The Inquisitr » bittorrent

Pirate Bay founders told hands off the site

Steven Hodson — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:43:00 +0000

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.

Michael Jackson finding new life on BitTorrent

Steven Hodson — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:06:40 +0000

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.

Oh, and about that searching for torrents on Google…

Steven Hodson — Sat, 02 May 2009 00:54:05 +0000

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]

Mininova helps musicians monetize their BitTorrent downloads

Steven Hodson — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:59:52 +0000

Everyone has pretty well heard of that other BitTorrent site but even though it might be one of the largest BitTorrent sites on the web Mininova is right up there with The Pirate Bay site. As well Mininova has been working with independent artists for some time now through their content distribution platform. However the problem has always been for the artists, and the labels, to be able to monetize those torrent downloads.

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.

BitTorrent in Developing Countries

Jonathan Gosier — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:57:27 +0000

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.

Coda.fm: The RIAA is going to hate this site

Duncan Riley — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 17:00:33 +0000

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.

AC/DC downloads hit 400,000 prior to physical only release

Duncan Riley — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 01:29:32 +0000

AC/DC has hit new highs this week, but their own stubbornness means that they may miss out from the record numbers.

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.

Comcast Wants to Slow Your Transfers (Again)

JR — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:35:06 +0000

Comcast is now fighting back against the FCC — and, seemingly, the world — in insisting it has the right to intentionally slow down selected file transfers on its network.

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

Comcast: The More You Surf, The Slower Your Speed

JR — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:59:59 +0000

Already under fire for its traffic management practices, Comcast is now considering a plan to slow down the connections of users transferring the most data during peak times. The company has just officially said it’s “made no final decisions” about such a practice, but it makes no qualms about the fact that it’s been testing the idea.

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