You may have heard that the Dutch Government now plans to outlaw music and movie (and whatever else) downloading. That seems pretty prosaic: since when was it legal to infringe on someone’s copyright? Isn’t that the whole point of copyright? No matter, for in the lead up to the Dutch announcement’s announcement a survey was taken. “What about the survey?” you may ask. Well, said survey reveals that a good number of artists believe that they’re not hurt financially by piracy, and that it’s about time to re-think the artist-fan relationship with respect to DRM.

The survey asked 4,000 artists (musicians, authors, photographers, etc.) for their views on all sorts of piracy-related subjects.

For example, only 12 percent of respondents said they believed file-sharing hurts them financially. Artists with more schooling’ under their belt tend to be among those who don’t believe file-sharing hurts them financially. So much for the claims by certain organizations that artists are being put in the poor house because of BitTorrent.

What else? Oh, that file-sharing helps spread the word about their work. So says just north of 50 percent of respondents, though this number may change as more and more streaming options break into the mainstream. A sort of, “Online music services help spread the word about my work.”

All of this being said, the Dutch artists aren’t a bunch of hippies who think everything should be free forever. Nope, with a majority saying that the penalties from illegal file-sharing should be more serious that the current penalties on the books.

The Internet is a cruel, mysterious mistress. What we have here is the story of a Canadian band called One Soul Thrust, a phony baloney (I refused to believe “bologna” is the proper spelling here; that’s not even how you’d pronounce the town name in Italian…) BitTorrent site, a misguided manager, and a lobbying group that apparently does little to no research. The story goes that this band’s manager wanted to see if any pirated copies of its debut album were available via BitTorrent. His sleuthing led him to LimeTorrents, a site we all know (or at least should know by now) that deals in trickery.

The site generates fake torrent information. For example, let’s search for “snooki” torrents, Snooki being one of the attractions last night at WrestleMania. As you can see, it turns up several “trusted” or “full” downloads, all of which are rubbish. This is exactly what the band’s manager did, and was shocked to discover that several thousand people were torrenting the album.

They weren’t, of course, but that didn’t stop the Canadian Recording Industry Association, in the form of Balanced Copyright For Canada, from freaking out, saying that pirates are evil and that this poor band was Exhibit A of how lives are destroyed, etc.

Of course, it was nothing of the sort, but at least now the band has increased exposure, so I guess everything worked out for the best in the end.

The upcoming horror film The Tunnel first gained Internet fame—is there any other kind?—about a year ago when its producers attempted to fund its creation by selling individual frames to fans. The money was secured, the movie was made, and now it’s time to distribute the film. And guess how the producers are going to distribute it? That’s right: with BitTorrent. Oh, and it’ll be totally free.

The film, which tells the story of the abandoned underground tunnels in Sydney, and presumably scary things happen down there, will be distributed for free via BitTorrent beginning on May 19. The film’s producers have also teamed up with Paramount for a more traditional release.

The DVD release will come with more than two hours of additional footage, in addition to an alternate ending. A little bit value in exchange for a bit of money.

This here is the trailer, which you can see with your eyes:

How embarrassing it must be for the 6500 people who’ve been sued for having illegally downloaded The Expendables. At least get caught downloading with merit, not that silly bit of nonsense. But yes, word on the street is that the same law firm (the “US Copyright Group”) that spearheaded the effort against people who illegally downloaded The Hurt Locker have now been retained to go after people who downloaded The Expendables. Hope you haven’t been downloading from BitTorrent lately!

The lawsuits target some 6500 unidentified individuals using the good ol’ John Doe method.

There’s a few reasons for the lawsuits. One, of course, is to try to obtain the personal details of the infringing IP address. Can’t really sue someone if you don’t know who they are. Two, and most sinisterly, it’s to get these people to cough up some money, perhaps to the tune of several thousand dollars per person. At this point you’re better off walking into a brick-and-mortar store, shoplifting the Blu-ray, getting caught, then paying the simple fine for shoplifting. It’s a wacky world we live in.

TorrentFreak notes that if 80 percent of defendants pay up (as opposed to actually trying to fight the lawsuit in court, being that justice is only available to the wealthy in this country) then the studio stands to earn some $10 million. Considering the movie made a cool $274 million at the box office, an extra $10 million may be able to pay for the inevitable sequel’s catering budget.

Advice? Stop using BitTorrent, people. It’s not 2004 anymore.

A recent study suggests that the music industry has done such a good job pushing people toward legal services (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify, etc.) that online music piracy has all but disappeared. While it’s probably true that the proliferation of legal alternatives has made illegal methods less attractive—why run the risk of contracting malware trying to download the new Sei A album from a shady source when you can just as easily download it from iTunes?—the idea that music piracy has “disappeared” is probably a bit overenthusiastic.

The problem with the study, which, as TorrentFreak notes, is generally robust, is that it’s weighted toward marginalizing smaller files. It looks at “popular” public BitTorrent trackers, but defines popularity by looking at the number of leechers a site has. Albums are generally under 100MB, and even people with slower Internet connections shouldn’t be leeching too long.

Meanwhile, the files most found to be traded on public BitTorrent trackers, pornography and movies, are several typically hundred megabytes in size, larger still if we’re talking about high-definition rips. In other words, people downloading these type of files will necessarily be leeching for a longer amount of time than people who are downloading music. That gives the impression that nobody is downloading music anymore, and that movies and pornography are the pirates’ new favorites.

That may help explain why the adult entertainment industry has now turned to suing end-users for pirating, often via BitTorrent, its content.

Not that this means anything, but I genuinely don’t know anybody who still downloads anything from public BitTorrent trackers. You’d be a fool to do so in 2011. That’s not to say that private BitTorrent sites aren’t still popular—they are, and they’re generally of a very high quality—but the days of the public BitTorrent tracker being the “go-to” place to grab your “stuff” surely has fallen out of favor within my sphere of influence.

It used to be that when you thought of BitTorrent-related lawsuits you’d think of the RIAA, or maybe the MPAA. It may be time to update that line of thinking. TorrentFreak notes that we’re now approaching 100,000 copyright infringement lawsuits filed here in the US of A in the past 12 months alone. The thing is, it turns out that pornography studios are now where the RIAA was several years ago, suing everybody under the sun in order to scare people into no longer illegally downloading their content. This should be fun for everyone.

The recent uptick in lawsuits can be traced back to The Hurt Locker, last year’s Oscar-winning film about the Iraq war. It was alright. You’ll recall that the movie’s producers had complained that nearly nobody had seen the movie, and clearly that was the result of people illegally downloading it. How else can an Oscar-winning movie have made so little money?

Perhaps because the average American doesn’t want to see movies about Iraq? Just a thought.

The adult movie industry was quick to follow The Hurt Locker’s lead. It’s no secret that the industry is hurting, and it’s also no secret that it’s dead-simple to find their content online, particularly in this age of streaming video sites. You simply Google “stuff” and you’re swimming in whatever it is you want to swim in.

That two of the biggest adult BitTorrent sites were recently shut down shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

These scare-suits typically have settlements in the $1,000 range. Again, the RIAA parellels are obvious: either you settle for X-Amount today, or we’ll make your live a living Heck; our lawyers are just sitting here, waiting to pounce.

You don’t want to get mixed up in that, so you settle and hope it all goes away.

Bottom line: if you’re still using BitTorrent to acquire content that you shouldn’t be acquiring, don’t.

Continue reading…

The company also revealed that it has over 20 million daily active users, over 400,000 daily client downloads, and uses are checking in to the clients from over 220 countries every day.

Put simply, BitTorrent’s clients make easy for users to downloads large files online.

Using the BitTorrent protocol, files are distributed in small pieces from peer-to-peer without the need for centralized data centers.

These files are downloaded from many different origins in pieces and are also uploaded in pieces at the same time to other consumers, which means that the more people who are downloading a file, the more who are also concurrently uploading it to others, so availability increases as demand increases.

BitTorrent recently released its annual list of the most popular searches on KickassTorrents; with Inception taking the top spot.

TorrentFreak has released the BitTorrent Zeitgeist 2010, a list of the 100 most searched-for phrases and keywords in 2010 on one of the most popular public BitTorrent indexes, KickassTorrents.com.

It’s unclear just how many searches KT indexes, but according to the blog post it concerns a “few hundred million searches a year”, so the data presented should give a pretty accurate view of what people were looking for on BitTorrent this year.

Of course, because of its nature, it’s virtually impossible to track what people search on the hundreds of torrent sites out there, so this is just one data point and should be evaluated as such.

Movies are super popular of course, with “Inception“ topping the overall ranking. Also in the top 10: “Iron Man 2″, “Avatar”, “Despicable Me” and “Clash of the Titans”. According to TorrentFreak, “Avatar” was also the most-pirated movie in 2010.

And evidently also in the top 10 of the BitTorrent Zeitgeist 2010: searches for “xxx” and “porn“ (at #4 and #9, respectively).

Perhaps more surprisingly, the first software-related search keyword in the ranking for this year is “Windows 7”, in 20th place.

Go <a href="here“>here for the full list of the 100 most entered search phrases on KickassTorrents.com.

Here’s the top 20:

1. inception
2. iron man 2
3. 2010
4. xxx
5. french
6. avatar
7. dvdrip
8. despicable me
9. porn
10. clash of the titans
11. toy story 3
12. glee
13. salt
14. twilight eclipse
15. dexter
16. the sorcerer’s apprentice
17. axxo
18. robin hood
19. prince of persia
20. windows 7

(Image via Flickr user Diraen)

Hmm, BitTorrent… that’s still around? I could have sworn plenty of folks, outside of niche communities, had moved onto other avenue by now. But, whatever. The company is now focused on becoming helpful in the streaming space. That is, it aims to help companies like Justin.tv and Ustream lower their monthly bandwidth bill by providing a P2P method of transferring data.

BitTorrent’s (the protocol) creator, and now the chief scientist over at BitTorrent, Inc., Bram Cohen, spoke to NewTeeVee to discuss the future of BitTorrent, Inc.

The company’s software would be useful to people looking to cut their bandwidth bills. It can’t be cheap for Netflix to stream all those movies. So, why not let, in effect, the users themselves pay for that bandwidth?

I can definitely see a certain segment of the population saying something like, “Why should I have to pay for Company A’s bandwidth? Isn’t that why I pay for subscription? And now you also want me to pay for the bandwidth? Hmm…”

“[W]ebsites and hosting services should not be ‘fads’ any more than forests and cities should be fads – they represent countless hours of writing, of editing, of thinking, of creating. They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely. There’s history here. Real, honest, true history.” And thus did the Archive Team set out to save the entirety of Geocities.

The team, which has been working for past year on downloading old Geocities Web sites, is in the process of putting together a torrent that will contain the entire Geocities archive. Well, “entire.” The team tried its best to save what it could, but Yahoo, which bought Geocities in 1999, certainly didn’t make it easy on the team. Pre-Yahoo Web sites were particularly difficult to track down.

The torrent will be huge, estimated to come in around 900GB.

But considering how cheap hard drives are, I’d be shocked if more than a few Internet history buffs don’t download the entire archive.

What should happen is that someone upload the archive to Usenet. Can’t get any more rock-solid than that. It’s probably a little more stable than a public torrent, too.

Above, of course, is how CrunchGear would look if it were created by a teen, possibly me, in the Geocities era.

Do you subscribe to Sky Broadband? Have you ever torrented pr0n? Terrible news! The names of many thousands of you—5,000 at last count—have been leaked onto the Internet. It’s pretty much the most egregious leak of this sort that I can ever remember, because now the whole world will know you downloaded Hot Chicks Doing Stuff Vols. 1-9!

Here’s what’s happened, best as I can figure this out.

There’s a law firm in the UK called ACS:Law. It’s one of those trashy law firms that works with content providers—music, movies, pr0n, etc.—to send scary sounding letters to IP addresses it’s “found” sharing content online. A sort of, “Dear sir, We have reason to believe you recently downloaded, illegally, Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream. Please stop, or else~!”

As such, the law firm has built up quite a little database of IP addresses, as well as real names and physical addresses. (Let’s hope Wayne Rooney wasn’t on the list; the guy has enough to deal with.)

And then there was a security breach at the law firm.

Apparently 4chan, a fine site that I frequent, was involved in the breach, as part of Operation Payback. You know, let’s teach those anti-piracy folks a lesson by breaking into their computers!

We’re left with a few questions, and these are just off the top of my head.

1. What kind of rubbish security did this law firm have in place?

2. What does this say about the practice of storing people’s details in a database? I mean, let’s say a law firm sends you a letter for downloading Whatever. You settle for a couple thousands pounds (dollars, euros, etc.) Why, then, do they need to keep your details on its servers? Makes no sense.

3. Surely there are more constructive ways to go about voicing your opposition to something than by causing destruction. Unless your name is Robespierre, leave the destruction to the history books.

Here’s an odd one. Popular BitTorrent site TorrentReactor has announced that it has “bought” a small Russian town, Gar, for just under $150,000, and that the town will rename itself in honor of the site. Sounds like a bunch of nonsense, right? It kind of is, but then it kinda of isn’t, too. Oh dear.

First, you cannot just “buy” a town in Russia. You certainly cannot rename a town on a whim. Apparently you need the express permission of the Russian president to do that.

That said, it seems as is there’s some truth to the matter.

Gar isn’t exactly a bustling metropolis (it’s actually quite difficult to find information on the town; here’s its location on a map), and a couple of extra rubles in investment certainly wouldn’t hurt. The roads there, for example, could use a bit of work.

Now the onus is on TorrentReactor to do something. No, it can’t buy the town, and it cannot rename the town in its image, but it can come up with some money to help out.

Let this be a lesson to would-be pranksters: unless you fully intend to carry out your aims (here, buying a small town in order to help it out), you’d do well to keep quiet. Because now TorrentReactor will look mighty silly leaving Gar high and dry.

The sharing and tracking of torrents through Twitter just got a little easier with today’s release of BitTorrent’s Torrent Tweet, an app that you can add to torrent client uTorrent in order to organize the discussions surrounding individual torrents on Twitter. Through Torrent Tweet, tweets are published with an automatically generated hashtag unique to each torrent file, like this one.

From BitTorrent VP Simon Morris:

“The point of Torrent Tweet is to adapt the powerful referencing system built into BitTorrent to the incredible social interaction engine that Twitter has built such that people can have conversations about things they are downloading, and they can be sure that they are talking about the same thing.”

Morris also hopes that other torrent sites will follow suit and adopt the shortened #bt hashtag convention. However his ambition to centralize all torrenting discussion through Twitter is counter-intuitive. Because it is currently illegal to duplicate and share copyrighted content, file sharers doing so risk becoming the targets of Hurt Locker-esque lawsuits. The savvier ones usually cloak their activities in at least some semblance of anonymity which Twitter lacks, as users are tied to an account.

Despite this risk, torrenting activity on Twitter shows no signs of ceasing. Twitter search “Mad + Men + torrent+ S4 + Ep3″ shortly after 7pm PDT on Sunday and be amazed at how quickly people post torrent files. Or just search for “Arcade+Fire+the+ Suburbs + torrent” right now. The launch of a Twitter-specific torrent indexing system only further reinforces the fact that Twitter has now become a powerful locus for file-sharing.

Nefarious pirates looking to, um, pirate StarCraft II are running into a bit of a problem: one of the more popular torrents that purports to be the game is actually nothing more than a conduit for a nasty bit of malware. I know $60 for a PC game may seem a little expensive to many of you, but would you rather pay the money (and earn Light Side points) or try to pirate it (and earn Dark Side points) and have to deal with cleaning out your system?

Microsoft has warned gamers about the dangers of trying to pirate the game:

’Starcraft_II.exe’ (Sha1: ae648158b87d1513d2777ddb2233d3e83e2741c9) contains a file named “WinUpdate.exe”, which is actually malicious and is detected as VirTool:Win32/VBInject.gen!DM. This is a generic detection for Visual Basic-compiled files that attempt to load other malware by injecting code into different processes.

Another interesting file we saw is “StarCraft.2.Wings.Of.Liberty.CLONEDVD-WW TRAINER.exe” (Sha1: fdaa5abd53256a3fb0ddca5d3dead622768b3ab2). We detect this file as Worm:Win32/Rebhip.A. After a bit of research, we found that it is available to download through the BitTorrent protocol. Worm:Win32/Rebhip.A is a worm capable of stealing sensitive information from your computer by logging keystrokes and gathering passwords.

Nearest I can tell there does exist a legitimate pirated copy of the game available online, released by one of the prominent release groups. No names here, of course. The crack is more involved than the usual replace-the-exe-with-another-exe, according to the nfo.

The point is, putting aside the morality of piracy, that you’re playing with fire if you try to find a pirated copy of the game online, particularly if you’re downloading it from a public BitTorrent site or one of those shady release blogs.

Beware!

I’d describe The Yes Men as a less annoying Improv Everywhere. There’s also a larger, more important point to their antics. They released a movie a few months ago called “The Yes Men Fix the World,” but DVD distribution can take you but so far in 2010. Solution? Release the movie (courtesy of Vodo) 100 percent legally via BitTorrent. I’m downloading now~!

The point to releasing the movie via BitTorrent—totally for free, of course—is obviously to get as many people as possible to watch it. Making a movie, even one that’s free of stupid special effects, takes quite a bit of time and money. There’s a handy donate button there if you’re feeling generous.

Like I said, I’m downloading the torrent right now, but I’d be lying if I said it’s the fastest torrent I’ve ever seen. It’s currently transferring at around 1.4 MB/s—a far cry from the 11-12MB/s that my connection can handle. There’s more than 200 seeders right now and some 700 peers. If even half of those people donate $5 or $10, well, perhaps we’ll see “The Yes Men Fix The World, Again” sooner rather than later.

Oh, this edition of the film contains footage you won’t see ANYWHERE ELSE~! because the guys are being sued. Figures.

via NewTeeVee

More news on the story that has captured America’s undivided attention. No, not the World Cup, which has captured my undivided attention, but the Hurt Locker BitTorrent lawsuits. When we last left you the Electronic Frontier Foundation was preparing to argue in front of a Federal judge that, in effect, the lawsuits were bunk. That didn’t exactly go as planned, but it’s not all bad news. Well, “bad news” from the perspective of a person still using a public BitTorrent tracker to download things. Who still does that?

The gist is that the Federal judge THREW OUT~! the EFF’s argument that the all-in-one lawsuit filed by the U.S. Copyright Group should instead be filed individually. The idea was there’s nothing linking John Doe number 1 with John Doe number 65 other than that they used BitTorrent to download a movie.

So the lawsuit(s) will continue.

The good news is that the judge has told the USCG to cooperate with the EFF in letting the defendants know about their rights. While the USGC would love nothing more than to intimidate thousands of people into cutting them a cheque for a couple thousand dollars, know they have to actually have to tell the people, you know, they have the right to fight the complaint.

What a waste of resources, all these lawsuits. We could be investing this time trying to invent better tasting ice cream or phones that don’t die when you hold them.

Of course, everyone has heard the story about the movie, the Hurt Locker. The movie pretty much failed at the box office, so the producers have decided make their money back by suing everyone who downloaded a copy of the film. This of course has been met with some derision amongst film viewers, since the film was considered to be of less then stellar quality. Of course, most companies immediately go after the bittorrent sites and tell them to cease and desist. Instead, the Hurt Locker people haven’t done that. It’s really not a stretch to suggest that they are doing this in order to get more people that download the movie. I guess they have to try and make money in some way.

via TorrentFreak

Interesting developments coming out of Sweden vis-à-vis The Pirate Bay, a site that I’m shocked is still around. Do you know anybody who still uses it? I sure don’t. The Swedish Pirate Party—inspiration to pirate parties all over the world, including the USA Pirate Party—has decided to take advantage of an obscure clause in the Swedish constitution to defend the site’s very existence. On top of becoming the site’s ISP, the Pirate Party has now decided to use a form of political immunity to protect the site from lawsuits and other forms of harassment. The end result is that The Pirate Bay now, always and forever, seems to be under the legal protection of Swedish law. How about that for a storyline twist?

What’s happening is that the Pirate Party has moved The Pirate Bay’s servers inside the walls of the Swedish Parliament. It’d be like running your blog out of your company’s break room. As such, and per the Swedish constitution, TPB is now considered part of the Pirate Party’s political, um, existence. The law is designed to ensure that an elected political party doesn’t have its views expunged from the record simply because they’re controversial or unpopular.

Now, assuming everything goes according to plan, outside authorities, be they foreign governments or international copyright agencies, won’t be able to sue or otherwise bother TPB ever again.

The Pirate Party isn’t doing this to ensure that people all over the world can download the latest episode Entourage, but to ensure that free speech and unfettered thought can continue to prosper on the Internet.

Noble, certainly, given the childish activity that TPB has engaged in in the past I’m not sure how well-received the move will be outside of the “community,” as it were.

First, TorrentFreak rules. Second, TorrentFreak rules. Third… Well, you know what third is! The guys over there point out that the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sorta like the ACLU for tech, will appear in federal court this week, trying to stop all those Hurt Locker BitTorrent lawsuits. The main reason is that the U.S. Copyright Group, which is just a fancy-sounding name for an otherwise unremarkable law firm, is denying justice to the thousands of individuals wrapped up in this mess. If the USCG is truly interested in justice, it would file suit against each person individually and let them have their day in court one-on-one.

But no, the USCG, using childlike logic, says that, well, since all these people used BitTorrent to download Hurt Locker (and others), they’re all equally guilty. That is, there’s no reason to single out Person A versus Person B because they both did the same exact thing (used BitTorrent to download a movie).

While we’re at it, let’s try all drunk drivers in a single trial because, well, they all consumed alcohol and all decided to drive an automobile…

Here’s how the USCG explains itself:

Essentially, because of the nature of the swarm downloads as described above, every infringer is simultaneously stealing copyrighted material through collaboration from many other infringers, through a number of ISPs, in numerous jurisdictions around the country.

Correct, Techdirt: if the USCG is truly concerned about “stealing,” then why not call the police? After all, “stealing” is a criminal offense, not merely something try to shake them down with a lawsuit.

Oh, that’s right: because the USCG is a sham, and all these lawsuits are nonsense.

It’s all about making as much money as quickly as possible. Justice doesn’t even come into it.

So let’s all hope the EFF can convince the United States District Court in Washington, D.C. to either kill these lawsuits in one fell swoop, or force the USCG to break up the lawsuits into individual parts.