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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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! → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
The efforts of media companies to quash online piracy are a bit like someone trying to put out a forest fire with a wet noodle. The latest pathetic flail comes in the form of coercing Google into censoring its results for some search terms. A number of words will no longer be autocompleted or trigger an instant search, among them the interesting and perfectly legal “bittorrent.” → Read More
BitTorrent seems to be growing like a weed – the company just announced that it’s hit 100 million monthly users of its software, the BitTorrent Mainline client and µTorrent. That’s up from 80 million monthly users most recently.
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. → Read More
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.
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“. → Read More
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 → Read More
“[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. → Read More
Do you subscribe to Sky Broadband in the UK? 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! → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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? → Read More
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~! → Read More
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? → Read More
While the producers of Hurt Locker have been quick to sue anyone they can find that’s downloaded the film, they’re not following the typical pattern of movie producers. Typically, after the producers start suing everyone they can find that downloaded the movie, they send out cease and desist orders. Not in this case. → Read More
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? → Read More
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. → Read More
