From the very first movie that was downloaded from the Internet the entertainment industry has been yelling and ranting about how the nasty evil Internet was killing the movie business and taking food out of the mouths of hard working people. Then as file lockers and BitTorrent files became a drop dead easy way for just about anyone to use to get the movies and other stuff that they wanted that ranting has gotten only louder.

It doesn’t matter that over the years just about anyone with any sense in their heads and who understood technology was telling exactly the opposite story that the movie industry wasn’t in fact being hurt by these types of downloads. It didn’t matter that while the popularity of things like BitTorrent grew so did the box office profits of the movie industry setting new records almost every year.

Well there is a new study out titled, Reel Piracy: The Effects of Online Piracy on International Box Office Sales, and guess what they found out?

Yup, BitTorrents have had no effect on box office profits. In fact if there is any blame for loss of money to be placed it is right at the feet of the movie industry itself.

According to the study, the factor with the largest impact on piracy is the delay between U.S. and international releases of films. Because of the delay in international releases, often the only way to get a film may be to pirate or wait. Given that choice, anyone who doesn’t want to waithas to turn to piracy whereas if a legitimate venue of purchase was available, at least some of that revenue could be retained.  The study estimates that if this pre-release piracy binge were eliminated — by releasing earlier, or simultaneously with the U.S. — overall losses could be reduced by 7%.

via Geekosystem

Of course we aren’t saying the outright piracy is right or a good thing but the declaration that it is killing the movie business is patently ridiculous and is being proven so each and every day, and with every new non-partisan study that is done.

Not so quick with the BitTorrent piracy killing the box office argument. is a post from: The Inquisitr

Right now there is a deathly pall hanging over the Internet, and the world of BitTorrent in particular. As we saw with the take down of Megaupload and the constant seizure of domains that the US Department of Justice and ICE don’t like because they think that they are just fronts for illegal acts being an owner of a site that has anything to do with BitTorrents isn’t good for your health.

As we saw leading up to the Super Bowl the definition of what is illegal is entirely at the whim of US agencies as a large number of sites, including a large number that were not based in the US, on servers that were not based in the US, or in countries that didn’t think they were doing anything illegal, were seized. This has only added to the worry of site owners around the world to the point that many of them are shutting down – permanently.

While we are all probably familiar with the most famous of the BitTorrents sites – The Pirate Bay – there is one other torrent site that has been fighting both the music and movie industry for the past six years. Owned by Canadian Gary Hung isoHunt is one of the oldest torrent sites, next to The Pirate Bay of course, and Hung has taken a rather novel approach to fighting those that would love to take him down.

Unlike other sites who wait to be sued or harassed by the music and movie industry Gary Hung took the novel approach and sued them first; and it turns out that may have been a very smart move given the latest witch hunt against torrent sites.

Ironically enough, isoHunt’s ongoing legal battle might be what keeps Fung relatively safe. If the authorities planned to launch a criminal investigation against a torrent site it would be strange to pick one that is already involved in a civil lawsuit with a copyright holder.

Besides not being worried about the future, isoHunt’s owner is going on the offensive and is urging the entertainment industries to embrace technology, instead if fighting it.

“Perhaps more than ever, I wish the content industries will wake up to the fact you can’t fight technological progress, that battles maybe won, the war is already lost. Unless Content really starts working with technology to accelerate spread of culture, as the Internet has naturalized it. And make more money than ever in the process,” Fung says.

“Because so-called piracy enabled by the Internet and media consumption is not a zero-sum game, a download does not equal a lost sale, and what pirates really want is not necessarily free as in beer, but free as in speech and convenience.”

via TorrentFreak

Personally that last item - convenience - is the biggest tipping point. Make it drop dead simple to buy while not pricing yourself out of the market will do more to bring you customers than taking down a hundred torrent sites will.

isoHunt continues the fight which may be its saving grace in the turbulent world of BitTorrent is a post from: The Inquisitr

I have to say, if you’re going down for torrenting a movie, you could have probably been sued for something far better than The Expendables.

Perhaps the US Copyright Group wants to add insult to injury by threatening BitTorrent users for something as eminently sucky as the film Rolling Stone called a “limp-dick bust” with a $150,000 judgment each. March 17th, a judge gave the group permission to subpoena contact information from the tens of thousands of users who downloaded the flick. (Although it sounds like the US Copyright Group could be a government agency, they’re actually a collective of lawyers who sniff around for a cut of suits like these, tricky.)

The filing is expected to be the largest of its kind to date, and if users refuse to settle for fines of about $3,000, they could be found liable for possible damages of $150,000. If the suit is successful for the lawyers group, expect to see many more of its ilk springing up in hopes of wringing money out of potential pirates. Another suit is already in the works, targeting 15,000 suspected porn-pirates.

US Copyright Group preps suit against 23K+ BitTorrent users is a post from: The Inquisitr

This is a curious story that popped up over at the TorrentFreak blog this morning. It seems that the Internet movie database IMDb, owned by Amazon, has decided that a publicly funded movie that is due to be released for free via BitTorrent doesn’t get to be listed in their database.

The horror movie, The Tunnel, by Julian Harvey and Enzo Tedeschi is being funded by the public who are buying frames of the finished movie for one dollar each. Once the movie is done it will be distributed freely using BitTorrent. However when the they try and get the movie listed with IMDb as part of their promotional push they have been continually denied.

In June, IMDb told the team that if a movie is not set up with a production company with a history of theatrically released movies, getting it listed at the early stages of development would not be possible. However, The Tunnel has backing from Zapruder’s Other Films which already have IMDb listings.

Undeterred by this setback, the creators decided to have another attempt at a listing once filming proper was underway, but all that resulted in was a further rejection in August.

Thanks for your new title addition to IMDb. Our title managers have recently examined the information which you supplied and it appears this title will not qualify for inclusion until it is in an advanced stage of production or completed, sorry.

The rejections continued, even though the team providing several trade magazine listings, news articles and other supporting material to show the film is legitimate. Then in September, and despite the Australian Director’s Guild recognising the movie’s online marketing campaign with an ADG Award nomination, IMDb rejected The Tunnel again saying that they can find no evidence to suggest the movie exists.

Enzo told TorrentFreak that he believes that it’s the movie’s distribution model which has caused this reaction from IMDb. The third rejection letter from IMDb says:

Hello. Please provide distribution info or evidence it will be released in 2010. Thank you.

“Seeing as we announced our distribution plan via torrents, a method that is completely within our control, we can’t see what ‘distribution info’ we could provide,” Enzo told us.

“There is no official deal in place to make that happen, as it isn’t controlled by a ‘distributor’ as such. The only conclusion we can reach is that in the absence of a ‘proper’ distributor, they won’t list us.”

Talk about discouraging new methods of distribution.

IMDb denies listing to a BitTorrent only movie is a post from: The Inquisitr

I’ve never been a big user of BitTorrent but just as there are illegal uses for it there are just as many legal ones. however if what the team at TorrentFreak has discovered is true you may want to seriously reconsider using it for those music or movie downloads.

It appears that they have stumbled across a website that will automatically show you your IP address as well as providing a list of all recorded BitTorrent downloads. Now TorrentFreak after doing some testing could tell for sure if the displayed results for real or not but if they are indeed real this isn’t a good thing.

Not only that but they found out that if you change the end of the tracking URL by adding on /?host=X.X.X.X (with the X’s being the IP address) you could retrieve a list of what files were downloaded by it. There is also other things that they discovered but aren’t releasing at this time because further investigation is needed but they say it is something to be concerned about.

You really might want to rethink using BitTorrent is a post from: The Inquisitr

I’m sorry but at what point are we just going to stick a fork in this one, call it quits and move onto one of the many other really good bittorrent tracking services out there. It was bad enough that some putz decided to buy the whole only to have the deal fall apart in flames as he got everything he own repossessed now we have courts trying to force judicial decisions upon people and companies that don’t even fall within their jurisdiction.

According to the team over at Torrent Freak the Stockholm District Court is now ordering that two of the site founder’s be banned from operating the site. The thing is here that neither Pirate Bay nor Gottfrid Svartholm or Fredrik Nelj are located in Sweden.

Ex-Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde, who appears to be excluded from the decision, is notably annoyed, noting that neither the founders nor the site are located in Sweden.

“The Stockholm City Court is located in Stockholm. Stockholm is in Sweden. Swedish borders apply. Frederick and Godfrid live outside Sweden, even outside the EU. The Pirate Bay is outside the EU,” he told SR.

“How then can the Stockholm District Court, Sweden, get to decide that people abroad must not work on a site in another country?”

Talk about the long arm of the law needing to be reminded that it isn’t that long.

Pirate Bay founders told hands off the site is a post from: The Inquisitr

While most of the world’s attention regarding Michael Jackson is now being centered around the cause of his death the online world is celebrating his music and life the one way they know how – they’re downloading his music. On Amazon his music is currently taking up the top 14 spots on the bestselling album list. Over at the iTunes to 10 album list is top heavy with Jackson albums taking up the top 7 spots.

As well the gang over at TorrentFreak are reporting on how well Jackson’s music is doing on BitTorrent sites.

At the time of writing the three most active torrents in the music section on the largest torrent indexer, Mininova, are all compilations or discographies from the “King of Pop”. On top is a torrent listing 30 Michael Jackson albums, The Jackson 5 and The Jacksons, totaling 1.94 GB of music.

Even the tag clouds found on some of the BitTorrent sites are showing a lot of activity around the Jackson name and music.

As with Elvis when he died I imagine the rush to get Michael Jackson’s music will increase over the next little while as people rush to get a slice of history.

Michael Jackson finding new life on BitTorrent is a post from: The Inquisitr

If you remember back in the middle of April of this year I wrote a couple of posts here about the silliness of the Pirate Bay getting slapped down by Swedish courts when you could find the same stuff on Google

The thing is that for all the accusations of Pirate Bay being a file sharer the argument is fundamentally flawed. Pirate Bay as a site does not host any of the files that they are accused of sharing. All they are doing is providing a search engine interface for torrents that point to both legal and illegal content. It’s not like they are twisting anyone’s arm to download anything – they are providing a service not a file depot.

Well it turns out that since that time Google has very quietly been putting the kibosh on any of the custom search engine provided through Google to be able to return any torrent search results. According to Ernesto over at TorrentFreak

The immensely popular BitTorrent client uTorrent recently added a Google powered torrent search engine to its website. This added search capability used Google’s custom search program and allowed visitors to search for .torrent files on Google. For reasons unknown, Google appears to be blocking the use of its search technology on the site.

[…]

The search engine uses Google’s search algorithms to find .torrent files on sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. BitTorrent Inc. profits from this through search based ads that Google adds to the search results.

Google of course hasn’t issued any statements regarding this move, which really isn’t surprising. However considering that you can still use the filetype:torrent as part of your search on Google and still get links to torrent files to download one has to wonder about the reasoning behind the cut-off. I guess it’s a matter of it being okay for Google to profit off of the ad sales on Google search pages but no-one else should be able to in this case.

Way to go guys.

[hat tip to Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins]

Oh, and about that searching for torrents on Google… is a post from: The Inquisitr

According to a post at TorrentFreak this is something that Mininova will be changing. In a move to encourage even more artists to use their service and possibly to prove to labels that BitTorrent is a valid alternative marketplace Mininova has launched an addition to their distribution service. Starting today artist, in just a few clicks, will be able to add links to CDs, concert tickets and other merchandising products that they want to sell alongside the torrent download link.

The new feature integrates a link to products in the artist’s myshopify.com store, as the record label Beep! Beep! has done with one of their latest releases.

The label even gives Mininova users a 20% discount for helping out with seeding. According to the label, the reason why they have decided to give all their albums away for free is simple. “Because it’s only fair not to pay for something you haven’t heard yet,” they say.

“In our opinion torrents are an excellent way to present you with our music. That’s why Beep! Beep! and Mininova have teamed up. We like the fact that you’re taking the effort to get to know new music. In fact, we’d like to thank you for downloading and seeding our music by giving you a discount on our hardcopies,” the label announced.

I gotta admit this is a pretty cool feature to see added and in my opinion actually puts Mininova a definite step above The Pirate Bay.

Mininova helps musicians monetize their BitTorrent downloads is a post from: The Inquisitr

Where bandwidth is plentiful it’s become a curse to the media industry. The television studios hate it because people don’t need TiVo when the latest episode of Lost is available on PirateBay the day (or only hours) after it airs. Hollywood hates it because when movies leak, it’s a virtually untraceable way for the culprits to cover there tracks while sharing content with millions. The music industry hates it because…well they hate anything that allows people to asynchronously share music without paying for it. So Bittorrent and peer-to-peer sharing in general is the bane of the majority of the media industry, highly destructive and incredibly disruptive to a ninety year old business model. In Africa and other developing countries I see a real and immediate value for bittorrent.

It goes without saying that bandwidth is precious. So what is bit torrent and why should more developmental groups adopt it as means of distributing software?

Oh, Virtuous Torrenting

BitTorrent is a file-sharing protocol that enables the download of large files using minimum Internet bandwidth in less a mounts of time than normal bandwidth. It maximizes transfer speed by gathering portions of the transferred file and downloading multiple pieces concurrently from people who already have them.

Continue reading >>>

BitTorrent in Developing Countries is a post from: The Inquisitr

New BitTorrent index Coda.fm offers something many BitTorrent sites don’t offer: a user friendly, e-commerce like interface.

Coda.fm specializes in music only, and indexes torrents, as opposed to hosting the torrent themselves. The front end looks like a music store, with popular artists, last albums, and categorization by music type.

According to Torrent Freak, the site owner started the site due to his frustration with public P2P sites and private trackers: “I always use BitTorrent to get my fix, but I was disappointed with all the public indexers and private trackers. I found the experience of searching for music on public trackers very tiresome, always having to navigate through a lot of irrelevant search results and dead torrents, and was tired too of the strict rules of most of the private trackers and the elitism of some of their communities.”

Browsing around the site, you get the felling this is a site that might open doors to more downloading by being so much more approachable than a PirateBay or Mininova, and that’s sure to make it a target of the RIAA. You can visit Coda.fm here before it gets shut down.

Coda.fm: The RIAA is going to hate this site is a post from: The Inquisitr

According to TorrentFreak, a leak of the forthcoming AC/DC album Black Ice, due to be released October 20 in physical form only and with no digital sales, has been downloaded 400,000 times from BitTorrent alone, so not including other P2P and file sharing services.

AC/DC maintain a complete refusal to allow their music to be sold online, because they believe that their music should be sold in album form only, where as Apple forces bands to offer sales of each single from the album individually. AC/DC cites album sales figures that have actually increased in the last 5 years as proof that their refusal to offer digital sales works for them.

The downloads from BitTorrent may lead to increased sales of the new album; studies have previously found that downloaders are more likely to buy the official release having sampled an illegal copy, than those who have never heard the music previously. And yet, the correlation between downloads and physical copies of music is hit and miss: a Canadian study found increased CD sales, another reported by the BBC found the increase went to purchasing digital copies. AC/DC is limiting those buying outcomes by offering a physical copy only, and the downloads actually do demonstrate one thing clearly: listeners want access to AC/DC music digitally.

AC/DC downloads hit 400,000 prior to physical only release is a post from: The Inquisitr

The battle began when reporters discovered last year that Comcast was limiting or even blocking BitTorrent transfers by its users. Just weeks ago, FCC commissioners ruled that was a violation of a communication law requiring any ISP to offer unrestricted Internet access. The panel said Comcast’s actions were “discriminatory” and “arbitrary” and pointed out the recent law making it illegal for an ISP to “slow any specific applications.” The company was told to stop immediately and to hand over detailed info about all its traffic management tactics.

Now, though, Comcast has filed an appeal against that ruling, saying it did nothing wrong and has the right to limit traffic as it sees fit. An executive went as far as to claim the FCC’s decision was “legally inappropriate.”

Yeah.

Regardless of what happens here, Comcast is already moving forward with a plan to implement bandwidth caps for all users. Residential customers will be limited to 250 gigs of transferred data per month starting in October. The company’s also eyeballed a system that’d slow down connections of anyone using a lot of bandwidth during busy times. But all that, evidently, isn’t enough. Comcast wants to go after BitTorrent, too.

If have a problem with the idea, you can schedule an appointment to voice your concern. Someone will get back to you Monday between either 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. or 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. Please make sure you’re home and available during both time windows or you might miss your chance.

Comcast Wants to Slow Your Transfers (Again) is a post from: The Inquisitr

So, what is this — some kind of misguided Internet tax system? The more you use, the less you get?

Remember, now, that Comcast first made waves over reports last year claiming it was intentionally slowing BitTorrent transfers to improve its overall network speed. The FCC formally issued its penalty just a day ago, saying that was a violation of communication law and requiring Comcast to disclose detailed information about its other practices. The newly passed regulation makes it illegal for ISPs to “slow any specific applications.”

The user-targeted tactic, then, wouldn’t technically be a violation, since a user isn’t considered an “application.” But give me a break…is it any better? It seems to me to be violating the same principle that led to that law — just doing so in a workaround, loophole-type way.

Comcast says it only seems “fair” to go after the people who are using the most bandwidth. Sure…if by “fair,” you mean “absolutely out of line.” Someone paying for access deserves to get it equally, whether he’s sending five e-mails a day or transferring 20 videos an hour. If Comcast can’t build a network that can handle that, maybe it should just stick to screwing up cable service and let someone else deal with the Internet.

Comcast: The More You Surf, The Slower Your Speed is a post from: The Inquisitr