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Tag: Torrents

  • Wolf of Wall Street, Frozen Top Most-Pirated Movies List

    Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street was definitely the most gloriously profane movie of the year (it’s in the record books!), and now it has another title.

    According to data from Excipio, as obtained by Variety, the film was the most-pirated film this year, with just over 30 million downloads.

    It just edged out Disney’s mega-hit Frozen for the top spot.

    The top 10 is filled with big-budget blockbusters like The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Oscar-winner for Best Picture 12 Years a Slave snuck in at #10.

    Here’s the top 20 most-pirated of 2014:

    1. The Wolf of Wall Street: 30.035 million
    2. Frozen: 29.919 million
    3. RoboCop: 29.879 million
    4. Gravity: 29.357 million
    5. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: 27.627 million
    6. Thor: The Dark World: 25.749 million
    7. Captain America: The Winter Soldier: 25.628 million
    8. The Legend of Hercules: 25.137 million
    9. X-Men: Days of Future Past: 24.380 million
    10. 12 Years a Slave: 23.653 million
    11. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire: 23.543 million
    12. American Hustle: 23.143 million
    13. 300: Rise of an Empire: 23.096 million
    14. Transformers: Age of Extinction: 21.65 million
    15. Godzilla: 20.956 million
    16. Noah: 20.334 million
    17. Divergent: 20.312 million
    18. Edge of Tomorrow: 20.299 million
    19. Captain Phillips: 19.817 million
    20. Lone Survivor: 19.130 million

    Do note that the RoboCop figure is not entirely accurate, as it also includes downloads of the original 1987 film of the same name.

    As far as TV shows go, no surprise in which took the most-pirated crown. According to Torrent Freak, Game of Thrones was, once again, the most-downloaded TV series of 2014.

    Image via The Wolf of Wall Street, Facebook

  • Game of Thrones, Once Again, Sits Atop the Iron Throne of Piracy

    The season finale of HBO’s Game of Thrones has shattered a piracy record, previously held by…Game of Thrones.

    According to torrent trackers, over 254,000 people were, at one point, sharing a single torrent for the season four finale episode, “The Children.”

    None of this should surprise you, really – at least if you’ve been following Game of Thrones and its swelling popularity. The show has won the most-pirated crown for two years in a row now, and continues to best its own records on an episode-to-episode basis.

    From TorrentFreak:

    Data gathered by TorrentFreak further shows that, in 12 hours, the season finale has been downloaded roughly 1.5 million times. Translated into actual data, that’s close to 2,000 terabytes transferred in half a day.

    The download total is expected to increase to more than 7.5 million during the weeks to come and means that unless a miracle happens, Game of Thrones will be crowned the most-pirated TV-show of the year once again.

    On the official front, Game of Thrones also bested itself. Nielsen reported 7.1 million total viewers on Sunday night, a record-breaking number which climbed to 9.3 million when you add in encore showings. That’s 32 percent more viewers than GoT had for its third season finale.

    So, what’s the significance of this piracy record? Well, Game of Thrones is an incredible show and people want to watch incredible shows. HBO has decided to tether their content to cable, refusing to offer a standalone streaming service. Some people don’t have buddies to share HBO GO passwords with. Remember, people like good shows.

    It may seem like a lot of missed revenue opportunity for HBO but strangely enough, the company has expressed indifference toward Game of Thrones‘ piracy in the past.

    “I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts. The demand is there. And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network,” HBO programming head Michael Lombardo famously said last year.

    He seems to have a point. Last year, Game of Thrones took the title for most-pirated show and Amazon’s best-selling show of the year.

    Image via Game of Thrones, Facebook

  • Popcorn Time Torrent Streaming Site is Dead, For Now

    It was bound to happen. Popcorn Time, the streaming video platform that allowed anyone to stream just about any TV or movie for free on a variety of devices is now gone. The creators of Popcorn Time have shut down the service despite their claims that the streaming was legal.

    Popcorn Time was released last month and slowly began to spread by word-of-mouth. The platform allowed users to search through a vast collection of movie and TV torrents and stream them instead of downloading. None of the torrents were hosted by Popcorn Time, a fact it’s creators cited when arguing for its legality. By early March the site had gained enough popularity for mainstream attention, almost certainly a factor in its shutdown.

    Popcorn Time’s creators had argued that movie and TV piracy are a service problem caused by antiquated methods of determining the value of content. They maintain that Popcorn Time was legal and insist that they checked up on whether this was true four different times.

    When visiting the Popcorn Time website visitors are now greeted with a message from the platform’s creators. The message states that they are “enormously proud” of the project, but that “standing against an old fashioned industry has its own associated costs. Costs that no one should have to pay in any way, shape, or form.”

    From the message:

    Popcorn Time is shutting down today. Not because we ran out of energy, commitment, focus or allies. But because we need to move on with our lives.

    Our experiment has put us at the doors of endless debates about piracy and copyright, legal threats and the shady machinery that makes us feel in danger for doing what we love. And that’s not a battle we want a place in.

    Of course, the open-source community will certainly not let such a popular project die. Already the developers behind the torrent site YTS have announced that they have forked the Popcorn Time software and will continue to develop it.

  • IsoHunt Is Back From The Dead… Sort Of

    IsoHunt Is Back From The Dead… Sort Of

    Earlier this month, IsoHunt, one of the world’s largest torrent trackers, shut down after settling a seven year lawsuit with the MPAA. There were efforts to archive all of IsoHunt upon the news, but founder Gary Fung killed the site earlier than planned to thwart those efforts. Now an entirely new team has resurrected the site in its entirety.

    TorrentFreak reports that a carbon copy of IsoHunt is now online at isohunt.to. The new site has nothing to do with the original site as it was brought back by a team that feels the site was a “file-sharing icon.” The team confirmed just as much in a post on the new IsoHunt under the title of “IsoHunt is back!”

    Hey everyone! IsoHunt is back online! It’s the same old isoHunt from the outside but very different from the inside. We have nothing in common with the isoHunt Inc. that made the original website. We proudly copied it and are happy to share. Isn’t that what we’re all here for?

    Feel free to search and download torrents like you used to. We’ll try to bring some of the old features back so we can recreate everything together.

    So, how similar is the new IsoHunt compared to the one one? The team behind it tells TorrentFreak that they have rescued about 75 percent of the original IsoHunt’s torrent database, and that they’re trying to bring more back online. They also might be able to bring back user comments, but it looks like the forums and user profiles will not be coming back.

    The death of IsoHunt was a big win for the MPAA in its tireless crusade to remove all file-sharing sites from the Internet, but its return is a powerful reminder that the the Internet doesn’t tolerate forced censorship. Even if what the site is doing is deemed illegal by the justice system, somebody on the Internet will ensure that it survives. That has happened here and it will happen again if the MPAA forces this new version of IsoHunt to shut down.

    In short, we may just have a new Pirate Bay-style game of whac-a-mole here, folks.

    [Image: IsoHunt.to]

  • Breaking Bad Premiere Both a Piracy and Ratings Smash

    On Sunday, AMC’s Breaking Bad finally picked up where it left off and delivered a mid-season premiere for the ages. I’m not too inclined to hyperbole, but I’m pretty sure that the episode shattered all expectations and blew at least a few minds out there in TV land.

    And apparently, expectations weren’t all that it shattered. The premiere episode (season 5, episode 9) broke its own viewership records – both in terms of piracy and traditional ratings.

    According to torrenting figures obtained by TorrentFreak, 80,000 people were sharing the premiere episode of Breaking Bad just hours after it aired. In 12 hours, that number had jumped to 500,000. The figures are on a pace to break the show’s previous torrenting record of 2,580,000 active downloads that it set last year.

    Even with that example of massive piracy, Breaking Bad is still pretty far behind the levels seen by HBO’s Game of Thrones, which was crowned most-pirated show of the year.

    What’s interesting about the regional breakdown for the highest levels of Breaking Bad piracy is that they occur in regions where the show was initially available – or premiered on a subscription streaming platform within 24 hours of its original premiere. The highest level of piracy for the show came from Australia, where viewers could have seen it via a pay TV network. The next two countries with the highest rate of piracy for the episode were the U.S. and Canada – both with traditional means for viewing.

    Finally, the U.K. came in fourth – even though Netflix in the U.K. opened up the episode just 24 hours after it premiered in the U.S. Apparently, many fans in the U.K. either don’t subscribe to Netflix or couldn’t wait for 24 hours to see what the entire internet was buzzing about.

    And as a true Breaking Bad super-fanatic, I can’t really say that I blame them. Why wait for some imposed delay when you can watch it immediately with a click of your mouse?

    The torrenting data shows that 16% of all downloading of the Breaking Bad mid-season premiere came from the U.S. – a pretty substantial chunk. But if you think that a high volume of downloads somehow negatively affected the show’s ratings, or at least signifies that less people chose to watch it via traditional means – tread lightly.

    In fact, traditional ratings for the premiere were off the charts.

    Sunday’s episode delivered 5.9 million viewers, which is not only the most int he history of the series but it more than doubled the ratings for the season 5 premiere.

    “We are so pleased and gratified by viewer response to a historic four-premiere weekend on AMC,” said AMC President and GM Charlie Collier. “For Breaking Bad to continue to deliver record-setting ratings in its fifth and final season is remarkable.”

    Remarkable, sure. But not at all surprising. With each subsequent season, buzz for the show continued to grow. It simply looks like everyone has caught up by now, and an anxious fanbase now awaits the fate of Walt, Jesse, and Hank, and the rest of the Whites.

    If you happened to miss Sunday’s episode, well, shame on you. But you can rectify your gross error and watch it online, for free, on AMC.com. It’s important to note that this option won’t last forever, and AMC doesn’t plan on doing this with future episodes.

  • Most-Pirated Show Game of Thrones Is Also Amazon’s Best-Selling Show of the Year

    In another blow to the “piracy kills sales” talking point, it appears that people are buying a lot of Game of Thrones DVDs.

    Why is this significant? Well, it’s because the hit HBO series has gained a reputation as of late as the king of all pirated content on the web. And now the show has just landed at the top of another list – Amazon’s best-seller list.

    According to Amazon, Game of Thrones: The Complete Second Season is the best-selling TV show of the year (so far). It beat out True Blood season 5, Dexter season 7, Breaking Bad season 5 and The Bible miniseries.

    Recently, torrenting figures crowned Game of Thrones as the most-pirated show of the year (so far, of course). With an estimated 5.2 million downloads per episode during season 3, GoT tallied over 2 million more downloads per episode than the next most-pirated show, The Big Bang Theory. This isn’t the first time that GoT has been given that title – it was also the most-downloaded how of 2012. Since then, GoT piracy has shot up 25%.

    But even with that uptick in downloading, there are still enough fans buying the show via Amazon to place it atop the bestseller list for TV shows.

    This should come as no surprise if you’ve been following the whole GoT piracy situation and HBO’s response to it.

    HBO programming head Michael Lombardo recently said that all the GoT downloading was sort of a compliment. Not only that, but he said that it didn’t negatively impact DVD sales.

    “I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts. The demand is there. And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network,” he said.

    Don’t let Lombardo speak for HBO as whole, however. The network still has plenty of anti-torrenting moves up their sleeves.

    And it’s not like HBO is making it easy for people to view their content unless they want to pony up for a cable subscription. HBO is firmly planted in its current model, which ties subscriptions to cable subscriptions. As long as that’s the case, and there’s no standalone HBO GO service offered in top piracy areas like the U.S., U.K., and Australia, people are going to continue to download it – even though it’s clear that people would pay for such a service.

    And apparently, they will still buy the DVDs too. If a show is great, people are going to want to watch it – by any and all means available.

  • Game of Thrones Is Your Most-Pirated Show of the Year

    Apparently, the Game of Thrones pirating army is one that even Khaleesi could be proud of.

    When it comes to the Spring television season, HBO’s hit show sits atop the iron throne. With an estimated 5.2 million downloads per episode, it’s not even close. The runner up, The Big Bang Theory, only pulled in an estimated 2.9 million downloads per episode . Here’s the rest of the top 10, courtesy of TorrentFreak:

    1. Game of Thrones – 5.2 million
    2. The Big Big Theory – 2.9 million
    3. How I Met Your Mother – 2.85 million
    4. The Walking Dead – 2.7 million
    5. Hannibal – 2.1 million
    6. Vikings – 1.9 million
    7. Arrow – 1.85 million
    8. The Vampire Diaries – 1.8 million
    9. Modern Family – 1.75 million
    10. Revenge – 1.7 million

    According to TorrentFreak, this means that Game of Thrones piracy is way up – a 25% increase from season 2.

    This shouldn’t really come as a huge surprise – all signs have been pointing to Game of Thrones retaining its title as the most pirated show on television. The season 3 premiere broke torrent records, only to have its records beat by the season 3 finale of the show.

    And we should expect this to continue when the show returns for season 4. It looks as if HBO is firmly planted in its current model, which ties subscriptions to cable subscriptions. As long as that’s the case, and there’s no standalone HBO GO service offered in top piracy areas like the U.S., U.K., and Australia, people are going to continue to download it. And it’s not like people wouldn’t be willing to pay for HBO.

    Either way, it’s not clear that HBO even feels that hurt by the piracy. A few months ago, HBO programming head Michael Lombardo said that it’s kind of a “compliment of sorts.”

    “I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts. The demand is there. And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network,” he said.

    And Game of Thrones director David Petrarca said that shows like his rely on cultural buzz that’s tied to downloading. He later walked those statements back a bit, but the thought remains – at what point does the downloading become particularly problematic for HBO?

  • Game of Thrones Breaks Piracy Records Again with Season Finale

    Though the reign of the seven kingdoms is still up for grabs, there’s no doubt who the king of piracy is.

    Once again, Game of Thrones broke records for torrenting following the airing of its season 3 finale on Sunday night.

    According to data gathered by TorrentFreak, the season finale of the incredibly popular HBO series garnered 171,572 people active on a single torrent – 128,686 sharing a complete copy and 42.886 still downloading. This breaks the record of 163,088 active downloaders set back in April with the season 3 premiere of Game of Thrones.

    TorrentFreak says the the finale was downloaded over a million times in the first 24 hours of availability.

    I have a feeling that this piracy record will last a little less than a year – until the season 4 premiere. There’s simply no reason for the high levels of torrenting to cease. HBO is still firmly committed to their HBO GO or bust position on content streaming, and in most areas of the world (save Scandinavia), HBO GO availability is tied to a cable subscription. With limited availability, where else will a cordcutter turn?

    Although there are no indications that HBO plans to budge on their position any time soon, there have been hints that they may be softening. Earlier this year, HBO CEO Richard Plepler suggested the maybe, just maybe HBO could consider a world where HBO GO could be offered in the U.S apart from a cable subscription.

    But is HBO even that worried about the piracy in the first place? A few months ago, HBO programming head Michael Lombardo said that it’s kind of a “compliment of sorts.”

    “I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts. The demand is there. And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network,” he said.

    And Game of Thrones director David Petrarca also hinted that the piracy isn’t that big of a deal, saying that shows like that rely on cultural buzz and that downloading is tied to that.

    We’ll see how it pans out next season. Now begins the long wait, which I’m sure will feel like the longest of Westeros winters.

  • Game of Thrones Premiere Broke Torrent Records

    Considering it was the most pirated show of 2012, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the new season premiere of Game of Thrones was downloaded quite a bit this weekend.

    But the sheer volume it pretty staggering – in fact, it broke records.

    TorrentFreak has the numbers: In just a few hours after the first torrent of the show was uploaded, 163,088 people were sharing the single torrent. That broke down to 110,303 actively sharing and 52,786 still downloading.

    That’s a record in the world of BitTorrent tracking – the largest previous swarm belonging to a season premiere of Heroes with 144,663 peers.

    If you take into account all of the torrents, TorrentFreak reports that estimates put the total number of Game of Thrones season 3 premiere downloads at over a million. That’s a performance that even a hard-to-satisfy Lannister patriarch can be proud of.

    If you break down the numbers, the majority of sharers came from the United States (12.9%), barely topping the U.K., who took 11.5% of the pie. Australia came in third with 9,9% of the total downloaders.

    Of course, there are plenty of reasons that so many people decided to torrent the show. It has a huge following, first and foremost. HBO’s international release delays don’t help either. Plus, there’s a large contingent in the U.S. (and elsewhere) that simply don’t subscribe to HBO and can’t get HBO GO because they don’t have cable. Many of these people would pay for a standalone HBO streaming service, but HBO is yet to offer that outside a few Scandinavian countries (although the prospects have gotten a bit better as of late).

    But according to one HBO exec, this piracy is more of a compliment and less of a problem.

    “I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts,” HBO programming head Michael Lombardo recently told EW. “The demand is there. And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network.”

  • Pirates More Likely To Pay For Digital And Physical Media Than Non-Pirates

    There’s nothing worse than pirates who steal and share content freely without repercussion. That’s at least what the entertainment industry would have you believe. They want everybody to know just how despicable those who would share their content really are. Problem is – the people they vilify are actually their biggest customers.

    A new study from the Dutch Institution for Information Law and CentERdata reveals some startling statistics that completely destroys any notion that pirates only steal. In fact, pirates buy more content than their non-pirate peers.

    The study broke down the difference between pirates and non-pirates into four categories – music, films/TV, games and books. In digital media, pirates bought way more content than their non-pirate peers. The study found that pirates are actually three times more likely to buy or stream films and four times more likely to buy digital music. Digital game purchases see the biggest difference with pirates being five times more likely to legitimately purchase games.

    As for physical media, it’s still the same. The only difference is that the difference is less pronounced, especially in books. The amount of pirates and non-pirates who legitimately buy books is about the same. The same is true for music and film. Once again, games are the biggest difference with pirates buying way more physical copies of games than their non-pirate peers.

    So what does it all mean? The author of the study, Joost Poort, told TorrentFreak that pirates “tend to be more heavy entertainment consumers.” These people will do anything they can to get ahold of content. In a lot of cases, especially in European countries, that means obtaining them through illegal means. It’s an unfortunate reality that entertainment companies are painfully slow in bringing their content to foreign markets.

    It should also be noted that many pirates, especially those who illegally download games, have a “try before you buy” attitude. They don’t want to drop that money on a product until they can be sure of the quality of the product. The entertainment industry makes it very hard to ascertain the quality of their products without buying it. Piracy affords them that quick look before making a decision.

    Either way, the researchers say that the entertainment industry should back off of file-sharers, pirates and all other groups that they constantly attempt to vilify. These groups are their biggest customers and criminalizing them will only drive away most of their profit. The RIAA already saw that their heavy handed lawsuit tactics from a few years ago actually hurt their bottom line as less people bought from them.

    This study comes just as ISPs are beginning to implement a six-strike warning system that will alert alleged pirates that their activities are being monitored. The plan was formulated by the copyright and entertainment lobbies to stop piracy. From the looks of it, their plans have only encouraged more piracy as people begin to move towards anonymous file-sharing via VPNs.

  • The Pirate Bay Did Not Get Shut Down

    The Pirate Bay went down for quite some time today. Whenever the site goes down for more than five minutes, people begin to fear the worst. There was also the small coincidence of The Pirate Bay’s former host being raided by the police today that added to the concern.

    Well, the folks from The Pirate Bay are here to set the record straight. They were not raided by the police, nor were they shut down.

    The Pirate Bay46 minutes ago

    Dear internet. We have not been raided. We are not shutting down. We like turtles, waffles and you. Sorry for not fulfilling your pirate needs tonight. It’s ok if you cheat on us with another site, just once. We know that you still love us, deep down in your cursed pirate heart. <3 Powered by socialditto  1,000+ likes ·  252 comments

    So what’s the problem? According to TorrentFreak, and a subsequent post on the site’s Facebook wall, it’s just a simple power outage. For now, there’s nothing to worry about.

    What about The Pirate Bay’s former host being raided? According to TorrentFreak, police raided Swedish hosting company PRQ today. They were reportedly trying to find servers containing copyrighted material. The hosting company may have been targeted because it was founded by two of The Pirate Bay’s co-founders, and used to house the servers used by The Pirate Bay in 2006. Several torrent sites that were hosted on PRQ’s servers have been taken offline as a result of the police raid.

    Long story short, The Pirate Bay is doing just fine. The site is not hosted at PRQ, and a power outage is to blame for the current downtime. It’s a little strange that the downtime coincided with the police raid, but stranger things have happened.

  • ISPs To Start Six-Strike Anti-Piracy Program Later This Year

    You may recall an effort on the part of the Center for Copyright Information to start a six-strike warning system for repeat copyright infringers. The plan called for tracking of Internet users and calling them out when they were found to be downloading copyrighted content. The warning system was to be put in place last year, but has been delayed numerous times. Now it looks like it may finally be launching before the end of this year.

    TorrentFreak reports that a source close to the CCI that the six-strike system is up and ready. The only thing standing in its way is a reluctance on the part of ISPs to start warning subscribers. The fist one out of the gate will be seen as betraying the privacy of their subscribers, and they could start to lose said subscribers.

    Regardless, the CCI is pushing for a launch by the end of this year. The current plan is to simultaneously launch the effort across the five largest ISPs in America – Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision. These ISPs will begin testing the warning system in November.

    TorrentFreak also reports that the CCI has contracted MarkMonitor to find the identity of alleged pirates. They point out that MarkMonitor is owned by the same company that currently identifies pirates under Ireland’s ridiculous three-strikes system.

    The concern right now is that the CCI is being rather secretive about the six-strike system. All we know is that ISPs will punish repeat offenders, but it was never made clear what the punishments would entail. ISPs claimed that they would not terminate a user’s service, but there was never any guarantee made.

    In slightly good news, TorrentFreak’s source reports that MarkMonitor had its evidence technique reviewed by an independent third party. The report will apparently be released in the next few weeks to provide transparency on their methods. At that time, we’ll hopefully be able to fully understand what exactly is going into this new method of pirate surveillance.

    For now, we can at least rest easy that the six-strike system is nowhere near as bad as Mediacom’s self-instituted three-strike system. The ISP recently said that they would ban a subscriber for life if they were found to be downloading copyrighted content three times in a row.

    Regardless of the system, any kind of elevated response system just shows that the copyright lobby still doesn’t understand the proper methods of combatting piracy. Services like Netflix and Spotify have done more to reduce piracy than harebrained schemes implemented by dinosaurs. Of course, we wouldn’t expect them to make things easy on consumers.

  • Torrent Sites Think Google Is Censoring Them

    Google caused a lot of discussion last week when they announced that they were introducing a new ranking signal into their search algorithm. The new signal directly targets sites that receive a lot of DMCA takedown notices and downgrades them in search results. It’s assumed that the move will have an effect on the visibility of sites like The Pirate Bay.

    What’s funny is that people can still find content from torrent sites as long as they search for relevant terms. It’s true that typing in “The Avengers download” no longer returns links to The Pirate Bay or other torrent sites. Typing in “The Avengers torrent” brings them all back to the front page.

    The Pirate Bay addressed Google lowering their search rankings in a blog post. They say that a “very low amount” of their traffic actually comes from Google and that’s only a good thing. They see themselves as a search engine and Google’s move was a way to get rid of the competition. They expect people to search for content directly on The Pirate Bay when nothing shows up on Google.

    They do, however, have one concern about Google’s new policy:

    The thing we don’t like with this is that a corrupt industry is deciding what another industry has to do. They’re dictating terms. It’s really ironic: an industry that makes funny movies about dictators, where the dictator is essentially calling the USA a dictatorship, is trying to dictate terms where they have no place to do so….

    isoHunt’s Gary Fung takes it a bit further and says that Google’s new ranking signal is an antitrust violation. He points out that YouTube is not on Google’s list of DMCA takedown notices. Google will say that’s because they have their own internal reporting system within YouTube, but isoHunt says it’s all protecting Google’s own interests in search. He reiterates the idea from The Pirate Bay that isoHunt is a search engine that’s competing with Google.

    Fung is also concerned over the use of “valid” DMCA takedown notices. He says that Google processes a DMCA takedown notice as valid if it hasn’t been countered. isoHunt receives too many DMCA takedown notices a day for them to counter and so they get counted as signals for Google to downgrade their ranking.

    The harm here according to Fung is that a lot of legitimate content on isoHunt gets flagged with DMCA notices by overzealous copyright trolls. The mountains of legitimate content on torrent sites will be removed from Google search results. He equates it to censorship. In response, he says that “we need a protest against Google censorship and antitrust.”

    Google has definitely ruffled some feathers with their newest search ranking signal, but it was to be expected sooner or later. The company must now ensure that legitimate content is not downgraded. They must also make search fair for everybody including themselves. Making YouTube and other Google services immune to their own algorithm may raise some antitrust flags in the future.

    [h/t: TorrentFreak]

  • BitTorrent Torque Allows Users To Make Torrent-Based Web Apps

    Does the introduction of introduction of web-based app development further legitimize the concept of file sharing via BitTorrent technology? Does it remove the vail of “this kind of technology is only used to steal” from act of sharing torrents with other computer users? Whether or not that was the goal of the BitTorrent developers, it’s hard not to consider the ramifications of such a legitimate move.

    Over at the BitTorrent blog, the team discusses the launch of BitTorrent Torque, which is related to the lead image in name only. Although it’s still in the alpha stage, it’s hard for them to discuss the program’s potential without a modicum of excitement:

    BitTorrent Torque is a JavaScript interface to a custom torrent client that exposes all the power of BitTorrent to web developers. Simply put, it allows anyone to utilize our powerful technology to create completely fresh and new experiences for users with just a couple lines of code.

    This alpha allows BitTorrent to move beyond desktop clients. We believe web developers are pioneers when it comes to creating beautiful, intuitive user experiences. Torque will empower them to create powerful applications that will appeal to broad audiences.

    Considering the ideas some have when “torrents” are mentioned, it’s clear there are many more options available than just sharing ripped movies and music. That being said, the majority of the apps being created are to make the act of file sharing that much easier. As an example, the four featured apps over at the BitTorrent Torque Labs offer such capabilities:

    Turns all torrents links into regular downloads. No torrents to manage. Just content.

    And:

    Create a sharable link to a file on your computer. No cloud, no hosting. Just a link directly to your file.

    So while the capabilities increase, it doesn’t look like the associations that are made when the word “torrent” is used will be going away anytime soon.

  • Dropbox Can Now Downloads Torrents Through Boxopus

    Ever since the war on file sharers began in the early 2000s, people have been looking for more and more ways to share files anonymously. The use of encrypted torrents and VPNs have met with success. There has also been a rise among the use of alternative file sharing software that allows users to share anonymously. The problem with these services is that they might be a little intimidating to the average user. A new service puts anonymous torrent use into the hands of the everyman.

    The new service called boxupus combines the power of torrents and Dropbox into one, easy to use service. Users can add torrents to Dropbox and the files will be downloaded to the digital file locker for all who share the account. The creators told TorrentFreak that the service is meant to bring torrents into the future that is the Cloud.

    The main benefit of being part of the cloud is that the downloads are taken care of by the team at boxupus. It means that all torrents downloaded by users will be tied to boxupus making it essentially anonymous for all who use it. The other benefit is that users can start downloads of torrents no matter where they are and have them available via Dropbox at any time.

    The company has had to answer to allegations that they have become a new Megaupload since they added the public folder option. They responded to the allegations by removing the ability to create public folders, but users can share their Dropbox accounts so it’s kind of moot point. It remains to be seen how they will respond to the existence of boxopus.

    If you want to try out boxopus for yourself, just hit up their Web site. It’s free for now while it’s in beta, but the creators told TorrentFreak that they have plans to monetize the service in the future. As for those monetization plans, it will probably be similar to how Dropbox monetizes its storage.

  • KickAssTorrents Blocked In Italy Following Court Order

    There’s a movement happening in courts across Europe and it’s starting to look a trend that’s here to stay. After the UK blocked access to The Pirate Bay, Italy is following up with a nationwide ISP block of KickAssTorrents.

    TorrentFreak points out that KickAssTorrents has only been in operation for a few years after getting its start back in 2009. The relatively young site has since shot up through the torrent rankings to become the third most popular torrent tracker on the net.

    With such fame also comes greater scrutiny from governmental forces who view such sites as harbingers of piracy and content theft. That’s exactly what a court in Italy has done as it has just concluded an investigation into the site. They have found the torrent tracker to be a “super pirate platform.”

    The investigation also led to some interesting statistics about the site in general. It is host to 10 million torrents and receives over 3 million visits daily from pretty much all over the world. It’s problematic in Italy because the country is the third most popular country of origin.

    According to the Guardia di Finanza, a department under Italy’s Minster of Economy and Finance, the site is more offensive than others because it profits off of piracy through advertising. They estimate that KickAssTorrents brings in $8.5 million a year from advertising.

    As we all know by now, these kind of censorship tactics don’t help curb piracy whatsoever. People will obviously find a way around the censorship, like they have with The Pirate Bay in the UK, using simple DNS switchers or proxies.

    TorrentFreak points out that the specifics of the blockade are not being made immediately known, but the GdF has only mentioned kickasstorrents.com so far. The funny thing is that kickasstorrents.com is no longer in use by the Web site. It only servers to redirect users to the new site, kat.ph.

    It remains to be seen if the Italian blockade will take this into account or only block the already useless domain. If so, it will just once again prove that law enforcement that’s backed by the copyright industry is generally incompetent when it comes to enforcing Internet law.

  • The Pirate Bay Goes Down After DDoS Attack

    Now this is odd. The Pirate Bay is a priority target to almost every government and media corporation on the planet, but none of them have ever been successful in truly taking down the Web site. It would appear that somebody finally has done the impossible though – restrict access to The Pirate Bay on a global level.

    Speaking to TorrentFreak, a Pirate Bay insider says that the site is being hammered by a DDoS attack. The attack is leaving the site unavailable to many people around the world. I have tried to access the site multiple times and have had no luck in even reaching the home page. This is uncharted territory for me as I never thought I would have seen The Pirate Bay being attacked in such a way.

    TorrentFreak suggests that some members of Anonymous may be behind the attack. The Pirate Bay publicly called out the group last week for taking down the Virgin Media Web site. They said that a DDoS attack amounts to censorship and that Anonymous was in the wrong.

    Anonymous is a big fan of The Pirate Bay and have offered protection and tips around censorship on multiple occasions. It’s hard to believe that anybody within Anonymous would turn on The Pirate Bay in such a way. On the other hand, there is no central leadership within Anonymous and members can do whatever they want, even to the detriment of the group.

    My best guess here is that some splinter cell within Anonymous took personal offense to The Pirate Bay’s message on Facebook last week. It’s happened before and it will happen again. Anonymous isn’t saying anything about the downtime at the moment, however, so it’s still hard to really grasp what exactly is going on.

    All we can say is that The Pirate Bay will be back sooner or later. They’ve been down before and the team knows how to get it back up. Until then, how about you peruse the thousand other torrent trackers out there.

  • The Pirate Bay Is Doing Well In The UK After ISP Block

    We reported Monday on the UK’s absurd attempt to stop copyright infringement by blocking access to The Pirate Bay. Nobody was going to lose any sleep over the matter since tips on how to get around the blocks went up immediately after the court’s ruling. If anybody thinks the tactic is going to slow down piracy, they’re only fooling themselves and The Pirate Bay has the proof to back it up.

    Speaking to TorrentFreak, a Pirate Bay insider said that the news circulating through all the major news networks like BBC and The Guardian equated to free publicity. They said that The Pirate Bay saw 12 million more visitors than usual after the story started to go live. They even suggested that The Pirate Bay should write a “thank you note” to the British Phonographic Industry, the group who instigated the case that ruled the torrent tracking site to be behind “copyright infringement on a massive scale.”

    The Pirate Bay sees this increase in traffic as only a good thing as it will give them time to educate new users how to get around what they see as pitiful efforts by governments to prevent access to their site. Our own Chris Richardson covered the majority of these solutions in his story on Monday. The gist is that users can use free services to change their DNS servers and any censorship is immediately circumvented. There’s also services like Tor and iPredator that help get around such blocks.

    I think we can draw a parallel between The Pirate Bay’s very public ISP block in the UK and MegaUpload’s very public takedown. Both sites were very well known and make up a good chunk of Internet traffic. Both sites are hit with some form of censorship that goes very public across multiple news networks. In the case of MegaUpload, file sharing went down immediately after the takedown. Unfortunately for the copyright industry, it went right back to pre-takedown levels the next day after everybody moved on to another service. I’m pretty sure that The Pirate Bay expects the same thing to happen in the UK. Even if they don’t use The Pirate Bay, they’ll figure out a way to obtain the files they’re after.

    As TorrentFreak points out, not everybody will be prepared to circumvent the block when it goes into effect. There will be some people who hear about The Pirate Bay and then find out later that it has been blocked. Will they search Google for one of many easy solutions or will they just give up and buy the legitimate product? I think it’s too early to tell, but The Pirate Bay will probably still see plenty of action from UK citizens.

    Do you think The Pirate Bay will continue to thrive in the UK? Or will the blockade reduce piracy in the country? Let us know in the comments.

  • RetroShare Brings Anonymous File-Sharing To the Masses

    It seems hard these days to find a file-sharing service that isn’t in some way affected by the recent events happening around the world to sites like MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay. There’s always Tribler, the file-sharing service that claims to make torrents obsolete. There may be a service on the net, however, that would make them all look paltry in comparison.

    TorrentFreak is reporting that a file-sharing application called RetroShare has been booming in the aftermath of the MegaUpload take down. We reported that the MegaUpload take down did not affect piracy in any way. While the study at that point said those affected move to other file locker services, the new research suggests that more people moved to services like Tribler and RetroShare.

    RetroShare is a file-sharing application that prides itself on being completely anonymous. For users to even start sharing files, they have to exchange PGP certificates with only those they trust. The transfer is encrypted using OpenSSL, while files from strangers must go through a trusted source. It sounds like the ultimate file-sharing heaven and it apparently is.

    DrBob, the founder of RetroShare, told TorrentFreak that the software has been around since 2006, but it was only recently that he began to see large jumps in usage. He says that downloads tripled on the network in January during the SOPA protest, and that it double again in February when other file sharing services cut back on their services in the wake of the MegaUpload takedown.

    DrBob laid out what RetroShare is all about:

    “RetroShare is about creating a private space on the Internet. A social collaboration network where you can share anything you want. A space that is free from the prying eyes of governments, corporations and advertisers. This is vitally important as our freedom on the Internet is under increasing threat.RetroShare is free from censorship: like Facebook banning ‘obscene’ breast-feeding photographs. A network that allows you to use any pseudonym, without insisting on knowing your real name. A network where you will not face the threat of jail, or being banned from entry into a country for an innocent tweet.”

    Examples like these show that file-sharing is going nowhere and is never going to die. Instead of attacking services or users, content holders need to attack the core problem – their business model. Give users a reason to buy your product and they will. If not, services like RetroShare are going to keep on expanding and growing.

  • The Pirate Bay Has Officially Switched To Magnet Links

    The Pirate Bay Has Officially Switched To Magnet Links

    The Pirate Bay has been planning on moving from torrent files to magnet files for a while now. The change is now official.

    Announcing the change on The Pirate Bay blog, the staff says that new files are simpler for them and less of a hassle for the user. As was already said before, the new file format also uses a lot less bandwidth saving everybody time and money.

    The biggest advantage to magnet links is that they are completely anonymous. The links are just a hash and are the same on every page so no one can know if a user actually downloaded a file or not.

    The only way to really restrict downloading from The Pirate Bay now is to block access to the Web site completely. The staff does say that they fear countries in the EU are moving towards such “harsh censorship tactics.” They are doing everything they can to avoid their users “ending up with less freedom.”

    Said “harsh censorship tactics” are already in place in countries like the Netherlands, but the UK just recently ruled the Web site to be illegal. They may be the next to instigate a block of the Web site on the national level.

    For those who are making the claim that The Pirate Bay is just dropping torrents altogether, The Pirate Bay says it’s like “saying that Ferrari is no longer selling cards – they’re just selling BETTER cars. As are we, we’re giving you the best links there are.”

    At the end, the staff uses a humorous pseudo-quote from the Bible to make a statement on the joys of sharing:

    “Spilling seed is more severe then all sins, since he defiles his soul in this world and the world to come and he does not see the glory of the sharing.”

    What do you think of The Pirate Bay moving to magnet links? Do you think it will protect file sharing? Let us know in the comments.

  • The Pirate Bay Switching To Magnet Links February 29

    The Pirate Bay Switching To Magnet Links February 29

    The Pirate Bay is the torrent site that refuses to die. Their founders were sentenced to prison and they still keep on chugging. They are now changing the site in a fundamental way on February 29 that will keep them one step ahead of the legal system.

    The Pirate Bay announced today that February 29 is the day that any torrent that has more than 10 seeds will be deleted. The actual torrent won’t be deleted, however, it’s just the link that will be deleted. The .torrent link will be replaced with a magnet link.

    The move is “a step forward in technology” and makes the site more resistant to being shut down the site said in a statement to TorrentFreak.

    The comments on the blog post point to some users thinking that this is the end for The Pirate Bay, but this is more like a new beginning for the site. By removing their dependency on .torrent files, the site will be able to serve more countries especially those that block The Pirate Bay.

    For those who don’t know, magnet links are essentially .torrent files downloaded from other people instead of The Pirate Bay’s servers. Users can still upload .torrent files to The Pirate Bay as well. The torrents will just be converted into magnet files.

    The amount of bandwidth and space saved by going to magnet links was demonstrated last week when a user reduced the entire Web site to 90 MB. The Pirate Bay team wants to make a portable Pirate Bay and may release an official version in the future.

    Finally, The Pirate Bay wants to assure their users that they aren’t going anywhere and will keep the site going even when they no longer host torrents.