The release should have been in the form of a double-feature art work with the album accompanying a book including a collection of original photos by David Lynch. The tracks on the album were written, composed and produced by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse and feature guest vocalists such as Wayne Coyne, Julian Casablancas, Black Francis, Iggy Pop, Susanne Vega and Gruff Rhys.

“Due to an ongoing dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse is unable to release the recorded music for Dark Night Of The Soul without fear of being sued by EMI,” says a statement at the official website DNOTS.com.

While not pointing directly to p2p networks as a possible source for grabbing a copy of the album the statement is still pretty suggestive: “Danger Mouse remains hugely proud of Dark Night Of the Soul and hopes that people lucky enough to hear the music, by whatever means, are as excited by it as he is”.

Below is the tracklisting for the unreleased album:

Revenge (featuring The Flaming Lips)
Just War (featuring Gruff Rhys)
Jaykub (featuring Jason Lytle)
Little Girl (featuring Julian Casablancas)
Angel's Harp (featuring Black Francis)
Pain (featuring Iggy Pop)
Star Eyes (I Can't Catch It) (featuring David Lynch)
Everytime I'm with You (featuring Jason Lytle)
Insane Lullaby (featuring James Mercer)
Daddy's Gone (featuring Mark Linkous and Nina Persson)
The Man Who Played God (featuring Suzanne Vega)
Grim Augury (featuring Vic Chesnutt)
Dark Night of the Soul (featuring David Lynch)

DOWNLOAD Dark Night of the Soul (via Kickasstorrents)

While The Pirate Bay tracker has recently announced its permanent retirement, Mininova made a different announcement yesterday saying that it has passed another milestone by serving (and this is indeed an impressive number) 10 billion torrent downloads!

After 5 years of existence Mininova has established itself as the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer: “We never really expected anything. We don’t really tend to focus on these numbers, we are just trying to run the site the best way we can,” said the site’s co-founder Erik Dubbelboer in an interview to TorrentFreak.

Dubbelboer pointed that Mininova is not their main focus and that’s not a big surprise since a torrent site is not exactly the safest business you can rely on considering the legal issues surrounding any such site: “At the moment we are mainly focusing on other projects besides Mininova,” he said.

Earlier this year, Mininova lost the case against the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN. The court ordered the site to remove all torrents that link to works protected by copyrights. So far Mininova hasn’t decided if they will push for an appeal.

After being at the core of the file sharing debate between artists and announcing her retreat from it later due to the “abuse” her blog was getting as a consequence of her views posted there, Lily Allen joins the issue again. This time she says that she is not against people getting burned copies of her CDs as long as they pay for them.

"If someone comes up with a burnt copy of my CD and offers it to you for £4 I haven't a problem with that as long as the person buying it places some kind of value on my music," she told Key 103.

The British pop singer had launched at first harsh criticism against the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) for their supposed tolerance towards illegal file sharing. However, the group later sent her a letter in which they made it clear that, actually, they did not condone online piracy but it was a mere matter of focal points – the ‘three strikes’ policy didn’t seem to them the perfect solution for the problem.

Talks between Ofcom and Detica, a data gathering and processing company, could result in the adoption of a new system developed by the latter to help identify the illegal P2P traffic on broadband networks

The UK’s concern with illegal file sharing has taken various forms. From Lord Mandelson’s plans to disconnect copyright infringers to the latest option that Ofcom (the independent regulator and competition authority for the communication industries in the UK) is considering – to use Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology developed by Detica and called CView to monitor file sharing (P2P) traffic on broadband ISP networks and asses the level of online piracy among customers.

Sources say that rather than being used against individual users CView could have the role of measuring the level of illegal downloading on a network, data which is quite precious for copyright owners. So far no details about how the system will actually work have been given.

Key principles of CVIEW-based system:

• anonymous data collection — all records collected from the network have their IP addresses strongly anonymised such that no reference to an individual can be made, even in conjunction with other ISP systems. No content data is recorded (e.g. URLs).

• proportional to right to privacy — traffic is inspected to establish what the content is and the application being used, with no persistence of traffic data or identity information.

• closed system — no traffic data or identity information is ever made available to a person. Traffic application data is produced by an entirely closed and automated “lights out” system. Appropriate hardware, software and process controls prevent intentional or accidental breaches of privacy (e.g. preventing access to the live system when data is being processed).

• no feedback loop — none of the behavioural data collected can ever be attributed back to a person or drive action against an individual

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Is file sharing indispensable? Yes, it is. Is Twitter becoming more than a craze? Yes, it is. So, naturally that developers can’t possibly ignore apps that make easier file hosting and sharing with Twitter.

TwitFile is a new such app that allows users to share up to 200 MB files on the popular service for fee.

How it works – you login using your Twitter username and password, and then select the file you want to upload and keying in the accompanying tweet and when that is done with just hit the “Post” button and send the file. As most of today’s things tend to be – simple and fast. Considering the 200 MB size that the service makes possible for sharing files, TwitFile could be an alternative to different email services.

From the site:

You can post files to TwitFile from your phone, our API, or through the site itself.
There are also popular twitter clients that have built-in support for Twitfile

Although the Pirate Bay operators herald the end of torrents and the beginning of a new era dominated by DHT, for now torrent sites are preferred by those who want to grab a movie, a music album online etc.

Good old HTTP however is back promising those less familiar with BitTorrent an easier way to download a file. HttpTorrents is a new site that allows just that – fast downloads without having to worry about blocking, ratings or waiting time.

The downsize would be that you are not likely to find many torrents available for direct download here – only a few of the most popular. The good thing is, however, that the site does add on its waiting list the file you have asked for.

How it works (in their own words):

[...] it is very annoying that even if you have a broadband you still have some downloading problems with torrents. Sometimes you get blocked by the firewall, sometimes you just can’t get the appropriate downloading speed, sometimes you need a rating to download the file and the most annoying thing is when the seeder leaves you with a 95.00% completed file. This turns the promising world of file exchange into a nightmare, but httpTorrents has a solution. We will turn the torrent file that you need into an easy downloadable http-link.

step 1 – You enter the torrent hash into the search field.

step 2 – We provide you with a list of files that you can download.

step 3 – You download the file from our server.

It’s quite a treat to see how fast some torrent sites move – take for example Kickasstorrents – besides being currently one of the most popular and neat file sharing sites around, it’s also one step ahead of many similar sites – it was quick to add download via magnetic links (in another post we reported about magnetic links and how they are seen as the future in file sharing and the death of torrent files) and download via HTTP. If you want to place a request for a certain file that you want to download using HTTP via Kickasstorrents you have to be registered.

For more on differences between direct downloading and BitTorrent read this extended article on Kickasstorrents.

Now doubt about it, after gaining a bad rep for being the first country to enforce the “three strikes” model for repeat copyright infringers, South Korea is determined to maintain it as a press release reveals:

“From now on, the failure to install the software will be taken as an offense against consumers and copyright holders. We will seek stern legal measures.”

A network of 78 Korean P2P sites, accounting for about 90% of the local online movie downloading sources, have already complied with the request to install the software which identifies copyrighted works on the Web using an audio encoding system.

Apparently, the distribution of the software hasn’t been exactly constant and even which led to a sort of business discrimination (those sites which are already using the filtering system have lost revenue over those which are not). Hence the KFPA’s rather drastic attitude.

(via HollywoodReporter)

The record industry has been claiming for a long time that new acts are suffering enormously in terms of establishment due to the massive file sharing and only recognized artists are somewhat safe from the danger it represents. However, many artists of the new wave have proved that to be wrong.

Dan Mangan is another artist to whom file-sharing is not that revenue-devouring demon but a way to reach a broader audience.

Nice, Nice, Very Nice, Mangan's latest album, was well received by both critics and public in Canada, and has brought him a $25,000 prize for Artist of the Year at XM Verge awards. The artist will be touring in European countries like France, Germany, Holland and UK.

"I don't mind people sharing my music, if downloading or pirating a digital format of a song brings someone to a gig and then they have a real face to face, human interaction, maybe they bring a friend, maybe they buy a t-shirt, that's great for me," says Mangan.

Mangan has accounts on both Facebook and Myspace (like most young artists nowadays) to help him keep in touch with his fans but also a site for anyone interested in his works at www.danmanganmusic.com.

His view on file sharing is summed up with much inspiration in a few words: "Even though the music industry has changed so much and people are buying less CD's, I refuse to believe that people don't want to support art that they believe in."

Michael Fricklas, Viacom's general counsel, has recently talked to Yale Law students about P2P and its legal implications. While he declared himself as a fan of fair use without an appeal for the idea of filing lawsuits against file sharers, Fricklas is also a fan of DRM (which he thinks could be a feasible solution for online content rental and online streaming) and a supporter of the "three strikes" policy.

As Arstechnica reports, Fricklas emphasized the importance of treating customers with respect as opposed to the feeling it gives you when bringing them to court which is like "terrorism."

In his speech at Yale he explained how suing end users for illegal file sharing was "expensive, and painful, and it felt like bullying."

TPB's new logo suggesting 'magnetic links' are the future in downloading files

After six years of turbulent existence, time in which P2P and file sharing have become everyday words, the Pirate Bay crew shuts down the site’s BitTorrent tracker permanently as they hail the beginning of a new era where a distributed, decentralized system, DHT, is the mighty ruler.

“The development of DHT has reached a stage where a tracker is no longer needed to use a torrent. DHT (combined with PEX) is highly effective in finding peers without the need for a centralized service. If you run uTorrent you might have noticed in the tracker tab of your torrents that the [Peer Exchange] (PEX) row is often reporting a lot more peers than the trackers you might have for that torrent. These peers all came to you without the use of a central tracker service!” says the site.

While for now TPB continues to host and index torrent files in a slicker manner, having switched off its tracker means that the site can no longer be actually linked to the exchanges of the downloaders and while this change should normally affect the ruling against the site’s founders, both the entertainment industry and the courts have previously shown their lack of knowledge when it comes to things like this quite a bit. However, Peter Sunde said that their decision has nothing to do with the legal ruling last month when the Stockholm district court threatened Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Fredrik Neij (two of the TPB’s co-founders) with a $73,000 fine if the site doesn't either close down, or all links to copyrighted content are removed.

According to TorrentFreak, TPB operators are trying to persuade other BitTorrent site owners to give up torrents entirely in the future as well. Since all of the major BitTorrent clients support DHT and PEX, they can take over the transfers just as Magnet links can become the substitution for traditional torrent files.

The announcement on the blog further says:

By moving to a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), BitTorrent will become less vulnerable to downtime and outages:

With decentralized peer acquisition, there is no central tracker that can be down.
With decentralized fetching of metadata (torrents) we don't need to rely on a single server that stores and distributes torrent files.

Pirate Bay was the entertainment industry’s enemy No1 but now that it’s gone, something tells me that the real nightmare for the industry is merely beginning.

Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi!