themselves in file-sharing networks and masquerade as regular users, but instead they’re collecting evidence of infringement. This evidence is then used to obtain the identities of alleged file-sharers in order to obtain cash settlements from them. It’s a messy and controversial game.

One of the hardest troll-hit countries is Germany but in the last few days came a surprise to shock even the most experienced lawyers in the field. Seemingly out of nowhere, many thousands of Internet users received letters from German lawfirm U & C apparently acting on behalf of a Swiss company called The Archive AG.

Up to a point their claims appear to be fairly standard stuff, unsurprisingly involving adult content with titles including Dream Trip, Hot Stories, Amanda’s Secrets, Miriam’s Adventures and Glamour Showgirls. For the user’s apparent transgressions The Archive AG asks for a payment of 149.50 euros for lawyer fees, 15.50 euros in damages and sundry other costs amounting to 250 euros. Some individuals are reporting receiving multiple demands.

However, the real shocker becomes apparent when one discovers where the alleged infringements are said to have taken place. Not a torrent site or other venue where user IP addresses are publicly available but on streaming video site RedTube, the 105th most popular site in the world. While RedTube specializes in adult content, its functionality is not dissimilar to that of YouTube.

The scale of this settlement operation becomes apparent when reading reports from Wilde Beuger Solmecke, a law firm that specializes in defending Internet users from the threats of copyright trolls.

“We assume that over 10,000 warning letters have been sent by the firm U + C,” the lawfirm explain, adding that at least 1,000 individuals had already called their offices for advice.

So how did the lawfirm acquire the identities of so many individuals? That question has become the subject of many theories, from IP address-grabbing adverts to malware, to a huge lawsuit forcing RedTube to comply.

That last theory was being pursued yesterday by German publication Die Welt, who ran a report claiming that the Cologne Regional Court had been involved in a request to hand over the data of individuals who had simply viewed the videos in question. One theory is that the Court may have mistaken RedTube for some kind of P2P file-sharing network where infringers also upload.

But even that theory was being questioned by RedTube themselves last evening. Speaking with XBiz, RedTube denied that anything had been handed over.

“Our security measures and user privacy has always been a top priority for RedTube,” said RedTube Vice President Alex Taylor.

“RedTube pursues stringent privacy requirements and maintains the highest industry standards of privacy protection to secure not only their assets and properties, but to provide comprehensive protection of their customers’ data when visiting a RedTube-owned site.”

But while that statement says a lot about the site’s privacy policy, it says little to nothing about what happens when the site is presented with a court order. Not complying with a request from a court with jurisdiction over RedTube or perhaps its technology partners trumps the company’s privacy policy all day long.

In any event, lawyer Christian Solmecke feels that if the claims are indeed against users that have merely streamed content, no offense has been committed.

“From our perspective, users have committed no crime here. Unlike the case involving [illegal streaming portal] Kino.to, the films published on RedTube are not manifestly unlawful (in the sense of copyright),” Solmecke said.

“Even so, when watching the films on your own computer this is a legal private copy in accordance with copyright law. Add to that the only copy ever made here is a few seconds of buffering in volatile buffer memory of the computer. Such copies are in my opinion in accordance with copyright law.”

Officials at RedTube-owner MindGeek say that an “in-depth investigation” is now underway into the “serious allegations that have surfaced in the media recently.” Given the sheer numbers of cash settlements that have been sent out and the nature of the alleged offenses, this matter is certainly not over yet.

If this does indeed turn out to be a cut and dried case against Internet users who have merely viewed streaming content, the fear is that while this affects RedTube users today it could easily affect YouTube viewers tomorrow. Definitely one to watch.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Giants such as PrimeWire.ag and Movie4K.to host links to all of the latest movies to view within a browser, but where does that content come from and how does it get there? What motivates people to contribute?

To find out, TorrentFreak has been speaking to an individual with a wealth of experience in this field. To protect his identity we’ll have to be vague about where he operates, but suffice to say he’s one of the most prolific uploaders and linkers online today with a hundreds of thousands of links spread and 30,000 movies and TV shows uploaded. So how did it all start for John?

“When I was a child, the hottest TV show was Happy Days. Well, it came on Tuesday nights at eight and if I wasn’t around ready to watch, I missed it. That’s right; you used to have to be in front of your television at a specific day and time to watch your favorite TV shows. There was no such thing as VCRs or DVRs and even good ol’ Blockbuster was a decade away from opening its first store,” John recalls.

The seeds of need had been planted and many, many years later John found file-sharing sites to be the perfect solution to that original problem. But then streaming sites came along with their ultimate convenience, changing things forever.

“I had just moved to Puerto Vallarta [Mexico] and went to a network’s website to watch a TV Show I had missed and I was blocked because I was outside the US. Grrrrr. Then a friend told me about [Richard O'Dwyer's former site] TVShack and a whole new world opened up to me. The site itself was ugly and clunky but it provided the market with what it needed and me with 100’s of hours of entertainment,” John explains.

While the site was clearly fulfilling unmet demand, not even TVShack had all the answers. This caused John to start contributing to the piracy ecosystem himself.

“One day, there was a movie I wanted to watch and there were no links to it. So I did a Google search and found one and added it to TVShack. Yay me! I was part of the community.”

That event triggered some thoughts. It’s a time-intensive task adding links, so why were some people spending so much time adding huge quantities of links to sites every night? John did some research and then it hit him in the head “like a brick.”

It was all about the money.

“In order to make money, you have to ‘own’ the links. The links come from file hosts. A file host is someone like YouTube or the now defunct MegaVideo. Of course there are hundreds of others out there and many of them have public, and often times private, affiliate programs,” John says.

The basic mechanism is that users upload hot content to file-hosting sites. The more people who visit that site to view the content the more advertising revenue the file-hoster makes. The file-hoster’s affiliate scheme then kicks in and part of the ad revenue generated gets sent to the uploader of the content. John says the payout to him is around $1 to $2 per 1,000 views of a movie or TV show.

Of course, putting content on a file-hoster is one thing, driving traffic to that content in order to generate the clicks – and the revenue – is another. This is where streaming link sites come in. By uploading hot movies and TV shows to file-hosters and then submitting their links to streaming indexes, more people find the content.

“Just post your links on one of the popular streaming websites like PrimeWire.ag, Movie4k.to or even up-and-comers such as TheShowDepot.com, and collect your money. Sounds easy doesn’t it?”

While John sounds very organized and streamlined now, things weren’t always that way. The main efficiencies have come in the way that movies and TV shows are obtained and made available on hosters and linking sites. Early on John would only be able to upload around ten TV shows per day and hard drive restrictions were becoming an obstacle to making more money.

“I made a few bucks, but I knew if I could do more and faster and add to more websites, I could make a nice living. Then I discovered seedboxes and a new way to download massive amounts of TV shows and movies. I even found software that automatically uploads the video files to the file hosts.”

With things hotting up with a part-automated system, John was soon adding more than a thousand links a day to several streaming websites. He now has 30,000 different movies and TV shows stored online, across 12 different file-hosting sites, each carrying between 10,000 and 30,000 items from John’s collection.

“Amongst the different streaming websites I have added over 200,000 links. And yes, I am making a nice living at it,” John concludes.

To some readers the idea of making money from unauthorized content will be something that’s unacceptable, yet it’s a difficult reality to escape online. While the vast majority of file-sharers and stream viewers will have no financial interest in the content being viewed, there will always be a small minority who seek to monetize it.

When reward becomes possible, motivations often increase and with that a proliferation of content online. It’s impossible to detect the motivations of the person who uploaded the content currently being viewed so the big question is whether the majority of consumers care. To be blunt – probably not.

Next time: How do copyright takedowns affect profits?

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The service was recently launched by Polish developer and Wikidot CEO Michal Frackowiak. Michal came up with the idea a while ago when he was looking for a convenient way to watch torrents on his iOS devices and TV without all the hassle of converting files and connecting cables.

“Watching movies on a laptop on a couch sucks, so I made a small script that uses EC2 and S3 to download and encode torrents so that I could stream these to my devices,” Michal tells TorrentFreak.

“I showed this to my friends and they wanted the same thing. So there was a thought: why not to build a web app that does exactly this?”

Fast forward a few months and Streamza was born. While the idea started as a simple home-brew solution to a common problem, the end result is a professional service that easily matches up with the competition.

Streamza works pretty straightforward. It downloads torrents instantly and supports streaming playback on laptops, desktops and iOS devices. In addition it also allows users to stream content directly to their TV via Apple TV. A lot of work has gone into the user interface which looks stunning on all devices.

Rather than a lengthy summary of Streamza’s features which includes subtitle support, or underlying technology such as the multi-bitrate HLS streaming, it’s probably best if people just give it a try.

And that’s where another advantage comes in – Streamza gives free accounts with one download slot and a maximum file size of a gigabyte. No credit card needed, no strings attached.

Another feature that will be appreciated by many users is the built-in torrent search. This is particularly handy on mobile devices where it can be quite cumbersome to add torrent files manually.

In the near future Streamza plans to add support for more devices and platforms. This includes support for Android devices, Roku, Chromecast, XBMC and opening up an API to allow third-party apps.

While the service will be expanded, the main focus of Streamza will remain “simplicity” and “accessibility” according to the developer.

“I definitely want to make the Streamza experience the best ever, so even my mom could use it. It’s the primary goal. It should work and make you say ‘wow’,” Michal says.

Those interested can sign up for a free account at the Streamza site. Users temporarily get 3 download slots and can earn additional ones by inviting friends, or by buying a paid account which also allows for torrents up to 30 gigabyte.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Certain acts of copyright infringement are criminal offenses, which opens up the possibility of jail time on top of already sizable fines, with the tax payer helping with the bill.

Current US law provides felony penalties for willful copyright infringement which apply to individuals who reproduce or distribute copyright works. However, companies distributing movies, TV shows and sports events say there is a loophole which allows streaming services to avoid the toughest of penalties.

The problem is that it remains unclear whether Internet streaming is considered distribution under current law and therefore any prosecution as a felony could prove problematic.

According to the MPAA, the lack of clarity means that prosecutors don’t want to pursue cases against streaming services so are instead using their limited resources to prosecute cases with a more certain outcome.

Since streaming video is currently only classed as a misdemeanor, outfits such as the MPAA and mixed martial arts company UFC desperately want to up the ante with a greater deterrent effect. Their efforts during 2011 and 2012 were concentrated on the streaming provisions in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), but both collapsed under a wave of opposition.

During March this year there were fresh calls to update the law but according to UFC lawyer Lawrence Epstein, it’s proving a tough job.

“I think we’ve got a lot of work to do,” Epstein told MMAjunkie.

“There is a general sort of bias that has anything to do with intellectual property because of the fallout from [the Stop Online Piracy Act] and [Protect IP Act].”

According to OpenSecrets, the UFC spent $620,000 on lobbying in 2012, much of it aimed at toughening up the law, changes that could have consequences far beyond the UFC. With $110,00 spent in the first quarter of 2013 the organization is keeping up the pressure, with Epstein confirming that he will be meeting with U.S. lawmakers this week to speak on the issue.

“The only way this is really going to slow down is if, frankly, there is criminal prosecution,” he said. “This needs to be a felony, and you need to prosecute these people.”

That kind of development would be welcomed not only by the UFC, but organizations such as the MPAA, the RIAA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO), all former supporters of the Commercial Felony Streaming Act.

If the six-strikes scheme really starts to bite in the U.S., streaming services will only gain in popularity, so deterring their operators now will be a useful tool.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Nevertheless, that learning curve will always be a step too far for some and that’s why sites like YouTube have become so popular. Everyone knows how a search box works and recognizing a ‘play’ button is simple, even for those who last used one on a cassette deck.

As YouTube has grown to become the number one streaming venue online, other sites have been blossoming in the background. Less likely to carry user home videos but extremely likely to link to the latest Hollywood blockbusters, sites like Movie4K (formerly Movie2K) and Primetime.ag (formally LetMeWatchThis) are pulling in millions of visitors every day. They are simple to use and deliver content immediately, so it’s little wonder they are so popular.

With BitTorrent, users are sharing content with others, which is the activity that gets a small minority in trouble with copyright holders. With streaming, no such problem exists. A user downloads video directly from a server and no third parties can see what is going on. No lawsuits, zero hassle. But just because people can’t see what goes on, does it necessarily follow that the activity is legal?

“As the law stands today, you can not say it is illegal,” admits Henrik Pontén from Swedish anti-piracy group Rättighetsalliansen (Rights Alliance).

Pontén says the effect on rightsholders is the same as if people actually download the content and likens the streaming of content to benefiting from other people’s crimes. However, there are clear problems from an enforcement perspective. In addition to users being safe from the law, streaming sites are often located overseas which complicates matters further still.

Justice Minister Beatrice Ask told P3 that the government has its eye on the problem but admitted nothing is in the legislative pipeline to deal with it.

“This is something that has come about in recent years and of course we’re following it very carefully. But it is also difficult for the law to keep pace with change all the time. It’s not only a Swedish problem but an international one and there is a big discussion about it,” the minister said. “We have no planned legislative changes going on today, but we are following what is happening and the discussion.”

In March, fresh calls were made to Congress in the United States to upgrade streaming from a misdemeanor to a felony. Earlier efforts stalled along with the doomed SOPA legislation.

In the UK, three recent cases involving streaming highlight the range of measures available to rightsholders.

The first, against UK resident Richard O’Dwyer, resulted in an amicable solution after an extradition battle was fought over his former site, TVShack. The second involved the harsh criminal punishments handed down to the admin of SurftheChannel.

More recently the site Movie2K (now Movie4K) was blocked by ISPs following High Court action initiated by the MPA. This, says Henrik Pontén, is where the battle could end up.

“If these perpetrators are using vast resources to hide, going abroad to hide their identities, then we have to ask the question – what should we do? It has been tested in other countries and it has a good effect.”

“There is a desire to say something to those who commit these kinds of acts – you’re driving the trend towards blocking,” Pontén concludes.

The latest example of that in the UK was revealed late last week when the Premier League approached ISPs to block Firstrow1. A few hours later TorrentFreak received a message from Pirate Reverse, one of the leading proxy operators.

“We saw your recent article about the Premier League trying to censor firstrow1.eu so we created firstrowproxy.com,” the email read.

And so it continues………

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

However, in recent years bandwidth has become more easily available at the right price and as a result streaming sites of all kinds have flourished. One only has to look at YouTube for the Internet’s best example.

But in the backwaters of the Internet less official sites have been flourishing. Streaming portals offering all of the latest movies and TV shows have grown from a niche experience into one enjoyed by millions of people everyday.

One of the biggest sites around is 1Channel.ch. The site is used by millions of people every week – probably every day – but most of its users have no idea of the site’s recent history. If they did, they may not feel so comfortable visiting the domain.

Early May, 1Channel.ch (which at the time was also known under its former name of LetMeWatchThis.ch) disappeared from the Internet without warning.

“We are having some issues with the 1channel.ch domain, please use letmewatchthis.ch domain in the mean time,” the site announced.

Behind the scenes all was not well.

“The [1Channel.ch] domain was hijacked from our registrar with a combination of falsified documents and a major security exploit in the registrar’s control panel, that allowed attackers to access any account in their system without a password,” the admin of the site told TorrentFreak.

From this point, 1Channel.ch – which is still running today – became a cloned site using a hijacked domain. Browsing through the site’s forums it’s clear that sections of the site are missing or have been removed while other errors persist. Obviously things are still not working properly for the domain’s new ‘owners’.

With no chance of getting the domain back, the real site was forced to revert to LetMeWatchThis.ch exclusively. As can be seen from the Alexa stats below, the hijackers are doing very well indeed.

On the other hand, the real site – LetMeWatchThis – has taken quite a hit. The site’s global rank with Alexa is now 5,527 while the fake is enjoying its status as the world’s 347th most popular site.

The woes don’t stop there. Anyone attempting to do a Google search for LetMeWatchThis draws a complete blank. Not only is the site completely absent from at least the first 10 pages of results, an even worse problem soon becomes apparent.

The first result for the domain is a link to 1Channel.ch, the hijacked site. What follows are results for perhaps a dozen or so other sites trying to pass themselves off as LetMeWatchThis with varying degrees of success. Some are very convincing indeed and most would easily fool a casual user.

So, faced with hijackers, clones, fakes and damn, damn pirates, LetMeWatchThis has decided to make a clean break to end all the confusion with a complete renaming of the site to PrimeWire.ag.

“We have switched to the new domain name to differentiate ourselves from all the clone sites out there,” the admin told TorrentFreak. “We would like to ask our fans not to use 1channel.ch as it is potentially spreading malware and collecting users personal log in information.”

Whether 1Channel is doing either of those things is a matter for debate, but it seems clear that so far its users either don’t know or don’t care about the hijacking situation. The site is doing very well and appears to have momentum that won’t be held back anytime soon. After all, going to the police for help is hardly an option.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Despite years of high-profile crackdowns on sites and their users, very few inroads have been made into reducing the amount of content being shared via the famous protocol. In fact, one might argue that in the past few years things have only become worse.

Among the technologically literate youth, mechanisms for obtaining unauthorized media are now common knowledge and BitTorrent is on the way to becoming a household name.

With this in mind the studios and their music industry counterparts are now embarking on a new educational drive. Wrapped up in projects such as “six strikes” in the United States, these initiatives aim to inform people that obtaining copyright material online without permission is illegal.

But education cuts both ways, and increasingly people are learning that it is the sharing or “uploading” of content that is what puts people in trouble. Uploading is built into BitTorrent so aside from a user employing IP masking techniques, little can be done about that. However, there are other ways of viewing movies and TV shows online, methods that are virtually 100% safe.

These days the “YouTube experience” is something familiar to most Internet users. Do a search, call up a page, press play and a video appears in the browser. But while YouTube specializes in general content there are dozens of sites that offer all the latest TV shows and movies in the same format and just as easily.

Fire up a site like Movie2K or TubePlus and not only are the perceived complexities of BitTorrent instantly removed, but also pretty much all of the risk too. No wonder they’re becoming so popular.

However, the rise of streaming sites isn’t going unnoticed. The industry-backed SOPA legislation would have allowed for harsh criminal penalties to be attached to streaming, had it not been defeated by a massive Internet revolt of course. But months on and the issue is now being raised again, on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.

According to U.S. Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante, the legislative gap between downloading and streaming needs to be addressed.

“There is a gap in the law,” Pallante told a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet yesterday.

“Law enforcement can go after the reproduction or the distribution [of copyright material], and they can go after them in a meaningful way because they are felonies, not misdemeanors. Streaming, whether it’s a football game or music, is a misdemeanor,” she said.

“If there is illegal streaming happening, especially in an egregious, willful, profit-driven kind of way, how do you get at that activity if the best that you can do is go after them for a misdemeanor?” Pallante added.

Although there is indeed a theoretical weakness in the law, one could be forgiven for thinking that wasn’t the case. The operators of streaming video portal NinjaVideo were all severely punished for their role in the site. Megavideo, a streaming service that needs no introduction, is currently the subject of the biggest copyright battle of all time.

On the flipside, other streaming and linking cases have been dealt with relatively amicably recently, including the conclusion of the U.S. case against UK resident Richard O’Dwyer and the amnesty given to operator of ChannelSurfing.

Of course the problem isn’t isolated in the United States. Over in Sweden, the spiritual home of The Pirate Bay, an interesting trend is developing.

Previously known as Antipiratbyran, Rättighetsalliansen (Rights Alliance) is well know for its anti-piracy activities. Just recently it scooped dozens of headlines with its demand that The Pirate Bay must get out of Sweden, but largely out of the public eye it also takes action against smaller sites.

But with their successes comes a flipside – as they continue to target file-sharing services, there is an increase in visitors to streaming sites.

“We can see that about 60 million movies were downloaded last year,” Henrik Pontén of Rights Alliance told SVT. “The latest figure we have on streaming is almost a year old, but then it was 20 million movies. It has increased since and we will soon get new statistics.”

Chasing down BitTorrent users in Sweden has its problems but the law is able to deal with those uploading copyrighted material, even if the punishments aren’t particularly harsh for an isolated user. However, those who watch streaming movies can do so with impunity. Not only can they not be monitored by anti-piracy outfits, but it’s possible that they aren’t even breaking the law either.

“Streaming is a growing problem,” says Pontén. “From the creators’ point of view, it’s irrelevant what technology is used, they lose sales and legislators have to deal with that.”

In any event, it seems that streaming is here to stay. Most of the sites providing the streams are outside the U.S. and Sweden and although they don’t say much in public, their operators don’t seem overly concerned about what the authorities think. Expect the activity to continue growing as more and more “strikes” warnings go out.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

These days XBMC is available on a range of platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, jailbroken iPhone /iPad and Apple TV. There is also an Android version available which means that it can be installed on one of these babies and simply plugged into a TV – no computer required. Crucially, for cord-cutting types, XBMC isn’t limited to playing local video and audio anymore either.

Out of the box XBMC doesn’t deliver much content at all but that functionality is available via the use of third party plugins for mainstream services such as YouTube, Spotify, Justin.tv and even GrooveShark. But that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Flicking through XBMC’s menus offers up a mind boggling array of live TV, recorded TV, movies of every kind, live sporting events, radio…the list goes on and on. In fact with the correct configuration XBMC pulls huge amounts of content from around the web in a way that no other piece of software can match. In the past discovering and installing the third party plugins took quite a bit of effort on the user’s part, but not any more.

XMBC Hub, the official site for third-party XBMC addons, have just released what they call their ‘Wizard’ installer. We’ve tested it on PC (Mac version here) and it couldn’t be any more simple to use. Install the latest version of XBMC, run it and close it at least once, then run the XBMC Hub Wizard. Done.

Once complete, all the user has to do is run XBMC again and the whole experience is set up and ready to go. Addons for 1Channel, Project Free TV, Icefilms, TV Links, and Tube Plus are all right there, and it looks pretty good too.

The purpose of this article isn’t really to review XBMC (people can experiment with its media functions for themselves) but to take a peek at how it’s being used by so-called “cord-cutters” – people who dump their cable TV provider and use the Internet to obtain their media instead.

Is it really possible to do that efficiently with XBMC? Well it appears so. For example users can search through genres, say comedy TV shows, and the screenshot below shows the kind of results they can expect from the tools provided by the Wizard installer alone. Start adding more sources inside XBMC (it will help you find them) and results go through the roof.

The list of TV shows goes on forever and there’s very little that can’t be found, in many instances going back several series on hundreds of shows from all around the world. None of the content is hosted by XBMC or indexed by its creators (it all comes via the optional third party plugins) but how much of it is legal is up for debate. The plugins pull content from official as well as unofficial sources but there is absolutely no indication from within the app which is which.

For example, Alki David’s FilmOn have just released an XBMC plugin that provides access to a wide range of live UK TV channels, as does the plugin for TVCatchup. There are also YouTube, Vimeo, NASA, Khan and other similar indexes just a couple of clicks away.

Assessing the legal status on other content listed by the plugins isn’t an easy task either. For example, XMBC will pull in live sporting events through sources including Rojadirecta, the site that the DoJ seized but then gave back 18 months later. Through this resource anyone can watch NBA, MLB, NFL, NPB and IPL matches for free, for example.

Despite the gray areas, some content is almost certainly unauthorized, as illustrated by the screenshot below. However, unlike with BitTorrent no sharing takes place, so there are currently no legal repercussions for accessing unauthorized content.

For users looking for an exciting media player that goes the extra mile XBMC certainly fits the bill, but people who have traditionally obtained their content via BitTorrent might feel a certain reluctance to try a new software package. That said, XBMC is free, open source, and its media playing functions are superb in their own right so there’s no problem in using the two side by side.

“XBMC is the future of television, it changes lives,” XBMC Hub’s Adam told TorrentFreak. “It gives you access to every movie and television show ever made, free of charge. So easy, even your grandmother can use it.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.