Others, such as Kazaa, eDonkey, iMesh and Bearshare, enjoyed great success but were slaughtered and/or reanimated into friendly forms by the international recording industry. But it was the 2005 United States Supreme Court decision in MGM Studios v Grokster which drew an important line in the sand.

That hugely complicated case underlined an important message – don’t create a product and promote it for infringing uses.

As we’ve seen from the recent dismantling of LimeWire, that lesson still eludes some and almost unbelievably it’s still being repeated today. What am I talking about? File-sharing client marketing.

A few weeks ago TorrentFreak learned that Cydia, the alternative market place for iPhone apps, were taking a harsh line on file-sharing software. We aren’t talking about an Apple-style blanket-ban on anything with the word ‘torrent’ in the title, but what appears to be an analysis by Saurik, Cydia’s owner, of what might be deemed illegal.

We know of at least two developers who have had their quite decent apps kicked out by Cydia, a victim of their apparent “one strike and you’re out” policy. But it appears that the apps were excluded not due to their functionality, but because of marketing missteps.

Paraphrasing one developer’s marketing blurb, the suggestion was that the app was great, not only for legal downloads but for “not so legal” downloads too. It’s just a few words but they clearly make all the difference.

Another coder, who made a suite of what look like perfectly nice apps for accessing various torrent sites and managing downloads, threw in some beautiful screen shots of the software in action. Whether those TV show download listings in among the nondescript stuff were intentional or not is impossible to say. Nevertheless, the outcome wasn’t good.

As is often the case, TorrentFreak recently received an email from a company promoting a new Mac torrent client, which came with a nice little promotional video. The video demo showed the shiny new client in action – downloading a discography of a very famous mainstream label singer. This, from a company who has clearly invested quite a lot of cash into their products. Why take this kind of chance?

Then just a couple of weeks ago an informative news article was published which mentioned the growing use of mobile apps. In it a respectable developer admitted that his app was mainly used for downloading TV shows. If that app goes huge in the future, what kind of damage would a confession like that cause? Following in the steps of LimeWire is great for a while but it ultimately ends in years of sleepless nights and $100m+ in damages.

There are some brilliant minds out there, coding some awesome applications and while some of them will wither and die, others will go on to greatness and bring the creator the satisfaction dreamed about during those long nights with just a screen, a bucket of coffee and a table lamp for company.

OK, not all software creators or indeed site operators care about or even need to abide by US laws due to their mindset or geographic location. They have chosen their path, are comfortable with it, and are doing what they do best. They are aware that their troubles will grow in parallel with their successes and they will morph, outmaneuver, hide or give the finger to their adversaries – that is their prerogative.

But for those who are positively out of the shadows and actively courting the US and increasingly the European markets, behaving today in a way in which one wouldn’t mind being judged by tomorrow might prove incredibly valuable. And make no mistake, that judgment standard is getting tougher every year.

That said, the good news for software devs is that maintaining respectability (for want of a better word) doesn’t devalue a product in any way, indeed it adds value. And it costs absolutely nothing, just a pause for thought.

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

The main focus of the client is to make it easier for people to find the various movie releases on BitTorrent. On startup users see a home screen where the most popular movies are featured, and on the side they can navigate through the ‘catalog’ of films by genre, actors, directors, countries and the year the film was released.

In addition to a catalog browser there is also an advanced movie torrent search engine built into zButterfly. Here, users can filter their searches based on production years, genres and IMDb ratings. In total, there are over 8200 films for which at least one torrent is available, but Philip Lamb, Marketing Director of zButterfly, told TorrentFreak that the catalog will continue to expand.

When users see a film they like they can continue to the movie download page where a wealth of information is presented. Various release formats, the film’s cast, its IMDb rating, trailers and recommendations for similar films are all available. Most of this meta-data seems to originate from IMDb. The actual downloads are torrentless, and rely solely on magnet links.

Although there is little doubt that there will be a subset of BitTorrent users who will be interested in using such a client, it is also a certainty that the MPAA will not be backing this project. zButterfly’s Philip Lamb agrees with this assessment but believes that they don’t do anything wrong.

“Trouble with the movie industry should be expected,” Lamb told us. “But legally we are a search engine. We do not copy the content on our servers, we do not operate a torrent tracker, we are just a mirror of the BitTorrent network. A mirror which is decorated with a catalog of movies.”

“All movies in our catalog were found with our automatic search robots. Any copyright holder may submit a request for removal, but there is no guarantee that the movie will not be added to our database in the future,” Lamb said, adding that search engines such as Google can also be used to find torrent files. “Legally we are not much different from Google.”

Up to a certain degree Lamb may be right. But judging from the movie industry’s lawsuits against torrent sites in the past years, we’ve learned that ‘intent’ is more important than technicalities. The MPAA would probably argue that zButterfly is promoting copyright infringement by featuring several blockbuster movies on their home screen.

The new client can be downloaded on the official site and all the project’s source files are available on Sourceforge.

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

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of September 1st, 2008…

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

Various forum threads, even on TorrentSpy, warn naive users about these clients. Still, TorrentSpy is actively advertising Get-Torrent, and infecting hundreds of their users’ computers, resulting in a torrent of annoying popups.

Unlike TorrentSpy, most BitTorrent site admins refuse to advertise these clients. The Pirate Bay and mininova successfully banned these malicious clients from advertising through Adbrite, and BTjunkie and many other sites wont let them on their site either.

The malware bundled with BitTorrent clients like Get-Torrent, Torrent101, TorrentQ and BitRoll is a sponsor program called “Cidhelp”. Apparently, it can be easily removed from the Windows Control Panel. However, in most cases your anti-spyware or anti-virus program damaged the files, leaving them impossible to uninstall, while they still cause numerous popups.

In April we ran a Google Adwords campaigns on the Bitroll, Torrent101 and Torrentq websites warning users not to install these clients. Even though it was fun and probably prevented a couple of hundred people from installing the clients, it is far from an ideal solution. The best way is to spread the word, start forum threads and write blog posts or emails to warn others.

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

In a response to the BitTorrent protocol encryption that is now supported by many BitTorrent clients, companies like Ipoque that provide bandwidth management hardware, claim that they found a way to detect and block these encrypted (obfuscated) transfers. Ipoque doesn’t provide any details on how they are able to detect encrypted BitTorrent traffic, and it is doubtful whether they can be sure that the traffic they block is indeed generated by BitTorrent.

In addition to the ability to throttle encrypted BitTorrent transfers, Ipoque’s bandwidth managing devices now also support the use of BitTorrent tracker whitelists. “Desired legal trackers such as tracker.opensuse.org can be registered in a whitelist so that their BitTorrent traffic is accepted. All other BitTorrent traffic can be blocked.”, says Ipoque in a press release.

Lately, more and more companies claim that they have found a way to detect encrypted BitTorrent traffic. The fact is however that none of these companies actually provides data on the effectiveness of these systems. Until they open up their methods I seriously doubt the effectiveness of these devices.

Interestingly, a few weeks ago, Canadian ISP Rogers even decided to throttle all encrypted traffic (not only BitTorrent). Apparently Rogers doesn’t need a device that is able to detect encrypted BitTorrent traffic on their network, they simply throttle everyone who is using encrypted transfers.

The cat-and-mouse game continues.

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

Why would the company open source uTorrent?
There are many reasons for them to do so. One of the many advantages would be to get it quickly and easily ported to other platforms such as OS X and Linux, a task the company has promised to get done. “[uTorrent is] lacking an implementation for Mac and Linux. We will improve uTorrent in these arenas,” said Ludvig Strigeus, the developer of uTorrent in an interview that followed the announcement. Until now he has refused to release non-Windows versions of the client. Also, if uTorrent were made Open Source it would be a lot less likely for its development to stagnate or slow down, there would always be someone ready to maintain and improve upon it.

Reasons not to open source uTorrent
The motivation behind BitTorrent Inc’s acquisition of uTorrent could very well be to have a client that can be customised and morphed to integrate with the upcoming BitTorrent Video Store. If the company were to open source uTorrent, it would not be able to stop users from creating a “clean” version of it, ie. without any Video Store-specific features. This “enhancing” of uTorrent is something users of the client are dreading. A reader of TorrentFreak posted a comment in reaction to the acquisition announcement, “R.I.P. uTorrent!” In a discussion here at TorrentFreak, we came to the conclusion that adding a content store to the client won’t affect most users’ decision to use the program or not. iTunes is a good example of people using a program because of its features, not the openness of its source code. After all, even Azureus will soon have a bundled content store.

By acquiring uTorrent, BitTorrent Inc now has almost 50% of all BitTorrent users in its grasp. They’ve probably paid a hefty price for the client and it’s only fair if they choose not to make it Open Source. The company said in an IRC discussion that followed the announcement that the source code of uTorrent will remain closed for now, but gave no clues as to what their future plans might look like.

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

So what’s the deal?

Torrent Swapper is an open sourced powerful, clean, fast, and easy-to-use BitTorrent client with special social abilities. That means you can get Amazon like recommendations from peers to find new and interesting files, and download double your current torrent download speed using uploading capabilities of your friends.

I haven’t tried “torrent swapper” myself, but I like the social functionalities. However, I also greatly value my privacy…

Torrent Swapper

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