In March, the White House published a white paper with several recommendations on how to make copyright law compliant with the digital age. Among other things, it suggested classifying unauthorized streaming of copyrighted material as a felony with a maximum prison sentence of 5 years.

These proposals were turned into a bill that Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn and Christopher Coons officially introduced in May. Simply said, the bill (S. 978) will make the “streaming” of copyrighted works a similar offense as “downloading” already is. On the surface this might sound logical, but in reality the implications could be disastrous.

If signed into law, hundreds of thousands of people who uploaded videos to YouTube could get into trouble. In short, everyone who shares a video which contains copyrighted material, a cover of a popular song for example, will face a maximum of 5 years in jail if the “felony streaming” bill becomes law. Justin Bieber included.

Launched today, the “Free Bieber” campaign hooks into this provoking image, and asks the public to tell Congress to vote ‘no’ to the bill. The campaign is organized by the non-profit organization Fight for the Future, which aims to counter the influential lobby of the entertainment industries.

“The main problem with the law is since copyright law is so expansive, it applies to lots of completely harmless and common things: like singing a song, dancing to background music, or posting a video of a kids’ school play, for example,” Tiffiniy Cheng, Director of Fight for the Future told TorrentFreak.

“Bieber got famous by posting unauthorized covers of popular R&B songs to YouTube. The fact that they were posted to advance his music career and the number of views on these videos means they blow past the (very low) threshold for what counts as a felony,” Cheng says.

The law requires only 10 YouTube views (performances) and a hypothetical “fair market value” of $5000. This, bundled with some commercial aspect such as running ads (or using the videos to advance one’s career), and a potential jail sentence awaits.

With the “Free Bieber” campaign, Fight for the Future hopes to bring these implications to the attention of the public.

“We think that a larger audience needs to understand the implications of this bill, and visualizing and talking about what it would be like for Justin to be in jail for this should make it completely clear,” Cheng said.

“What’s genuinely troubling is that this bill applies to a massive slice of social media activity. And if you doubt that the RIAA and MPAA would push the government to go after teenage Facebook users, remember: these are the same people who used $7,000-per-song civil penalties designed to punish large-scale commercial piracy to sue 14-year-old P2P users and their families,” she added.

Some supporters of the bill have indeed argued that YouTube users have nothing to worry about, and that the bill is mainly aimed at site owners who stream millions of copyrighted songs, movies and TV-shows. Although this sounds believable, the question would then be why the bill itself doesn’t make this distinction.

And is this new law really needed in the first place? Are current laws not sufficient?

Earlier this year the authorities arrested the owner of Channelsurfing.net, a website where links to external sports streams were listed. The site itself did not offer any streams, it merely linked to streams that were offered by third-party sites.

For linking to streams the 32-year old Brian McCarthy from Texas charged with criminal copyright infringement for “reproduction and distribution” of copyrighted material, and without the new bill he still faces 5 years in prison.

The above raises enough questions to ask Congress to take a good look at the necessity and implications of “felony streaming” bill (S. 978).

Source: Free Justin Bieber! (Why Streaming Shouldn’t be a Felony)

While BitTorrent was one of the first technologies to enable the easy downloading of very large video files, it now has some catching up to do. The masses want their video and music on demand, and if BitTorrent wants to remain the big player it is today it has to deliver just that.

To this end, during recent years many BitTorrent clients have introduced streaming functionality, and there are also a few web-based services that offer similar capabilities. The Torrent Stream Magic Player is a new streaming service that sets itself apart by offering a true video-on-demand look and feel through a browser add-on.

Developed by a team of Russian coders the free add-on, bundled with a windows streaming application (Mac and Linux will follow this autumn), adds a “view torrent online” option to the browser’s context menu. Once the add-on and app are installed and configured all the user has to do is right click on a .torrent link and a fancy player slides into the browser.

Providing the user has enough bandwidth and the torrent file is well seeded, the video or music track starts to play in just a few seconds. Additional controls also give the user the option to manage a playlist and pause the torrent file whenever needed.

The add-on is in an early stage of development and the developers told TorrentFreak that many new features will be added in the near future. Aside from obvious bugfixes users will get the option to style the player into a more personal look. The team is also working on decreasing buffering times to allow for even more instant gratification.

And then there’s another upcoming feature that will be a bit more controversial. The developers are working on an upgrade that will allows users to get relevant streams from various movie and music portals that don’t offer content themselves. This ‘magic button’ will appear when users browse a compatible site such as IMdB, and it will bring up suggested content to stream directly.

We tried the add-on and can confirm that it works as promised. Although the add-on can be improved on some small points it doesn’t have the clunky feel of some other browser-based torrent streaming solutions. It works well with both videos and music and is definitely worth a try.

Interested readers should be aware that aside from streaming, data is also saved on the local computer and has to be removed manually. More information, tips and tricks are available on the Torrent Stream Magic Player website.

Source: Stream Torrents in Your Web Browser With Magic Player

This has resulted in the arrests of several site admins including those from TV-Links and BitTorrent site FileSoup.

A few days ago a FACT investigation led to another arrest. A 26-year old man was arrested Wednesday with police reportedly seizing £83,000 and computer equipment following a raid in Derry, Northern Ireland.

After being questioned the man was released on bail, a very similar situation to other FACT-assisted arrests we’ve seen over the years. Other than that, the police haven’t released any information on the site in question or the exact nature of any alleged offenses.

However, after some digging TorrentFreak can with near certainty conclude that the man in question is connected to the video streaming website “Fast Pass TV”. The site’s Twitter account – which was recently deleted – an associated email address and various other trails all point to a man (P. M.) in Derry, Northern Ireland.

Another source later confirmed that the man from Derry is indeed the operator of “Fast Pass TV.”

The website in question did not store any video material but merely linked to third party sites. “Fast Pass TV does not host, store, or distribute any of the videos listed on the site and only link to user submitted content that is freely available on the Internet,” it stated on the website.

Fastpasstv.eu went offline around the time of the arrest leaving 68,287 registered members and hundreds of thousands of daily visitors in the dark. Without official confirmation from the authorities we can’t conclude that Fastpasstv.eu was the primary site FACT was after, but all signs point in that direction.

The arrest and the involvement of FACT are interesting, since the UK police have failed to convict any of the previously arrested operators of file-sharing or streaming sites. Most relevant to this case is the previous action against TV-Links.co.uk, a site which operated a service comparable to that offered by Fastpasstv.eu.

Legal action was taken against TV-Links.co.uk but eventually its operators won their lengthy trial. This set a precedent at least in the UK/European Union that under certain conditions these website owners do not do anything illegal. According to Section 17 of the European Commerce Directive, TV-Links was seen as a conduit of information and was afforded a complete defense in criminal proceedings for linking to other websites.

Whether the police are going to walk down the same path again, or whether the site operator was arrested for an unrelated crime is something the future will tell. However, it appears that Fastpasstv.eu has already made a comeback as fastpasstv.ms, where the recent seizures are also referenced. TorrentFreak could not verify the validity of the new site.

Source: Fastpasstv Shuts Down After U.K. Arrest

The first suggestion has now been turned into a bill that Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn and Christopher Coons officially introduced last week. The bill (S. 978) was presented in the same week as the PROTECT IP Act, another major anti-piracy bill designed to clamp down on sites that facilitate online copyright infringement.

If adopted, the bill will criminalize sites that offer streams of copyrighted content (such as YouTube) if they don’t act within the boundaries of the law. Under current definitions the law considers streaming to be a “public performance” instead of “reproduction and distribution.”

Under the new bill, streaming sites (and users) will get the same treatment as the more traditional forms of file-sharing such as BitTorrent and direct downloads. This opens the door for the authorities to crack down on streaming sites more aggressively. But the big question, however, is whether this additional power is really needed.

Those who’ve followed the news about the U.S. Government crackdown on ‘unauthorized’ movie streaming sites in recent months might reasonably think that providing streams is already a felony. As part of “Operation in Our Sites” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) have already launched several criminal investigations into such sites.

One of the affected sites was Channelsurfing.net, a website where links to external sports streams were listed. The site itself did not offer any streams, it merely linked to streams that were offered by third-party sites. Nevertheless, ICE and HSI classified the site as a criminal operation and arrested the alleged owner, 32-year old Brian McCarthy from Texas.

McCarthy has been charged with criminal copyright infringement for “reproduction and distribution” of copyrighted material. In addition he was charged with aiding and abetting copyright infringement.

The above suggests that the authorities already treat streaming, or linking to streams, as a felony. This means that either the arrest of McCarthy and the seizures of a dozen domains last year were illegitimate, or that the new bill isn’t really needed to deal with streaming sites.

If the bill is adopted, streamers of copyrighted content face a maximum prison sentence of five years. This is the same sentence as Brian McCarthy is currently facing, even though he was arrested in March for ‘linking’ to streams.

The law can often be confusing, and apparently so confusing that it may even fool justice at times.

Source: U.S. Bill To Criminalize Illicit Movie / Music Streaming

Several months later in November 2009, TorrentFreak looked at some Netnod data which seemed to indicate that not only had Swedish traffic levels returned to pre-IPRED levels, but actually surpassed them.

Traffic levels naturally increase year-on-year anyway, so it was difficult to be certain that that this boost was related to recovering levels of online piracy. However, new research just published by a consultancy firm seems to suggest that accessing illicit material online is indeed on the increase.

Mediavision bills itself an independent consultancy firm specializing in analyzing consumer behavior within the sphere of digital media. Its clients include media groups, TV channels, advertisers and production companies.

In its just published 2009 fourth quarter report, the company reveals that it detected an increase in the downloading of TV shows during the autumn of that year. In the 15 to 74 year-old bracket, 1.4 million Internet users engaged in that activity.

In the 15 to 24 year old group, 0.5 million used illicit streaming services to access both movies and TV shows, a method which Mediavision believes is becoming more sought after. 20% of the respondents in this age group admitted using them.

The company further says that 60% of 15 to 24 year-olds are estimated to have consumed illicit media online via various means in the fourth quarter of 2009, versus 40% of the 15 to 74 year-olds. This figure is the same as that reported by Mediavision before IPRED was introduced.

Overall, the company says it believes that the accessing of illicit movies and TV shows via the web has recovered at least to pre-IPRED levels, maybe slightly higher.

Jens Heron at Mediavision says that the piracy situation with TV shows would improve if foreign TV shows and other international became more readily available, at a time and place of the consumers’ choosing.

“Our analysis shows that consumers increasingly want to decide for themselves when to watch and from which screen. Unfortunately, many have become adept at circumventing the IPRED legislation. The way to remedy this, in addition to legislation, is, of course, by offering great legal alternatives,” he added.

Indeed, as earlier reported, around 10% of Swedes aged between 15 and 25 are taking measures to neutralize IPRED, with as many as 500,000 others in the country following suit. Måns Svensson, PhD in Sociology of Law in Lund, estimated that 6 to 7 percent of all Swedes could now be hiding themselves online.

Source: Illicit File-Sharing and Streaming of TV Shows Increases

Now, at the end of the decade where BitTorrent has become a synonym for file-sharing, hundreds of millions of people have high speed broadband connections at their homes. Downloading a popular movie or TV-series often takes less than an hour nowadays, but for the demanding web users of today this delay can still prove quite annoying.

Spoiled by the many streaming video sites that have surged in popularity since YouTube’s launch in 2005, many people simply want to start watching instantly. To satiate this demand the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent has now added streaming support to the latest uTorrent beta release, which allows users to play video files while they are downloading.

“Our hope is to transform getting media using uTorrent from a ‘load-wait-watch-tomorrow’ to more of a ‘point-click-watch’ experience,” Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management said in a comment.

Although several other BitTorrent clients have already implemented similar streaming capabilities, uTorrent will finally make BitTorrent streaming possible for the majority of BitTorrent users.

In our tests the new feature worked flawlessly on well-seeded torrents. Users simply have to click on the play button next to the download, and after a few seconds or minutes it will turn green, ready to be streamed.

By default the latest uTorrent release is configured to use the DivX web player to stream video. This works well for most files but for us it caused problems with some video formats. Changing it to VLC or any other media player is relatively easy though, by nominating a different streaming player in uTorrent’s preferences.

Aside from streaming regular downloads, uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. is also working on BitTorrent-powered live streams. BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen himself aims to develop a piece of code that is superior to all the other P2P-based streaming solutions on the market today.

“I think there’s a very large market for live [streaming] in general, and to date no-one has proven that a p2p solution can meet the real-world requirements for being an acceptable live solution. I intend on changing that,” Bram told TorrentFreak earlier this year.

For now, uTorrent users will have to settle for on-demand streaming. Those who do not intend to use the feature can be assured that the streaming implementation used by uTorrent is designed on the principles of tit-for tat sharing, meaning that it does not slow down regular downloads.

Source: uTorrent Adds Video Streaming Support

The BBC is one of the parties currently testing the new BitTorrent streaming format, which is part of the P2P-Next project. The scientific director of the project, Johan Pouwelse, told TorrentFreak that it’s not just the BBC interested in this new technology: “We are working with a lot of interested parties. Through the European Broadcasting Union we are getting a lot of feedback. We are expected to do more field trials in the near future.”

If the technology turns out to be a success, broadcasters can save millions of dollars each year on video streaming projects. ISPs on the other hand will be less excited, because they now pay for this bandwidth. Most importantly, however, is that this technology allows individuals to broadcast their streams to thousands of users, without having to invest in lots of bandwidth. YouTube 2.0, sort of.

Pouwelse further told TorrentFreak that, unlike services such as Joost, they are fully committed to open standard and Open Source. “As a research project we, by definition, need to make things that others don’t already have, without needing to worry about business models,” he said, going on to explain how they got live streaming via BitTorrent to work.

“To be relevant we remain BitTorrent compatible,” Pouwelse said. “However, traditional BitTorrent is not compatible with streaming. We solved this problem by dropping the tit-for-tat protocol and making something which is more generic, which we call Give-to-Get.”

“Give-to-Get tries to obtain video blocks just in time for displaying. Tit-for-tat rewards people that give bandwidth to you, which does not work in the streaming case. Instead, Give-to-Get gives bandwidth to people that are nice to others. This is more powerful, but proved to be quite tricky to get working.”

Indeed, streaming a webcam feed is totally different than downloading a huge video file. What the Swarmplayer does is download and buffer one minute’s worth of data, which is then traded with other people in the swarm. The users are actively trading the buffered data.

A key breakthrough was that Dr. Arno Bakker got the “UnDownload()” functionality working. This is needed, because the player has to drop data after a while, since you’re watching a continuous stream. This turned out to require momentous revamping of 7 year old code.”

For those who want to test the BitTorrent live streaming, there is a streaming test where you can tune in to a webcam in Amsterdam, or a 5 minute weather report (not live) from the BBC. You can provide feedback and check out some of the statistics here. More details about how to set up your own BitTorrent live stream are also available.

The Swarmplayer and the BitTorrent live streaming technology are still work in progress. “We hope that we can get this code solid and stable in a month,” Pouwelse said, “then we can focus on the next milestone of sharing ratio enforcement, where we give better video experience to those that upload more.” We will certainly keep an eye on these developments, as it may change the way we watch video online.

Source: P2P-Next Introduces Live BitTorrent Streaming

But inefficiency is not the only reason the service is no more, while the vilified Pirate Bay, Mininova et al. are still with us. Stage6 was also a lot more illegal than a BitTorrent tracker — whether it pretended to be complying with the DMCA or not. Surprisingly under reported after the abrupt demise of the service was the 6th Feb US court ruling against DivX’s attempt to establish its protection under the DMCA’s safe harbour provisions ahead of a legal battle with Universal Music Group. My reading of the company’s consequent, speedy exit from the stage (and correct me if you think I’m wrong) is that Stage6 didn’t have the cash or confidence to test its luck any further. (How much this affects DivX as a whole remains to be seen. But only six days after the court decision, Jerome Vashisht Rota, the inventor of DivX and a major shareholder in DivX corporation, was openly dumping stock.)

It’s not hard to read the tea leaves. While GooTube (famously being sued by Viacom on pretty much the same grounds) probably won’t lose sleep, smaller players eating their lunches off of pirate content will be paying very close attention. VCs burning money on pushing streaming media to the masses will at least want to imagine some returns on their investment rather than the further expense of executives in the dock.

So why is the exit of Stage6 a step in the right direction? Because for all the hyperbole in the mainstream (and sometimes online) media about the YouTube or Google Video or Stage6 ‘revolution‘, the relationship to media they offer us is far too traditional. Come to this place. Be served your media (and suck down your advertising along with it). Go away again. Yes, we can upload material, but I’m not the only one who feels that this wasn’t the primary function of Stage6, even if it did distribute about 50,000 copies of STEAL THIS FILM II before its demise. No need to share, no need to understand the technology, no need to think. It’s what they called ‘lean back’ media: millions of people slouching thoughtlessly in front of an marketing-emitting portal.

The promise of P2P is a thorough breakdown of the kind of power that congeals in a portal like Stage6. A user-owned, user-operated infrastructure that doesn’t require massive investment, doesn’t by default allow oligarchs to make more money from us. A disruptive, mutable infrastructure that brings media to us in the context we choose, forcing a massive re-think about what, why and how we create — as individuals, as businesses, as a society.

It is lazy for us to rely at all on portals like Stage6, but worse than lazy, it’s dangerous. It suggests we don’t value the potential autonomy P2P offers us. Our old media masters profited from control of content: are we really so happy to swap them for new ones who profit from control of our eyeballs? However lazy we are, I think that most of us are able to see that that this isn’t a model that we want to encourage. The demise of Stage6 and the portals that will follow gives us cause to think about strengthening our infrastructures: and that can’t be a bad thing.

Source: Stage6: The Beginning of the End for Streaming Video

Here’s a demo of a BitTorrent accelerated demo video that is available worldwide. In order to play the video you need to install BitTorrent DNA and restart your browser. This demo also shows how much bandwidth you share with other peers who are watching the same video. It works like this; the user who wants to watch a stream first has to install the BitTorrent DNA application, which is also bundled with the BitTorrent mainline client. When the user plays a BitTorrent accelerated stream it will not only download data, but also upload it to other people who are watching the same stream, similar to a regular BitTorrent download.

Most ISPs probably wont be happy with peer-to-peer streaming because their customers will use even more bandwidth, but it will be a great cost saver for sites like Youtube. In fact, it is safe to say that it could save them thousands of dollars a day in bandwidth costs. TorrentFreak talked to Ashwin Navin, president and co-founder of BitTorrent Inc., and he told us: “It’s safe to say that this product is relevant to all major players in the video space. Any company who is pushing lots of video can benefit from BitTorrent DNA, because it’s very easy to implement, and it delivers dramatic benefits. Whether a company is delivering video, software, or games, BitTorrent DNA can increase the reliability, efficiency, and quality of content delivery. Users notice the benefits immediately when streams are higher quality and are no longer choppy.”

The Watch Now section currently list thousands of clips, some of which are supported by ads. Unfortunately it is only available in the US at the moment, but this will change in the near future. Ashwin told TorrentFreak that this is just a soft launch, international versions will be rolled out as soon as we identify some sponsors to make them available. Another downside is that there are no big movie or TV distributors in the “Watch Now” program just yet, but they are always a bit behind when it comes to technological innovation. However, this does not mean that they start empty, Ashwin told us: “Our partners have published some great content, such as the entire “Ring” series in Japanese, the “Zatoichi” sequels, and hit Bollywood films like “Rang De Basanti”, which have huge fans around the world. We even have some stand-up comedy and special interest automotive videos from GT Channel.”

BitTorrent Inc’s next step will be to move beyond the PC environment into other consumer electronics devices such as moblile phones and DVD-players. The possibilities are endless, as Ashwin notes: “We will soon be announcing more progress with device manufacturers integrating BitTorrent technology into the next-generation of consumer electronics. Between the hardware makers and a new slate of partners deploying BitTorrent DNA, I believe the BitTorrent ecosystem will grow from its current 150 million installed clients to a billion clients installed in the next few years.”

Interesting times, stay tuned!

Source: BitTorrent Launches Ad Supported Streaming

It works like this; the user who wants to watch a stream first has to install the BitTorrent DNA application, which is also bundled with the BitTorrent mainline client. When the user plays a BitTorrent accelerated stream it will not only download data, but also upload it to other people who are watching the same stream, similar to a regular BitTorrent download.

Some people have argued that BitTorrent Inc. would use the application (DNA) to let people seed content that they never agreed on downloading, for instance, to speed up the downloads from their entertainment network or sell the bandwidth to others.

However, BitTorrent Inc. CEO Ashwin Navin refutes this rumor and told TorrentFreak: “BitTorrent DNA only accelerates content that a user clicks on. It does not anticipate user wants, or pre-load a user’s PC with content they did not explicitly ask for (via an HTTP request from a webpage). Our terms for DNA require websites to disclose to users why and how DNA improves the experience for video, software, and games with P2P acceleration.”

BitTorrent Inc announced earlier this year that they will launch an ad-supported TV-network this fall. A TV-network powered by BitTorrent’s streaming servoce will have a great advantage compared to competing services, because it saves on resources, and keeps the bandwidth bills relatively low.

ISPs will probably not be happy with P2P streams, because it will increase the bandwidth their consumers are using – so it will cost them more money. The bandwidth war is not over yet.

Source: BitTorrent Streaming Service Launched

Technologies like this could save popular streaming websites like YouTube or Google Video a lot of money. It is estimated that YouTube uses 45 terabytes of storage, requiring several million dollars worth of bandwidth a month to stream the content. Peer to peer streaming would significantly decrease the costs for YouTube, because most of the bandwidth would come from peers instead of YouTube’s own servers.

Solid State announced:

Solid State Networks is a developer of high-performance, content-delivery solutions, and the first commercial-class software suite based on the massively scalable BitTorrent protocol. Our flagship product, the Solid State Distributed Delivery Network, is a hybrid content-delivery solution that combines the economic and performance advantages of peer-assisted technology with the reliability of a traditional CDN. It now includes support for on-demand streaming of content.

Although Solid State can implement some of the features of BitTorrent, they have to make some concessions. A key feature of the BitTorrent protocol is that the pieces of the file are not delivered in a “chronological” order, to make it possible to give a high priority to rare pieces. This doesn’t seem to suit streaming.

In August we reported that the “social” BitTorrent client Tribler has plans to integrate YouTube videos in their client. Johan Pouwelse of the Tribler project told TorrentFreak that they are planning to index every one of the +6 million videos posted on YouTube.

A prototype of the YouTube indexing function from Tribler will be ready by the end of this year, and includes an Amazon like recommendation system, and video tagging features.

Source: Solid State to Launch Hybrid BitTorrent Video Streaming Service

Download a P2P streaming player from the forum Football Streaming Info, which is stuffed full of links to downloads and tips if you get into technical trouble. TvAnts is a front-runner due to its ease of use — a big plus is that the channel menu is mostly in English, unlike many of the other players which seem to be in Chinese.

Once you have a player installed, a clear and detailed schedule of the day’s games and where to view them can be found at BoxtoBox.

Wired also points their readers to BitTorrent. The World Cup matches are posted on several trackers within a few minutes. No real-time streaming, but very useful if you miss a game.

Over at tvRSS you can find some matches in hr.hdtv, and subscribe to the world cup rss feed.

Update:

In a previous article I pointed to the article in Wired, with some tips and tricks to watch the world cup online. But it seems that quite a lot of people still have problems watching world cup streams online. Don’t worry, there’s another p2p world cup stream player, and it’s easier to use.

People from the UK can use the BBC streams. The rest of the world should try the TVUplayer.

Tune in to the ESPN2 channel for English commentary, and you’re ready to go.

And yes, some people say it’s illegal…

Source: World Cup Streaming & Downloading