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

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

Arrr.

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

Rather than manually trawling many torrent sites hunting for material, most will agree it’s much more convenient for the content to come to the user, especially when it’s possible to take advantage of the RSS feature built into many BitTorrent clients.

TVNanny is a site dedicated to indexing various torrent sites around the world and bringing the latest in TV torrents to its users, as quickly as possible after they appear on the web.

It’s easy to sign up to TVNanny. Simply enter a username and a password along with an email address (no validation required) and registration is complete.

Clicking on the ‘Shows’ button reveals a fairly comprehensive list of TV shows, currently numbering nearly 200. Popular shows are highlighted, as are shows which have new episodes freshly indexed during the previous 24 hours. Clicking on any show name displays a page giving some detail about the plot, the actors involved and other useful information. More comprehensive reading material is made easily available by the TV.com link provided at the bottom of each page.

Once the ‘Subscribe’ button is clicked, the ‘subscriptions’ page appears where it’s possible to indicate the season and episode numbers to be monitored, the desired quality (ranging from TVRip to HDTV) and a convenient release name filter. The page supplies the URL of a custom RSS feed tailored to the user’s subscriptions which can be entered into the RSS section of a BitTorrent client such as uTorrent or Azureus, providing automatic downloads as soon as the required episodes are indexed.

In the unlikely event that a certain show doesn’t appear, requests for the indexing of new shows can be made via the ‘Suggest a new show’ button.

For users who operate a client that doesn’t support the downloading of .torrent files via RSS, the TVNanny site provides a standalone piece of software which will work alongside the existing torrent client. Those using a client like uTorrent which already has RSS support can find additional information about the feature on the official uTorrent site.

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

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of May 13, 2007…

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

In Geneva, the TV bosses want to hear about Tribler because it works a bit different then the other P2P systems out there. It has a recommendation system for downloads, based on what you downloaded before. It now has very basic support for adding friends. Tribler may look bad, but it proposed standards which removes large .torrent files, fixes trackers/DHTs and it no longer requires websites for hunting down .torrent files, which is an interesting development (but opens up possibilities for spammers).

The Tribler team is planning to release more features in their 4.0 release later this month. In Amsterdam they are holding a workshop around P2P with speakers such as BBC, Pioneer, Ilse Media, German TV people, and others. A picture of their planned new interface is shown here. Tribler conects to peers on the network with similar taste in torrents. The interface shows your top 20 most similar downloaders in the interface.

On their website they describe how this new interface will work:

“Tribler automatically scans the Internet for fresh BitTorrent content. It does not require typing keywords such as ’1984 Hilary clip’ when looking for content. With Tribler we are experimenting with software that can bring Bittorrent to your TV screen. Tribler is the product of university research. Our long term aim is to bring the wealth of content and vibrant community of Youtube to the TV, operated with a simple remote. By simply asking around Tribler build up a catalog of Bittorrent content. Our software asks other peers on the network what content they know about and the location of other peers. When it finds something you might like, Tribler will display the name of the torrent, number of leechers, seeders, size, included files, and the tracker URL.”

A year ago the Tribler people said they where making a “social BitTorrent client“. They now have some source code for a Version 4.0.0 of Tribler which actually does that. Here’s a preview of the interface planned for Tribler 4.0. Too bad those thumbnails only work for content from Vuze.com or other places that put previous thumbnails inside .torrent file. This is going towards a Facebook with P2P avatars. Finally a solution for world peace that works…

We hereby would like to thank all taxpayers in Holland (including myself) who, with a smile, payed the taxes that made the screenshots possible

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

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of April 22, 2007…

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

Files being distributed via BitTorrent and purporting to be a copy of the final book in J.K Rowling’s series were not leaked copies of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows” but a piece of Potter fan fiction called “The Seventh Horcrux”, written by Melindaleo.

Melindaleo, a dedicated fan to the end, gives her work away for free on the internet. However, she denies that she had anything to do with the renaming of the .torrent files that gave quite a bit of extra publicity for her work.

Melindaleo, worried that she could have inadvertently given her community a bad name, said “I got nervous that I’d be jinxing the whole fanfic writing thing for everyone”. She also showed concern that she may attract the attention of Rowling’s lawyers, something that uploaders of this particular torrent won’t have to be concerned about.

Back in 2004, J.K. Rowling gave her blessing to fans who wanted to write their own Harry Potter books and put them online. A spokesman said she was “flattered people wanted to write their own stories” based on her characters.

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

Subscriptions to various shows are managed from within the application. Once set, the software runs silently in the background checking to see if .torrent files are available for your chosen shows yet, and if they are it downloads them by triggering an instance of your favorite BitTorrent client and the download begins.

TVShows is able to download the correct episode from within a series and offers a choice of video qualities to download – Normal, High and Very High.

The open source TVShows 0.2 runs on Mac OS X 10.4+ and is available on SourceForge.

Windows users may like to try Ted, the Torrent Episode Downloader.

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

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of March 11, 2007…

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

Here’s what you need to do:

That’s it, you’re done. Now whenever you send your IM account that’s logged in at home a torrent file, it’ll automatically start downloading it! A simple, yet effective solution.

Have you already tried this, and has it worked for you?

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