BitTorrent

BitTorrent usage is on the decline in the US largely as a result of consumers having access to legal online content options. This trend isn’t echoed in other parts of the world where access to legal content is either restricted or delayed significantly.  

Writes Ernesto on TorrentFreak: In recent weeks the anti-piracy antics of Microsoft have made the news on a few occasions. From censoring The Pirate Bay to funding BitTorrent poisoning startups, the software giant is determined to attack piracy head-on. But perhaps the company should make a start by educating its own employees first. In Microsoft’s offices around the world many company employees are using BitTorrent to download and share...  

Just a few days ago, reports revealed that Microsoft is the top petitioner to Google for the removal of links to allegedly pirated media. This comes shortly after news broke that Microsoft had cen...  

In recent weeks the anti-piracy antics of Microsoft have made the news on a few occasions. From censoring The Pirate Bay to funding BitTorrent poisoning startups, the software giant is determined to attack piracy head-on. But perhaps the company should ...  

Ernesto / TorrentFreak: BitTorrent Traffic Booms Due to “Licensing Challenges”  —  Over the years we have been following various reports on Internet traffic changes, specifically in relation to BitTorrent.  One of the emerging trends is BitTorrent and P2P traffic as a whole losing its share of total Internet traffic, in the U.S. at least.  

First time accepted submitter CAKAS writes "After legal actions taken by several industry outfits, BitTorrent traffic has fallen in the United States to the all time low of 12.7 percent of internet traffic. However, this trend seems to be unique to the U.S. — In other parts of the world, like Europe and Asia, BitTorrent traffic continues to rise. 'According to Sandvine, the absence of legal alternatives is one of the reasons for these high...  

Despite the Movie industry’s claim that you cannot compete with free, the growth of legal TV/movie on demand services such as Netflix appears to be killing off BitTorrent’s Internet share in the US, with BitTorrent traffic now just 11.3% during peak ...  

In the U.S., BitTorrent’s share of total Internet traffic is falling sharply and the aggregate share of all P2P sharing applications is now at an all-time low of 12.7 percent. In other parts of the world, however, this trend is noticeably absent. In Europe and the Asia-Pacific region BitTorrent continues to surge. In part this difference can be explained by the lack of legal alternatives. Source: BitTorrent Traffic Booms Due to “Licensing...  

Conversely however, in the US, BitTorrent traffic has been on the decline ... "We see higher levels of P2P filesharing than in many other regions, at least partially due to geographical licensing challenges that restrict the availability ...  

File-sharing services have been around for very long time, starting predominantly with Napster, which provided users the ability to share and download music for free. A lot has changed since, and new services have come up but it appears ...  

San Francisco-based BitTorrent Inc. says its peer-based “branded products and services are used by ... domains and demands that the German company stop using the BitTorrent namesake. Bram Cohen, a computer programmer, unveiled the BitTorrent ...  

Microsoft is funding a new Russian startup named "Pirate Pay" that is being built to help track and shut down the distribution of copyrighted works on BitTorrent. According to Torrent Freak, they've developed a technology which allows them to attack existing BitTorrent swarms by flooding clients with fake information, masquerading as legitimate peers. "We used a number of servers to make a connection to each and every P2P client that...  

BitTorrent Inc. of San Francisco, the developer of the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, claims in a federal lawsuit that a German company is ripping off its intellectual property. BitTorrent file sharing, aka torrenting, is a protocol often used by online pirates to obtain free music, games and software.  

BitTorrent Inc., the company behind the BitTorrent protocol and the world famous uTorrent client, has taken legal action against a company attempting to trade on the company's brand. In a lawsuit against a German-based company calling itself BitTorrent Marketing GMBH, US-based BitTorrent Inc. is claiming damages for trademark infringement, unfair competition and cybersquatting.Source: BitTorrent Inc Takes Legal Action Against Download Scammers  

The Pirate Bay may be getting some support from ISPs in some places, but other BitTorrent sites are not so lucky. With The Pirate Bay already blocked in the country, Italy has now turned its eye on a popular alternative, KickAssTorrents. Unlike in some ...  

BitTorrent is a torrent client for sharing data via the BitTorrent protocol. The software enables users to share, search, download and upload application, music, video, document, picture and other files. BitTorrent supports download of multiple files...  

In recent weeks alarm bells sounded at Poland's Computer Emergency Response Team when it was discovered that an unknown entity is sending massive amounts of forged data packets and posing a threat to BitTorrent users worldwide. A detailed analysis reveals that anti-piracy outfits may be initiating these attacks to prevent movies from being downloaded. According to security experts, the legality of these attacks is doubtful.Source: Anti-Piracy...  

In the past week, a couple of new movies (new to BitTorrent ... The Avengers continues to be a popular download, despite only being a CAM copy. 21 Jump Street went down from the first place to the fourth in the past week.  

Judge is upset at telecom's decision to turn over records early, forces records to be destroyed  

The movie and music industries continue to complain about how much piracy is costing them. DRM doesn’t work as it is easily circumvented, and it seems big lawsuits don’t work either. The proof being The Pirate Bay still being online today. Another solution has presented itself, however, and it comes in the form of a [...]  

John Carter is the most downloaded movie this week. The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.  

My qBittorrent client (for Linux) stalls out far too often and knocks me offline. Why is this happening, and what can I do to fix or mitigate the problem?I'm very new to torrenting, but all this interruption just can't be normal, or no one would be doing it. Please correct (or overlook) any improper vocabulary on my part. I don't have a handle on this stuff yet. When I download a well-seeded torrent for, say, 500 MB file(s), it takes very...  

Users in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy have been blocked from accessing the Pirate Bay, as widely reported. Now, the notorious BitTorrent site has launched a new site at 194.71.107.80, which may be reachable in those ...  

TheGift73 writes "The Russian based 'Pirate Pay' startup is promising the entertainment industry a pirate-free future. With help from Microsoft, the developers have built a system that claims to track and shut down the distribution of copyrighted works on BitTorrent. Their first project, carried out in collaboration with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures, successfully stopped tens of thousands of downloads. Hollywood, software giants and...  

The mass-BitTorrent lawsuits that are sweeping the United States are in a heap of trouble. After a Florida judge ruled that an IP-address is not a person, a Californian colleague has gone even further in protecting the First Amendment rights of BitTorrent users. The judge in question points out that geolocation tools are far from accurate and that it's therefore uncertain that his court has jurisdiction over cases involving alleged BitTorrent...  

Ernesto / TorrentFreak: Microsoft Funded Startup Aims to Kill BitTorrent Traffic  —  Hollywood, software giants and the major music labels see BitTorrent as one of the largest threats to their business.  —  Billions in revenue are lost each year, they claim.  But not for long if the Russian based startup “Pirate Pay” has its way.  

The Adam Duritz-lead act is dropping a BitTorrent Bundle of new tracks, liner notes and artwork from the album directly to the 150 million users of BitTorrent. Additionally, the band will spend its summer vacay on tour, from June 9 through Aug. 11.  

This first attempt was carried out in partnership with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures, as two out of numerous companies who believe that torrents are one of the largest threats to their revenue. The idea started three years ago with a management ...  

Indeed, new builds are out for the stable and beta releases of uTorrent. As expected, the set of changes is modest in both cases, the former showing a single entry and the latter sporting twice as many. The stable release eliminates a bug that had been ...  

"The Russian based 'Pirate Pay' startup is promising the entertainment industry a pirate-free future. With help from Microsoft, the developers have built a system that claims to track and shut down the distribution of copyrighted works on BitTorrent. Their first project, carried out in collaboration with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures, successfully stopped tens of thousands of downloads." Each of which, naturally, ran out to buy the...  

Actor Wil Wheaton, known for his roles in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Lost and The Big Bang Theory made a few interesting comments on his blog. He says that piracy isn’t as evil as Hollywood claims.believes that Internet providers shouldn’t mess with people’s BitTorrent traffic. “I believe in network neutrality, I don’t believe that [...]  

A report this week says that a startup funded by Microsoft is aiming at killing BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer network used heavily by hackers to trade pirated software. The report, fromm TorrentFreak, says that Pirate Pay, a Russian startup, has been developing a system which tracks down and shuts down the distribution of copyrighted works on BitTorrent, has been working with major studios such as Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures to stop...  

North Carolina State University assistant professor Robert Hammond monitored prerelease albums being downloaded through BitTorrent and compared the numbers with actual album sales. The investigation is said to have uncovered a direct correlation ...  

µTorrent is a small and incredibly popular BitTorrent client.  

Ernesto / TorrentFreak: BitTorrent Piracy Boosts Music Sales, Study Finds  —  For more than a decade researchers have been looking into the effects of music piracy on the revenues of the record industry, with mixed results.  —  None of these researchers, however, used a large sample of accurate download statistics …  

itwbennett writes "Geek advocate Wil Wheaton has written a blog post on the (legal) usefulness of BitTorrent, saying that the speed of his recent download of Ubuntu 12.04 should serve as a reminder that BitTorrent fills an important niche. Wheaton compares blocking BitTorrent to closing freeways because bank robbers could get away." ...  

We've been following the news of the DDOS attack on Swedish BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks. Now, ZeroPaid has finally learned who was behind the attack. We have some news just breaking right now. ZeroPaid has learned who was behind the attack of Swedish BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay. The attacker goes by the name Anonymous Nyre - a defector of the online collective Anonymous. A comment was left on PasteBin explaining...  

Along with adding a second leg to their impending "Outlaw Roadshow" tour, alt-rockers Counting Crows have unveiled a BitTorrent bundle of tracks from the brand-new "Underwater Sunshine."More news: Counting CrowsAll the latest music and artist coverage from SoundSpike  

LinuxSecurity.com: A hacker who claims to hate both Anonymous and notorious BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay (TPB) has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack that TPB has been suffering under for the last 24 hours.  

Remember that episode of The Wire when Avon Barksdale filled out a police report after Omar jacked his stash? No? You're right, that never happened. But this is happening: BitTorrent, the California-based file sharing website that allows people to download ...  

BitTorrent may not be all bad for the music industry which is contrary to how they would like to portray it. It seems that piracy could aid album sales, if a new study is to be believed. North Carolina State University assistant professor Robert Hammond examined prerelease albums being BitTorrented and the album sales of said albums.    The investigation netted some interesting results. What he found was that there was a correlation between...  

Ernesto / TorrentFreak: Verizon Refuses to Identify Alleged BitTorrent Pirates  —  Last fall, John Wiley and Sons became the first book publisher to go after BitTorrent users in the US.  —  By filing a mass-BitTorrent lawsuit the company became one of the many copyright holders who together have sued a quarter million people in the country since early 2010.  

IT World: Geek TV star uses Ubuntu 12.04 download as example of legal BitTorrent use.  

Woz was Woz in Australia, Nokia showed off mobiles and really big guns were still being made perfect in this week’s top stories. Woz On Innovation, Robots And What Apple Does Wrong Steve Wozniak’s view on what’s needed for innovation — and where Apple could afford to loosen up a little. Read More How To Protect Your BitTorrent Privacy OK, you’re us ...  

A new study conducted by economist Robert Hammond, assistant professor at North Carolina State University, has shown that pre-release leaks of albums onto BitTorrent search sites actually increase the overall sales of the music, while targeting the sharing ...  

However, this latest independent study, entitled "Profit Leak? Pre-Release File Sharing and the Music Industry" by Robert Hammond, Assistant Professor of Economics at North Carolina State University, claims that piracy actually increases sales ...  

When the latest alpha version of uTorrent was released earlier this week several users spotted something unusual in the 'about' window. For years the uTorrent client belonged to BitTorrent Inc., but all of a sudden ownership was being credited to an unknown company named Gyre Inc. The uTorrent team was quick to fix this 'coding mistake,' but they couldn't wipe out a trail of evidence suggesting that BitTorrent might rebrand itself in the near...  

A recent study found that contrary to arguments repeatedly posed by major record labels — and perhaps contrary to logic as well — BitTorrent piracy.  

A Russian startup called Pirate Pay — in allusion to the notorious file-sharing site — has reportedly created a way to attack “BitTorrent swarms,” or groups of computers hosting content, making it hard for them to share files. Apparently the company was initially building a traffic management system for ISPs,...  

"BitTorrent" or "Torrent." TorrentFreak's Ernesto first caught wind of the potential corporate switch when he noticed a change in the alpha release of BitTorrent's uTorrent client. In the "About" menu for the software, the copyright typically attributed to ...  

American rock band Counting Crows have sold more than 20 million albums worldwide, but this success hasn't caused them to overlook the changing landscape of the music business. Today the band releases four tracks from their new album for free on BitTorrent. Talking to TorrentFreak, Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz says BitTorrent is the new and improved radio.Source: BitTorrent is the New Radio, Says Counting Crows Frontman  

Geek TV star uses Ubuntu 12.04 download as example of legal BitTorrent use. read more  

American rock band Counting Crows is embracing BitTorrent rather than suing every user. American rock band Counting Crows doesn't share the same view of BitTorrent that the recording industry expresses with each and every John Doe lawsuit. The landscape of ...  

Here's the official description of Deluge: "Deluge is a full-featured BitTorrent client for Linux, OS X, Unix and Windows. It uses libtorrent in it's backend and features multiple user-interfaces including: GTK+, web and console. It has been designed using ...  

Starting this summer millions of BitTorrent users in the United States will be tracked as part of a voluntary agreement between the MPAA, RIAA and all the major ISPs. Those who are caught sharing copyrighted works will receive several warning messages and ...  

Skolkovo or Russian's competition to Silicon Valley has a hot company Pirate Pay which just received funding from Microsoft. The idea behind the system is to confuse BitTorrent clients to keep them from downloading specific content. The monetization comes from movie studios and other content providers who would pay to keep their products from being shared.The idea makes sense but the challenge is it could be illegal to use a targeted attacks...  

Guide to circumventing the country's High Court ruling ordering IPS to block Swedish BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay. This past February the UK's High Court found that the operators of Swedish BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay  "authorise its users’ infringing acts of copying and communication to the public," thus paving way the way for the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the British record industry's trade association, to...  

The confusingly named Pirate Pay (I love a pun) claims that its technology can stop any torrent dead. Now the former VP of engineering at BitTorrent Inc, John Pettitt, has pointed out that Pirate Pay might be more smoke and mirrors than ...  

A Russian startup called "Pirate Pay" has received seed funding from Microsoft. The company's technology is designed to attack BitTorrent swarms and trick clients into disconnecting. They've already been hired by Disney and Sony Pictures to attack downloaders, apparently successfully. The company won't disclose how their technology works, which is usually a sign that it [...]  

LinuxSecurity.com: A team of Russian developers is touting a technology it says can kill off BitTorrent-based P2P file sharing - and says it has attracted investment from Microsoft.  

The Counting Crows on Monday released a slew of tracks from its latest album to fans on the popular peer-to-peer file sharing platform BitTorrent. The band -- which introduced the album Underwater Sunshine (Or What We Did On Our Summer Vacation) in June ...  

Rock band Counting Crows released four tracks of its new album Underwater Sunshine on BitTorrent Monday, complete with artwork and 25 pages of liner notes. Counting Crows singer Adam Duritz told me during a phone conversation last week that he ...  

A hacker who claims to hate both Anonymous and notorious BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay (TPB) has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack that TPB has been suffering under for the last 24 hours. The user, who goes by the Twitter handle @AnonNyre, has ...  

The band worked with BitTorrent Inc. to create a special bundle of content that includes music along with artwork and what used to be called liner notes written by Counting Crows’ lead singer Adam Duritz. Existing users of the µTorrent peer ...  

John Pettitt, former VP of engineering at BitTorrent (who we've heard from before in a very different context related to software patents), noted in a mailing to Dave Farber's IP list that what Pirate Pay described didn't sound particularly effective or (more importantly) particularly legal. "Reading the article it sound like they are spoofing traffic to confuse torrent clients and force disconnects. It's not at all clear if this will...  

In a move quite contrary to current trends, Counting Crows has released an album using the BitTorrent protocol to spread the music for free. Both the band and label have approved this new move, which comes in advance of a new concert tour the band is about to embark on. "I don't know why everybody's not doing it," said Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz.    Torrents allow musicians to get more exposure. Sure they don't sell as many albums...  

A group of Russian developers is touting a technology they say can kill off BitTorrent-based P2P file sharing – and says they have attracted investment from Microsoft. According to a story in Russia Beyond the Headlines, the technology developed by ...  

Another site that has received high ratings by our readers. 4. Torrent Project: a Torrent search engine able to crawl through numerous sites and get both torrents and files inside each torrent. 5. BitTorrent.am: Another open site with a number of good ...  

Infamous BitTorrent site denounces Virgin Media attack.The Pirate Bay has declared that DDoS attacks against websites are an "ugly" method that mirror efforts to block the BitTorrent website itself. Earlier this week, Virgin Media confirmed that its website was taken offline amidst an ongoing DDoS attack, allegedly carried out as revenge for the ISP blocking the Pirate Bay.The Pirate Bay took to Twitter and to Facebook to denounce attacks such...  

Just a few weeks after a New York judge decided that an internet protocol address is not enough evidence for lawsuits against accused illegal file-sharers, a California judge has ruled that an IP address can't even pinpoint one's state. As detailed by CNET ...  

Someone is angry at whistle-blower site WikiLeaks and Swedish BitTorrent file-sharing site Pirate Bay. Both sites have been battling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks this week, but it's not clear who is behind the attacks and why ...  

Last December, the film "Vysotsky. Thanks to God, I’m Alive" hit Russian theaters, and for one month, Pirate Pay blocked downloads of torrents of the movie. In those 30 days, Pirate Pay technology blocked 44,845 infringed copies of the movie from being downloaded.  

So yesterday, I decided that I'd download Ubuntu and put it in a Virtualbox on my iMac, just to see how the distro is doing these days. As you can see from the images above, if I'd downloaded the iso straight from their server, it was going to take the better part of an hour, so I decided to grab the torrent instead. Turns out it was a good choice, because it was finished in about six minutes. I was so happy with the speed and performance, I...  

When most large ISPs are subpoenaed by the entertainment industry for trading copyrighted files, they hand that data over without much concern for user privacy. Occasionally you'll see a company like Time Warner Cable protest the subpoenas, albeit simply because they're annoyed by the added labor costs involved. Verizon was one of the few big ISPs to fight with the entertainment industry over their DMCA carpet bombing efforts back in 2003...  

A Firefox add-on that automatically uploads torrent files to your favorite BitTorrent client's Web Interface  

Five years ago, we wrote about a fascinating writeup by the keyboard player for the band The Counting Crows, in which he discussed his views on piracy and the music industry. While we didn't fully agree with what he was saying, his viewpoint was ...  

Microsoft is reportedly backing a Russian-based start-up called "Pirate Pay" that claims to track and shut down BitTorrents that share copyrighted materials. According to TorrentFreak, their first test of their technology involved ...  

The developers, which have received an investment from Microsoft claims to have already stopped about 50,000 downloads of the movie “Vysotsky: Thanks go God I’m Alive” in the month after its release, in its proof-of-concept test. Over the past three ...  

Verizon Wireless is refusing an information request from John Wiley and Sons concerning alleged BitTorrent pirates. TorrentFreak reports that Verizon Wireless is refusing to hand over the information of its subscribers to book publisher John Wiley and Sons ...  

“Counting Crows is an enduring musical phenomenon ... of all stripes the flexibility to distribute multimedia experiences directly to their fans at scale. Our commitment is to create powerful technology to connect cutting edge artists with new fans ...  

“Counting Crows is an enduring musical phenomenon ... of all stripes the flexibility to distribute multimedia experiences directly to their fans at scale. Our commitment is to create powerful technology to connect cutting edge artists with new fans ...  

“Nobody’s carrying a boombox on their shoulder waiting for you to tell them what they can listen to anymore. But everyone has an iPod in their pocket and a choice. Everyone. So we’re going to give 150 million people some songs they can fit ...  

Robert Hammond studied a year's worth of album sales data, comparing it with file shares via BitTorrent. He found that album sales did better if they became available first as shared files--selling up to 60 more copies a month after their online "release."  

Voltage Pictures, the production studio behind the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker, has filed a new lawsuit in a federal court in Florida, according to TorrentFreak. The studio’s latest complaint targets at least 2,514 alleged BitTorrent users, whom Voltage Pictures claims pirated the film and cost the studio millions. The company last year filed a joint lawsuit against more than 30,000 alleged BitTorrent users who illegally downloaded the...  

As long as there have been pirates, there have been people trying to stop them. Most of the time that's via lawsuits, draconian legislation, all sorts of blocks, limits and artificial hurdles for legitimate buyers, and generally spoiling everyone's fun ...  

µTorrent is a small and incredibly popular BitTorrent client.  

But even if The Pirate Bay was blocked in the UK by a court with little regard to due process, it's still a lot better than in India for example, where companies can have entire websites blocked at their will. This happened last year when several torrent ...  

The Pirate Bay is getting pounded with a denial of service attack and most of the likely suspects deny involvement. There's a good whodonit developing over at The Pirate Bay, the popular BitTorrent file-sharing service. An unknown entity has ...  

frontman Adam Duritz said that the label simply wasn’t equipped to let them play with the internet in the way that they wanted. Ray understands why record labels keep garlic in their offices to ward of torrents – labels make money by selling ...  

So far so good and of course, as investment sums go those are pretty small beer. “We used a number of servers to make a connection to each and every p2p client that distributed this film,” Klimenko says of the technology test. “Then Pirate ...  

Das russische Unternehmen Pirate Pay sagt Software-Piraten den Kampf an und will zusammen mit der Industrie die Verbreitung von Torrent-Downloads eindämmen.  

Silicon Valley veteran and former Formspring COO Ro Choy has been hired by BitTorrent Inc. as VP of Biz Dev and Marketing. One of his first tasks on the job: Dealing with rumors that the company is going to rebrand itself as Gyre Corp. (Read on Source)  

Although not official at the moment, news has it that India is the latest to have joined the 'BitTorrent sites ban' bandwagon, resulting in the ban of sites, like The Pirate Bay, KickAssTorrents, BitSnoop and other large BitTorrent ...  

More than 2,500 people who allegedly downloaded a copy of The Hurt Locker in 2010 are being targeted by the creators ... by their Internet protocol addresses, used BitTorrent to download the film and help others download it by “seeding” copies on ...  

Voltage Pictures, the makers of the Oscar-winning movie The Hurt Locker, have filed a new lawsuit at a federal court in Florida. By targeting at least 2,514 alleged BitTorrent users, Voltage Pictures hopes to recoup several million dollars in settlements ...  

Although not official at the moment, news has it that India is the latest to have joined the 'BitTorrent sites ban' bandwagon, resulting in the ban of sites, like The Pirate Bay, KickAssTorrents, BitSnoop and other large BitTorrent ...  

Madmen Bittorrent Edition – “Video comprising one episode of Madmen incompletely downloaded from the internet via bittorrent. The video has been linearly edited, no digital effects were used and all jump cuts and repeats are in the corrupted file.” It’s an interesting concept and a fantastic result. I wonder how far it can be taken [...]  

TorrentFreak reports that For-Dummies publisher John Wiley & Sons has moved to file suit against several BitTorrent users who allegedly shared its books online. The majority of BitTorrent sharers to whom it sent nastygrams capitulated with $750 settlements, However, four users have not: New York residents Jeff Ng, Ralph Mohr, Robert Carpenter and Xiaoshu Chen [...]  

Although not official at the moment, news has it that India is the latest to have joined the 'BitTorrent sites ban' bandwagon, resulting in the ban of sites, like The Pirate Bay, KickAssTorrents, BitSnoop and other large BitTorrent websites and popular video-sharing website, Vimeo. Users of the Internet services provided by ISPs, like Reliance Communications and Zylog ... +. X. Recommended for you. Loading.. Recommended Post Slide Out For...  

When copyright trolls speak, they usually do so only through their lawyers. For the driving force behind a new wave of anti-BitTorrent settlement letters about to hit the UK, things are a little different. Out goes the stuffy legal jargon and in comes the basics - BitTorrent users are 'tight' and the upcoming campaign is about making even more money.Source: BitTorrent Troll Admits Its All About Making Even More Money  

Last May, it sued about 10 times that number of alleged file sharers for the loss of income resulting from illegally sharing the studio's Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker blockbuster ... new defendants downloaded the movie in 2010, so the studio waited ...  

A Russian based outfit "Pirate Pay" claims to have come up with some software which can kill off the distribution of copyrighted works on BitTorrent.  

A recent court ruling in the UK could have wide-ranging consequences across the Internet - especially for those living in the UK. The high court in the UK has ruled that ISPs must block Swedish public BitTorrent website ThePirateBay. The BBC is reporting that the UK high court has ordered the countries ISPs to block Swedish BitTorrent website ThePirateBay. The report covers numerous reactions including the major record labels who were happy...  

A UK High Court ruling that ordered ISPs to block Swedish BitTorrent website ThePirateBay has sparked condemnation from multiple corners. The UK Pirate Party, musician Dan Bull and the Open Rights Group have expressed their opposition to the ruling. Yesterday, we covered the UK High court ruling saying that ISPs in the country must block Swedish BitTorrent website ThePirateBay. The development sparked condemnation from political, artistic...  

Dear Lifehacker, I’ve been downloading torrents for a long time and people keep telling me about how great Usenet is, but is it actually safer than BitTorrent downloads? Or is it just not as popular? Sincerely, Searching Bins Title image remixed from Leremy (Shutterstock). First off, BitTorrent and Usenet are both pretty safe provided you’re not downloading anything illegal and we don ...  

A Microsoft-funded Russian startup company has developed a new technology to stop the downloading of pirated content. The company, Pirate Pay, said it has already worked with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures to stop “tens of thousands” of illegal downloads on sites such as BitTorrent. Film and music industries have long seen BitTorrent as a major threat to their business, claiming the site costs them billions in lost revenue each year...  

After an epic four year legal battle, the Australian High Court has upheld previous rulings that ISP iiNet is not responsible for the copyright infringements of its customers. Despite today’s huge defeat for Hollywood, the chief of local anti-piracy ...  

Among other things, New York Judge Gary Brown explains in great detail why an IP-address is not sufficient evidence to identify copyright infringers. According to the Judge this lack of specific evidence means that many alleged BitTorrent ...  

This is an episode of Mad Men, incompletely downloaded from BitTorrent. The video captures an episode of the popular TV show in the act of being shared by thousands of users on bittorent. The video simultaneously acts as a visualisation of bittorrent traffic and the practice of filesharing and is an aesthetically beautiful by product of the bittorrent process as the pieces of the original file are rearranged and reconfigured into a new...  

Wiley has filed mass John-Doe lawsuits on 250,000 BitTorrent users in the US since 2010, using the same strategy as movie studios have in the past: gain details of the infringing parties and offer the chance of settlement before proceeding with further prosecution.  

Among other things, New York Judge Gary Brown explains in great detail why an IP-address is not sufficient evidence to identify copyright infringers. According to the Judge this lack of specific evidence means that many alleged BitTorrent pirates have been ...  

After being busted last year following an ICE Homeland Security investigation, four alleged members of the movie release group IMAGiNE have now been indicted. The defendants, all US residents aged between 27 and 57 years old, face up to five years in prison for criminal copyright infringement. Rumors persist that they were led to the slaughter by a rival release group with a grudge.Source: IMAGiNE BitTorrent Piracy Group Indicted, Face Years...  

Miami Judge Marc Schumacher has issued a landmark order in which he protects accused BitTorrent downloaders from mass-lawsuits filed by copyright holders. One of the main arguments of the judge is that these "fishing expeditions" violate BitTorrent users' right to anonymous speech, which is protected by the constitution. The order effectively kills all BitTorrent lawsuits in Florida state courts.Source: Judge: BitTorrent Downloads Are...  

John Wiley & Sons, one of the world’s largest book publishers, is continuing its efforts to crack down on BitTorrent piracy. The company has now named several people who allegedly shared Wiley titles online, and is demanding a jury trial against them. If these actually go ahead it will be the first time that BitTorrent-related evidence is tested in a US court.Source: Major Book Publisher Demands Jury Trial Against BitTorrent Pirates  

Almost exactly a year ago, we saw yet another trick come out of the copyright troll's bag. To justify the increasingly failed attempts to sue a ton of people in a single lawsuit, there was a claim that all of the people connected to a single BitTorrent swarm represented a conspiracy to infringe on copyrights together. As we said at the time, this seemed like an incredibly weak argument, and it appears that at least one court agrees. A judge...  

So don’t fight them using their ugly methods. DDOS and blocks are both forms of censorship. If you want to help; start a tracker, arrange a manifestation, join or start a pirate party, teach your friends the art of bittorrent, set up a proxy, write your ...  

New submitter PhxBeau writes with news of a particular sane judge in a copyright case. Quoting Torrentfreak: "In yet another mass lawsuit against alleged file-sharers, a California court has said that while it's sympathetic towards the plight of the copyright holder, it will not assist it to identify BitTorrent users. It's a shame that technology that enables infringement has outpaced technology that prevents it, the judge wrote, but added...  

Efficient BitTorrent client sporting a very small footprint. It was designed to use as little CPU, memory and space as possible while offering all the functionality expected from advanced clients. Read more...  

“If you want to help; start a tracker, arrange a manifestation, join or start a pirate party, teach your friends the art of bittorrent, set up a proxy, write your political representatives, develop a new p2p protocol, print some pro piracy posters and ...  

According to an indictment unsealed this week, the four alleged members of the BitTorrent movie release group IMAGiNE have now been charged with one count of "Conspiracy to Commit Criminal Copyright Infringement," four counts of "Criminal Copyright ...  

A file sharing software that allows users to search and download torrents.  

Pirates are as enamoured with the latest Mission: Impossible flick as they have been in recent weeks, but a few new movies have made it to the top 10 most downloaded on BitTorrent, as compiled by TorrentFreak. The Hunger Games, the already popular movie ...  

The following is a Plus Edition article, written by and copyright by Dick Eastman. Downloading files using any of the traditional file transfer protocols can be costly for companies and frustrating for users. It places a big load on the file server that hosts the file(s). Whenever a company releases new software on its file servers, thousands of people may try to simultaneously download the files. If the files are large, such as an entire CD...  

µTorrent is a small and incredibly popular BitTorrent client.  

Some technical mumblings:BitTorrent breaks up a file into a series of pieces (for a file like this, probably about 256KB each) and downloads them in random order, based on availability. This means that if you try to view the file while it's downloading, the player has to deal with random holes of various sizes where data is missing because those pieces haven't arrived yet.This file was likely encoded in a format called MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced...  

µTorrent is an efficient and feature rich BitTorrent client for Windows sporting a very small footprint. It was designed to use as little CPU, memory and space as possible while offering all the Read more...  

µTorrent is a small and incredibly popular BitTorrent client.  

In a few months millions of BitTorrent users in the United States will be actively monitored as part of an agreement between the MPAA, RIAA and all the major ISPs. Those caught sharing copyright works will receive several warning messages and will be ...  

A former executive at BitTorrent, Inc. known for inventing a highly successful credit card fraud detection technology has joined 50 other Internet professionals, educators, engineers ... their privacy and civil liberties,” they wrote.”  

The Pirate Bay, based in Sweden, offers an index of millions of copyright songs, films and TV shows to download from other users via the BitTorrent file sharing protocol. Attempts to access the The Pirate Bay are now diverted to a page ...  

Tribler is a free BitTorrent client that might be virtually shutdown-proof. Tribler is designed to keep BitTorrent alive, even when all torrent search engines, indexes and trackers are pulled offline. Read more...  

Following the astronomic rise of BitTorrent and related technologies in recent years, inquiries from the general public have grown to the point where they can't simply be overlooked anymore. To satisfy this demand two of the world's leading dictionary publishers have been consulting with TorrentFreak over the addition of many torrent-related entries to their paper and digital versions. The shortlist is now complete.Source: BitTorrent Terms...  

A landmark ruling in one of the many mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US has delivered a severe blow to a thus far lucrative business. Among other things, New York Judge Gary Brown explains in great detail why an IP-address is not sufficient evidence to identify copyright infringers. According to the Judge this lack of specific evidence means that many alleged BitTorrent pirates have been wrongfully accused by copyright holders.Tags...  

Over the years, private file-sharing communities built on the BitTorrent protocol have developed their own policies and mechanisms for motivating members to share content and contribute resources. By requiring members to maintain a minimum ratio between uploads and downloads, private communities effectively establish credit systems, and with them full-fledged economies. We report on a half-year-long measurement study of DIME -- a community for...  

A landmark ruling in one of the many mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US has delivered a severe blow to a thus far lucrative business. Among other things, New York Judge Gary Brown explains in great detail why an IP-address is not sufficient evidence to identify copyright infringers. According to the Judge this lack of specific evidence means that many alleged BitTorrent pirates have been wrongfully accused by copyright holders.Source: Judge...  

COMMENTARY| File sharing, unauthorized downloads and motion picture leaks have been part of the multimedia experience since the arrival of Napster. Now BGR is reporting Voltage Pictures, the studio behind "The Hurt Locker," is attempting to get the ...  

Imagine this - you get all of your entertainment free of charge, courtesy of people who record it for you in their spare time and put it on the Internet. Then these people, who you're not paying, change the format they are offering this free entertainment in. Would you, realizing that you're getting free entertainment because of volunteers, just accept it? Or would you complain about it in the comments section of torrent sites?  

As part of their never-ending quest to reduce copyright infringement major entertainment companies have been engaged in talks with ISPs and representatives from the Australian government. Worryingly, these meetings have been held in secret and all attempts ...  

Bittorrent rolled out quite a number of builds for the stable version of uTorrent. Most of them would deal with only one bug at a time, according to their change log. Nevertheless, when the bug leads to crashing of the app or its various components, it ...  

... a torrent site with more ads and popups than torrents. Torrentard – The impossible-to-please commenters on sites like The Pirate Bay who despite getting the latest stuff for free, always find something to complain about. Torrenteer - Anyone in the ...  

In a few months, millions of alleged BitTorrent pirates in the US will risk being punished by their Internet providers. While the plan was announced a year ago, protests against it have only started to heat up this week. In just a few days more than 90,000 people have signed a petition asking their Internet providers not to participate, and many more are expected to follow.Source: Planned BitTorrent Pirate Punishments Spark Protest  

This article was first published on file-sharing news site TorrentFreak under a Creative Commons licence and is re-published here with TorrentFreak’s permission. It was written by TorrentFreak writer Enigmax. analysis As part of their never ...  

John Wiley & Sons, one of the world’s largest book publishers, is continuing its efforts to crack down on BitTorrent piracy. The company has now named several people who allegedly shared Wiley titles online, and is demanding a jury trial against them. If ...  

The most popular P2P application of current times on its original form.  

The decision is designed to limit traffic to the world’s leading BitTorrent site but in the short-term it had the opposite effect ... It’s not possible to buy advertising “articles” from leading UK publications such as the BBC, Guardian and ...  

Yesterday the UK High Court ruled that infamous torrent site The Pirate Bay must be blocked from access by all UK internet providers due to copyright infringement issues. “The galaxy’s most resilient BitTorrent site” responded with a call to arms and ...  

With anticipation running high for their new album “The Money Store” and a top-billing at Coachella today and next weekend, Death Grips has released an exclusive video and audio bundle with BitTorrent, targeted squarely at the 150 million young ...  

uTorrent is an efficient and feature rich BitTorrent client for Windows sporting a very small footprint.  

µTorrent is an efficient and feature rich BitTorrent client for Windows sporting a very small footprint. It was designed to use as little CPU, memory and space as possible. Read more...  

When you load a torrent with multiple files into the uTorrent Bittorrent client, you will notice that uTorrent by default will not prioritize any file in particular. While that may not be an issue most of the time, especially not if the torrent is well seeded. There are however situations where you may want to [...]  

Seeding ubuntu-12.04-desktop-i386.iso on #Bittorrent until Moonday #ubuntu #fast #download  

Following a US court decision BitTorrent search engine isoHunt was ordered to implement a site-wide keyword filter provided by the MPAA. According to isoHunt’s owner the ruling would result in mass censorship of legitimate content, and recent evidence ...  

uTorrent is an efficient and feature rich BitTorrent client for Windows sporting a very small footprint.  

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol can't be budged from the top spot in the illustrious top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, but that doesn't mean things are static across the board. Four new entries made it to the top 10 this week, one proving ...  

The site has been in operation for a year and is still going strong. Rather than searching for .torrent files around the web like most engines, BTDigg scans BitTorrent’s DHT (Distributed Hash Table) to discover new files instead. In theory, BTDigg should ...  

A proxy (like TorGuard) funnels internet traffic—in this case, just the BitTorrent traffic—through another server, so that the BitTorrent swarm will show an IP address from a server that can't be traced back, instead of the address that points to your house.  

BitTorrent isn't the safe haven it once was and if people are going to use it to share and download files after July 1st, they must realize they are taking a very large risk. While TorGuard’s anonymous bittorrent protection service isn't free ...  

Miami Judge Marc Schumacher has issued a landmark order in which he protects accused BitTorrent downloaders from mass-lawsuits filed by copyright holders. One of the main arguments of the judge is that these “fishing expeditions” violate BitTorrent ...  

Ernesto / TorrentFreak: Microsoft Censors Pirate Bay Links in Windows Live Messenger  —  The place where breaking news, BitTorrent and copyright collide  —  Microsoft Censors Pirate Bay Links in Windows Live Messenger  —  The Pirate Bay is not only the most visited BitTorrent site on the Internet, but arguably the most censored too.  

Speculative invoicing – the practice of claiming people pirated files on BitTorrent, listing hundreds or thousands ... able to provide as to the extent to which they have engaged in P2P filesharing of the relevant Claimants’ copyright works.  

A federal judge has rejected attempts by several copyright holders to compel ISPs to hand over the identifying information of numerous customers without actually filing copyright lawsuits against them. The Friday opinion by James F. Holderman of the ...  

Miami Judge Marc Schumacher has issued a landmark order in which he protects accused BitTorrent downloaders from mass-lawsuits filed by copyright holders. One of the main arguments of the judge is that these  

The global standard for accessing rich media over the Internet  

Through education, organizing and advocacy, we promote diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media and universal access to communications. This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically ...  

Three new entries made it in this week's top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, but the top three remains virtually unchanged, apart from a small switch. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol sits at the very top for the second week in a row, after ...  

U.S. and Australian studios sued iiNet in a federal court in 2010 for allowing their users to download pirated movies using BitTorrent on their ... To read news items as they develop watch for more Fast Feed stories during the day, by clicking here.  

This article was first published on file-sharing news site TorrentFreak under a Creative Commons licence and is re-published here with TorrentFreak’s permission. It was written by TorrentFreak writer Ben Jones. news Speculative invoicing might ...  

Protocol for distributing files. It identifies content by url and is designed to integrate seamlessly with the web.  

Microsoft has confirmed that it is now blocking links to The Pirate Bay website from Windows ... itself as the "largest BitTorrent tracker" in the world, enabling users to download sometimes illegal copies of films, software and music.  

BitTorrent users' right to anonymous speech. Miami Judge Marc Schumacher signed an order which effectively protected accused BitTorrent downloaders from mass-lawsuits filed by copyright holder ...  

Some days it seems like there are tidal shifts in technology and how it is used when it comes to the law and today was one of those days when we see a huge shift in the law because of one judge’s rulings. One of the things that has always been ...  

Microsoft Live Messenger blocks links to The Pirate Bay, claiming the site is unsafe. Of course, this move blocks legal file sharing through The Pirate Bay as well. But, as they admit on TorrentFreak, TPB is both the most visited BitTorrent site on the Web ...  

The file-sharing world has had more than its fair share of unbelievable stories in recent years and many of them are linked to The Pirate Bay, the world’s most resilient BitTorrent site. It’s never really certain where it will next appear – a nuclear ...  

The Pirate Bay is not only the most visited BitTorrent site on the Internet, but arguably the most censored too. Many ISPs have been ordered to block their customers’ access to the website, and recently Microsoft joined in on the action by stopping ...  

A judge deals a blow to the copyright police:In his recommendation order the Judge labels mass-BitTorrent lawsuits a “waste of judicial resources.” For a variety of reasons he recommends other judges to reject similar cases in the future. One of the arguments discussed in detail is the copyright holders’ claim that IP-addresses can identify the alleged infringers. According to Judge Brown this claim is very weak.“The assumption that the person...  

The Pirate Bay is not only the most visited BitTorrent site on the Internet, but arguably the most censored too. Many ISPs have been ordered to block their customers’ access to the website, and recently Microsoft joined in on the action by ...  

Techworld — A hacker who claims to hate both Anonymous and notorious BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay (TPB) has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack that TPB has been suffering under for the last 24 hours. The user, who goes by the Twitter handle ...  

Someone is angry at whistle-blower site WikiLeaks and Swedish BitTorrent file-sharing site Pirate Bay. Both sites have been battling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks this week, but it's not clear who is behind the attacks and why they are being ...  

Wil Wheaton needed a copy of Ubuntu over the weekend, but the download from one of Ubuntu's web-based mirrors simply took to long. So he turned to BitTorrent - and was reminded of the fact that many entertainment industry colleagues want ISPs to throttle it.  

The file-sharing site voiced its disapproval of the attack on Wednesday ... teach your friends the art of BitTorrent, set up a proxy, write [to] your political representatives, develop a new p2p protocol," it added. Anonymous claimed responsibility for ...