Like everyone else I’ve been reading, talking to friends and thinking about this for the last couple of days. What I’m about to say is the result of that — my own opinion and nothing more.

Let’s start with a great fact: that, as Rasmus Fleischer of Piratbyran points out, the entire Pirate Bay could fit on a single USB stick. This got me thinking: what if someone was to simply scrape and copy all The Pirate Bay’s torrents over to a new tracker and Mininova and all the other indexes currently using the TPB tracker were to change their listings to point to that? OpenBitTorrent.com for example, an independent open tracker which started recently.

What if someone else — it could be anyone; it could be you! — decided to make a new index of these torrents. Call it ‘The Pirate Ship’, ‘Brand New Pirate’, whatever. I’m sure someone has already got a domain ready and waiting for this.

This new index would be functionally equivalent to The Pirate Bay. By the magic of copy-and-paste, TPB would have transplanted itself somewhere new. The corporate ‘buyers’ are free to run the old site into the ground with whatever specious business models they care to waste their shareholders’ money on, while The Pirate Bay’s new foundation uses it to fund interesting, new projects.

Think about it for a moment. What would be the downside of the sale here?

Privacy, possibly — a serious concern. Had The Pirate Bay been keeping logs of seeders and leechers, the acquiring company could — after flailing about for a few months trying to sell bits and bandwidth — auction this to the highest bidder. But TPB have been scrupulously failing to keep such logs. So provided people switch at the right time — as I’m sure they’ll have the intelligence to — there will simply be nothing to sell.

Let’s not be glib about it: after the shenanigans with insider trading, who knows if the deal goes through. But if it does, those behind TPB may have managed to square the circle, sliding out from behind the old, compromised identity while handing-off everything of value (tracker, torrents, users) to the community.

The very fact that this is possible should give those backing business models based on copy-restriction something serious to think about. Not only is this not a blow for P2P, it’s a signal of something very worrying for the MPAA and Co. Spend years going after the world’s most prominent pirate site, only to find that when you get it, it dematerializes and by the magic of copy-and-paste, reappears elsewhere in a different guise. It’s like Whack-A-Mole with infinite holes, infinite moles, and just one hammer. Your odds: not good.

The feelings of betrayal and being ’sold out’ by the TPB founders are natural. We believe(d) in The Pirate Bay; The Pirate Bay was ‘forever’. But in one way, an important way, this belief was right: what made The Pirate Bay possible is forever.Even if I’m wrong, and a service like OpenBittorrent doesn’t immediately get populated with all the torrents from the old database, the ‘community’ should learn some lessons from this:

(1) Big != Good

Let’s face it: The Pirate Bay itself had become a huge focus of attention for those trying to preserve the old copy-restriction model of the culture industries. By some accounts TPB’s tracker has been responsible for 50% of all Internet traffic, and its founders have been looming larger and larger, waving their pirate flags more and more visibly, for quite a few years. They are international celebrities and, love them as we might, that made them and TPB targets. It’s not a secret that quite a few peers on the TPB trackers today are ’spies’, there to gather data on legitimate peers — a real danger to Bittorrent users. And as well being feted, Brokep, Anakata and Tiamo have been followed, spied on, raided, arrested, maligned, sentenced and, now live under a real threat of imprisonment.

The bigger we get, the more of a target we are. Mininova, isoHunt and TPB have all been under siege these last years. We need to stop thinking about ‘one stop shops’ for our media. Distribution and aggregation point the way: think ’separation of powers’. Clients like Miro can aggregate feeds from a variety of sources according to the needs of the user. TPB may have represented the needs of the community for half a decade or more, but we don’t need them. We are our own media infrastructure!

(2) We are all The Pirate Bay now…

… and this is why we have to amend our idea about what being a ‘pirate’ is. In the P2P world, as in that of Web 2.0, it’s us and our sharing that makes the value. Hopefully some of the indignation leveled at The Pirate Bay in the last few days will cause us to think not only about the weirdness of entrusting all this value to TPB, but about all those corporate behemoths — Facebook, say, or Twitter or YouTube — who play fast and loose with the value that we create for them every day. Make no mistake, we’ll wait a thousand years for the Mark Zuckerbergs of this world to start a foundation with the billions they have made from us and our interactions.

We’re all The Pirate Bay now because we all make media; we all copy media, we all redistribute media and because the ‘war against piracy’ has criminalized us. Young or old, middle or working class, any of us could expect that letter from the RIAA or MPAA at any moment. Our online activities are routinely surveilled in the attempt to preserve a paradigm that is manifestly outdated. That fits well with the totalitarian mentality of many of our governments and it isn’t to be accepted casually.

So is it really enough to throw a little bit of bandwidth into the cloud, vote Pirate Party, and then wax indignant about betrayal of a ‘community’ when its end (however temporarily) comes? Is that a sufficient resistance to the erosion of our liberties, to which the ‘war against piracy’ contributes?

What about grabbing one of the many, free ready made trackers out there and starting up our own Bays? By letting a thousand Pirate Bays bloom, we can demonstrate the futility of trying to prop up the old system, speeding the adoption of new models to help artists and ourselves make and distribute culture.

(3) Copy + Paste will never die.

Actually, as I’ve said, I suspect that none of TPB’s functionality, not a single torrent, will have been lost in this ’sell out’. I say this partly because of what I know of its founders, and partly because of my conviction that we live in a world in which the copy predominates, evading all attempts to outlaw it and rendering attempts to ‘buy it off’ futile.

Let’s just remind ourselves again: the entire code and all the torrents for TPB — information which accounts for half the traffic on the internet — fits on a single USB key. Perhaps someone will find a way to make a torrent of THAT. And then we can all sit around and wonder what it is, precisely, Global Gaming Factory have bought for all their millions.

Post from: TorrentFreak

Founded in 2001, FTD is the largest Usenet community in The Netherlands with around 450,000 members. FTD and its software allows members to report material they find on Usenet along with its location. This material could include movies, music and TV shows and this made it a target for notorious anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

BREIN says that FTD operates illegally but the Usenet community and its specialist IT lawyer, Arnoud Engelfriet of Ictrecht law firm vigorously deny this and are now taking legal action the Dutch anti-piracy outfit. The background to the case can be found in our earlier article, and a more detailed report on the action against BREIN here.

Yesterday, while BREIN’s site was still supposedly out of action following an alleged (or Hoaxed) DDoS attack from Pirate Bay fans, it published a further report about FTD, which was hidden on its site away from easy public viewing. Strangely the same page at the time of writing is password protected and the report unavailable, but we have a copy and translation.

Entitled ‘BREIN Demands Closure of FTD’, the anti-piracy outfit went on to say that if FTD does not close it will require a penalty of 50,000 euros ($70,000) per day against the service, in addition to compensation and full reimbursement of costs. BREIN said that FTD “organizes and promotes” Usenet content, most of which is illegal.

BREIN then refers to earlier discussions it had with FTD, noting that it asked FTD to cease its “structural use of illegal content” in early 2009. The two sides had entered discussions to see if they could iron out their difficulties. Following on, FTD pro-actively modified how they operate to ensure that there could be no doubt as to their legality.

“After we made the changes, we got complete radio silence from BREIN. No confirmation, no rejection, nothing,” Arnoud explained. “Only after several days we found out what BREIN thought - but only by reading the online news. That was a huge disappointment.”

The news saw BREIN declare that FTD was a criminal operation in an article titled “You do not pay for it, it’s unlawful” and this led to FTD taking legal action against BREIN to try to clear their name by having their operation declared legal by a court. Now BREIN is counter-claiming against FTD.

Tim Kuik from BREIN now says that it is clear that FTD “continued their abuses unabated” and that the modifications they made were only made to hide the “true nature” of the site.

“It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Kuik. “FTD earn money with a system that exists by virtue of the huge supply of illegal content to Usenet.” Mirroring the disappointment felt at FTD, Kuik added: “It is disappointing but illustrates that BREIN’s outstretched hand has been cut off.”

So what exactly does this claim for 50,000 euros per day mean for FTD? Lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet told TorrentFreak that BREIN did not ask the court for damages. Legally they are barred from asking for damages - article 3:305a of the Dutch Civil Code says that an organization that represents the interests of a certain group can never ask for damages. They asked instead for a penal sum of 50k euros if FTD were ordered by the court to shut down but it refused.

“The idea is that a court can order you to shut down but you can ignore the court,” said Arnoud. “With the penal sum, you risk that the court will then sell your house or seize other assets. In principle that’s legal, but the amount is of course ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous also sums up my view of the BREIN counterclaim. Instead of addressing any of the points we raised, they simply repeat their standard rhetoric. Nowhere is the distinction made between uploading works and telling people that someone has uploaded a work for (legal) download. And downloading illegal uploads is legal in the Netherlands,” notes Arnoud.

“BREIN is not known for its careful handling of the truth,” he added. “They are a propaganda organization after all.”

Post from: TorrentFreak

Aside serving torrents the TorrentReactor team launched TorrentPrivacy last year, a service that allows BitTorrent users to download torrents anonymously. Unfortunately, the site itself now poses a security threat of its own.

Websense reports that TorrentReactor has been injected with an IFrame that connects to a malicious site full of exploits. The exploits affects various applications including Internet Explorer and Adobe’s Shockwave and Acrobat Reader.

Once the user is successfully exploited a Trojan Downloader with an extremely low anti-virus detection rate will download and install a rootkit on the user’s system, after which more evil is bound to happen.

TorrentReactor’s founder Alex told TorrentFreak that they are looking into the matter and hope to fix the vulnerability as soon as possible. Alex further told us that he has no clue who’s behind the attack.

This is not the first time that TorrentReactor has suffered from an IFrame injection as The Register points out. Last year it dealt with a similar security breach.

Needless to say, TorrentReactor users may want to avoid the site for the time being if they’d rather not have a rootkit on their system.

Post from: TorrentFreak

In common with most other European countries The Netherlands is trying to find a solution to the ever increasing use of file-sharing sites to share copyrighted material. Presently, downloading movies and music for personal use in The Netherlands is seen as “fair use” and not punishable by law.

In their advice to the government, a working group consisting of four members of the Dutch parliament looked into the matter. They suggested criminalizing downloading once the entertainment industry has come up with sufficient legal alternatives.

The conclusions of the report were widely debated in the Dutch press. Worryingly, also some of the factual errors about Mininova that the parliamentarians dreamed up were recited in the media, which may hurt the BitTorrent site in the ongoing court case against the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

For instance, the report claims that Mininova ignores complaints form copyright holders and refuses to remove torrents from their site. This nonsense of course, since the site has had a copyright policy for years and is known to follow up every complaint.

Another inaccuracy in the report is the claim that Mininova adds “reviews” to the torrents their users have uploaded, something we’ve never heard before. The rumors that they actually host copyrighted content and that they filter porn from their site pro-actively don’t hold up either.

The Mininova staff are not happy with these allegations, especially since they are currently involved in a lawsuit against the entertainment industries that covers the same issues. “We are very displeased with the fact that the working group didn’t contact us prior to releasing this report, or even took a look at mininova.org,” Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer said.

“We demand that the spreading of false information related to Mininova will be stopped. In addition, we demand that the working group removes the name Mininova from the report and places a rectification on the website of the Dutch parliament and in several national newspapers,” Dubbelboer added.

“We take this very seriously,” Erik Dubbelboer said. “If these demands are not met, we’ll consider to take legal steps,” he said to emphasize the seriousness of their demands.

Arda Gerkens, the head of the parliamentary working group pointed to her parliamentary immunity when she was confronted with the news. However, legal experts said that parliamentarians don’t have any immunity when they speak out in public, which she did.

Mininova demands that the rectifications are made before the verdict in their case against BREIN is due, so it wont influence the decision of the judges.

Post from: TorrentFreak

The sale of the largest BitTorrent tracker in the world to Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) blasted like a shockwave though the BitTorrent community yesterday. For years The Pirate Bay has been a synonym for free file-sharing, something that many fear will change in the near future.

However, thus far GGF’s plans for the site and tracker are rather vague and uncertain. First of all there is a huge divide between what the Pirate Bay co-founders think will happen to the site and what GGF is telling the public.

TorrentFreak has spoken with Pirate Bay co-founders Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij who both think that the Pirate Bay will stay pretty much like it is now for the time being. The only difference in the short term, according to their knowledge, is that the site will link to torrents hosted on a third party domain tracked by a third party tracker.

Both the torrent hosting service and the tracker they are referring to are still in development, the co-founders said. They are not aware of any concrete plans to turn the site into a legal venture. In an attempt to find out we asked GGF to elaborate on their future plans and the response we got was remarkable.

GFF told us that most of their recent comments to the press were nothing more than “corporate bla bla.”

So let’s take a look at some of the bla bla that surfaced in the past day, to see if it makes any sense at all. Here are some of the key proposals.

1. The new Pirate Bay will put a halt to illegal downloading.
2. The Pirate Bay will compensate rights holders who publish their content on the site
3. The Pirate Bay will pay users for sharing files.

This sounds very impressive but, to put it mildly, it raises a few concerns.

It’s basically the same as saying that iTunes would pay its users to share music. When GGF has to pay both file-sharers and content providers they will undoubtedly have to raise huge sums money from a third party. So what is going to bring in this cash?

Ads of course! GGF is predicting to sell ads like no other website in the world has ever done. They told BusinessWeek that they hope to make as much as $780 million a year from advertisements.

GGF is also planning to raise money from ISPs. Theoretically ISPs might be willing to contribute because they could save on bandwidth costs if most of the files are served locally or directly from caching services, but it wont be enough. Also, they assume that The Pirate Bay will generate a significant portion of Internet traffic once they go ‘legal’, which is doubtful.

An even more significant problem is keeping the current users on board and cutting deals with content providers, all at the same time. This is an almost impossible task since copyright holders will only join if there is no illegal content on the site, and users will only stay if there is enough free and unrestricted DRM-free content available.

This means that GGF has to cut deals with pretty much every large music and movie studio from the start to have even a chance of survival. Even if they manage that, they also have to collect millions of dollars to compensate both the users and copyright holders.

Nevertheless, only hours after they announced they would acquire The Pirate Bay, GGF claimed that the entertainment companies they’ve spoken to are already interested in teaming up with the site they fought long and hard in court. Perhaps the Big Four are more open-minded than we expected - maybe GGF will draw on the business relationship it built with Vivendi in 2007?

No further explanation is needed to see that the bright future GGF is selling will never happen. Their plans seem to be completely delusional, at least in this world, and it’s even a mystery where they will get the $7.8 million funding to actually buy the site. If they ever will….

Post from: TorrentFreak

Confidence and trust in the BitTorrent community reached a possible all-time low yesterday as news broke that the world’s largest tracker, The Pirate Bay, would be sold to the corporate Global Gaming Factory X (GGF).

The acquisition for $7.8m (SEK 60 million) came as a huge shock to most people familiar with The Pirate Bay, as GGF promised that when it takes over the site it will eliminate illicit file-sharing - the base upon which The Pirate Bay achieved its worldwide fame and enabled it to gather millions of loyal users.

Indeed, most indications point to GGF being only interested in three things - the Pirate Bay’s domain name, the users and the revenue they can generate from them.

However, according to a report, the news of the acquisition didn’t come as a shock to everyone. Indeed, accusations are being made that some individuals knew what was about to happen and took the opportunity to try and cash in.

Around a week ago, equity marketplace Aktietorget shut down the trading of GGF stock after it spotted unusually large trading volumes leading to a rapidly increasing stock price, notably in the absence of any new information to explain the sudden interest in the company.

Indicating they suspect insider dealing and announcing an investigation, Peter Gönczi, executive vice president of Aktietorget told Dagens Industri: “There are reasons to suspect that information was leaked.”

After the price of GGF shares rocketed by more than 150% yesterday, at one point today they had lost 29% of their value, up to date details here.

Post from: TorrentFreak

Weighing in at a svelte 1.5 pounds and a compact 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.8 inches, CinemaCube is a brand new HD multimedia BitTorrent-enabled set-top box.

CinemaCube connects to your regular TV. It has an HDMI port and supports HD content up to 720p. It has all the usual analog and composite connections, S-Video and S/PDIF and plays back a multitude of formats including Xvid, DivX, AVI, H.264, MP4, MP2, RMVB, WMV, MP4, MKV, JPEG, BMP and PNG. Audio formats are also supported including FLAC, AAC, OGG and WAV.

Crucially for TorrentFreak readers, all of the above media can be acquired via the machine’s built-in BitTorrent client or from your existing PC archive via the built in 10/100 network socket.

Of course, there are many other set-top style boxes with these type of capabilities these days but what sets CinemaCube out from the competition is what it doesn’t have.

For starters the device doesn’t have a built in hard drive. Instead, CinemaCube has USB 2.0 connectivity which means that you can use your own external units or take advantage of small and cheap USB memory sticks which simply plug in.

For green-minded individuals, due to the lack of a hard drive CinemaCube doesn’t have a thirst for power consumption either, using only 10 watts of electricity when downloading via BitTorrent.

Perhaps most importantly, the device also lacks a big price tag. Unlike other admittedly higher-spec boxes, CinemaCube from brite-View costs just $89.99, putting it in reach of even the most frugal BitTorrent user.

Post from: TorrentFreak

With a theater release scheduled for less than two weeks time, Bruno is doing several interviews promoting his upcoming mockumentary. One of the most anticipated Q and A sessions is the Dialogg with the Digg.com community that was released earlier today - on Digg as well as Mininova.

Our traffic sponsor Digg is no stranger to BitTorrent. Before the MediaDefender debacle Digg’s weekly video podcast Diggnation was published on Revision3’s very own BitTorrent tracker, but times have changed.

However, with their latest Dialogg video Digg has again decided to embrace the Internet’s most powerful distribution method. They’ve teamed up with Mininova, the largest BitTorrent indexer, to make the file available to millions of Bittorrent users.

“We see BitTorrent as a smart way to legitimately distribute content amongst millions,” Matt Van Horn, Business Development Manager for Digg told TorrentFreak. “That’s why we’re excited to share Digg Dialogg via torrents as one of the ways in which people can enjoy Digg’s interview with Bruno,” Matt added.

In addition to a regular torrent, Mininova is also testing a BitTorrent-powered video stream using Bitlet’s services. By clicking on the “stream this video” link users can directly watch the stream in their browser, fully powered by BitTorrent.

Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer told us that they are delighted to be working with Digg. “We have always liked Digg so when they asked us to work together we jumped on it immediately. This was also a nice opportunity to test the new video streaming from Bitlet which we had just implemented into our Content Distribution service,” he said.

With its Content Distribution service Mininova is seeding the file on its servers which guarantees a high speed download. The advantage for the Digg team is that they save some bandwidth and don’t have to seed Bruno themselves.

The Dialogg with Bruno can be both downloaded and streamed using on Mininova. Geil!

Post from: TorrentFreak

Today it was announced that Global Gaming Factory X is in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August 2009 and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.

Tomas Wennström of What’s Next managed to secure a recorded audio interview with The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde. In it Peter says why the site was sold, talks a little about the future for the site and touches on the huge disappointment being expressed by the site’s fans. It’s a very interesting interview, although in common with everything else going on today, it raises even more questions.

Some key points from the interview:

GGF approached The Pirate Bay with a deal several weeks ago. TPB considered GGF to be the correct company to bring the project “to the next level” since they didn’t feel capable of doing it themselves. Peter said he feels that GGF share the same values as TPB.

Peter said that TPB have been approached by companies before to sell out, but they didn’t understand the value of TPB. He said the value of the site is to be found in the userbase and nothing else. He added that if a company is interested in buying that userbase they have to keep up spirits or they will find themselves owning something that rapidly decreases in value.

Tomas Wennström said that he found it crazy that TPB would become a listed company. Peter responded that they think the concept is “super funny” and that’s one of the main reasons they are doing this.

Peter said in the past they’ve had to hide the financial details of the site and who is doing what “for legal reasons” but says that in the future there will have to be more transparency about how the operation is run, adding that people now not only have the chance to share files, but also buy shares in the site.

Peter explained that he and the original owners of TPB disposed of the site in 2006. He refused to name who took the site but referred to a single owner in one of his responses, using the word “he”.

Peter noted that the site hadn’t yet been sold to GGF and the company will have to find funding inside 4 weeks. He said he doesn’t know who the financial backers are, but if GGF cannot find the money then everything goes back to exactly the way it was before.

Peter said that the perfect situation would be if the users of the site set up something to buy The Pirate Bay. Certainly, with all the previous fund raising for buying islands etc this might have been a possibility but this has never even been put forward as an option. The idea seems optimistic considering the backlash among the users.

Currently the site is down after suffering a minor DDoS attack, and TPB’s TiAMO told TorrentFreak that the site’s load balancer had crashed .

Peter says running Pirate Bay has resulted in ‘bad pay’, i.e minus SEK 30 million in fines - incidentally an identical amount to the cash payment part of the deal with GGF.

Tomas Wennström put a scenario to Peter - what if GGF screws up and makes all that is good about The Pirate Bay go away - which seemed like a veiled reference to the availability of the usual TPB content.

“I’m agnostic about it, I think it could be true, could be faulty, but whatever happens at least something happens, which is the big thing here. I’d rather see The Pirate Bay die in a chance of becoming better, than just dying.”

For the time being The Pirate Bay crew will assist the new owners in operating the site. In addition a new tracker will be launched as well as a new torrent hosting service.

The interview can be downloaded here.

Post from: TorrentFreak

Earlier today The Pirate Bay announced that it would be acquired by Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) who are listed on the Swedish stock market. So, Pirate Bay users can not only share files but they can buy a share of the site as well.

Perhaps even more significant for the BitTorrent community is the thus far unreported decision to close down the BitTorrent tracker. Up until today Pirate Bay’s public tracker connected more than half of all BitTorrent users but this is about to change.

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde has informed TorrentFreak that the site will soon decentralize and stop running a BitTorrent tracker of its own. Instead they will encourage their users to use a yet to be launched third party tracker for their torrents.

To decentralize even further, the torrents that will be listed on the site wont be hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers anymore. In the near future the site will use a new torrent hosting service that will store the torrents for them. This new hosting service will be open to other torrent sites as well and can be accessed through an API.

In the end The Pirate Bay is making these changes to ensure that the BitTorrent ecosystem stays intact no matter what happens, Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak. By decentralizing the different aspects they hope that BitTorrent users will be less reliant on the uptime of The Pirate Bay’s servers alone. The burden will now be spread among several independently operated services.

For now it remains a mystery what GGF CEO Hans Pandeya meant with “We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.” That’s worrying to say the least.

In addition, GGF also acquired Peerialism who apparently have developed a new P2P distribution technology which will be used on The Pirate Bay. How this related to the new tracker and external torrent hosting remains unknown.

This is a breaking story, more info will be added as it comes in.

Post from: TorrentFreak

Software company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) says it is in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay and file-sharing technology company Peerialism.

The changeover of ownership is scheduled for August 2009, whereby GGF will take over the operation of the site.

The company says that after it has completed the acquisition it will “launch new business models that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners,” which is clearly a huge diversion from TPB’s previous modus operandi.

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” said Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF.

“The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary. Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers’ need faster downloads and better quality,” said Pandeya.

GGF will acquire the site’s domain names and sites for SEK 60,000,000 ($7.8 million) - SEK 30,000,000 in cash and the rest in newly issue shares.

File-sharing technology company Peerialism will also be acquired by GGF for a total of SEK 100 million, of which at least SEK 50 million will be in cash.

According to GGF, Peerialism has developed a new P2P distribution technology which will be used on The Pirate Bay. The technology is said to be backwards-compatible with BitTorrent although details are scarce at the moment.

This is breaking news and this article will be added to constantly - please keep checking back.

Post from: TorrentFreak

The latest in a long line of scams targeting email users is attempting to capitalize on the increasing number using BitTorrent sites.

Targets of the scam receive an unsolicited email purporting to come from notorious anti-piracy company MediaDefender. The email, which is simply addressed “Dear User!” claims the individual has been monitored on any of several torrent sites while engaging in anything from copyright infringement, through to simply browsing the sites.

Of course, citing MediaDefender is a nonsense, since that company doesn’t get involved in anti-piracy warning letters - its specialty was spoofing on BitTorrent networks.

Additionally, most of the sites listed don’t even operate a tracker, so committing any type of copyright infringements on them is almost impossible. Here is the body of the email;

Dear User!

Your recent internet activity was logged on the following sites:

* Btjunkie
* SumoTorrent
* isoHunt
* Btscene
* Mininova
* Fenopy
* Monova
* Yotoshi
* GetInvites
* Btmon

hxxp://XXXXX.net/report_78478XX.exe (XX added by TorrentFreak)

We have a report about the copyrighted movies, music, softwares you downloaded or searched on these webpages. We strongly advise you to stop any future activities regarding the downloading of illegal content or you can expect prosecution by 17 U.S.C.512,1201?1205,1301?1332; 28 U.S.C. 4001 laws.

Sincerely,

MediaDefender Inc.

So what is this scam all about? Attached to the email is a logfile which supposedly provides additional information about the user’s infringements, but of course this is a lie - the log is really a virus.

This type of scam is nothing new - the same type of thing has been tried before, probably by the same people. However, this time the virus is different. Here is the report, courtesy of ThreatExpert;

Threat characteristics of ZBot - a banking trojan that disables firewall, steals sensitive financial data (credit card numbers, online banking login details), makes screen snapshots, downloads additional components, and provides a hacker with the remote access to the compromised system. Creates a startup registry entry. Contains characteristics of an identified security risk.

Savvy Internet users will hopefully realize the email is a scam fairly quickly, but hardened file-sharers should smell a rat even earlier due to the omission of demands for money.

Post from: TorrentFreak

ACS:Law, the outfit that at least appears to have taken over from lawyers Davenport Lyons in chasing alleged uploaders of 2nd rate games on file-sharing networks, have experienced another blow to their credibility. Their ‘evidence’ has been called into doubt yet again - this time by Internet service providers.

The hypocritical law firm - who were recently shown to be copyright infringers themselves - partner with Swiss anti-piracy tracking company Logistep in order to demand settlements of around £665. However, time and time again there have been allegations against individuals who have absolutely no idea why they are being accused of copyright infringement.

Last year, in the most prominent case of mistaken identity and when Davenport Lyons were working with Logistep and porn companies, they incorrectly accused a retired 64 year-old man of sharing the hardcore movie ‘Euro Domination 5′ via BitTorrent. The man received an apology and the demands for money ended.

Eventually the actions of Davenport Lyons and Logistep attracted the attention of consumer group Which? who made a complaint to the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Although that action is still ongoing, Davenport decided - at least on the surface - to withdraw from the business.

But of course, ACS:Law were waiting in the wings and they are now conducting business with Logistep in much the same fashion. Unfortunately for them, Which? is now on their case too.

In their most recent print edition, Which? published an article which casts an even darker shadow over the issue. They say they have been contacted by 20 individuals who say they have no knowledge of the games in question - Dream Pinball 3D and Two Worlds.

Which? quoted hospital ward clerk Deborah Hughes who said: “It’s distressing to receive such a letter. I’ve never heard of this game and I’ve no idea how to share it. I’ve searched my computer but it’s not there.”

Of even greater concern and embarrassment to ACS:Law are the accusations they leveled at Colin Dixon, Technology Director at a UK software developer. “My wife and I are middle aged (51 and 49) and work from home, and the computers here are owned by our employer, and are strictly controlled for pirated software - that’s my job!”

Which? also spoke with the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) about the issue. They replied: “We’re not convinced of the efficacy of the software and not confident in its ability to identify users.”

Up to now, this hasn’t worried Logistep, Davenport Lyons or ACS:Law since they say in their claims letters: “We do not claim that your computer was used to commit the infringing act (although we do not exclude this possibility), nor do we claim that you downloaded our client’s work. Our claim is that your Internet connection was used to make our client’s work available via one or more P2P networks. The file may not, therefore, be on your computer.”

So, in a nutshell, they admit that the people named in their letters may not have carried out any infringement. Absolutely priceless.

Neither ACS:Law nor Davenport Lyons have ever won a contested case against a UK file-sharer, despite all their bluster. Hundreds of people are “let off” after simply digging in their heels, denying the accusations and refusing to pay.

Thanks Hickster

Post from: TorrentFreak

This week there are three newcomers including Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker. ‘Knowing’ managed to stay on top of the chart for another 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 DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Post from: TorrentFreak

Some people might remember Nexicon from the Getamnesty site we mentioned in the past, or perhaps as the Youtube copyright cops. The company has a history as a cigarette retailer but went on to hunt pirates after they were sued for selling smokes to minors and failing to report their sales to the tax office.

After its transformation into a pirate tracking outfit Nexicon launched its Getamnesty program which offers copyright holders a chance to turn piracy into profit. They cleverly circumvent privacy protection laws by using ISPs to forward settlement requests for various copyright holders to alleged infringers. One of their most successful partner programs is the Payartists website which is a misleading name to say the least.

The money collected through Payartists is not going to any artists at all. The only artist they collect ’settlements’ for on the site is Frank Zappa, and he passed away in 1993. All the settlement money collected now goes to The Zappa Family Trust which is headed by Zappa’s widow.

Most recently a new Nexicon franchise emerged, as the ‘Video Protection Alliance’ (VPA) has teamed up with several porn studios to track down and force settlements from alleged copyright infringers. The methods they use are very similar to Getamnesty and Payartists and are designed to get cash payments from illicit file-sharers without even having to first find out who they are.

The process is simple. Their software monitors BitTorrent swarms and other filesharing networks and records the IP-addresses of those people who share the work of their clients. It then automatically sends an email to the ISP linked to the IP-address with a request to forward it to the associated customer.

Thus far, this is very similar to the warning letters that the movie and music studios have been sending out for years. However, there is one big difference. The emails sent out by Nexicon to alleged infringers contain veiled threats of legal action if they don’t choose to settle within 10 days.

In their email they write that “it may be beneficial to settle this matter without the need of costly and time-consuming litigation.”

If you don’t settle they are “prepared to pursue every available remedy including damages, recovery of attorney’s fees, costs and any and all other claims that may be available to it in a lawsuit filed against you.” To make it even more scary, they point out that ISPs might cut your Internet connection if you don’t comply.

In the FAQ on the VPA website it is noted that consulting a lawyers is an option, but it would be a rather silly thing to do since it will cost more than the settlement itself. “It is likely that the cost incurred to retain a lawyer will exceed the settlement amount offered.”

Indeed, the settlements are rather cheap compared to the fine that was handed out to Jammie Thomas recently. The settlement offer for an adult movie is close to the retail price of a DVD and for a single Frank Zappa track you’ll pay $10. In comparison, Jammie Thomas was ordered to pay $80,000 per song.

However, because of these low fees and the use of threatening language we cannot help mentioning the word ‘extortion’ once more. Even if they handle with the best intentions they should adjust their tracking software to be more accurate. We confirmed at least one case where they sent a settlement offer to the wrong person, and we’re pretty sure that this is not the only mistake they’ve made.

Still, even people wrongfully accused of sharing [insert obscene porn title here] may be inclined to pay a few bucks rather than risk being taken to court. The threats are worrying enough for some people to pay for an offense they didn’t commit. But there might be an even easier way out.

Unsurprisingly, very little happens when the threats are ignored. A Manhattan College employee dealing with DMCA notices wrote recently. “We have not passed the settlement info on to the students linked with the allegedly infringing IP address and have not had any follow up notices from them.”

This aside, we are not aware of any legal action taken by any of Nexicon’s partners to back up their threats. To the best of our knowledge they don’t even have a proper license to act as private investigators which is a felony in several US states and renders the ‘evidence’ they have in their spreadsheets useless.

Our advice, if you get a settlement offer from one of Nexicon’s partners please forward it to your spam folder - after forwarding it to us first of course.

Post from: TorrentFreak

More than two years have passed since The Pirate Bay team first announced that they were working on a video streaming site. However, as with most of their projects it can take a while before the public can catch a glimpse of what they are working on.

The Video Bay - as the project is named - opened up to the public with a very early test version a few weeks ago. Initially, users were able to browse though the videos but this has been disabled now. What is left is an announcement that the site will be launched somewhere in the future.

“This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don’t bug us too much if the site ain’t working properly,” it currently reads on the site’s main page.

How long it will take before the site will be opened up to the public is unknown. Pirate Bay’s TiAMO told TorrentFreak that there is still a lot of work to do behind the scenes. The encoder is not finished yet and the design is also a work in progress.

Pirate Bay Spokesman Peter Sunde agreed that it might take a while before the site goes live and told us that “it will be done when it’s done, in the future, in like a year or five.”

The Video Bay aims to implement some of the latest technologies including HTML 5 features such as the video and audio tags as well as the embedding of ogg/theora video and audio formats. However, it will not use p2p technology to stream the videos.

In time the site has the potential to become a major player in the video streaming area, similar to what BayIMG is for image hosting. A no-nonsense video sharing site where users can share whatever they want - uncensored.
Hollywood will be delighted.

Post from: TorrentFreak

Since 2005, Brazilian senator Eduardo Azeredo has been proposing new ‘cybercrimes’ legislation. Unlike some European proposals, the Brazilian one isn’t limited to dealing with copyright issues alone, but has expanded to include all “dangerous” online activities. Anyone creating a virus or simply sharing illicit files could be arrested and jailed for up to three years.

The International Free Software Forum (FISL) is an annual event sponsored by the Free Software Association taking place in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The event sees the coming together of researchers, social movements, entrepreneurs, hackers and free information advocates, this year including Peter Sunde, spokesman for The Pirate Bay.

At the event yesterday was a rather high-profile individual, Brazil’s President Lula. The President took the opportunity to publicly criticize the legislation supported by Senator Eduardo Azeredo.

“In our government it is prohibited to prohibit,” said the president during his speech at the event. “I consider this bill a form of censorship,” he added.

After meeting with others including Richard Stallman, President Lula noted that “..the Internet must continue free,” adding ”..the freedom is the source of the creativity”.

Also invited to the event was someone with perhaps an even higher profile in Internet-related issues than the president himself, The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde. Not wanting to miss out on a great photo opportunity to boost his popularity, President Lula Peter Sunde posed with Peter Sunde President Lula.

Post from: TorrentFreak

Tine, Norways largest dairy products company is giving its Litago chocolate milk branding a bit of a makeover. Rather than waste time and money employing expensive designers, they started a competition.

Litago milk features a cow on the packaging so not wanting to break with tradition, Tine invited the public to enter their own cow designs. Once all entries were received voting began - the winning cow will become the new Litago logo - no bull.

Here are the finalists, they are very amoosing.

According to reports, the cow in first place right now - the Opera Browser Cow - could have been put there by supporters or even (gasp) employees of the Norwegian browser company. An udderly scandalous allegation, especially when the steaks are this high.

But take a closer look at the design in second place right now. That’s right, just as expected, it’s a Pirate Bay-inspired cow. With green arrows on it.

“What we are really talking about here is Litago with a Pirate bay logo, submitted by a someone who loves to drink milk and loves to download torrents,” say IT-Avisen, “but perhaps has less love for Tøndel and intellectual property law.”

But of course, Tine has a few safeguards to ensure that no Pirate Bay logo gets anywhere near their bottles and packaging. The final decision will be made by a panel of farmers judges - selected by Tine.

Moo.

Post from: TorrentFreak

Michael Jackson suffered a cardiac arrest on Thursday afternoon, which was likely caused by a Demerol overdose and ultimately led to his death.

There is no doubt that Jackson had a tremendous impact on several generations of musicians, and millions of people who grew up with his music. It is therefore no surprise to see that only hours after he was pronounced dead, his music is being sought by hundreds of thousands of people.

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.

In common with social media sites, ‘Michael Jackson’ is one of the most sought after phrases on torrent sites too. The search cloud on Mininova is filled with Jackson-related searches from fans who want to complete their collection.

This renewed interest in Michael Jackson is not limited to just torrent sites though. On Amazon, Jackson’s work takes up the top 14 spots on the bestselling albums list. Currently the top 10 albums chart on iTunes is dominated by 7 Jackson albums. On eBay there is a similar boom with memorabilia being traded for ten times the prices of just two days ago.

It had been rumored by Michael Jackson biographer Ian Halperin that the ‘King of Pop’ had recorded as many as 100 unreleased tracks but was keeping them locked away. He claimed that upon Jackson’s death, the tracks would be made available to his three children as a personal legacy and to secure an inheritance.

With Jackson’s death the 100 songs could now become available, and considering his troubling financial situation it may not take very long before they become available to the public, in stores and on BitTorrent.

Post from: TorrentFreak

During the summer of 2008, iPhone developer Alec Renolds announced he was working on a BitTorrent application that would be capable of automatically downloading and installing iPhone applications. Provisionally named ‘AppDowner’, the project looked promising but faltered a little due to some personal issues.

Now things are back on track as Alec has teamed up with a new designer Miles Lorry to revitalize the newly and slightly renamed ‘appDowner’. Available in beta “soon”, appDowner will be compatible with iPhone 3.0 devices, so what’s the deal?

“The concept of appDowner has changed slightly, from being a simple ’smart’ BitTorrent application to a full on App Store replacement,” explains Alec.

“No longer will you have to remember and type in the URL to your torrent file, simply click the “Store” tab on appDowner, and you’ll be brought to a beautiful interface designed by Miles (which isn’t quite ready to be shown off yet, but he assures us that it will be very, very soon!) which will allow you to search and find the apps you’re looking for.”

Unlike the official App Store, there will no iTunes-like approval process to get your own applications onto the appDowner store, with Alec promising that submissions to the system will be accepted within a week.

While BitTorrent is employed to serve apps to the user, the appDowner torrent client can also be used for non-appDowner downloads too

When released in beta, appDowner should become available via Cydia/Icy.

Stay tuned for updates

Post from: TorrentFreak