In what will be seen by the British Phonographic Industry as a partial victory in its war against file sharers, major ISPs in the UK have agreed to music industry demands to start sending out warning letters to those it accuses of sharing its copyright works.

The report states that the deal was agreed by six of the UK’s most prominent Internet Service Providers following intense government pressure. It’s estimated that these as-yet unnamed ISPs will send out hundreds of thousands of letters to suspected uploaders of music. The ISPs - thought to include Virgin Media who already did an early deal - are BT, Orange, Tiscali, Carphone Warehouse (AOL, TalkTalk) and BSkyB.

Demands from the music industry to disconnect uploaders from the Internet have not been met by the ISPs nor insisted upon by the government as Culture Secretary Andy Burnham had already stepped back from a government implemented ‘3 strikes and you’re out’ policy. One ISP, Virgin Media, already indicated that there was “absolutely no possibility” of them disconnecting alleged pirates from the Internet.

However, it’s being reported that other measures may be taken against alleged file-sharers, including traffic management techniques being deployed to punish persistent offenders. As we reported earlier, this element is likely to be negotiated by the UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom.

The Times is reporting that other steps may be taken by the government such as the introduction of an annual £30 ‘download tax’. Peter Jenner, a music industry player who has been supporting such a plan said that the tax could bring in enough turnover to support the music industry: “If you get enough people paying a small enough amount of money you can turn around the wheels of the music industry” he said. Although UK citizens are used to this type of charge with the current TV licensing system, this type of tax seems unlikely to succeed in the current environment.

A Memorandum of Understanding drawn up by the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR) and signed by all six ISPs states that not only must the ISPs commit to a “significant reduction” in music file-sharing in the UK but they must also help develop legal music services too. One can see how this might be attractive to certain ISPs, such as BSkyB who just days ago signed a deal with Universal to set up an online music service “to rival iTunes”.

All this will be backed up by an educational campaign to ensure that every customer knows that it is illegal to upload copyright music.

More on this breaking news as we get it during the day.

Update: Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI says reports of a levy are incorrect: “A levy is not an issue under discussion. It has not been discussed between us and government and as far as we are aware it is not on the table.”

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

ISPs To Send “Hundreds of Thousands” of File-Sharing Warnings

August last year we reported - based on findings from network expert Robb Topolski - that Comcast actively disconnected BitTorrent users. Comcast initially denied our allegations, even though we had proof to back up these claims, and they continued to do so for months. Now, a year later, there is no doubt that Comcast offered a degraded service to BitTorrent users, and they now face a nationwide class action lawsuit (doc).

“Comcast surreptitiously installed receiver packets to keep people from using file-sharing programs when it promised it wouldn’t,” Alyson Foster, an associate at the law firm Gilbert Randolph alleges. “Of course the competition is fierce in telecommunications, but they were trying to get an unfair leg up.”

Robb Topolski, who is now the plaintiff in the nationwide class action lawsuit against Comcast, told TorrentFreak at the time: “We have had two Comcast techs confirm Sandvine in use, but neither confirmed or denied its connection with the RST interference. For me, seeding is possible. I can reach my upload speed limit, but there sure is a lot of interference. Since your article came out, I too have received many reports of seeding being impossible. I’m not sure if it’s regional, or what!”

These reports however, were soon picked up by the mainstream press, and eventually led to an investigation by the FCC. Two weeks ago, the FCC announced that it will order Comcast to stop interfering with BitTorrent traffic. FCC chairman said that Comcast slows down BitTorrent users independent of the amount of traffic they use, and that the company failed to communicate their network management practices to their consumers.

It is now up to the federal court to decide if Comcast’s BitTorrent users deserve to be compensated, and whether the company need to stop their misleading advertisements. Foster said the amount of the damages has yet to be estimated, but the alleged damages are expected to exceed $5 million.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

BitTorrent Users Seek Compensation from Comcast

Leaks of pre-release material onto the Internet are pretty normal events these days. Even the mainstream media are happy to cover the big leaks, usually while portraying file-sharers as the son of the devil. In the past many file-sharing news sites have covered such leaks of movies and music as a matter of course, but as they become more prevalent, less people report on them.

Normally the approaches of the mainstream (and the bands, artist and labels) and that of the file-sharing community are pretty much opposite. On the one hand piracy is killing everything it touches. On the other hand, the file-sharing hand, it’s something totally different - free promotion and all-important publicity for the artists.

Our regular readers will know that the relatively unknown Indiana Gregg did rather well from her recent experiences with piracy, thanks largely to The Pirate Bay, TorrentFreak and dozens of other sites. And she’s not on her own, many other artists have benefited from piracy.

Some of these people are openly happy with their ‘piracy’ successes, others complain like crazy. Interestingly (and this is an opinion piece so feel free to disagree) we now appear to have a third type of piracy complainer - the complain-like-crazy-but-secretly-love-it type.

Enter ‘BuckCherry‘. I haven’t been (un)fortunate enough to hear anything from them but according to Wikipedia they are a hard/alternative rock band. They claim to be pretty mad that a track entitled “Too Drunk…” from their latest album “Black Butterfly” has started cropping up on BitTorrent sites, way in advance of its September 15th release date. This is what the band has to say:

“Too Drunk…,” a featured track from “BLACK BUTTERFLY,” recently appeared online at a number of BitTorrent sites. Buckcherry has released an official statement regarding the song’s unscheduled arrival, declaring, “Honestly, we hate it when this s*** happens, because we want our FANS to have any new songs first.”

There is an old saying, “Least said, soonest mended“, but clearly BuckCherry have never heard of this saying or the concept, since they didn’t just comment casually on the leak, but shouted it from the rooftops in a fully-blown Atlantic Records press release. They mention the leak in the opening paragraph:

Buckcherry Reveals “BLACK BUTTERFLY”; Platinum-Certified Hard Rockers Announce New Album as “Too Drunk…” Appears Online;

…and then go on to mention the actual network (BitTorrent) in the second paragraph detailed above, which is not a particularly smart move if you’re trying to dissuade file-sharers from the inevitable free download. Adding further fuel to the already smoldering pile of suspicion is the fact that it’s possible for fans who preorder to get the “Too Drunk…” track for free.

I may be completely wrong in coming to the conclusion that BuckCherry has (cleverly?) manipulated 30 million world-wide file sharers into sampling their work through their faux displeasure in this press release. I may be wrong that Indiana Gregg is quietly enjoying all the extra publicity afforded to her by piracy.

But of course, the BitTorrent community wouldn’t fall for such a cynical publicity attempt and the file-sharing press wouldn’t fall for it either, we’re not that stupid.

Hmmmm….

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Does BuckCherry Think The BitTorrent Community is Stupid?

The data is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

At the end of the year we will publish a list of most downloaded TV-shows for the entire year, like we did last December.

TV-shows such as “Lost” and “Heroes” can get up to 10 million downloads per episode, in only a week.

Top Downloads June 13 - July 20

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Top 10 Most Pirated TV Shows on BitTorrent (wk29)

Still a relatively unknown BitTorrent client at the moment, Halite is named after a mineral - rock salt in plain English.

The open source application is developed by Irishman Eóin O’Callaghan, who started the project in 2006, and has been adding features and improvements ever since. We’ve been following Halite’s development for quite a while now and over the past few months it has become a fully-featured, yet lightweight BitTorrent client.

One of the greatest strengths of Halite is that it uses minimal system resources. The latest release uses less than 10,000k of memory, half of what uTorrent uses on average and only a fraction of the consumption of Vuze or BitComet.

Halite started to develop a steady user base after uTorrent, the most widely used BitTorrent client, was sold to BitTorrent Inc. At the time, many uTorrent users were afraid that their favorite BitTorrent client would be ruined by the company, and some abandoned the application. Although these worries turned out to be unfounded, Halite has certainly become one of uTorrent’s main competitors.

Halite supports all of the basic features the average downloader requires including encryption, selective downloading, a torrent creator and more. So far there is no support for disk caching, seeding preferences and torrent queuing, but these and other features are on the to do list, and will be implemented in the future.

The download speeds of Halite are pretty much comparable to clients like Vuze and uTorrent. Some people report that it is significantly faster than uTorrent, but in the TorrentFreak test lab we were not able to replicate these results. The most important thing is to configure your torrent client correctly.

Overall I would say that Halite is a great BitTorrent client for those people who are looking for a client that uses minimal system resources and has all the basic features. Worth a try.

Halite screenshots

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Halite, a Fast and Lightweight BitTorrent Client

We do not link to actual torrent files because linking to files that link to files that may be copyrighted is something that might get us in trouble.

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of July 21, 2008…

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Most Downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent (wk29)

Just when things seemed to cool down in Malaysia, we received a rather disturbing email from one of the sysops of tbkresources.org. The sysop told us that, after a few days of downtime, the server was suddenly up again. “After further inquiries with Shinjiru’s billing and abuse department we were assured that “the coast was clear,” he said.

This turned out to be a false sense of security though, as the sysop explained. “Two days ago we discovered that an external disk was suddenly mounted on our box (in a quite clumsy way, I might add) 24/7 support didn’t know shit about it, until 2 hours ago when a senior admin confirmed that this disk was attached by their legal department and out of their hands.”

The sysop discovered that there was something wrong, because the server load was extremely high. At first, the support department couldn’t really figure out what was wrong, but after a few messages back and forth, they got this worrying explanation.

Hi,

After investigation on your server, we found that your server is involve with an abuse case on copyright/torrent. Your server was accessed by our local legal party for investigation. This is a sudden action by them, and we not informed earlier. Due to legal party we have no choice but to comply. Kindly contact to our abuse department for further information. Thank you.

Paul C.
Level 2 Support

So, it turns out that - without notification - Shinjiru started to copy data from the BitTorrent tracker for investigation, whatever that may be. It is unsure at this point whether the ISP will hand over the data to authorities, and whether they are doing it with other trackers, but it’s not looking good.

“This is important to get out as they are most probably doing this to every site they know about, and users are being recorded,” the sysop said. “We have destroyed the data on their USB connected disk, destroyed our site backups on it and truncated and deleted all tables, to ensure the protection of our users. As I have stated it was done with out warning nor consent.”

It looks like Shinjiru might have been pressured by the Malaysian government again. However, even then it is still a strange move to copy data from one of their clients, without notice. The sites that are still hosted there need to be aware of this, and take appropriate action. To be continued.

update: Shinjiru confirmed to TorrentFreak that there was indeed an external drive connected to the server, and that “authority on copyright infringement” attempted to copy the data.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

ISP Secretly Copies BitTorrent Tracker Data

It was always going to be a big, big movie and it certainly didn’t disappoint, going to set a one-day box office record of $66.4 million on opening day, according to Warner’s head of distribution, Dan Fellman. No one, not even pirates are allowed to ruin this party.

Hindering piracy of the movie was always high on the list for Warner and it handed out night vision goggles in Australia in an attempt to thwart ‘cammers’ - people who record movies in theaters. In Australia ‘cammers’ are asked to leave if they are caught by theater staff, in the United States things are a little different.

According to reports, on Friday morning Eastglen 16 Theater employees grew suspicious that a man was recording, or ‘camming’ the “Dark Knight” movie. Following movie industry guidelines they called police at around 9:40pm, who arrived shortly after.

Lee’s Summit police confirmed that they found evidence that the 40-year-old man from Grandview, Mo. had recorded the movie so they arrested him. A few hours later the police went to the man’s house and conducted a search where they say they found pirate movies on DVD.

According to the MPAA, several other movies have been recorded at the Eastglen 16 theater, but at this stage it is not known if the man is affiliated with any particular group or was acting alone. Police have not released the name of the suspect.

Inevitably, and despite the best efforts of Warner, Rlslog reports that a copy of the movie has been leaked onto the Internet by a release group called “TradingStandards” who apparently ’stole’ it from a P2P group called ‘DEViSE’ who actually ’stole’ it from 2Bros - quite confusing. But anyway, by most accounts the quality is pretty poor and not worth bothering with at all, so Warner will be happy.

Considering the popularity of the movie, maybe this time it just has to be the big screen.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Police Arrest Man Camming ‘The Dark Knight’

There are several ways to optimize your BitTorrent download speeds. One of the easiest ways is to join a private torrent tracker, but there are others.

Since there’s always a lot of debate about what works and what doesn’t, we decided to ask an expert to share his thoughts with us. Olivier Chalouhi, developer and CTO of Vuze (formerly known as Azureus) was kind enough to give us some of his own tips and tricks. Since Olivier was the person who initiated the Azureus Open Source project in 2003, which went on to create one of the most popular BitTorrent clients ever, if anyone knows how to get the best out of your torrent client, he does.

Here are some of Olivier’s tips for optimizing your torrent download speeds. There tips work with every BitTorrent client, except for the last one.

1. Seed.

Downloading speeds will be sub-optimal for everyone unless everyone plays their part and seeds. Private tracker sites are a great example of how the overall speed of the swarm increases when everyone is seeding and downloading in equal measure. So, play your part in seeding and tell others to as well.

2. Be connectable.

Make sure you’re not “firewalled” by opening up your incoming ports or by enabling UPnP in your router, otherwise you’ll be leaving bandwidth on the table.

3. Manage your upload speed.

It is all about striking a balance. You don’t want the upload speed to be too high, nor do you want it to be too low. Ideally you want to set your upload speed to be 80% of the maximum possible line speed.

TF note: Want an easy life? Try this handy settings calculator, works for all clients

4. Select the right torrents.

Your download will be faster if you choose to download a torrent where there is a good balance of seeds and peers. For instance, Vuze ranks its search results according to the number of seeds and peers to make this easier.

5. Be realistic.

Check the swarm average and if you’re already above average, then you just need to be patient. If you’re below average, go back and check some of these other things I’ve mentioned.

6. Get a Friend Boost.

I wouldn’t be a Vuze developer if I didn’t give a plug for the Friend Boost feature we recently developed :). When you create a network of Friends on Vuze, you agree to seed content to each other on a preferential basis. That is, if one of your friends has a torrent that you want, you will be able to directly use a portion of their bandwidth to get it. In most cases this will increase your download speed.

Obviously, ways in which to actually implement some of these tips will differ from client to client. If you want to find out how to do it on Vuze, you can check out our wiki.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Speed Up Your Torrents, Tips from a BitTorrent Developer

This new breakthrough technology allows everyone to broadcast a live stream, such as a webcam feed, to thousands of people, using around the same amount of bandwidth you would use to stream to one or two people. With SwarmPlayer, the user can simply click on a “live” .torrent file and tune into any live BitTorrent channel. To make this possible, the P2P-Next research group created a new .tstream format which is a regular .torrent with live capability.

The BBC is one of the parties currently testing the new BitTorrent streaming format, which is part of the P2P-Next project. The scientific director of the project, Johan Pouwelse, told TorrentFreak that it’s not just the BBC interested in this new technology: “We are working with a lot of interested parties. Through the European Broadcasting Union we are getting a lot of feedback. We are expected to do more field trials in the near future.”

If the technology turns out to be a success, broadcasters can save millions of dollars each year on video streaming projects. ISPs on the other hand will be less excited, because they now pay for this bandwidth. Most importantly, however, is that this technology allows individuals to broadcast their streams to thousands of users, without having to invest in lots of bandwidth. YouTube 2.0, sort of.

Pouwelse further told TorrentFreak that, unlike services such as Joost, they are fully committed to open standard and Open Source. “As a research project we, by definition, need to make things that others don’t already have, without needing to worry about business models,” he said, going on to explain how they got live streaming via BitTorrent to work.

“To be relevant we remain BitTorrent compatible,” Pouwelse said. “However, traditional BitTorrent is not compatible with streaming. We solved this problem by dropping the tit-for-tat protocol and making something which is more generic, which we call Give-to-Get.”

“Give-to-Get tries to obtain video blocks just in time for displaying. Tit-for-tat rewards people that give bandwidth to you, which does not work in the streaming case. Instead, Give-to-Get gives bandwidth to people that are nice to others. This is more powerful, but proved to be quite tricky to get working.”

Indeed, streaming a webcam feed is totally different than downloading a huge video file. What the Swarmplayer does is download and buffer one minute’s worth of data, which is then traded with other people in the swarm. The users are actively trading the buffered data.

A key breakthrough was that Dr. Arno Bakker got the “UnDownload()” functionality working. This is needed, because the player has to drop data after a while, since you’re watching a continuous stream. This turned out to require momentous revamping of 7 year old code.”

For those who want to test the BitTorrent live streaming, there is a streaming test where you can tune in to a webcam in Amsterdam, or a 5 minute weather report (not live) from the BBC. You can provide feedback and check out some of the statistics here. More details about how to set up your own BitTorrent live stream are also available.

The Swarmplayer and the BitTorrent live streaming technology are still work in progress. “We hope that we can get this code solid and stable in a month,” Pouwelse said, “then we can focus on the next milestone of sharing ratio enforcement, where we give better video experience to those that upload more.” We will certainly keep an eye on these developments, as it may change the way we watch video online.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

P2P-Next Introduces Live BitTorrent Streaming

Piracy can be a funny business at times, but the rhetoric is often extremely predictable. So when something unexpected happens it can knock you off your stride. Something like… a major game publisher distributing a Scene no-cd crack as a fix would do it, for instance. If it sounds unlikely, that’s because sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. In this case, the publisher is Ubisoft, the game ‘Rainbow Six: Vegas 2‘, and the Scene ‘no-cd’ crack – yes that’s there as well.

The situation revolves around that oddest of characters, Direct2Drive (D2D) - an online games store, owned by IGN, selling games over the Internet as protected downloads. Game code is modified to prevent the standard retail DRM from inhibiting game play (as there is no actual disc to check for) with Trymedia activation utilized instead. More importantly, since the code around the DRM has been modified and changed to a different system, regular patches from the game developers can’t be used. Instead, patches must be reworked by D2D to accommodate these changes. These changes are not always quick, a point D2D does try and defuse in its FAQ.

Thus we come to Rainbow Six: Vegas2 (R6V2) which, since its release in March, has had three patches released for it. The third, 1.03 provides a lot of changes, including new play modes, so legitimate purchasers of the game were eager to try it. The problem is, those that bought it via D2D can’t use it. This is the problem inherent in DRM. Those that buy the product are the ones affected, not those the DRM is designed to defeat.

After lots of complaining and attempts to fix things themselves, one Ubisoft employee found a solution. A zip file was uploaded to the help/support site, named “R6Vegas2_fix.zip”.

If D2D users patched to 1.02, then replaced the EXE with this one, they could then update to the new patch. However, someone ran a hex edit and it appears the fix was not Ubisoft code but actually a ‘no-cd’ crack released by the Scene group RELOADED, as shown here.

Since then, the zip file containing the fix has been pulled from the Ubisoft support site, so we’re unable to verify. The game’s community is as baffled by this as everyone else. Since the claimed origin of the fix, 10 days ago, there has been no word on it officially from Ubisoft, beyond a ‘Community Manager’ who states

We’re looking into this further as this was not the UK Support team that posted this, however if it is an executable that does not need the disc I doubt it has come from an external source. There’d be very little point doing so when we already own the original unprotected executable.

As soon as we find out more about this we’ll let you know.
_________________
Ubi.Vigil
Community Manager
Ubisoft UK

Although it is not unknown for a Scene release to be used to ‘fix’ a retail product, it’s certainly rare to have that fact promoted. That the ‘no-cd’ patch works, might have some relation to how brutal the Scene is when it comes to the quality of their work, especially in games. Whilst this is a validation that the Scene isn’t as bad as the lobby groups would have you believe (they fixed the game, and did it for free) you can bet that Ubisoft won’t be smiling at E3, and that they, and Direct2Drive, will continue to use DRM to annoy and inconvenience paying customers.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Ubisoft Steals ‘No-CD Crack’ to Fix Rainbox 6: Vegas 2

As long as there have been lawsuits against alleged file-sharers, there have been people claiming that they did not do what the anti-piracy agencies are alleging. In a practical world, although it should be possible for competent groups and individuals to identify an IP address infringing copyright, it is known worldwide that many anti-piracy outfits are simply not competent. They send warnings or compensation demands to laser printers and hundreds of other non-infringing users and devices, such as the user in Germany recently who proved to be using a client which wasn’t capable of infringing. Even the MPAA acknowledges that it’s so difficult to gather evidence to use in these cases that feels it shouldn’t have to provide any.

Let’s imagine for a moment that these anti-piracy tracking companies operate 100% flawless systems (I know, I know…) That they have opened up their systems for scrutiny, and that they can correctly identify an infringing IP address 100% of the time. Surely if we reached this point, there can be no further dispute? Well, not quite. Although the identification of an infringing IP address should be possible, in the absence of spy cameras it is absolutely impossible to identify the user sitting at the keyboard at the time of the alleged infringement. Add a wireless router into the mix and the infringer on the network could be just about anyone within its range. Add an unsecured wireless router in a densely populated area, and it’s happy hour at lawsuit hotel.

However, this doesn’t put off lawyers from sending out compensation claims as they only target the bill payer. Since the UK law firm Davenport Lyons are leading the chasing of alleged file-sharers in the UK, we’ll look at their cases. Davenport acknowledge in their compensation-demanding letters that the bill payer may not be responsible for the infringement - but nevertheless, that doesn’t stop them from threatening them anyway. So what happens when a bill payer is accused of an infringement he knows he did not commit?

Recently, we covered the story of a German case where the Regional Court in Frankfurt declared that if an infringement takes place on a wireless network, it is the responsibility of the infringer, not the network owner. Of course, for Davenport Lyons this was quite a problem due to the fact that for over a year now they’ve been saying that German law would be echoed in the UK, and that wireless network owners would be found liable for activities carried out on them.

Now, Struan Robertson, a technology lawyer with prominent law firm Pinsent Masons (the company behind the well respected Out-Law.com) has confirmed what we’ve suspected all along - that a UK court would not hold the bill payer responsible if it’s clear they weren’t responsible for the infringement:

“The onus is on the party bringing the action to convince the court on a balance of probabilities that the person being sued is responsible for the infringement,” he said. “The legal wrong isn’t that you left your network open, it’s the file-sharing.”

In a civil case in the UK, this phrase “balance of probabilities” is very important and roughly means “is it likely the defendant carried out the act, based on the evidence provided?” It’s worth noting that higher levels of proof (as in a criminal case) are not required, as Robertson notes: “The trouble is, if you use the Wi-Fi defense, absent of any computer evidence to back either party’s case, the judge might simply think that you’re lying. That’s one reason why you’re asking for trouble by leaving your Wi-Fi network open to the world.”

Noting Robertsons comments, in preparing a wireless defense, evidence from a router showing that others have accessed the device (multiple MAC addresses in the logs, for example) could prove vital in tipping the scales in the favor of the defendant. Presuming that the case ever gets to court, that is. There isn’t any requirement to hand this evidence over beforehand, but indicating that it could be produced in court would be helpful. As Logistep provide their data to the court in spreadsheet format, that should also suffice when offering evidence in defense.

Information received by TorrentFreak further indicates that some of those who have robustly denied Davenport’s allegations, have found the law firm backing down. Now it appears that in some cases they seem to be backing down when faced with a strong “wireless defense”. This is quite a turning point since up to now, Davenport have insisted the bill payer is always responsible for what happens on his connection. Interestingly, according to documents shown to us, Davenport state that although they won’t take any further action now, they would take action if the user’s IP address is seen infringing in the future, and that proceedings would be made against the bill payer for failing to secure the network against 3rd party access. Back to Mr Robertson’s comments:

The legal wrong isn’t that you left your network open, it’s the file-sharing.

Moving on…..

The dangers of mounting a weak or non-genuine “wireless defense” were outlined earlier by Mr Robinson, so this is a clearly a very serious issue. However, there are also other areas where infringement could’ve been carried out by someone other than the bill payer, not from outside but from within the family unit - by children for instance. Out-Law has kindly clarified the position in the UK:

“Both Scots law and English law provide that a parent generally is not liable for the actions of their child, and that a civil judgment is as binding on a child as it is on an adult. There are, though, some circumstances in which a parent can become responsible for the child’s actions. That can happen when a child causes injury to others or where a parent has previously authorised or subsequently ratified the child’s unlawful act.”

There is little doubt that at least some of the people accused by Davenport have committed some sort of infringement. Equally we have seen lots of evidence that shows that many have not. Many bill payers are wrongfully accused due to the actions of others and since the Logistep tracking company (and others like them) won’t open up their software to outside scrutiny, it’s impossible to say how many others are being wrongfully accused simply through errors in the system.

Whatever the truth, one wrong accusation is 100% unacceptable.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

UK File-Sharers and the “Wireless Defense”

The proposal, as we explained on Monday, is simple. Extend copyright by 45 years in order to help ’struggling session players’ earn money when they’re old. It seems a noble principle, and seems to be one that has convinced commissioners, in any case.

Perhaps the biggest incongruity that came from the announcements about it, is the feeling that session musicians, after being paid for the last 50 years for a single days work, need, all of a sudden to get another 45 years of payment.

You can bet the guy that put paper in the printer, that spat out the plans for McCreevy’s house hasn’t gotten paid for the last 50 years. I’ll bet the architect hasn’t either. However there is some reason that musicians, particularly jobbing musicians without the talent or ambition to head off on their own, should be paid for work of decades past. The press materials put out by the commission tries to spin a brave face on this, with the likes of frequently asked questions, and number 7 asks the question we all have:

7. Have performers not earned enough in the 50 years of protection?

Most performers or singers and session musicians start their career in their early 20’s or even before. That means that the current 50 year protection ends when they will be in their 70’s. Current life expectancy in the EU stands at 75.1 years for men and 81.2 years for women and it is usual for persons to live well into their 80’s and 90’s. Once protection has ended, performers no longer receive any income from their sound recordings. For session musicians and lesser known artists this means that income stops when performers are retired - the most vulnerable period of their lives.

Alas, they have overlooked one important fact. When someone retires, they cease getting paid for their work, since they are NO LONGER WORKING. That is what retirement means. If these session musicians haven’t worked since 1967, they have been retired for the last 40 years. Can we look forward to the Commissioner putting forth more legislation allowing nurses, gardeners, factory workers, mechanics, lorry drivers etc. to retire at 30 as well, safe in the knowledge that they will have their money woes cared for?

However, there was not all doom and gloom as a result of today’s meeting. Two other proposals were also passed that were in some way, better for the artist AND the consumer. First, part of the provision of extending the copyright is a requirement dubbed ‘use it or lose it’. It allows musicians to recover their copyrights from labels, if the label no longer wishes to market the recording. If, after a year of no commercial availability, then the copyright will be rescinded. This could be seen as an attempt to force recordings back into the market, but it will remain to be seen how effective this will be, or how it will be enforced. If selling copies only at a small back street shop in a small town would qualify, for instance.

Of course, of greatest interest to us, is the actions to deal with the royalty collection groups. Until now, they’ve had country monopolies. You play a song in public, and as long as it’s under copyright, you’ve had to pay a fee, regardless of the artist wishing the collection group to do so. As the final shake up of copyright reform, the national franchises such groups have enjoyed (like cable TV companies) will be broken up, and artists will be able to sign with any agency they desire, bringing about, the commission hopes, competition.

However, none of this is binding yet, as it has to be approved by the Parliament. It is worth noting however, that the proposal document lists the history behind the proposal. That in 2004, they issues a call for comments, and later had meetings with certain stakeholders. Stakeholders in the EU context means businesses involved with the subject, not citizens. Tellingly, the proposal itself lists where it seems to have gone wrong

Summary of responses and how they have been taken into account
Responses in favour of term extension came from performers’ associations, the recording
industry, collecting societies, music publishers, performing artists and music managers. Those
against term extension were telecoms, libraries, consumers and public domain companies.
The arguments of those against term extension were addressed in the analysis of impacts of
the various options.
• Collection and use of expertise
There was no need for external expertise.

From first looks at the impact study, it would appear that it only concerned itself with those who have created and published music in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cost difference between public domain, and copyrighted music. A study that had it’s conclusion written into the brief, and hardly representative of the real facts.

Euro-sceptics have disliked the EU for years, and with the increasing evidence that, in this case at least, commissioners are being lead by their wallets, rather than by common sense and the interests of Europe, it’s a sad state of affairs for a body described as “the only body paid to think European”. Clearly, ‘European’ is a euphemism for ‘greedy’, or possibly ’short-sighted’.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

EU to Extend Copyright, Break Royalty Monopolies

When we first wrote about YouTorrent, we never expected the site to grow in popularity as quickly as it did. A month after its launch the site was getting millions of visitors, and it continued to grow. In fact, no BitTorrent site had ever grown as fast as YouTorrent.

Unfortunately this astronomical growth didn’t last. In April the meta-search engine stopped indexing sites like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, and other sources that provide links to unauthorized copyrighted files. They even considered selling the site at the time, but this never went though. Unsurprisingly, this change cost the site most of its visitors, who moved on to YouTorrent alternatives.

After a while however, the traffic stabilized, and a few weeks later it started to grow again. Today, four months after this drastic change, YouTorrent is ready to move on, as it launches the largest legal torrent search engine with tens of thousands of torrents adding up to a whopping 6TB of data.

“We feel that a full meta-search engine is a better experience for our users considering our switch to legal content,” Patrick, the co-founder of YouTorrent said. “We now return accurate seed and peer data and results are quick and easy to navigate, and more in line with traditional search engine result pages.”

The new site searches verified torrents on sites such as Jamendo, Vuze, BitTorrent, Legaltorrents, Legittorrents, Gameupdates, Wortharchiving, BT.etree and Mininova’s featured torrents section. By default the results are ordered by relevance, but they can also be sorted by number of seeds and peers, the size of the torrent, the upload dates and the number of total downloads so far.

For music files, YouTorrent has also included a link to the Bitlet streaming tool, so users can preview tracks before they decide whether or not they want to download them. Similar to the old design, there is a list of related searches in the sidebar, which may serve as inspiration. The YouTorrent blog has been updated, and has some great content as well.

Patrick further told us that they are currently working on a content distribution platform. This will allow individual publishers to upload files to the site, and YouTorrent will make sure that the files are seeded. The content distribution platform will be similar to Mininova’s CD, but Patrick assured us that it will include some great features that are unique to YouTorrent.

“Although we have lost some traffic we are still very popular and serving hundreds of thousands of searches a day,” Patrick said. “This is very encouraging and we believe with the new service this will continue to grow as our content aggregation reach and depth increases.”

Going legal has cost the site more than half of its traffic. The new interface and several other updates are aiming to get at least some of these visitors back, and make the site one of the big players in the “legal” torrent niche. Time will tell if they have made the right decision.

YouTorrent’s New Look

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

YouTorrent Relaunches with 67,170 Legal Torrents

Last week we reported on the final chapter of the QuebecTorrent story. After a long legal battle against 31 Canadian media organizations, the administrator decided that rather than fight and lose, it would be better not to mount a defense at all. After receiving a permanent injunction ordering the closure of the site, QuebecTorrent closed its doors for the last time having amassed an impressive 108,805 members.

Many people are drawn to BitTorrent news as it can be both exciting, confusing, intriguing and amazing all at the same time. Today we can report on a story which has all of these elements.

Seemingly out of nowhere appears Torrent411.com. Dubbed “The Torrent Yellow Pages”, this site will have the Canadian recording industry - ADISQ and CRIA et al - tearing out its hair out today. Hosted in Malaysia, from a standing start it already has 109,006 members, which is a couple hundred more than QuebecTorrent.

In fact, all of the QuebecTorrent user accounts have been transferred there - plus all the ratio stats and pretty much everything else. Adding insult to injury, categories that were removed on QuebecTorrent in a failed attempt to avoid legal action in Canada, have now returned. “No censoring blacklists will be tolerated on the site!” claim the Torrent411 admins.

It’s hard to imagine a bigger kick in the teeth for the media industry than this. A notice on the homepage reads:

Welcome to one and all! It is with great pleasure that we launch the Torrent411.com site today. All the team of Torrent411.com wishes you the most cordial of welcomes! Here you will find all the torrents imaginable which will be for you for thousands of’ hours to come! Filled with surprises that await you!

Of course, Sebastien Brûlotte, aka ‘Doditz’ the ex-administrator of QuebecTorrent, is abiding by the terms of his injunction to the letter. He assured us that he had no part in the creation of the new site and this is backed up the admin team at Torrent411: “All the members of the’ team behind QuebecTorrent.com were preserved, except for late Doditz, our old Admin, who by court order could not join us.”

One area where the sites aren’t quite identical is the number of peers currently being tracked. Of course, to comply with the injunction QuebecTorrent is currently tracking zero peers but already there are instructions on Torrent411’s homepage to get the site’s old torrents working - either a simple edit of the .torrent file’s ‘announce url’ to match the format on Torrent411 - or users can simply re-download matching torrents from the site and use those instead.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

QuebecTorrent Clone Outmanoeuvres Music Industry

Seedboxes are not something every BitTorrent user wants or needs. They are mostly for people who share a lot of files, and those who want to keep a good ratio on one of the elite private BitTorrent trackers.

The downside to having a seedbox is of course that they are not free. To some this isn’t a problem, “I pay for my Internet connection, so why not pay a few extra bucks to get the best out of it,” is an argument we often hear. Others, however, are satisfied with the speeds they get, and don’t want to pay extra for BitTorrent traffic.

So why should people use these seedboxes? What are the benefits? Here are some of the advantages.

1. Competition.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, users on private trackers are extremely competitive. No matter how many torrents you have seeding, or how you’ve managed to tweak the BitTorrent client settings, there’s just no competing with the uploading power of a seedbox. With many elite private trackers, a seedbox is not just recommended, they’re almost essential for account longevity.

2. Speed.

Most seedboxes are on 100Mbit lines, which makes them really fast. Unquestionably faster than your home Internet access - unless you live in Japan or Sweden, that is. You can sit back, relax and watch in amazement at how fast the torrents finish. Gigabyte files will be downloaded in minutes, practically without limitations. Of course, you’ll still be limited to the speed of your home connection when you want to transfer these files from the server to your computer.

3. Uploading.

Some users of private trackers are less concerned about the downloading, and more about seeding. Good ratios are crucial to a healthy membership - without them, the account will wither away and die. With a seedbox, your ratio will be 1:1 within minutes, not days. 10:1 ratios are not uncommon within the first hour for popular torrents. No more do you have to seed the torrent for weeks just to stay in the good graces with your private tracker. You’ll be free to delete seeding torrents, and replace them with other ones.

4. No more throttling and bandwidth limiting ISPs

ISPs like Comcast are known to throttle your BitTorrent traffic, and they will soon introduce a monthly bandwidth limit of 100GB. With a seedbox you can bypass these limitations. Your seedbox traffic is not counted towards your ISP account stats and won’t be throttled. The only time it becomes ‘your’ traffic is when you choose to download the files from a finished torrent to your home PC, and uploading torrent traffic will not eat into your cap.

5. They’re Secure & Safe

With a seedbox, you don’t even need to use a BitTorrent client on your home computer - your worries about the RIAA or MPAA spying on you are over. No more DMCA notices or warning letters from your ISP - and more importantly, no lawsuit letters will be coming either.

Where to get a Seedbox…

Seedboxes aren’t cheap, but they don’t have to break the bank. Many services now offer a ‘torrent-specific’ seedbox packages that are great for entry-level users, and include the ‘TorrentFlux’ interface for easy setup and torrent management. Here are some affordable TorrentFlux hosting solutions:

These are only a few of the many options of course. Another option would be to install a web-based BitTorrent client like TorrentFlux on a server yourself. Happy torrenting…

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Speed Up Your Torrent Downloads, Get a Seedbox

The data is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

At the end of the year we will publish a list of most downloaded TV-shows for the entire year, like we did last December.

TV-shows such as “Lost” and “Heroes” can get up to 10 million downloads per episode, in only a week.

Top Downloads June 06 - July 13

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Top 10 Most Pirated TV Shows on BitTorrent (wk28)

The proposal by Irish EU commissioner Charlie McCreevy, currently serving as European Commissioner for Internal Market & Services, was first proposed back in February. It aims to extend copyright protection for performing artists from 50 years to 95.

The proposal is supposed to secure the pensions of long forgotten artists. In a statement, McCreevy said “I am not talking about featured artists like Cliff Richard or Charles Aznavour. I am talking about the thousands of anonymous session musicians who contributed to sound recordings in the late fifties and sixties. They will no longer get airplay royalties from their recordings. But these royalties are often their sole pension.”

According to the Financial Times, the proposal could come up to vote as early as this Wednesday, July 16th. Also up for discussion would be a plan to split up rights societies by the antitrust arm of the commission, potentially making rights societies compete against each other for the rights to collect royalties from artists.

While this would certainly be a better way to curb their less than philanthropic actions, if it comes at the cost of greater copyright, is it that beneficial to the 500 million citizens of Europe? There is a glimmer of hope though. Two commissioners are opposed to the extension plan; telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding and commissioner Antonio Tajan.

The copyright extension plans met initial scorn back when they were first announced in February, with groups like the Open Rights Group and the EFF launching a petition to have it blocked, as well as a website to deal with the issue. Nevertheless, McCreevy kept on going, and the proposal is now ready to be voted on.

McCreevy himself has his pension already planned from a former partnership in a chartered accountancy firm (and he has been in politics since 1977, so he clearly planned early). It is left to wonder then why he feels the need to legislate some sort of speciality pension for artists. If they decide to stop work at 25, why should they be paid for it past 75? If that has been their only source of income, why could they not have done as the hundreds of millions of other EU citizens, myself included, and planned for their retirement?

Commissioner McCreevy had not replied to a request for comment at the time of publication.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

EU to Extend Music Copyright to 95 Years

There are many cases where data collected by anti-piracy companies has been called into doubt. Apparently even laser printers are pirating media these days, such is the flimsy nature of the data gathering. Now, according to an interesting Heise report, it seems that it’s possible for these companies to log pure downloaders and provide this information to lawyers to process compensation demands, even when no uploading has taken place.

Despite operating a version of eMule modified to never upload (via a so-called ‘leecher mod’), a user of the eD2K network has received a claim for compensation of 700 euros. Anti-piracy tracking company Media Protector allegedly gathered the data in October 2007 and stated that the user had been caught uploading a movie and some adult material.

The accused has claimed that, because of the zero-upload modded client, it was impossible that anything was uploaded. The client itself had never been reset and displayed a operating time of 924 days and it had never distributed a file.

Of course, tracking companies such as Media Protector and Logistep are always super-confident of the accuracy of their systems, even though they are never confident enough to open them up to scrutiny. Lawyers are always quick to point out that the evidence is good enough for the courts to grant orders for the disclosure of user’s personal information, but it’s a one sided process and the defendant never gets the opportunity to contest before their identity is revealed.

In the interests of fairness and transparency, the sooner these companies have their systems opened up for scrutiny, the better. If the systems are proved accurate, then this strengthens the position of anti-piracy tracking companies and enhances their credibility, so one has to question why they are so reluctant to reveal their techniques. Maybe it’s because they are afraid that Cory Doctorow is on the right track?

Perhaps of more concern is why courts are so willing to accept this data as foolproof when seemingly no-one knows how it is collected. And when defendants are denied this information too, fairness seems a distant concept.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Anti-Piracy Evidence Put in Doubt by Leecher

We do not link to actual torrent files because linking to files that link to files that may be copyrighted is something that might get us in trouble.

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of July 14, 2008…

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Most Downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent (wk28)