P2P Blog

Copyright filters haven't killed Mininova just yet

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 15:57:06 -0700

All eyes have been on the Pirate Bay in recent weeks, but the Swedish pirates aren't the only ones forced to radical changes due to increased pressure of rights holders. The Dutch torrent site Mininova.org has been defending itself in court since early June, with a verdict due at the end of August.

Mininova has started to take a more proactive approach against infringement, filtering out infringing torrents much like Youtube is filtering its uploads. The Mininova staff described these filters this way:

"(L)ikely infringing video files referred to by torrents are checked by a third party content recognition system. If the system finds that the file corresponds to unauthorized content, we remove and block the torrent that refers to this file on Mininova."

The announcement was met with a lot of skepticism from Mininova's users, with many users denouncing it as suicde. Well, guess what: It's two months later, and Mininova is still very much alive. The site clocked almost 45 million uniques and over 628 million page views last month. However, there are some early signs for users abandoning the site because of the filters.

Most websites have pretty heavy seasonal ups and downs. That's traditionally also been true for file sharing communities and services, which usually tend to get much less traffic during the summer months. Kids that travel don't download that much. You can see that Mininova had some of those seasonal ups and downs earlier this year as well.

However, Mininova had a clear dip in page views in June. Page views were down by almost 14 percent month-to-month. Visits declined only by ten percent, which seems to be an indicator for users spending less time and clicking on less links on the site.

The next few months could be make or break for Mininova. Back to school will be a good indicator on whether users are coming back to the site or switch to torrent sites without filters, and any court decision that would force Mininova to even slightly stricter controls could spell trouble for the site.

Tags: mininova, mininova.org, torrentsites, copyrightfilters, filters

The Progress and Freedom Foundation: Limewire is the devil's child

Wed, 8 Jul 2009 12:59:46 -0700

The Washington-based conservative Progress and Freedom Foundation has published a study titled "Inadvertent File-Sharing Re-Invented: The Dangerous Design of LimeWire 5" today that makes Limewire sound like the most dangerous application ever.

Limewire's features help "identity thieves, pedophiles, terrorists, and spies," "can also grant reduced jail sentences to dangerous pedophiles," and "knowingly (inflict harm) upon children and their families," according to the study. Scary stuff, all thanks to what has been called inadvertent file sharing, meaning that users share some files they didn't really mean to.

Limewire has gotten some heat for inadvertent file sharing before. There've been congressional hearings about the subject, including one earlier this year. The company responded to its critics by redefining the way its new version 5.0 shares files - but that didn't please the Progress and Freedom Foundation's Thomas Sydnor. "No prior version of LimeWire inflicted such serious risks upon so many of its users and their families," he writes in the new report.

So what is all of this about? Limewire 5 introduced the idea of a content library that by default isn't shared with anyone. Users have to take an extra step to select files within the library and share them to make them available for download via the Gnutella network. At the core of Sydnor's criticism is a feature that makes it possible to share bulk selections of these files by clicking on "share all with P2P network":

"The design of LimeWire 5 centers upon a premise that verges upon lunacy: LimeWire 5 presumes that most users really want to be one click away from �sharing� all of the audio, video, image, and, (perhaps) document files stored in their My Documents folders and all of its subfolders�in other words, their entire collections of popular music and movies; all of their family photos; all of their home videos; and many or all of their scanned or faxed business, medical, legal, and identifying documents. "

Of course, one could debate whether the option "share all with P2P network" is really that unclear. Sydnor thinks that it's written so small that you could easily get confused and share everything when you'd want to unshare all of your files.

He forgets however to mention that Limewire 5 offers multiple ways of monitoring which files you're sharing. Each and every file comes with an icon that visualizes its status. It's green if you share it and grey if you don't. Secondly, there's a whole menu entry in the side bar called "P2P network." Click on it, and you'll see all the files you are sharing with the world in one list. Doesn't really get any easier than that.

But that's not all. Did you notice how Sydnor writes that users "(perhaps)" share documents by accident. That's because by defition they don't. Limewire makes it impossible to share any pdf, txt, doc or xls files through Gnutella without changing a setting under "Tools > Options > Security > Unsafe Categories." Hard to do that accidentally. However, Sydnor has still found a way how users can expose some personal data:

"Most consumer and business scanners and multi-function copier-printers can save scanned documents in bitmap, TIFF or JPEG formats. Scanned documents can include very sensitive or personal records like tax returns, business records, financial data, legal documents, medical records, lists of account numbers and passwords, and identifying documents."

Sure, that's possible, even though I'd assume that most scanners by default save documents as PDF files nowadays. However, users still have to explicitly share these files. One should probably also point out that all of the previous stories about massive breaches through inadvertent file sharing focused on actual document files. The blueprint of Obama's helicopter wasn't leaked through a scanned BMP file, and those 150,000 tax returns that the Today Show supposedly found on P2P networks weren't JPEGs either.

But wait, that's not all: Sydnor stretches the definition of sensitive information even further:

"By definition, most music collections will tend to contain a lot of popular music�and almost none of it will be legal to �share� over the Gnutella network. Consequently, when entire collections can be �shared� at once, audio files become 'sensitive.'"

Riiiiight. Michael Jackson MP3s are pretty much the same as Social Security numbers ...

It's not really a surprise that Sydnor deems audio files that valuable. The Progress and Freedom Foundation foundation has a track record of copyright maximalism, and one has to wonder whether its repeated attacks against Limewire aren't really just attempts to rid the net of copyright infringement.

The foundation is funded by entertainment industry heavyweights like EMI, Viacom, Vivendi and Sony Music. Those companies apparently pay enough money to fund 27-page studies that boil down to one single point of criticism: Limewire 5 has a "share all" feature that may or may not be used to accidentally share files.

Well, I got good news for Mr. Sydnor. I've recently had a chance to take a look at the upcoming Limewire version 5.2, which includes further refinements of the new Limewire UI. One of them is that the "share all" button is gone. Somehow I doubt that this will stop Thomas Sydnor from plotting new attacks against Limewire ...

Tags: limewire, pff, progressandfreedomfoundation, inadvertentfilesharing, thomassydnor

Kazaa's bizarre new PR campaign

Tue, 7 Jul 2009 11:38:35 -0700

Remember Kazaa? I know, it's been a while. Kazaa used to be one of the most popular P2P applications, until Edonkey and Emule and eventually Bittorrent came along to offer better ways to download media files. And then there was that lawsuit, resulting in an expensive settlement as well as the commitment to stop unlicensed file sharing on its network.

But that didn't stop the owners of Kazaa from trying to cash in on the popular name. Sharman Networks and Brilliant Digital Entertainment have converted Kazaa.com into music download store that essentially resells subscriptions of DRM-protected Medianet (formerly known as Musicnet) music downloads.

Those downloads can only be played with a Windows Media Player, and they come with a pretty hefty price tag: Kazaa charges you about 20 bucks per month for its music service. Just a quick comparison: Rhapsody Unlimited costs $12.99, and Napster.com only charges 5 bucks per month.

So how does Kazaa compete? Through heavy advertising via Google (you might have seen some of their ads on this blog as well), and questionable SEO marketing. Case in point: Brilliant Digital sent out a press release through PRWeb today that touts a new option to share HD home movies. The whole thing doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and in fact the new feature isn't even mentioned on Kazaa.com.

But that's not really why the company invested a few bucks in PR. The great thing about PRWeb is that you can include links in your press releases, and Kazaa's contains multiple links, with terms like "free music download" linking to its website. That's good for Google juice, but bad for people who actually look for free music: Kazaa.com offers its subscribers a free seven day test period, but each downloaded track will stop working soon after you cancel that subscription.

But wait, that's not all. The company also decided to include a really odd endorsement of its product in the press release, presumably to fill the gaps between those SEO links. Here's what they came up with:

"Jonathan James, Web Hacker spoke of the endless possibilities the software provides to the Kazaa community "They are going to come at you like they came at 'tereastarr,'" he said."

And here's what's wrong with that:

Tereastarr was the Kazaa user name of Jamie Thomas, who has just been sentenced to 1.9 million dollars in damages for trading music via Kazaa's former P2P client. She might not feel all that happy about being part of Kazaa's marketing campaign, but one also has to wonder what this endorsement is supposed to say: Subscribe to Kazaa's overpriced service, and you'll get sued anyhow?

The quote itself actually doesn't come from Jonathan James, but from Thomas' defense attorney Joe Sibley, who used it in her trial, according to AP.

So who is Jonathan James? It's obviously a pretty common name, but there probably aren't too many hackers called Jonathan James. In fact, I can only think of one right now. Jonathan Joseph James was conviceted of breaking into Nasa computers in 2000, and eventually committed suicide in 2008.

Whoops. That would have been a major PR blunder for any reputable company. Good thing nobody really remembers Kazaa.

Tags: kazaa, brilliantdigital, sharmannetworks

How To Save The Pirate Bay

Sun, 5 Jul 2009 14:57:38 -0700

News of the Pirate Bay�s impending sale has worried file sharers around the world. Rights holders on the other hand seem to be somewhat optimistic, hoping that the deal will put an end to the world�s largest file-swapping platform. But history has shown again and again that the demise of popular P2P sites and systems doesn�t lead to less file swapping. On the contrary, the gap is oftentimes filled with more sophisticated systems.

It�s been 10 years since Napster, and some record company executives seem to have slowly realized that they should have struck a deal with the original music-swapping service instead of pushing users to Gnutella, Kazaa, eMule and eventually BitTorrent. Letting the Pirate Bay with its up to 25 million concurrent users die could be another mistake just as big as the failure to embrace Napster. Granted, saving and monetizing the Pirate Bay may be close to impossible, but that doesn�t mean it isn�t worth trying. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

Tags: tpb, thepiratebay, ggf, globalgamingfactory, newteevee

Essayrunner sells school papers found on Limewire

Thu, 2 Jul 2009 15:19:30 -0700

Would you pay ten bucks per month for the chance to access thousands of school papers that your teachers won't find with a simple Google search? Essayrunner.com is betting that some folks will, and it is using the Gnutella P2P network to build a business based on this idea.

essayrunner

The site is basically a giant archive of essays, currently promising access to over 140,000 school papers. There are dozens of essay sites with names like Duenow.com out there, and many students have started to upload papers to sites like Scribd. Essayrunner however offers an interesting twist: The site scours the Gnutella P2P network for essays shared via Limewire and similar file sharing clients. From Essayrunner.com:

"Because of Limewire's complex distributed nature most of the essays are not available on the network at any given time. EssayRunner scours the network for files 24 hours a day 7 days a week so you don't have to. EssayRunner is a mirror for Limewire content. "

A site like Essayrunner obviously brings up a whole bunch of legal issues. Most people use Limewire to download music and videos, and documents are more often than not shared accidentally (in fact, newer versions of Limewire don't share any documents by default to prevent inadvertent file sharing.)

Essayrunner does have a take-down policy, promising to remove any content at the request of the original author, but one has to wonder whether such an author will ever know that their articles are hosted on Essayrunner in the first place.

But wait, that's not all: Adding to the murky picture is the fact that the owner of the Essayrunner.com domain previously tried to spam file sharing networks in order to prevent copyright infringement. He started a Sourceforge project called kNewt about a year ago that was supposed to scour torrent sites for popular file names and then pollute Gnutella with fake files using these names. From the kNewt website:

"For several years open source developers have continued to release versions of p2p software that protect against varied threats, such as spam, but fail to prevent the distribution of copyright files. Should open source software create problems or solve them? Should open source solutions that are mainly used to subvert copyrights be hosted on sourceforge?"

Luckily, his plea for deleopers to "corrode the effectiveness of the Gnutella network to distribute pirated works" got completely ignored, and kNewt never evolved beyond the concept stage. After all, how would Essayrunner have found all those papers in a network of rusty tubes?

Tags: essayrunner, essayrunner.com, knewt, essays, papers, termpapers

Three strikes: Five minutes per court decision

Wed, 1 Jul 2009 12:39:02 -0700

France's government is gearing up for a new version of the controversial HADOPI legislation that would force ISPs to disconnect file sharers after three offenses. HADOPI's original version was struck down by France's Constritutional Council earlier this month because it enabled rights holders to police P2P networks without a judge's oversight. The council ruled that this procedure, also known as Three Strikes, was unconstitutional because it didn't guarantee suspected offenders a fair trial.

A new version of the law currently proposed by the French government would address these concerns by having a judge decide whether or not a file sharer should be disconnected. These decisions would however be made in a fast track trial that would only give a judge five minutes for each case on average. All in all, each case should require about 45 minutes of work, according to an official government study, Futurezone.at is reporting.

That doesn't sound like much time at all, but it still adds up, especially if you want put a dent into the phenomenon of millions of users sharing files online. The original HADOPI plans called for 250,000 blocked Internet accounts per year. The new proposal is slightly less ambitious and only calls for 50,000 decisions per year. The government study still estimates that it would take 109 new full-time positions, including 26 judges, to deal with these cases. One can easily imagine the total cost to reach tens of millions of dollars.

We'll have to wait and see whether French politicians are still eager to support the bill with this price tag attached. France wouldn't be the first country to drop Three Strikes because it's simply too expensive. British regulators estimated earlier this year that implementing Three Strikes would cost about 2.5 million GBP per year. The UK government eventually abandoned the idea of Three Strikes and is now favoring solutions that would require less oversight.

Tags: threestrikes, france, french, hadopi, futurezone

The Pirate Bay sale: Saving their ass or taking the fall?

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:43:07 -0700

The first thing that came to my mind today when I was reading the headlines about the sale of the Pirate Bay was Kazaa. Okay, that's not true. The first thing probably was something like "HOLY SHIT!!!" And then I had to think of Kazaa.

Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom sold their wildly popular file sharing network in the midst of a legal battle with Hollywood and the record companies, essentially saving their ass, securing a way to move forward and found Skype and Joost.

Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg are now trying to sell their site just weeks after Swedish court handed them jail terms, and the news broke only days after they failed to get a retrail based on the claim that the judge was biased. However, there's one very important difference:

The Kazaa case was civil litigation, and and the center of the case was Fasttrack BV, a company founded by Friis and Zennstrom. The duo dropped out of their lawsuit by simply selling the assets and closing the company.

The Pirate Bay lawsuit on the other hand was a criminal case against four individuals, and not a corporate entity. That means that the new owners won't actually inherit any part of the lawsuit. They're essentially starting with a clean slate, as I wrote today on Newteevee.com.

The original owners on the other hand may just have pretty much killed their chances to get the original verdict overturned. Sure, a jury may eventually decide that this isn't really a crime worth a prison sentence, but they'll also ask: If this was really legal, then why did you sell it?

That's obviously a very different outcome than the Kazaa sale. To me it looks much more like the Pirate Bay guys are taking the fall to potentially save the site, and put some more rubust infrastructure in place that would help to keep other sites safe as well.

Tags: tpb, thepiratebay, petersunde, fredrik, neij, fasttrack, sharmannetworks, kazaa

5 Things to Know About The Pirate Bay Sale

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:49:36 -0700

The sale of The Pirate Bay to a Swedish software company, which plans to revamp the site and launch a new business model to compensate rights holders, has most everyone in the P2P community scratching their heads today. Global Gaming Factory X announced that it will buy the site for roughly $8 million, along with Swedish P2P solutions provider Peerialism, which has been developing BitTorrent-based distribution solutions for P2P streaming and downloads. The plan is apparently to use Peerialism�s technology for the next generation of The Pirate Bay.

Countless file-sharing users are now asking: Where does this leave us? Some are wondering if it will lead to the BitTorrent meltdown that we�ve been hearing so much about in the wake of the Pirate Bay lawsuit. And what will happen to all that money? Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

Tags: tpb, thepiratebay, newteevee

Limewire helps to circumvent Irianian Internet censorship

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:58:24 -0700

Limewire is encouraging its users to download and share videos documenting the protests against the Iranian election.

limewire vs iranian censorship

The company's P2P client started to display a splash screen late last week that asks users to add videos about the protests in Iran to their shared folders, explaining:

"Iran has been limiting its own citizens' and the world's access to coverage of the post-election protests by blocking sites distributing such material. Peer-to-peer software, like Lime Wire, provides access to critical information and coverage of the events in a manner that the Iranian government cannot effectively block."

Users that click on the splash screen are automatically starting to download a zipped 110 MB archive of videos from Iran. The Zip file comes straight from Limewire's servers, and users are encouraged to unzip and then share it. Some of the videos are pretty graphic, and most of it is clearly shot with mobile phone cameras or small photo cameras. Of course, you'll probably find most of these videos on Youtube as well - unless you're in Iran, and Youtube is blocked ...

I wrote previously about the way P2P networks and file sharing sites are becoming increasingly important in distributing information about the protest movement in Iran. Videos of the demonstrations as well as the violent crackdowns on protesters have been circulating via BitTorrent, and the folks behind the Pirate Bay have even launched a web forum in support of the Iranian opposition.

Limewire doesn't go that far, but the company wants to take a clear stance against attempts by the current Iranian regime to suppress information about the protests:

"The Iranian government has been limiting the free flow of information in the wake of their presidential elections. Lime Wire takes no stance on the election itself, but we strongly believe in internet and information freedom."

Tags: Iran, Iranelection, limewire, limewire.com, censorship

Joost Adds Widgets, Metadata API to Its Flash Player

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:07:13 -0700

Joost has announced that it is going to allow third-party developers to add Flash widgets to its video player soon. The Joost Labs blog this week previewed a widget that adds keyword-based Twitter search results to a video. Joost wants to eventually release a widget API that will expose some of the underlying video�s metadata and make it possible to integrate these widgets within the Joost Flash player.

This isn�t the first time Joost is toying with widgets. The company�s P2P-based video application also featured a widget API, but few wanted to develop for a player that had no user base. However, Joost has clearly been thinking about how to make widgets work in the past few years, and some of these ideas could lead to interesting results. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

Tags: joost, widgets, api, metadata, newteevee