To display the most relevant entries to you in priority,
vote for the stories you are interested in
()
and reject those that you are not interested in
()
Over
recent years, TV-shows have become increasingly popular on BitTorrent. While some watch the shows
directly on their computers, quite a few people prefer viewing them on a big screen TV. For the
latter group, Netgear’s Internet TV
Player might be worth checking out.
The new device can play videos from several large streaming sites, including YouTube, Google
Video and Metacafe. However, its true power comes from the built-in BitTorrent client. Millions of people use
BitTorrent to download TV-shows every week, so there are a lot of potential customers out there.
‘Whenever’ and ‘wherever’ are two words that are often heard when people
explain why they use BitTorrent, and Netgear cleverly acknowledges this with their new player.
“It is ideal for those who are geographically displaced from their preferred television
content, such as international sporting events and Bollywood productions,” is how
Netgear’s marketing
promotes it.
If Netgear is indeed hoping for BitTorrent users to embrace the device, most of the potential
lies outside the US, where 90% of all the TV-torrent downloads take place. The main reason being
that fans sometimes have to wait for weeks or even months before the show airs on TV in their
country.
For those who have a large library of video files downloaded already, the Internet TV Player also
supports external USB drives. Plug it in, and all your videos will be available on your TV
instantly, easy as that. Netgear expects that the Internet TV Player (ITV2000), priced at $200,
will be available in stores early Summer 2009.
Whack ‘em
All is a newish game for iPhone and iPod Touch, based on the ‘Whack-a-Mole’
idea. The creators are married couple Constance and James Bossert, who together form Fairlady Media.
James told TorrentFreak “We decided to develop a game for the iPhone while driving one
evening and over the next couple of months put Whack ‘em All together in our spare time.
Altogether, its taken us about 250 hours to develop the game with about 100 hours worth of
graphics work and 150 hours worth of development, bug testing and submitting the app to
Apple.”
The game is available for purchase via the
iTunes
App Store and has steadily been achieving around 10 sales a day. It’s pretty cheap, at
just 99 cents.
On January 4th, Fairlady Media got all excited. Suddenly they discovered they had over 400 brand
new users in a day, but after checking with iTunes, disappointment set in. Only 12 people had
actually purchased the game. It turned out that the surge was down to pirates - someone had
cracked the game and offered it for free on the web. While mildly encouraged that there is demand
for the game, James told us he decided to confront the person responsible to “try and
figure out why there was such a strong market for pirated apps.”
“I’m the developer for Whack ‘em All. I noticed you’re being
given credit for cracking Whack ‘em All and making it generally available for
free,” he said in his opening email to the cracker. “We (just my wife and I)
haven’t even made enough money off of this to pay for the iPhone we had to buy to develop
it on. Just yesterday 40 times more people got your version of the app than bought it off the app
store!” James told the cracker he was curious about his motives. Surprisingly, the cracker
responded:
“As many iPhone and iPod touch owners have discovered, Apple’s iTunes App Store has
many flaws which render it useless to the common user,” he replied. “Apple has chosen
to allow a multitude of ridiculous, worthless, poorly-represented applications through its
’strict’ screening process, nearly all written by mediocre programmers with a dream
of getting rich quick. Many of these programmers game the reviews system, misrepresent their
application in the description, and generally try to swindle the honest buyer.”
The cracker, known as most_uniQue, went on to say that people are fed up with wasting
money on these type of applications, so they simply stopped buying them. He then went on to offer
a solution. “Apple could quite easily solve this problem by implementing a sort of trial
period for each application, but they do not. The user is forced to buy blindly without ever
getting to try the application first.”
most_uniQue told James that he became motivated to crack iPhone games after he bought a
few that didn’t live up to their marketing hype, feeling he could help others ‘try
before they buy’. “To solve this problem either talk to Apple to allow trials,”
he said, “or you can release your game on Cydia with ads.”
James told TorrentFreak that he was happy with the extra exposure generated by the cracked copy
of the game, while hoping this would translate into cash to be invested in the development of
future projects.
The outcome of this exchange? “My goal would be to get a response from Apple about
this,” he told us, while going on to reveal that a free, ad-supported version of the game
(and future games) is in the planning.
During recent months, the RIAA, MPAA and other anti-piracy outfits have
been lobbying for legislation that would make it possible to disconnect repeated copyright
infringers from the Internet, with some success.
The RIAA recently announced that it would stop its massive
legal campaigns and limit the court visits to a minimum. No surprise there. Lawsuits are
expensive and the RIAA lost more of those than they had hoped, so they turned their attention to
lawmakers, local governments and ISPs instead.
The new plan is to get legislation implemented that will allow the entertainment industry to spy
on the filesharing behaviors of individual Internet subscribers, and order their disconnection
when they are suspected of repeated copyright infringements. Ideally they would like to make
“downloading” a criminal offense of course, and this is exactly what the Pirates Prison Project is
anticipating.
According to Dimitri Johnson, CEO of Pirate Prisons Project (PPP), billions of Internet users
around the world will have to be thrown in jail if the anti-piracy lobbyists have their way.
“Everyone is guilty by default: since nobody will want to do without Internet access, no
matter what, everyone will end up going to jail. All of our kids, parents, friends and peers. Off
to jail we go,” he
writes.
“This trend has led PPP to foresee a gigantic business opportunity,” Dimitri adds,
while introducing his plans to build thousands of prisons where these Internet pirates can be
locked up. Investors can buy shares in these yet to be built prisons, and pirates have the
opportunity to book a comfortable cell in advance. PPP currently offers three options:
1. Buy Shares
You can invest in the new prisons due to be built, which is a solid investment according to the
PPP. 150 shares currently trade at $10,000, but people with a smaller budget can get 2 shares for
just $200.
2. Denounce Someone
If you happen to know someone who pirates music, software or movies on the Internet, you can
first report them, and then send them over to the PPP website to book their cell early on. There
are several options to choose from, and early birds get the best picks.
3. Book a Cell Yourself
Last but not least, you can book a cell yourself, and make sure that you’ll have a
comfortable time in prison once you’re locked up. If your budget allows it, you can book
the “jail premium” package: the largest cell available, complete with broadband
Internet.
TorrentFreak contacted one of the project leaders, who told us that he hopes to get the RIAA and
MPAA on board as one of the main investors in the project. He’s right, it’s their
future…
The ability to partake in some anonymous BitTorrent-ing is becoming increasingly desirable. A
reputable VPN service, offering fast transfer speeds and unlimited transfers costs around $10 to
$20 per month, so when a ‘new’ service called VPN4Life was about to launch last week
offering incredibly cheap prices, we took a closer look.
In a nutshell, a representative from VPN4Life claimed they were about to offer a fast, 128 bit
encrypted, fully unlimited and anonymous PPTP service - all for just a one-off payment of $50.00.
It seemed to good to be true and in our
report we said as much, warning people away from the service.
Nevertheless, since the offer was so cheap, some people decided to take the chance. After handing
their cash over via PayPal, customers did not receive a PPTP VPN service, but an executable file
named ‘VPN 4 Life PC.exe’. Sadly, this was neither new nor original code, but a piece
of software designed to protect people’s privacy when using public WiFi networks. The
ad-supported software, called Hotspot Shield, is already available for free from
AnchorFree.com. The scammers at VPN4Life simply renamed the
file to make it look like their own work.
Confirmation that the two files are identical can be obtained by checking the MD5 checksum, which can be viewed as a type of digital
fingerprint. The results for each file are identical.
4b34079841d43799e5d0849ac16feb61 HSS-1.10-install-anchorfree-76-conduit.exe
4b34079841d43799e5d0849ac16feb61 VPN 4 Life PC.exe
The VPN4Life site now has a note on it stating that if anyone is unhappy with the service,
that’s too bad. “No refunds will be given if you are dissatisfied with our
services,” says the site’s recently-added Terms and Conditions. However, according to
reports from purchasers, a complaint to PayPal seems to do the trick.
Top Gear is
leading this week’s chart. UFC 92 is one of the surprising (one-time) entries.
The data for the most recent TV episodes are collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and
is for informational and educational reference only. A list of the most pirated TV-shows of 2008 was published two
weeks ago.
Thanks to ShowInsider we now also include a list based on
the total number of downloads (not only recent episodes) of all shows in the past week.
Mininova,
founded in January 2005, soon became one of the most successful torrent sites. The site has grown
steadily over recent months, and for a few weeks now the millions of daily users have been
downloading well over 10 million torrents a day.
In 2008 the site passed several milestones, and in December Mininova broke a new record of 44.7
million unique visitors in one month. More users download more torrents, and just about every
three to four months the site added another million torrent downloads to its counter. Today, just a few days into 2009, Mininova
is close to recording the 7 billionth download, a double up compared to a year ago.
Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak that he expects this growth to continue in the new
year. “Traffic is still growing according to Quantcast and Google Analytics.
Unless something drastically changes, I see no reason why this will be different in 2009,”
he commented.
Over the past months we’ve reported on the trend of more artists and publishers taking
BitTorrent seriously, and Niek has noticed the same. “That’s definitely true,”
he said. “We have almost reached the point of 1000 active CD
publishers. We expect that free content distribution will play an increasingly important role
in the music and video industry during the coming year.”
While existing Internet users are turning to BitTorrent at an increasing rate, most growth can be
expected from rapidly developing countries such as
India. With only 5 million broadband Internet subscribers, India is a relatively small
player. However, the government plans to increase this number to 50 million by 2012, a 1000%
increase, and we expect that many of them will be eager to try BitTorrent.
The exponential growth reported by Mininova and other torrent
sites shows us that the BitTorrent hype is far from over. ISPs should brace themselves.
The
term “3 Strikes” is a familiar one to those monitoring attempts to crack down on
illicit file-sharing. Many countries are looking at proposals which if implemented, would mean
that a ‘graduated response’ is taken against those accused of online copyright
infringement. ‘Strike One’ would earn the infringer a warning, ‘Strike
Two’ would result in a slowing of the user’s Internet connection, with Internet
disconnection proposed on a third accusation.
However draconian these proposals might appear, they are nothing compared to the proposed
‘Section 92′ of the Copyright Amendment Act in New Zealand. Scheduled for
introduction at the end of February 2009, the act assumes that any individual simply accused of
sharing copyright works on the Internet, is guilty. The punishment for ‘guilty’ is
summary disconnection from the Internet. Understandably, this proposal hasn’t been well
received by many outside of the entertainment industries. Indeed, RIANZ, New Zealand’s
answer to the RIAA, has been a vocal supporter.
One group voicing dissent is The Creative Freedom
Foundation. On January 2nd the group launched with the aim to “unite artists who are
against the removal of New Zealander’s rights through proposed changes in Copyright law,
done in the name of protecting creativity.”
Foundation Co-Founder and Director, Bronwyn Holloway-Smith is strongly opposed to Section 92, which she says threatens Internet
disconnections “without evidence or even a trial.”
“The result of this law could be that one rogue employee or even one virus infected
computer could bring down a whole organization’s internet and it’s highly likely that
schools, businesses, hospitals, and phone services will be harmed by this,” she said.
Hollyway-Smith warns that as the government has shown support for the bill, unless there is a
major public protest against it the proposals will “roll over into law” - just 54
days from now. To this end, the foundation has started a petition and campaign against the
“Guilt Upon Accusation” laws, called “Not in my Name”. The petition can
be signed on the Creative Freedom Federation website.
contrary to
the remarkable first place for “Disaster Movie” last week, this weeks list includes
several movies that were well received by the public.
The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational
reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.
The trojan in
question (Troj/Qhost-AC) identified by
anti-virus company Sophos, is a rather unusual one. It doesn’t seem to install spyware or
traditional malware, but instead blocks access to the two most popular BitTorrent sites.
One of its victims, who got the trojan from downloading a torrent from The Pirate Bay, contacted
TorrentFreak. He told us: “I didn’t follow the well established rules
of downloading. It was a file with a low number of seeds, many leechers and no comments.
I’ve downloaded the file and didn’t visit the torrent page again to view if there
were any negative comments.”
It turned out that the trojan originated from a keygen supplied with a copy of pirated software.
Instead of generating a key, it modified the hosts file of the computer so that it redirects The
Pirate Bay, Suprbay (The Pirate Bay forums) and Mininova to 127.0.0.1, which means that the sites
never load.
Aside from blocking the three sites in question, the trojan caused popups and even played a sound
file saying that “downloading is wrong”. The bad torrent was removed from The Pirate
Bay soon after users commented that the key generator didn’t work, but it is safe to assume
that this is not the first and only attempt to spread a trojan like this one.
The question remains, who is behind this? While some might argue that the MPAA, RIAA or other
anti-piracy advocates might be the source, we think it more likely that the attack originates
from a relatively innocent prankster targeting pirates.
The good news is that it is fairly easy to fix, manually removing the entries from the hosts file
solves the problem. “Overall a bad experience, but the computer is fine now,” the
affected user told us. Advice and tips about the Windows Hosts file can be found here.
Hustler Europe is getting on the “turn piracy into profit”
bandwagon. It has recently hired anti-piracy tracking company Media Protector to start tracking down those who share Hustler
videos online.
Media Protector operates in a similar way to tracking company Digiprotect, who currently
work with lawyers Davenport Lyons in the UK. It connects to BitTorrent swarms, eD2k and other
filesharing networks, and harvests IP addresses of those sharing copyright works without
permission. Media Protector then works with lawyers to force ISPs to disclose the personal
details of those allegedly sharing files, sending them letters ordering them to pay a
‘fine’ (out-of-court settlement) or face legal action.
“We are working today with a lot of international rights-holders and leading production
companies — including Hustler, the world’s largest adult entertainment
company — and have detected well over 200,000 copyright infringements in
Germany alone,” Media Protector founder and Managing Director Rainer Strassmeir told Xbiz.
Strassmeir believes that aggressive anti-piracy enforcement is the key to embedding a type of
fear in the illegal downloader. He claims it soon becomes known which content producers chase
pirates, with those that do witnessing a corresponding decrease in illicit downloads. He also
believes that the decrease in piracy leads to an increase in retail sales.
Anti-piracy company Digiprotect has been open about its aims - it says it helps clients
“turn piracy into profit”, although the lawyers it works with in the UK deny that
there is any profit motive, rather their actions are purely for anti-piracy purposes. Strassmeir
isn’t embarrassed to say that he tries to generate profit from piracy either, as he states
that his customers “enjoyed a new revenue stream by effectively monetizing copyright
infringements.”
Last year, the evidence collected by Media Protector was called
into doubt. A recipient of a 700 Euro compensation demand for unauthorized uploading was
actually operating a client which was modified never to upload, thus making infringement
impossible.
Spotify is a music service that gives users access to a huge
library of music, through a lightweight application that looks like a mashup of the best parts of
iTunes and Last.fm. Music is streamed, partly supported by P2P technology, but it plays
instantly, like we’ve never seen before.
One of the software engineers at Spotify is Ludvig Strigeus, the creator of uTorrent. It is
therefore no surprise that the application uses very few resources, just 12k memory when we
tested it. The rumor goes that some of the money made when uTorrent sold to BitTorrent Inc., has
actually been invested in Spotify, an application that competes with piracy.
When we asked Andres Sehr of Spotify to describe the service, he told us “Spotify is a new
way of enjoying music. We believe Spotify provides a viable alternative to music piracy. We think
the way forward is to create a service better than piracy, thereby converting users into a legal,
sustainable alternative which also enriches the total music experience.”
The quality of the music on Spotify is comparable to 160kbps MP3s, which is more than decent for
a streaming application. To fill its library, Spotify has cut deals with EMI, Warner Music,
Sony BMG and three other major labels, which all responded positively to the new concept.
Interestingly, Spotify also uses P2P technology to stream the more frequently accessed tracks.
“Spotify uses a hybrid p2p system where music is delivered both by our servers and using
P2P,” Andres Sehr said. “This allows us to deliver the long tail of music which may
not be very popular, as well as quickly serve up the latest hits that the majority of users
listen to. P2P allows us to both increase the speed that we deliver music and also lower the cost
of streaming it.”
Aside from being a music streaming application, Spotify also allows users to create and share
playlists with each other, the top 100 tracks of 2008 according to Pitchfork editors for example. On top
of that, the Spotify interface helps you to discover new artists with its “similar
artists” and “artist radio” feature.
The overall response from Spotify users seems to be very positive, but can it compete with
piracy? Time will have to tell, but Spotify invites are actively being traded within the
BitTorrent community, and it has even been well received on some of the most elite music
trackers.
One user at the music tracker What.cd wrote: “Honestly
it’s going to be huge. I’ve been browsing and playing from its seemingly endless
music catalogue all afternoon, it loads as if it’s playing from local files, so fast, so
easy. If it’s this great in such early beta stages then I can’t imagine where its
going. I feel like buying another laptop to have permanently rigged.”
Spotify is not perfect though. One of the mentioned downsides is that it is not compatible with
iPods and other portable MP3 players. The Spotify team hasn’t ruled out the option of an
iPod compatible version in the future, but for now they will focus on optimizing the Windows and
Mac application.
Overall we can conclude that Spotify definitely has potential, but time will tell if it’s
able to compete successfully with piracy. Spotify is currently in Beta stage, invites to the free
(ad-supported) version can only be used in the UK, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Spain and France, but
restrictions usually don’t
stop pirates.
Spotify gave out some invites to TorrentFreak, so if you’re interested, send me an email
with “spotify” as the subject.
Granted, making predictions is easy. Being right is much harder, but I’m going to give it a
try anyway. Please check back in a year and see how well I did, and feel free to share your own
thoughts about what this year might bring in the comments.
File-sharing will continue to grow.
Okay, this is a no-brainer. Torrent sites like the Pirate Bay have been showing huge growth
rates every single year, and there is no reason to assume that 2009 will be any different.
Except maybe for the fact that the global economic crisis will continue to force consumers to
spend less. And what’s an easy way to save some dough? Exactly, free music, movies and TV
shows. File sharing is going to get a big recession bump in 2009.
One of the biggest torrent sites will close down.
Just don’t ask me which one. Rights holders will continue to put pressure on site admins
and their hosting providers in 2009, just as they did in 2008, and
at least one well-known name will fold under this pressure. For a few days it will look like the
file sharing world is going to end, but then it will be business as usual again.
The RIAA’s new three-strikes policy will fail.
The music industry announced just two weeks ago that it will stop its mass
lawsuit campaign and instead cooperate with ISPs to punish file sharers. The Wall Street Journal
reported at the time about
“agreements in principle” with an unspecified number of unnamed ISPs that “may
cut off” net access for repeat offenders. Or not, one should add. ISPs don’t like to
lose customers over a few traded songs, which is why a similar deal in the UK still doesn’t include any enforcement measures
half a year after it was struck. The same will happen in the US. In fact, some smaller ISPs might
even get a boost by promising that they won’t disconnect customers over P2P.
P4P will actually work.
The somewhat controversial technology
that aims to mitigate the effect of P2P transfers on ISPs’ networks has proven to work
pretty well in field tests, but those were limited to a single video file provided by personal
file sharing start-up Pando. 2009 will bring us some first mass-scale implementations, and I
suspect that some of you will start to use P4P-assisted file transfers without even noticing,
which is how good infrastructure technology should work.
We will all become socialists.
The uproar was huge when Warner Music first expressed support for a flat fee for legal P2P music
sharing in the spring of 2008. Techcrunch called the idea extortion,
others warned of socialism, big government and an unfair music tax. Then the global financial
markets hit rock bottom, countries like the US started to nationalize banks left and right, and
people warmed up to the fact that government intervention and taxation aren’t always bad
things. This will continue in 09.
We’ll see billions of tax payer’s money spent on infrastructure projects and
governments taking stakes in major industries. In a way, we will all become socialists, if only
to wait out the end of the crisis. And in the process, we will warm up to the idea of collective
licensing. Now, it’s unclear whether the record labels will actually come through and start
first blanket licensing trials by the end of the year, but I predict that consumers will be ready
for it. Because really, who will object to five bucks a month in light of billions spend on
bailouts?
Janko Roettgers is a Los Angeles-based journalist. He is also the editor of P2P Blog.
During the
last year there has been a surge in businesses offering VPN (Virtual Private Network) services to
those who prefer to operate with a degree of anonymity on the Internet. A VPN service assigns
your PC with a different IP address to your regular one, making it much more difficult for people
to identify you on the Internet. A VPN service could also help you access blocked websites or
services such as BitTorrent or Skype, and offer security while accessing the Internet via public
hotspots.
A good VPN service offering unlimited data transfers and healthy speeds usually costs around $10
to $20 per month, so when a new service launched this week, offering all this for a one-off
payment of $29.00 (introductory price), it warranted further investigation.
According to their website, the people behind VPN4Life are
entrepreneurs “striving to free the world from ISP monitoring, government restrictions, and
capitalism’s growing influence on the Internet, one account at a time.” Offering
unlimited bandwidth and 128 bit encryption through servers in the UK, Germany and Singapore with
a 99.7% uptime guarantee, it certainly looked attractive. The official site carries little
detail, so we contacted VPN4Life and asked a number of questions.
First of all, the $29.00 payment looked like an introductory offer, so how much would the service
cost normally? VPN4Life told us the 20mb/sec fully BitTorrent compatible unlimited bandwdith PPTP
service would cost “between $45 and $50″, while confirming that the payment is indeed
a one-off for a lifetime subscription.
Since there is no privacy policy on the site we asked a few questions along those lines. VPN4Life
told us that they do not log what any of their customers do. We asked about the lack of a
displayed Terms of Service and their response was it wasn’t needed. “Customer pays,
we provide VPN,” they told us, while assuring that they would never divulge any customer
information to 3rd parties, since they have nothing stored to give them.
$50.00 for life sounds an amazing offer - but is this super-low price sustainable? The immediate
difficulty with a lifetime subscription is that once off the ground, the company is then
responsible for providing a service to thousands of members forever who paid very little
in the first place. More and more new signups are then required to pay for the spiraling hardware
and bandwidth costs and since VPN4Life offer unlimited bandwidth, it’s difficult to see how
the whole operation can be sustained.
As far as the real costs of bandwidth go, we spoke with Bruce at VPN provider Perfect Privacy who told us: “There is a reason why we
currently charge about EUR 10.00 to EUR 15.00/month (depending if you pay for 3 or 24 months in
advance), namely that 1 mbps of dedicated bandwidth in the West costs about EUR 10.00 to US$
15.00 at the very minimum. In Asia it costs about US$ 80.00/mbps. That’s US$ 1,500
(U.S/Europe) to US$ 8,000 (Asia) every month just for 100 mbps.”
In the face of these figures, the VPN4Life offer starts to look vulnerable indeed. “How are
they going to pay for their ever increasing bandwidth needs if the number of paying members
becomes ever smaller in relation to the total number of members?” asked Bruce,
rhetorically. He has a very, very good point. It looks impossible, much like the classic pyramid scheme.
Some might feel that at $50.00 this service is worth a try but I strongly believe that if
something looks too good to be true, then it probably is. Time will tell, but I won’t be
changing provider, that’s certain.
Before we go on to the list of the 10 most popular articles based on the number of views per
article, Ben, Enigmax and Ernesto pick their personal favorites of 2008.
Ernesto
It is hard to pick one article out of the hundreds of posts we have done. The BuckCherry
article is definitely one of the most enjoyable articles of 2008. The band issued a
press-release complaining about the early leak of their album, but with a little bit of research
we found out that it was actually the manager of the band who had uploaded it onto various
BitTorrent sites.
Enigmax
When Ernesto’s Top 10 Most Pirated Games
2008 article went mainstream, culminating in the BBC using TorrentFreak as a source, it was a proud moment. But
i’d like to say a special thanks to international megapopstar entrepreneur extraordinaire
and established anti-piracy writer Indiana Gregg, for her contribution
to TorrentFreak. Unintentionally the best laugh of the year, with heaps of good old fashioned
Interwebs drama on top.
Ben
My favorite story of the year has to be the near bankruptcy of
MediaDefender, a year after we reported on the release of their emails. Shoddy enforcement
techniques, and a spot of DDoSing have put their share price in the toilet. To paraphrase MediaDefender’s Randy Saaf, “They’re
f*cked”.
Most BitTorrent
users have probably never heard of Opentracker, but there is little doubt that many of them will
have used it. It is the piece of software that The Pirate Bay is running on, as well as the
denis.stalker tracker. Together, the two trackers alone are responsible for the communication
between 25 million BitTorrent peers at any given point in time.
Opentracker is a lightweight
BitTorrent tracker which uses minimal resources. The software does not store any data or log any
IP-addresses, supports UDP-tracking and is more stable and efficient than most other tracker
software. Last year, The Pirate Bay started using the
software, which allowed them to handle more users with the same hardware.
As with most software, Opentracker comes with a license, although it is an unusual one. The
software is published under a Beerware
license, meaning that if a satisfied user should ever run into the developer, he or she owes the
developer a beer. This is exactly what the German Pirate Party did, as the party is actively using BitTorrent.
As a token of appreciation for all his efforts, the party donated 50 litres of Augustiner, a
German wheat beer, to Opentracker developer Dirk Engling (aka “Erdgeist”).
“Pirates, P2P and especially BitTorrent is part of a new culture. Users decide on their own
what kind of information they want to get, instead of simply sitting in front of the TV,”
the German Pirate Party
writes on their blog, as they thank the Opentracker folks for all their hard work.
The beer is well deserved of course, and it came as no surprise that Erdgeist promised to share
it with the other congress goers.
Prison
Break is leading this week’s chart. Since most shows are on a break it’s a bit of an
unusual week with nine newcomers.
The data for the most recent TV episodes are collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and
is for informational and educational reference only. A list of the most pirated TV-shows of 2008 was published last
week.
Thanks to ShowInsider we now also include a list based on
the total number of downloads (not only recent episodes) of all shows in the past week.
Spain has hit
the headlines a number of times in 2008 as it deals with the file-sharing phenomenon. Notably,
following a Spanish case concerning telecoms company Telefonica, on 29 January 2008, the European
Court Justice held(.pdf)
that community law does not require member states to oblige ISPs to disclose details of suspected
file-sharers to enable a copyright owner to bring civil proceedings. This was an important
decision, one that is yet to be tested elsewhere in Europe.
Anti-piracy lobby groups are always keen to paint file-sharing as a very serious offense, and
have had some successes in
this respect. Despite the fact that in 2006 a Spanish judge ruled that a man
who shared copyright music didn’t break the law because he made no money, and another
ruled a
BitTorrent tracker legal on the same basis, the anti-piracy lobby presses on.
In November, the Spanish government launched a TV, radio and print media campaign called
“Si eres legal, eres legal” (If you are legal, you’re legal) which strongly
criticized citizens who used the Internet to download copyright works. This campaign has annoyed
many people and groups, and the opposition isn’t staying silent.
Recently a group of Spanish free-culture supporters demanded the withdrawal of the campaign and a
public apology from the government. In protest, they arranged a demonstration on the doorstep of
one of the leading political parties in Spain. After notifying the police, the groups - Compartir
es Bueno (Sharing is good) and Hacktivistas (Hacktivists) - sat in front of the socialist party
headquarters and shared copyright material. The police did
nothing, suggesting a de facto acceptance of their actions.
Now, according to a report,
it is the turn of Spain’s Madrid-based Association of Internet
Users to make a formal complaint to the government.
An official statement from the group claims that the campaign “recklessly offers
information that lacks all legal basis, with the exclusive aim of re-educating public
opinion.”
Writing to Culture Minister César Antonio de Molina, the Association of Internet Users
said the campaign must cease, since it risks “the manipulation of public opinion to the
benefit of private interests,” i.e, come down on the public in order to serve the recording
industry.
The association asserts that the campaign “includes information that is untrue, and
therefore is contrary to the constitutional principle
)
and reject those that you are not interested in
(
)
Over
recent years, TV-shows have become increasingly popular on BitTorrent. While some watch the shows
directly on their computers, quite a few people prefer viewing them on a big screen TV. For the
latter group, Netgear’s 
Whack ‘em
All is a newish game for iPhone and iPod Touch, based on the ‘Whack-a-Mole’
idea. The creators are married couple Constance and James Bossert, who together form 
During recent months, the RIAA, MPAA and other anti-piracy outfits have
been lobbying for legislation that would make it possible to disconnect repeated copyright
infringers from the Internet, with 
Top Gear is
leading this week’s chart. UFC 92 is one of the surprising (one-time) entries.
Mininova,
founded in January 2005, soon became one of the most successful torrent sites. The site has grown
steadily over recent months, and for a few weeks now the millions of daily users have been
downloading well over 10 million torrents a day.
The
term “3 Strikes” is a familiar one to those monitoring attempts to crack down on
illicit file-sharing. Many countries are looking at proposals which if implemented, would mean
that a ‘graduated response’ is taken against those accused of online copyright
infringement. ‘Strike One’ would earn the infringer a warning, ‘Strike
Two’ would result in a slowing of the user’s Internet connection, with Internet
disconnection proposed on a third accusation.
contrary to
the remarkable first place for “Disaster Movie” last week, this weeks list includes
several movies that were well received by the public.
The trojan in
question (Troj/Qhost-AC) 
Hustler Europe is getting on the “turn piracy into profit”
bandwagon. It has recently hired anti-piracy tracking company 
During the
last year there has been a surge in businesses offering VPN (Virtual Private Network) services to
those who prefer to operate with a degree of anonymity on the Internet. A VPN service assigns
your PC with a different IP address to your regular one, making it much more difficult for people
to identify you on the Internet. A VPN service could also help you access blocked websites or
services such as BitTorrent or Skype, and offer security while accessing the Internet via public
hotspots.
Most BitTorrent
users have probably never heard of Opentracker, but there is little doubt that many of them will
have used it. It is the piece of software that The Pirate Bay is running on, as well as the
denis.stalker tracker. Together, the two trackers alone are responsible for the communication
between 25 million BitTorrent peers at any given point in time.
Prison
Break is leading this week’s chart. Since most shows are on a break it’s a bit of an
unusual week with nine newcomers.
Spain has hit
the headlines a number of times in 2008 as it deals with the file-sharing phenomenon. Notably,
following a Spanish case concerning telecoms company Telefonica, on 29 January 2008, the European
Court Justice