Whatever happens, we’ll try to be there with a post every day as always.

Thanks everyone for reading…

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Here are a few stats from 2011…

We published 1178 articles (bits included)

With 1,557,408 views the Mega Song article was the most read of the year.

“New Law Will Shut Down TorrentFreak, Music Industry Expert Says” got the most comments, 449 in total.

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

Below is a selection of some of the most remarkable topics covered here on TorrentFreak in the latter part of 2011. Part 1 (covering the first 6 months of the year) can be found here.

Feel free to add your assessment of the last year in the comments section below.

July

BitTorrent had its 10th birthday at the start of July, and inventor Bram Cohen was kind enough to share his thoughts on the past decade with us.

In the same month the MPAA, RIAA and all major ISPs in the US announced a deal to curb piracy with a six-strikes warning system. Under the agreement the ISPs agreed to send “copyright alerts” to subscribers whose Internet connections are used for copyright infringement. Repeated offenders will not be disconnected from the Internet, but could be slowed down instead.

Around the same time, the French authorities provided some details on the scope of their three-strikes law, Hadopi. During the first 9 months of operation, a total of 18 Million file-sharers were tracked. This mass discovery process resulted in 470,000 first warning emails, which equals a little over 50,000 per month. The number of people who received a second warning is currently stuck at 20,000 and only 10 Internet subscribers received a third warning.

Yet another ruling (final this time) confirmed that ‘pirate’ sites operate lawfully in Spain. In India things started working differently, with copyright holders obtaining the power to order ISPs to block sites deemed to be infringing.

Following a hearing in London’s High Court, leading UK ISP BT was forced to block subscriber access to Usenet indexing site Newzbin2. After an attempt to stop the blockade the order went into effect in November. The blocking decision was the first of its kind in the UK on copyright grounds and increased the pressure on other ISPs to follow suit, which Sky did later in the year.

Oh, and sadly enough file-sharers were denied official religion status in Sweden.

August

The mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US continued at a rapid pace and by August 200,000 people had been sued for allegedly sharing copyrighted material online.

The UK communications regulator OFCOM published a report which came to the conclusion that blocking ‘pirate’ websites would not be effective. Ironically enough the document wasn’t redacted properly, revealing a comprehensive guide on how to bypass all possible blocking attempts.

The US domain name seizures resulted in another arrest. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) apprehended a 19-year-old man who allegedly ran HQ-Streams.com and HQ-Streams.net, domains that were previously seized by ICE in February.

Two of the original Pirate Bay founders launched a one-click file-hosting service called Bayfiles. The new service is dedicated to respecting copyrights while offering its users a great platform to store and share files.

Meanwhile, anti-piracy lawyers sue a dead person and a blind man.

September

Early September five people connected to the video streaming and download site NinjaVideo were indicted by a grand jury on copyright infringement and conspiracy charges. NinjaVideo was one of the sites first targeted by Operation in Our Sites mid-2010. The authorities hold the defendants responsible for providing access to unauthorized movies and TV-shows between 2008 and 2010, which allegedly earned the site more than $500,000. In the same month the site’s founder Hana Beshara and co-defendant Matthew Smith plead guilty, and two others followed in October.

Throughout 2011, the Florida-based file-hosting service Hotfile has battled in court with five major movie studios. In September, Hotfile turned the tables on Warner Bros., suing the movie studio for fraud and abuse. Hotfile accused the movie studio of systematically abusing its anti-piracy tool by taking down hundreds of titles they don’t hold the copyrights to, including open source software. Among other things, Hotfile is looking for damages to compensate the company for the losses they suffered.

After blocking The Pirate Bay and BTjunkie, Italian lawmakers proposed several new measures that will put Internet users at risk of losing their connection after one alleged infringement. These copyright complaints can be sent by anyone, not just the copyright holder in question.

The German Pirate Party scored an unprecedented win in the elections for the Berlin state parliament. The Pirates got 9 percent of the vote, which translated into 15 parliament seats. A few weeks later the party polled double digits across the country. With 10 percent of the total vote, the Pirates would become the third largest party in the country if federal elections were held.

Oh, and girls are not into the Pirate Bay at all, but those who are fancy porn just as much as men.

October

In Belgium the Antwerp Court of Appeal ordered Belgian ISPs Belgacom and Telenet to initiate DNS blockades of 11 domains connected to The Pirate Bay. A few days after the verdict The Pirate Bay registered depiraatbaai.be, a new domain not covered by the court order. By the end of the month this domain was already on its way into the top 100 most-visited domains in Belgium.

The Stockholm District Court sentence against Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was finalized after he failed to appear at the Court of Appeal. Svartholm, also known as Anakata online, did not appear at the appeal trial last year because he was hospitalized in Cambodia. He later went missing. The Court of Appeal decided to finalize the initial verdict of one year jail time and a fine of $1.1 million. The other defendants await a decision on their request for a Supreme Court appeal.

A report showed that the majority of users on The Pirate Bay value their anonymity online, but how anonymous can they really be if VPN-providers don’t value the privacy of their customers?

On October 26, Representative Lamar Smith introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which is the House version of the Senate’s PROTECT IP (PIPA) bill. This marked the start of a months-long Internet battle that was still ongoing at the end of the year.

Aside from making streaming of copyrighted content a felony, the pending bill aims to make it easier to put sites that facilitate copyright infringement out of business. Should SOPA become law, authorities and copyright holders will have a broad range of tools to censor sites they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement. Aside from domain seizures, they can demand that search engines remove ‘rogue sites’ from their results, order ISPs to block these domains, and cut off their payments providers.

Meanwhile, Justin Bieber face the prospect of jail for pirating.

November

The SOPA soap continued. Mid-November leading civil liberties and tech policy organizations called for an Internet-wide day of protest against censorship. Every hour more than 23,000 emails were sent to Congress via the American Censorship campaign and Tumblr users alone made 3.6 calls per second.

US authorities carried out the largest round of domain name seizures yet as part of their continued crackdown on counterfeit and piracy-related websites. Right before “Cyber Monday” more than 130 domain names were taken over by the feds to protect the commercial interests of US companies. The new round came exactly a year after 82 domains, including Torrent-Finder, were taken over in 2010.

Across the pond, the European Parliament adopted a resolution which criticized domain name seizures of “infringing” websites by US authorities. According to the resolution these measures need to be countered as they endanger “the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication.” With this stance the European Parliament joins an ever-growing list of SOPA opponents.

Universal Music filed a lawsuit against the popular music streaming service Grooveshark. The music label claimed that bosses and other workers at Grooveshark personally uploaded many thousands of infringing tracks to the service, and could demand hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Grooveshark denied the claims and is determined to fight back.

At the end of November, Rick Falkvinge, founder of the first Pirate Party in Sweden and TorrentFreak columnist, earned a spot in Foreign Policy’s prestigious list of Top 100 Global Thinkers.

December

More than a year after Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized the domain of music blog Dajaz1, they finally gave it back. It turned out that the seizure was a mistake.

SOPA continued to dominate the news all over the Internet. Wikipedia aired a plan to censor itself to protest the pending bill, and the General Manager of the largest online community Reddit said that the bill would “almost certainly mean the end” of the popular site. Reddit’s users also played a key role in convincing domain registrar GoDaddy to drop their support for SOPA.

A new service called YouHaveDownloaded exposed what people behind an IP-address are downloading on BitTorrent. Using this data, we were able to show that unauthorized downloads occur even in the most unexpected of places, from the palace of the French President, via the Church of God, to the RIAA and the US House of Representatives. Ironically, the RIAA blames another company for pirating though their IP-addresses.

Early December, cyberlocker service Megaupload pulled off one of the biggest file-sharing marketing coups in recent memory. Their Mega Song, a production by Printz Board and Kim Dotcom, featured some of the biggest names in pop and show business including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, The Game, Mary J Blige , Kim Kardashian, and even boxer Floyd Mayweather.

Within hours, Universal had vented their fury by having the Mega Song removed from YouTube, even though they had no legal right to do so. Megaupload and its founder Kim Dotcom responded by filing a lawsuit against Universal. The label responded with a “so what?” attitude but Megaupload made it clear that Universal won’t get away so easily – questions must be answered.

Finally, downloading copyrighted content for personal use will stay legal in Switzerland and The Netherlands.

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That’s it for 2011, we’ll be back next year.

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

Take a deep breath…

January

After pressure from the entertainment industries, Google started to censor piracy-related keywords from its instant and autocomplete services. Keywords such as ‘torrent,’ ‘BitTorrent’ and ‘RapidShare’ were excluded from the start, and later in the year Google added a wide range of new terms including ‘The Pirate Bay.’

Despite these efforts the RIAA remained dissatisfied, patronizing the search engine with a could-do-much-better “Report Card” in December.

The mass-BitTorrent lawsuits that entered the US during 2010 reached a new milestone in 2011 with the 100,000th person being sued for alleged copyright infringement. In January alone several prominent lawsuits were added. Anime distributor Funimation announced a lawsuit against 1337 alleged BitTorrent downloaders, and the rights holders of “The Expendables” and Paris Hilton sex tape did the same.

One alleged BitTorrent user paid a mysterious settlement of $250,000.

There was also positive news from the UK, when so-called Speculative Invoicing schemes there came to an end, at least for a few months. ACS:Law, the law firm that had terrorized untold thousands of alleged file-sharers in the UK, quit the anti-piracy business and went into bankruptcy a while later. ACS:Law’s Andrew Crossley was honored with the title of “Internet Villain” of the year and will now face the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal in early 2012.

Two lawyers who were responsible for introducing Speculative Invoicing to the UK were fined and banned from practicing for 3 months. David Gore and former partner Brian Miller of the law firm Davenport Lyons were each told to pay a £20,000 fine and interim costs of £150,000 for their professional misconduct.

Meanwhile, RapidShare and Megaupload fought back against entertainment industry propaganda.

February

Early February, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized several domains belonging to major sports streaming sites. One of the websites was Rojadirecta, an unusual target because two courts in Spain previously ruled that the site operates legally. Rojadirecta appealed the seizure but thus far without result.

In response to domain seizures many people voiced concern that they may be unconstitutional. US Senator Ron Wyden feared that the seizures could stifle free speech, and this indeed turned out to be the case as the US government shut down 84,000 websites by mistake late February.

In Australia, the Federal Court dismissed the movie industry’s appeal against a 2010 ruling which found that Internet service provider iiNet is not responsible for copyright infringements carried out by its file-sharing customers. This decision was appealed once more and is now with the High Court.

Oh, and despite rampant piracy Hollywood box office grosses worldwide surpassed the magic $30 billion mark for the first time in history.

March

Following the February seizure of several domains belonging to major sports streaming sites, the feds arrested the operator of Channelsurfing.net in March. The 32-year-old Texan Bryan McCarthy was taken into custody on suspicion of criminal copyright infringement. In November, McCarthy was indicted on several copyright related charges. Awaiting his trial, the psychologically-troubled operator pleaded not guilty on all counts.

In the same month President Obama’s “IP Czar” Victoria Espinel laid the foundations for PIPA and SOPA, calling on Congress to make changes in order to make it easier to clamp down on copyright infringement. Among the recommendations were calls to turn streaming into a felony alongside authority to wiretap in copyright cases. Music industry expert, book author and Grammy winner Moses Avalon welcomed the plans, which he declared would signal the end of TorrentFreak.

In the ongoing mass BitTorrent lawsuits, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell laid down a landmark verdict that would make it easy for copyright holders – the makers of The Hurt Locker in particular – to send cash demands to people they suspect of copyright infringement. The fact that Howell previously worked as an RIAA lobbyist and as the Managing Director of a pirate-chasing outfit led to suggestions of a conflict of interest.

Meanwhile in Belarus, a pirated copy of The Hurt Locker aired on national TV.

April

In April, worries about the US domain seizures prompted another major torrent site to move to a new domain as a precaution. KickassTorrents, one of the most visited torrent sites on the Internet, replaced its .com domain name with the Philippine extension .ph.

At the same time a group called MAFIAAFire coded a browser plugin to make these type of domain transitions go more smoothly by automatically redirecting users to these new homes. The release went viral and in the following months more than 200,000 people installed the add-on. ICE wasn’t happy with this and asked Mozilla to pull the add-on from their site. However, Mozilla denied the request, arguing that this type of censorship may threaten the open Internet.

An Italian court ordered all ISPs to block subscriber access to BTjunkie, leaving hundreds of thousands of Italians with the task of finding a new torrent site. At least, that was the plan. Just hours after the news was made public, a brand new and ad-free proxy site was launched. The site allowed Italians to browse an uncensored web and access BTjunkie, as well as another popular blocked site, The Pirate Bay.

May

In May, US lawmakers introduced the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), a bill that delivers a wide range of censorship tools authorities and copyright holders can use to quash websites they claim are facilitating copyright infringement. It is basically a revamped and worsened version of the controversial COICA proposal which had to be resubmitted after its enaction failed last year. Two weeks after its introduction, the Senate’s Judicial Committee unanimously approved the bill and it now awaits the senate vote.

In the same week as PIPA was introduced, three U.S. Senators presented the Commercial Felony Streaming Act, a bill that would make streaming unauthorized music, movies and TV-shows a felony. The bill is said to address a gap in current legislation where streaming is not considered a criminal offense.

The popular video streaming site “Fast Pass TV” was shut down following the arrest of one of the site’s alleged operators. The site itself didn’t host any copyrighted content but indexed videos hosted on third-party sites.

In the US the controversial mass-BitTorrent lawsuits continued. Early May the makers of the Expendables set a record when they sued 23,322 people at once, but this record was broken a few weeks later when The Hurt Locker lawsuit was updated to include 24,583 alleged BitTorrent users. Both cases were dismissed a few months later.

In another mass-BitTorrent lawsuit – VPR Internationale v. Does 1-1017- Judge Harold Baker denied a Canadian adult film company permission to subpoena ISPs for the personal information connected to the IP-addresses of their subscribers. The reason? IP-addresses are not people, and especially in ‘adult entertainment’ cases this could obstruct a ‘fair’ legal process.

US authorities resumed “Operation In Our Sites” and seized several domain names associated with copyright infringement or counterfeit related crimes. Among the new targets were two sites that linked to copyrighted films hosted on third-party streaming sites such as megavideo.com and veoh.com.

Oh, and in the midst of all the censorship talk The Pirate Bay moved their severs to a secret mountain complex after Comcast offered help to fix a network issue.

June

A report from the UN’s Human Rights Council labeled Internet access a human right, arguing that laws which allow for the disconnection of Internet users are disproportionate and should be repealed.

Richard O’Dwyer, the 23-year-old UK-based administrator of a TV show and movie links site was arrested by police. Following his detention in the UK’s largest prison, the admin continued fighting his extradition to the U.S.

On June 11th 2011, Europe witnessed one of the largest piracy-related busts in history. The popular movie streaming portal Kino.to was shut down and a dozen people connected to the site were arrested.

As collateral damage, several file-hosting services connected to Kino.to also went down. Several people went on trial for their part in the site’s operation and the main admin was sentenced to three years in prison. Interestingly, a report published after the raids revealed that Kino.to’s users were actually the movie industry’s best customers.

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Part 2 covering the second half of 2011 can be found here.

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

These lists give insight into recent trends, and in 2011 Rebecca Black, Google Plus and Ryan Dunn were the fastest rising searches on Google.

But what about BitTorrent? With billions of searches every year it’s worth taking a look at the most-entered keywords on the dominant file-sharing network.

Unfortunately there is no central database of searches available, but Kat.ph, one of the top 5 torrent sites in terms of visitors, was kind enough to share the most popular search terms of 2011 with us. This list is based on millions of searches and gives an indication of what people were looking for on BitTorrent during the last 12 months.

Interestingly, the most searched for terms are not targeted at specific content, but used to discover files instead. “Ita,” “French” and “2011″ make up the top three and are used to find media in Italian, French and from 2011 respectively. The same is true for “DVDrip” and “720p” which are also listed in the top 10.

The first search term related to a specific title is “Thor” in 9th place, a title that also ended up in the most pirated movies list of this year. Movie related searches are clearly the most popular among users of the site as we also find “Harry Potter,” “Kung Fu Panda 2,” “Green Lantern” and “Transformers 3″ in the top 20.

Traditionally, TV-shows are also much sought after on BitTorrent as well, and that’s no different this year. “Glee” is the most popular TV-related search phrase in 13th place, followed by “True Blood,” “Game of Thrones,” “How I Met You Mother,” “Supernatural,” “House,” “Dexter” and “Breaking Bad” further down the list.

Besides movies and TV-shows the list is completed with a few unavoidable adult related searches, and the relatively rare software and game related keywords such as “PSP” (11) and “Windows 7″ (23). Music isn’t all that popular on public BitTorrent indexes, as we find the first and only artist related search is “Adele” in 44th place.

Below is the full list of the 50 most-entered search phrases on Kat.ph. This list will be different on other public BitTorrent sites, but we assume that the top searches will be popular on other indexes as well.

1. ita
2. french
3. 2011
4. ita dvd
5. xxx
6. dvdrip
7. italian
8. kickasstor
9. thor
10. 720p
11. psp
12. harry potter
13. glee
14. kung fu panda 2
15. green lantern
16. 1080p
17. wwe
18. movies
19. porn
20. transformers 3
21. cars 2
22. captain america
23. windows 7
34. true blood
25. fast and furious 5
26. hindi
27. sex
28. game of thrones
29. telugu
30. tamil
31. rango
32. super 8
33. playboy
34. x art
35. how i met your mother
36. pirates of the caribbean
37. x men
38. transformers
39. mac
40. rio
41. supernatural
42. kickassto
43. source code
44. adele
45. house
46. sucker punch
47. final destination 5
48. dexter
49. nero
50. breaking bad


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

The total number of downloads for Fast Five pales in comparison to last year’s victor Avatar which was downloaded more than 16 million times. This downward trend is also visible throughout the rest of the top 10, where the average number of downloads is lower than in 2010.

In part this drop might be explained by the increase in legal alternatives, although upcoming alternative piracy sources (such as cyberlockers and steaming sites) may have also had an effect. However, since the total number of active BitTorrent users isn’t shrinking, the downloads may simply be spread out over more titles in 2011.

As is the case every year, our top 10 lists have a few notable absentees in 2011. These include the top grossing Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. On the other hand, 127 Hours and Sucker Punch were both hugely popular among the downloading public, while their box office grosses were relatively modest.

The data for this list is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from thousands of BitTorrent trackers. All release formats, including cammed versions are counted. Afterwards, the data is carefully checked and corrected if needed.

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