This year’s Wikipedia edition for schools is the largest since the project started back in 2006. With 34,000 images and 20 million words, it is comparable to a twenty volume encyclopedia captured on a single DVD.

Without a doubt, it is the most successful “checked content” project based on the English Wikipedia, used by hundreds of schools in first and third world countries. The project was originally aimed at schools in developing countries, but because of the high quality articles - all based around the UK curriculum with an absence of adult content - it is often used on intranets in first world schools too.

To save on resources, Wikipedia for schools is only available online via BitTorrent, which practically reduces the charity’s distribution costs to zero. SOS Children CEO Andrew Cates, who is a Wikipedia administrator himself, said that they have no other choice than to use BitTorrent, since the 2.9 GB download would crush their server.

“BitTorrent was a bit disappointing in that it got us the only substantial criticisms we received online,” Cates said in an interview with Wikinews. “A lot of people find it too much effort to use. However for the period we offered a straight http: download we had huge problems with spiders eating vast bandwidth.”

“As per last year therefore our main two channels will be free download by BitTorrent and mailing the DVDs free all over the world. At a pinch we will (as before) put straight copies up for individuals who cannot get it any other way, and we have some copies on memory sticks for on distributors,” Cates added.

The .torrent file is available for download on the SOS Children’s Villages website. For those who don’t want to install a BitTorrent client, the DVD can also be downloaded from any web browser with BitLet.

A final word of advice from SOS Children’s Villages: “It helps our charity if you keep µTorrent running after your download is finished.”

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Wikipedia DVD Released on BitTorrent torrent downloads.

The law will make it easier for copyright holders to get a court order in order to force ISPs to release the customer info linked to a suspect IP-address. The Local reports that, although the law is based on a EU directive, the current draft goes further than that.

In order to obtain the personal details, copyright holders will have to prove that there is “probable cause” that a person, or rather an IP-address, has actually shared copyrighted material with others. With the current state of evidence gathering, where mistakes and false accusations are fairly common, this may not be that easy to achieve.

The many unsecured Wireless routers complicate the evidence gathering even further, and BitTorrent trackers have also implemented countermeasures of their own. Earlier this week we reported that the Pirate Bay tracker software automatically inserts several “random IP addresses” that are not actually downloading data. This is done on purpose, to pollute the evidence gathering of anti-piracy outfits.

The new law is also heavily opposed by Swedish Pirate Party Chairman Rick Falkvinge who told TorrentFreak: “These laws are written by digital illiterates who behave like blindfolded, drunken elephants trumpeting about in an egg packaging facility. They have no idea how much damage they’re causing, because they lack today’s literacy: an understanding of how the Internet is reshaping the power structures at their core.”

“We have good hope of putting an end to these ridiculous developments. Either the existing politicians start to understand what they’re actually doing at work all day, or they will escalate the conflict to the point where we’re replacing them in office. Either way, copyright will be scaled back,” Falkvinge added.

It is to be expected that opposition against the new anti-piracy law will be great, similar to the public outrage when Sweden introduced a wiretapping law earlier this year, and after the raid on The Pirate Bay in 2006. It wouldn’t surprise us if The Pirate Bay fights this battle at the front, clashing with local politicians and media once again.

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Sweden to Introduce Controversial Anti-Piracy Law torrent downloads.

The methods universities use to reduce piracy on their networks have been scrutinized in our ‘Tackling College Piracy’ series. Most of them have been found to be technologically ineffective, working only at the psychological level. The main problem with the “technological approach” is that it’s impossible to distinguish authorized from unauthorized network traffic. Nonetheless, these anti-piracy efforts are quite expensive.

First of all, the amount of time spent dealing with allegations of infringement are huge, according to the study by the Campus Community Project. IT personnel alone spend a mean time of 750 hours at public universities, while private university IT personnel spend around 620 hours a year on this. The shorter time for private institutions generally comes about because of their smaller size, and so smaller search size, and less frequent notifications.

Overall, the costs that come with them are larger than most would expect. It was concluded that between $350,000 and $500,000 is spent annually per institution - directly and indirectly - dealing with copyright infringement notices. The quality of US education has already been questioned (most recently by US presidential candidate Barack Obama in the 3rd Presidential Debate), especially in contrast to the high cost of it. In this light, the costs incurred dealing with copyright infringements are nonsensical.

The study reports that 25% of public universities use a form of technological filtering, such as Copysense, to try and reduce infringements. As noted before, such measures are fairly inaccurate and rarely work. Less common are educational methods, which may be linked with p2p access, as at Missouri S&T. However, most universities and colleges simply disconnect pirating students from the network, and make them promise to never do it again when they want to get back on. Financial penalties are also given, but this is not yet commonplace. We will deal with this in an upcoming piece.

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Tackling College Piracy: At What Cost? torrent downloads.

To celebrate Global Anti-Piracy Day, The Pirate Bay has decided to replace their well known logo with the mugshot of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Below the mugshot it reads “Bill Gates made me do it,” referring to his ‘criminal’ history.

Although the company does send out DMCA takedown requests to BitTorrent site owners, Millions of Microsoft products are being pirated on BitTorrent and other filesharing networks every year.

Of course, Microsoft is doing all it can to prevent people from installing illegally obtained copies of their products, with their ‘Windows Genuine Advantage‘ system as the flagship solution. Similar to most other anti-piracy measures, it also hurts honest customers, as it has a false positive rate of more than 20%. The pirates will get what they want one way or another.

What Microsoft does not do, however, is sue individual downloaders. Unlike the RIAA they don’t think that the people who are potential customers are the right targets in their battle against piracy. Instead, they mostly target resellers who sell illicit copies of their products. “Legitimate businesses struggle to compete against these illegal resellers who undercut their prices and contribute to the 20 percent software piracy rate in the U.S.,” the company states.

The Pirate Bay has no commercial interests, but contrary to what Microsoft would have hoped for, they are not very responsive to letters from Microsoft either. In addition, we seriously doubt that ‘Global Anti-Piracy Day’ is the success they want it to be, now Bill Gates’ is on the frontpage of the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet.

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Pirate Bay Celebrates Microsoft’s Global Anti-Piracy Day torrent downloads.

Most often, companies such as BayTSP and MediaSentry are hired to connect to BitTorrent trackers, and send takedown notices to the users (via their ISP) who download movies, TV-shows or music albums of a company they represent. This is a fairly easy process, since BitTorrent is far from anonymous: Every user necessarily broadcasts his or her IP-address to other peers in the swarm.

Sometimes anti-piracy outfits use their own trackers to gather evidence. Last week we reported that The Pirate Bay started to actively remove these suspicious trackers from their torrents, with some help from torrenteditor.com. Running a tracker is not required though, to collect information from BitTorrent users. In fact, many attempt to use publicly available trackers such as The Pirate Bay to do so. However, the tracker owners are aware of this, and trick these tracking companies by polluting the list of IP-addresses the tracker returns. That is one of the techniques The Pirate Bay uses, just to show how flawed the evidence gathering is.

Polluting the evidence works like this. When a client asks for a list of peers who are downloading the same torrent, the tracker software automatically inserts several “random IP addresses” that are not in the swarm. They are based on existing sub-nets, but might be from people who may not even be aware that BitTorrent exists. This means that the evidence that’s being gathered by anti-piracy companies includes IPs that belong to people that were not downloading the movie or album they are accused of. Perfect deniability, as the people who coded the tracker software explain.

Of course, this doesn’t work when the pirate-tracking company requires itself to connect to the peer, before the IP-address is collected, since it is impossible to connect to a non-existing peer. A representative from BayTSP told TorrentFreak that they have such a requirement, but several others are less thorough, which makes their claims useless, and impossible to defend in court.

The best solution is of course to ban these anti-piracy companies from using the tracker in the first place. This is something The Pirate Bay is working on as well, and they have blocked many IP-ranges already, but it’s impossible to ban them all. Unlike most of the suits in Hollywood, the companies that go after illicit file-sharers are experts in their field, and know more about BitTorrent than many users. They try to circumvent blocklists such as PeerGuardian whenever possible, and change IPs when they are marked.

Pirate Bay co-founder TiAMO told TorrentFreak that he has several criteria on which he can pick out the suspicious users that might be collecting IP-addresses. He also said that he’s working on a automated warning system which will operate as a sniffer on a monitor port. That project is far from complete, but has the potential to detect suspicious behavior more easily.

Nevertheless, it is impossible (as the name might give away) to keep the prying eyes of Hollywood off public trackers. Even private trackers are far from secure, as most anti-piracy companies have accounts at the larger communities. The private in “private tracker” merely refers to the fact that you have to login, and has nothing to do with “security”. The Pirate Bay (and other tracker owners) take several measures to prevent their users from being tracked by anti-piracy outfits, but there’s only so much they can do.

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Pirate Bay Tricks Anti-Pirates with Fake Peers torrent downloads.

Quote Unquote Records is an Internet based record label, run by Bomb the Music Industry! and ‘The Arrogant Sons of Bitches’ frontman Jeff Rosenstock. A forward looking outfit, all artists on the label give their music away for free on the label’s website. Well, they would, if the webhost hadn’t have taken down the site for alleged copyright infringement.

In a MySpace blog entry, Jeff Rosenstock explained that the Quote Unquote Records site is non-operational, and other sites connected to the label, including the Bomb the Music Industry! and Arrogant Sons of Bitches sites, have all been taken down too. So what happened?

Around a week ago, the label was notified by its webhost that it had some copyright music files on its server, which was no surprise to them since they were tracks by Arrogant Sons of Bitches, one of the label’s bands. The tracks the webhost referred to were actually written by Jeff himself. Jeff spoke with someone at the host on the telephone, explained that they were his own tracks and was informed this wasn’t a problem.

Three days later the labels site went down completely, due to Jeff hosting his own copyright files on his own site - a claimed violation of the hosting company’s Terms of Service. In order to solve the problem, Jeff would have to send his copyright registration forms to the host by mail, to prove he held the copyright, a problem in itself, explains Jeff:

“I called the company to explain that a lot of this material was NOT in fact registered with the US copyright office, instead we did the ol’ poor man’s copyright. The music that was copyrighted was done so under a Creative Commons License, which is a digital copyright that cannot be viewed if the website where the files are posted is down.”

It seems amazing that a host should be proactive like this, especially since it has clearly made a huge mistake. However, a week later and Jeff’s site is still down and he’s quite rightly upset: “I guess the scary thing for me is that it seems that my hosting server employs a guilty before proven innocent policy, which is terrifying for anyone who does not physically mail forms for every small idea they’ve ever had in their bedroom to the US copyright office. What a great new digital age, stuck in the trappings of wasteful forms and red tape.”

If losing your site to a bogus copyright claim isn’t enough, there is a more immediate problem. Jeff is being denied access to his data by the host and he says that since he had a crash on his local hard drive, he no longer has copies of any of the content that was on the Quote Unquote Records server. “So, long story short, I’m looking for any artwork or mp3s that were put on Quote Unquote Records,” he said.

If you can find any of the material Jeff is looking for on P2P networks, please post comments on his blog.

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Record Label ‘Infringes’ Own Copyright, Site Pulled torrent downloads.

Always wanted to learn more about Robotics, Linear Dynamical Systems or Programming Paradigms? Now you can, for free, thanks to Stanford Engineering’s online courses.

The University not only gives away videos of lectures, but also syllabi, handouts, homework and exams. In addition to offering torrents, the courses are also available on YouTube, via iTunes and Vyew. With the project Stanford aims to spread knowledge on technology worldwide.

Thus far, the online courses have been a great success. Over 200,000 people from all over the world have visited the site already. Most foreign visitors come from Canada, according to a recent news release, followed by Brazil, China, Italy and the UK.

For now, only the 10 most popular computer science and electrical engineering courses are published online, but additional courses will be added later. All course materials are published under a Creative Commons license, which allows others to adapt, remix and share them as long as it is for noncommercial use, and if they link back to the university.

As P2P-blog points out, there is one downside to the torrents Stanford is offering. They do not use regular trackers, but only Vuze’s DHT tracker. This means that people who use BitTorrent clients that do not support DHT, such as Transmission, BitLord and BitTornado, are not able to download the files. Of course, uTorrent and Azureus users will have no problems.

While Stanford recognizes the benefits of BitTorrent, it is also cracking down on students who use it to download copyrighted material. Students who get caught for the first time have to pay a $100 fine, the second offense costs $500, and those who get caught three times will have to pay $1000 to regain access to the university network.

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Stanford University Embraces BitTorrent torrent downloads.

Sweet…Pirate My Book Please
Guest post: Dan Morrill, Program Director at City University of Seattle

BitTorrent needs to do things to survive the lawsuit roiled atmosphere that is happening world wide. There is no argument; there is a lot of stuff on BitTorrent that literally belongs to someone else. BitTorrent however is part of the landscape; it is something that we all have to deal with, both in terms of a legitimate and non legitimate content distribution channel.

With the permission of my publisher, and in talking to some of the best people in the world when it comes to helping people generate buzz, I uploaded my book into BitTorrent to see what would happen. For me this is a marketing decision, and not something that I am overly worried about, because I am giving the eBook away for free anyways, this allows me to control the release and gather good stats on the process. Mininova offers that opportunity, so my marketing person and my publisher both agreed that this would be a grand experiment to see how well BitTorrent equates to additional sales if any.

I am not worried about the sales, what I am interested in is how the data is distributed using BitTorrent as a CDN (Content Distribution Network). For bands, for new publishers, for eBooks, using BitTorrent as a CDN makes sense, especially if you have marketing goals in mind. Does it matter if it generates additional sales? No not really. Does it matter if you want to build buzz around your book, definitely.

If you own the copyright, Mininova’s foray into using Bittorrent as a CDN can power a lot of good things. The biggest one is helping generate buzz, most small bands, most small publishers who are doing eBooks or music do not have a global network to distribute their goods. Access to the global network is going to be spotty; you have the choice of ITunes that has cross border licensing issues or Google searches, which are not always going to be effective. Here is how the data breaks out though:

The above picture is the global distribution channel for the book in the first 24 hours, with some 691 downloads. What makes me particularly happy is the picture below.

The reason this makes me happy is that Africa is one of those places where knowing how to run an ecommerce shop, or even in alliance with a larger ecommerce site can help a person raise themselves out of poverty. You can track all the stats on the book right here if you want to.

While the book is written in English, and aimed right at American business and business law, the basic principles apply universally. Have something that someone wants, and price in a range that people can afford to buy at. This works regardless of local or international borders, and seeing the book being downloaded in chronically economically depressed regions is very good to see.

The pie chart below also shows how the country distribution breaks out overall, while I am not surprised by the American stats, what is interesting to me is to see outside of the country. The book is not distributed globally; no one has global rights to the book outside of me. Seeing the UK, Canada, and Australia downloads coming in at 18.2% is also good. The book can help them out as well. India is the surprise at 5.2%.

Overall, with the number of downloads, this has been amazingly successful as a way to generate marketing buzz, and the potential to reach an international audience. The book is too pricy for people living on less than a dollar a day, but if sales should pick up internationally, or even locally that will be an interesting thing to see. Sales in the last 24 hours have remained the same as they have been since the book came out. It is at least a steady seller.

Overall I would have to rate my experience with Mininova over the last 24 hours as highly satisfying, and something that people who do not mind using BitTorrent to distribute their free eBook, or other digital good should check out. While it has yet to equate to sales, what is has done is build buzz, as a marketing process, this cannot be beat. As a survival mechanism for Mininova, this can be their saving reasoning, because they are offering a valuable service, not everyone has access to a CDN.

Download ‘Selling Books On Amazon, Tips and Secrets’ from Mininova, and please take the time to leave a comment for Dan.

Dan’s blog can be found here.

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Sweet, BitTorrent Users - Pirate My Book Please! torrent downloads.

DistriBrute is a brand new desktop deployment solution developed by 4M88. Instead of several central distribution servers, it uses the BitTorrent protocol to update workstations in a local network.

With DistriBrute, central distribution servers are no longer needed. The data doesn’t have to be distributed from one location, since all the workstations connected to the network actively help in the spreading the data. Every desktop in the system becomes a peer, and helps to send the data to other desktops. The result: faster distribution of updates and patches, and a significant cost reduction.

There are more selling points other than the cost reductions and speed improvement. Since servers tend to use a lot of energy, between 6000 and 7000 KWh a year, it can also be been as a ‘green’ solution. This ‘green’ aspect has not gone unnoticed. Today, DistriBrute won the audience price of the Digikring Innovation Awards, an initiative that rewards environment friendly ICT solutions.

After winning the award, DistriBrute officially launched. Thus far, it had two successful test runs at large educational institutions in The Netherlands, and the initial results are promising. At INHOLLAND, a concept version of DistriBrute is now used to send software to 6500 desktop computers across 16 different locations. It thereby eliminates 20 servers that were used before to distribute 25.6 TBs of data across the network. Even more so, the P2P based solution speeded up this process significantly, from 4 days to only 4 hours.

The cost savings for those who use DistriBrute are immense. Leo Blom, co-founder of 4M88 told TorrentFreak that they were able to cut 50 servers at ROCMN, another Dutch educational institution. The costs to manage a TCO server can get as high as $10,000 a year, but these will evaporate thanks to DistriBrute.

DistriBrute is one of the first commercial products for business use to reveal the true power of the BitTorrent protocol. For now, availability is limited to organizations in The Netherlands, in the first quarter of 2009 it will be released internationally.

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DistriBrute: P2P Powered Desktop Deployment torrent downloads.

Running the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet requires a lot of expensive hardware. To keep this hardware running smoothly, The Pirate Bay is constantly optimizing their setup.

One of the latest changes is that they have started to automatically remove duplicate trackers from torrent files, to keep unnecessary connections between BitTorrent clients and their tracker to a minimum.

Pirate Bay co-founder TiAMO explained to TorrentFreak: “It’s totally unnecessary to have more than one of our tracker URLs when they all have the same peers, they just ask the tracker for the same data lots of times.”

“Also, now we can strip out all bad trackers from anti-p2p companies, as well as old ones that stopped working years ago,” he added. So, while they were at it, they have also decided to remove dead trackers, and BitTorrent trackers that are run by anti-piracy organizations. This makes it less likely that the MPAA and RIAA , often though companies like Mediasentry, can keep tabs on the download habits of Pirate Bay users.

Another advantage, of course, is that the number of fake files and spam from companies such as MediaDefender are kept to a minimum. Fake torrents are often used to trick people into downloading useless data instead of Hollywood’s latest blockbuster. The Pirate Bay already had quite a good track record when it comes to removing fakes, and this will only improve with these latest changes.

The Pirate Bay currently has 13 servers dedicated to the tracker, and another 14 servers for the website itself. Yesterday, the tracker broke a new record, with close to 18 million active users on “TV-torrent Tuesday“, and at the current rate, they will be tracking 20 million peers a few weeks from now.

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The Pirate Bay Removes Fake Trackers from Torrents torrent downloads.

Together with thousands of other blogs, TorrentFreak is participating in the Blog Action Day 2008. This year’s goal is to raise awareness and generate discussion on poverty, so that’s exactly what we’ll do.

Our plan? Encourage people to donate their pirate ’savings’ to projects that help to reduce poverty. Why? Because we believe in sharing.

The Rules:

The idea is to calculate how much you have ’saved’ in the past week by downloading copyrighted content. If you haven’t downloaded anything, just pretend you have, we’re trying to raise money here.

In the interests of grossly inflating the figures and therefore raising as much money for charity as possible, just like the MPAA and RIAA we’re going to assume that one pirated copy equals one lost sale. We decided not to include software, because things can get a little out of hand for those who downloaded Photoshop.

1 music track = $1
1 music album = $10
1 movie = $10
1 TV-show = $5
1 book = $10

Now, calculate your savings based on the example above (you are allowed to show off in the comments) and donate this amount to a project that aims to reduce poverty. You can pick your own charity of course, but we also have a pretty good suggestion.

Where to Donate?

We assume that most of our readers are familiar with the concept of P2P, so we would like you to consider the following. Let’s say you fire up your BitTorrent client because you want to download the latest album from your favorite artist. You use BitTorrent, which means that the more you share with others, the more you will receive back.

The only problem is that you will start with nothing, so initially, you don’t have anything to share at all. Luckily, the BitTorrent protocol has solved this problem, and when the swarm recognizes you as a new entrant, random peers will send you a few bits which you can then start to re-share with others. People might wonder what this has to do with poverty, so we’ll try to explain.

In ‘real life’, people sometimes also need to receive something before they can start building up their business, and generate a steady income. They are just like file-sharers - without the first bits, they can never fully participate in the downloading process. Kiva tries to solve this problem. With Kiva you can lend a few dollars to entrepreneurs in developing countries, who will use it to make a living for themselves.

These people will use your $10 to start their own businesses, so they can provide for themselves and their families - P2P in the real world. The good thing is, once they have a steady income they will repay their loans, give to get, just like BitTorrent.

Final Note

The MPAA, RIAA and other anti-piracy lobbyists want you to believe that thousands of people lose their jobs because of piracy, and that it’s a disaster for the global economy. We know better of course, and would argue the opposite. An illegally downloaded song is not a lost sale, in fact, it tends boost sales. We could even argue that, without piracy, hundreds of thousands of people would lose their jobs. For example, iPod sales would plunge and bandwidth usage would drop by 50%.

Piracy is embedded in our world economy and eliminating it would be devastating. It’s better to work on legal alternatives instead. So dust off your calculator and let’s donate!

Post from: TorrentFreak

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Donate Your Piracy Savings to Reduce Poverty torrent downloads.

The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008, or PRO IP Act, finally gathered the signature of President George W. Bush, and made it into law. The act, as we previously reported, has been criticized by both the US Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Commerce (DOC), but gathered support in the wake of economic troubles that have hit the US.

Title I of the bill, which allowed the DOJ to pursue civil copyright cases, was dropped by the senate when they passed the bill, with Richard Esguerra, spokesman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, noting that he was relieved that attorneys won’t become “pro bono personal lawyers for the content industry.” However, the objections of the DOC - that the creation of a ‘Copyright Czar’ would be an unconstitutional violation of Separation of Powers - went unopposed. Included in the bill is the issue of ‘civil forfeiture’, where articles can be seized and held if it is thought they are to be used in committing a crime, or infringement.

The unanimous passage of this bill is worrying, mainly because it shows a triumph for lobbying over facts, and how common sense can be easily overruled with enough money and influence. Claims that support the bill include spurious job creations from this bill, to money saved in the economy. “Counterfeiting and piracy costs the United States nearly $250 billion annually,” says the US Chamber of Commerce in a Reuters article, while others have more effectively broken down the figures and pointed out how they don’t make sense.

Yet, in a country on the brink of economic meltdown, a bill that is claimed to help the economy by creating jobs (and boost the economy by reducing those jobs and revenue claimed to be lost) seems like a good political move, regardless of how absurd and baseless the figures are. Dan Glickman of the MPAA certainly wants to play the economic card, saying: “At this critical time for our economy, it’s important to send a message that the jobs created and maintained by the protection of intellectual property is a national priority.”

The person filling this Copyright Czar role will, presumably, be in a similar position to that of the Drugs Czar, and will listen mainly to lobbyists and ’safe’ peer pressure. Just as in the case of narcotics, symptoms will be dealt with, and not causes. Targeting causes means targeting contributors, while targeting symptoms just means targeting voters, and there are millions of them. It also remains to be seen who will be given the role of Copyright Czar, but don’t be surprised if it’s a member of the MPAA/RIAA, although some might start pushing for Prof. Lessig, as happened when California’s 12th District lost its congressman. However, Prof. Lessig told TorrentFreak that he’s “not going to be an enforcement czar, and nor would I be wanted for that.”

Perhaps the worst aspect of the bill, though, is the extension of forfeiture. Already used extensively in drugs cases, it is often inappropriately applied. If drugs are found in someone’s home, and along with that comes a claim from a 3rd party (even if they were caught breaking into the home) that they were dealing, the home owner can have their house taken away, along with anything of value in it.

Although some may feel that forfeiture is an appropriate response to serious large scale drug dealing, those same draconian measures can now apply to copyright infringement cases. It can cause more expense and difficulty in defending cases when defendants have to prove in a separate court action, that the materials seized were not used for the actions claimed. Wikipedia indicates that 3 years, and $10,000 is the typical cost of fighting such cases. Public Knowledge opposes these forfeiture measures, with spokesman Art Brodsky saying: “Let’s suppose that there’s one computer in the house, and one person uses it for downloads and one for homework. The whole computer goes.”

The increase in powers and fines exacerbates an already bad situation. With the forfeiture laws, in theory they may be able to have equipment belonging to ISP’s seized (while the DMCA gives safe harbor for prosecution under infringement, it may not allow a defense under forfeiture) and that could be used as a club to beat ISPs into the role of copyright police – one that ISPs worldwide have been loathed to accept.

With the election just weeks away, perhaps our American readers might be interested in tracking who voted for the bill, as all representatives are up for election. Senate voting was not recorded.

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Bush Signs Draconian Anti-Piracy Law torrent downloads.

The first version of the Java based BitTorrent client Azureus was more than 5 years ago, and a lot of things have changed since then. Azureus was renamed to Zudeo, and later to Vuze. Backed by millions of dollars in venture capital the company launched its own distribution platform, which alienated some of its early users.

With the latest release, 4.0, Vuze once again introduces quite a few changes. The difference this time is that they emphasize more on the BitTorrent experience than their Vuze Network. The UI is more lightweight, less cluttered, and should appeal to both novices and hardcore BitTorrent users (old UI is still supported).

The most interesting change they made is to include BitTorrent search in the application. This allows users to search all their favorite BitTorrent sites from within the application. Mininova and BTjunkie are included by default, but any site can be added to the search, including private BitTorrent trackers.

We had the chance to discuss some of the major updates to the client with Vuze CEO, Gilles BianRosa.

TF: What was the reason to update the user interface of the client, and how is this new release an improvement to its predecessors?

Gilles: Our new UI has been directly inspired by the feedback of our users, who told us loud and clear that our previous UI was confusing and a little schizophrenic—with core torrent functionality they loved, and new features bolted on in odd places. So we’ve done a few things.

First and foremost, we’ve tried to have the application reflect our core functionality, and that’s what you’ll see across the top of the global toolbar: Find, Download, and Play. Second, you’ll see an intuitive left-nav framework that users have responded to extremely well, since it provides direct and persistent access to all of the product features. And finally, you’ll see improved category navigation within the Vuze HD Network, to enable our users to browse directly to the type of content that interests them.

In terms of functionality, there are two key things users will appreciate in this release. First, there’s the new subscriptions, and second, there’s now private tracker login support for the meta-search functionality that we launched back in June.

TF: How do these new subcriptions work, and how are they different from the regular RSS feature most BitTorrent clients have?

Gilles: The new subscription feature enables users to request that specific content be sent to them automatically. Just click the orange Subscriptions button associated to content in your Library. You can set your subscriptions to download automatically, or simply to notify you when new items are available.

The big innovation here is that these subscriptions are initially created by users (usually power users) and then made available to everyone. This removes entirely the complexity associated with RSS for torrents, which tend to return lots of unwanted or duplicate results. Just click Subscribe!

TF: The latest release seems to offer an “all in one” solution where users can search, download and play content. Do you believe this approach will appeal to both advanced and new users?

Gilles: For the uninitiated, the BitTorrent ecosystem is a confusing one. In order to get up and running, a person has to find a tracker site, choose and download a torrent client, download a video player, and then figure out how each one works and how they all work together. For the new user who isn’t shown how it works, it’s almost impossible to figure out.

So, for new users, we’ve created an all-in-one BitTorrent client, that enables them to Find, Download, and Play high quality and HD content, all in one easy-to-use application. We think advanced users will like it too, since Vuze has all of the features it’s known for, plus some great new functionality like torrent meta-search with support for private trackers, and Subscriptions. As we’ve user tested the new Vuze, new and advanced users have found the all-in-one functionality to be both intuitive and powerful.

TF: You said before that you listened to feedback from users. How has this helped to develop the client?

Gilles: This release has been directly inspired by feedback from users. We’ve surveyed our users in multiple ways, talked with them on the phone, and watched them as they used the last version of Vuze client, as well as prototypes for this new one. We’ve talked to power users, casual users, and non-users. All of that is reflected in this release. That said, this release is just a foundation for the great things we’ve got in the development pipeline.

Vuze was scheduled to be launched today, but the release has been postponed for 48 hours. TorrentFreak readers who want to play around with an unofficial early release can grab it from Vuze (Win/Mac).

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Vuze Reinvents Its BitTorrent Client torrent downloads.

A big name band releasing their first album in 8 years is important, so when AC/DC’s forthcoming album ‘Black Ice‘ leaked onto the Internet last week, it felt like it should’ve been a newsworthy event. But there seemed little to get worked up about because let’s face it, everything leaks these days and this particular leak initially seemed to offer little new.

Then, just one day after the October 7th leak, Undercover ran a story, claiming that Sony was flooding BitTorrent sites with fakes in an attempt to frustrate potential downloaders of ‘Black Ice’. TorrentFreak investigated these claims and couldn’t find any fakes on the most commonly used BitTorrent trackers and it’s pretty certain that fakes wouldn’t exist on any private trackers either. Calls for Undercover to clarify the basis for the claim have gone unanswered.

However, there is something exciting to report in respect of this leak. During the last 5 years when most recording artists have experienced a drop in CD sales, AC/DC have been flourishing, last year selling 1.3 million CDs in the US alone. For a band that hasn’t released any new music for 8 years, never releases a ‘greatest hits’ album and does not sell any of its music online in digital format, this is pretty impressive.

Of course, AC/DC might not want to distribute their music online, but there are plenty of other people who are happy to do so. Since the album leaked to BitTorrent on October 7th, a full 13 days in advance of its worldwide release date, ‘Black Ice’ has been downloaded an incredible 400,000 times, which is a pretty clear indicator that AC/DC fans would like the band’s music in digital format rather than just CD. On Mininova, one of the world’s most popular BitTorrent download locations, four of the top five most downloaded music torrents in the last week are AC/DC.

Other ‘winners’ in the BitTorrent music download charts this week were Keane, coming in at #3 with 80,000 downloads of their album ‘Perfect Symmetry‘ (due to be released officially tomorrow) and Oasis in second position with 100,000 downloads of ‘Dig Out Your Soul‘.

Just this week, Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher said he believes that the music industry loses around 25% of its profits to piracy. “That’s what was spent on champagne and limos,” he said, adding, “It’s good when record companies panic. They need to streamline. Just like these big banks going under, and those Wall Street idiots driving Ferraris. What about people who had a hurricane rip apart their community? That’s real pressure, my friend.”

Whether artists actually lose money from ‘illegal’ downloads is something that can be debated. However, it is clear that refusing to make it available online will boost pirated downloads significantly. In just a few days the downloads on BitTorrent downloads equal a third of all their album sales last year. Quite a shocker.

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AC/DC Electrify BitTorrent Album Downloads torrent downloads.

Jack Layton, leader of the Canadian New Democrats is a proponent of net-neutrality, and he believes that social networking sites, YouTube and torrent sites are great services that should be available to everyone.

In a direct message to our friends at p2pnet Layton stated: “Torrent sites [...] are actually very fundamental to making a democracy work, and to helping human intelligence to be shared and exchanged. It’s about as fundamentally democratic as you can get.”

In the video message Layton is very clear. Throttling people’s connections is not an option. The Internet should be open and equal to everyone.

“What we want to see is the Internet used as a public tool — a public tool for exchanging ideas and I particularly want to say that if we don’t fight to preserve it, we could lose it. We don’t want to see hidden fees and gouging and service slow-downs all in the interests of promoting the objectives of certain large corporations,” Layton says in his message to P2Pnet.

With his statement, he joins his fellow party member Charles Angus, who has spoken out against against ‘anti-piracy bills’ and in favor of Net-neutrality many times before. In an interview last June, for example, he said that the proposed three-strikes law is idiotic, and completely useless.

“It’s idiotic because as we see with the DMCA those that get accused of infringements lack the legal power that the corporations that are threatening them have,” Angus said. “So it’s always going to be a completely one-sided argument and if ISP’s are legally bound to cut you off after three claims of infringement, I think there are certainly problems.”

Based on their views on net-neutrality and copyright bills, the New Democrats seem to be the best party to vote for. Much better than the Conservatives at least, who are supporting ACTA and bill C-61. Unfortunately, many Canadians are planning to vote for the Conservative, as they are awfully close to a majority. This triggered isoHunt’s founder Gary Fung, who’s from Canada as well, to encourage his Canadian users not to vote for them.

On the frontpage of isoHunt Gary writes: “I know about 3.7 million Canadians visited isoHunt last month, which is more than 10% of Canada’s population. So I ask all who read this to tell your Canadian friends to not be a slacker and vote on Oct. 14. I don’t care which party you vote, just vote any party but the Conservatives.” In addition to this statement, all Canadian isoHunt visitors will now see the following message on top of the page, which leads them to Gary’s statement.

The New Democrats seem to be a good alternative to the Conservative party. However, towards the end of the video message Layton scared us a little by saying: “The Internet belongs to Canadians,” but we’re pretty sure he is trying to say that all Canadians should have equal access to the web.

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Canadian Democrats are Pro BitTorrent and Against Throttling torrent downloads.

The “real-time” search approach YouTorrent introduced appealed to many users, and it is no surprise that most of the new meta-search engines that were inspired by it have been growing steadily. PizzaTorrent and NowTorrents serve hundreds and thousands of searches a day, and newcomers such as TorrentFly and the more basic looking Gpirate are picking up steam as well.

In March, we mentioned both PizzaTorrent and NowTorrents in our top 10 YouTorrent (meta-search) alternatives. Since then, a lot of things have changed, both in design and feature-wise. We decided to catch up with Godius, the founder of NowTorrents, to find out what’s happened since Spring.

“We recently re-coded and designed the whole website,” Godius told us. “The new site has a more user friendly layout and has a bunch of new features. For example it’s now possible to filter site-by-site results, filter keyword and categories, all in real-time. We also build a popular searches caching system, this has greatly improved loading times. And we added more personal search preference settings.”

One of the new features at NowTorrents (and Gpirate) is the BoxOffice listings. The MPAA probably won’t be too happy with such a feature, but the users love it according to Godius.

“We are planning to expand the BoxOffice torrents feature with a latest Games and Music Albums charts section. We have noticed that users greatly appreciate the BoxOffice section, so we feel that adding games and music charts will satisfy their needs even more. Many people don’t know what to search for; they just want to download the latest stuff that has just been released.”

Godius is not too worried about the MPAA showing up at his doorstep, as he told us: “Basically we are doing exactly what Google is doing only we do not list non-torrent related results. We feel as long as Google gets away with it, and the torrent sites we link to get away with it, we have nothing to worry about.”

One of the downsides of all these new meta-torrent search engines is that they all rely on a handful of BitTorrent trackers, and sites that actually host torrent files. Running a meta-search engine is easier, less costly, and probably safer from a legal point of view. Nevertheless, they become useless if there are no torrent files to index, or torrents to track.

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Real-Time BitTorrent Search Engines Expand torrent downloads.

Two months ago, following an order from an Italian prosecutor, ISPs started to prevent their customers from accessing the Pirate Bay. The administrators of the popular BitTorrent tracker were accused of making copyrighted material available on the Internet for commercial purposes.

Of course, the Pirate Bay team didn’t agree, and responded in true Pirate Bay style. “We’re quite used to fascist countries not allowing freedom of speech. A lot of smaller nations that have dictators decide to block our site since we can help spread information that could be harmful to the dictators,” Sunde wrote in a blog entry.

The BitTorrent tracker was not going down without a fight, and later announced that it would appeal the decision in court, which they won. The block was lifted and ISPs could again grant their users access to the most frequently used BitTorrent tracker on the Internet.

The Court of Bergamo decided that this block was unlawful, and earlier this week they explained why. According to the court statement (Italian), no criminal court is allowed to issue an order to ISPs to block traffic to a foreign website, based on alleged copyright infringement. Italian law implements an European Directive, 2000/31 CE, which this means that this ruling should be valid in other European countries as well.

“Under Italian law, this is possible only for child porn and for unauthorized gambling, but there is no such provision for copyright infringement,” Pirate Bay’s lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus and Francesco Micozzi explained to TorrentFreak.

“We have to make sure that no legislative bill promoting such filtering provisions will be passed in the future. At the European level, many authorities pointed out the need to find a balance between the enforcement of alleged copyright infringements, users’ rights, and privacy issues.”

In hindsight, the block only helped the Pirate Bay to grow even further. The case generated a lot of free promotion, and the number of visitors from Italy increased by 5 percent. Not exactly the outcome IFPI had hoped for.

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Court Deems Pirate Bay Block to be Illegal torrent downloads.

For weeks on end, the NorBits tracker has been crushed by DDoS attacks. Last month IT-Avisen reported that the tracker had been allegedly hacked by a group called MORRADi. The group threatened to publish all IPs of Norbits’ users, if the site didn’t cease to operate.

Staff members at Norbits now refute these claims in a post on the weblog they recently launched. “There have been rumors that “MORRADi” has IP information on our users. This is not true. DDoS attacks don’t compromise security, it’s only the servers that are overloaded, ” they write.

In response to these “hacker” reports, several users of the tracker took their anger out on journalists who wrote about the site. Trond Bie, who writes for IT-Avisen, and commented on the case in other news outlets as well, was one of the main targets. NorBits staff have condemned these attacks, and say they will ban any users who engage in this kind of behavior.

“We condemn attacks on anyone who criticizes or speak about NorBits. We know that many have sent e-mails to public persons and journalists and we can’t emphasize clearly enough that these only are sent from a small number of our users.”

NorBits staff may have inadvertently motivated this minority, since they briefly replaced their frontpage with a caricature of Trond Bie, which they pulled from his Picasa photo album. This was meant to be a joke though, not an attack on his person, as they explain on the NorBits weblog. “When a journalist is starting to become so obsessed with a webpage that he/she writes about every little modification that is happening on it, that person must accept an humoristic response.”

The photo was removed shortly after it was posted, and for now, the Norbits domain is redirected to the website of Urospredere, an upcoming Norwegian documentary about filesharing. This documentary by Asbjørn Engedal and journalist Simon Eriksen Valvik discusses how filesharing can be made legal, the changes that are needed, and how it will all work. A good cause to support.

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DDoS Attacks Force Norbits to go Offline torrent downloads.

More and more over the last year, we have witnessed anti-piracy lobby groups targeting ISPs to force them to either hand over the details of users they allege breach their copyrights, or, more clumsily, pressure them to block access to entire sites. The most famous recent case concerned The Pirate Bay, which was blocked by ISPs in Italy at the behest of the IFPI, who were then forced by a court to unblock the site again.

Now it’s the turn of one of Romania’s largest ISPs, UPC Romania, which is blocking its customers from accessing one of Romania’s most popular trackers, Torrentbits.ro. UPC has around 1 million customers, and according to reports received by TorrentFreak, these customers no longer have access to the BitTorrent tracker, receiving a message in their browser which is usually reserved for sites that simply don’t exist.

Those accessing the site via a proxy or from another ISP receive this message:

Founded in 2006, Torrentbits.ro quickly became one of Romania’s most popular sites but in May 2007 it became the subject of a police raid, resulting in the arrest of the admins. They were later released.

TorrentFreak’s requests for UPC to comment on the site block have so far gone unanswered.

Thanks to Voor

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Major Romanian ISP Blocks BitTorrent Site torrent downloads.

Like many other filmmakers, Moore wants his film to be seen by as many people as possible. However, the ‘rights holders’ have other interests. They want to sell the movie to as many people as possible, making sure they get every penny they are entitled to.

Moore’s latest documentary, Slacker Uprising, is only available for free in Northern America. People who attempt to download the torrent elsewhere get this annoying “Sorry” message. Since there are no geographical restrictions on the official torrent file, however, it was easy to share the film with the rest of the world. It would only take one person to upload the torrent to another site, and the rest of the world would have access to it. That’s exactly what happened.

In last week’s article, we asked the question: “Is this deliberate, or accidental?” Since it is so easy to share the documentary with people outside the US and Canada, we hinted that this might have been done on purpose. A few days later, Michael Moore contacted us, with a direct response to the question we posed.

“What do you think I’m up to? I know it may not be obvious to most, but I think you guys get it,” Moore wrote to us. “I only own the US and Canadian rights. So my hands are tied. But this is the 21st century. What are ‘geographical rights’ ?” Moore continued. “I’ll say it for the hundredth time: If I buy a book and read it, and then give you the book to read, I have broken no laws. Why is that not true for all media?”

“I wish someone would figure out what I am up to,” he concluded. We believe many people have by now. This isn’t the first time Moore has clashed with the ‘rights holders’ of one of his own films. Last year The Weinstein Co. went after websites that hosted “Sicko”, while Moore publicly said that it was ok for people to download his movie illegally. “I’m not a big believer in our copyright laws. I think they’re way too restrictive,” he said at the time.

Even further back, in 2004, Moore also backed the people who downloaded his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. “The more people who see it the better, so I’m happy this is happening, he said. “Is it wrong for someone who’s bought a film on DVD to let a friend watch it for free? Of course it’s not. It never has been and never will be. I think information, art and ideas should be shared.”

Perhaps it’s time to do a documentary on the anti-piracy and pro-copyright lobby Mr. Moore? They might not kill our children in the US or overseas, but they do kill creativity, innovation, and the spread of knowledge. Worth looking into.

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Michael Moore on Slacker Uprising’s Piracy ‘Problem’ torrent downloads.

BitSmash will be launched officially on October 15th, but the website is already fully operational. The project looks promising, and might prove to be a great tool for those who are interested in BitTorrent trends, including ourselves. One of the major downsides at the moment, however, is the accuracy of some of the statistics that are reported by BitSmash.

We’ve gone through the data, and it seems that BitSmash is off on the numbers of seeds and peers. One of the top downloads according to the service is The Incredible Hulk, with 414 peers and 139 seeders. However, Mininova and several other BitTorrent sites report that the torrent has more than 15,000 peers, and a manual scrape of one of the trackers returned close to 18,000 peers.

The service is of course still being developed, so these numbers might be corrected later. Smash, the founder of the project told us: “I’m going to stand by our numbers,” but said he will take a look at the inconsistencies. He encourages everyone to submit feedback while the site is in Beta.

Interestingly, BitSmash has decided to include a link to the .torrent files on their detail pages, which basically makes it a meta-search engine as well. The anti-piracy lobby might not be too happy about that. A few days ago we reported on the Swedish news site Nyheter24, that was criticized for linking to torrents on The Pirate Bay.

The service will officially launch October 15th, and later this year there will also be an API available for other services and websites to access, who can use the data for other purposes. Overall we think that BitSmash could develop into a great research tool. It’s worth checking out.

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BitSmash Launches BitTorrent Statistics Tool torrent downloads.

Earlier this week, Swedish news site Nyheter24 was launched. Backed by big investors, it aims to challenge the established newspapers online and appeal to a young readership with quick reporting.

Of course, since young readers are used to downloading the TV shows they want to watch, it was natural for Nyheter24 to include not only a top-list of conventional audience ratings on their TV schedules page, but also the top-list of most downloaded TV shows at The Pirate Bay. In addition, the site decided to link the entries in the top-list entries to the respective TV show’s torrent page on The Pirate Bay.

This didn’t fall too well with Henrik Pontén of the Swedish Anti Pirate Bureau. Pontén gathered fame earlier for manufacturing evidence against The Pirate Bay before the controversial raid, and spearheading the copyright lobby as charges were filed against the tracker in January.

“We consider this being ‘assisting copyright infringement’, just like The Pirate Bay itself. I assume this is a mistake and that they will remove the links,” he told Realtid.se. The story didn’t discuss if sites that are linking to Nyheter24.se (or sites that link to sites that link to Nyheter24.se) are also considered to be assisting in copyright infringement by Pontén.

Nyheter24 replied to Pontén’s accusations, and said that the The Pirate Bay admins have not yet been convicted of anything illegal, and that removal of the links only become matter of discussion if they, against all odds, will be. Hours later, however, Nyheter24 revised its position and removed the direct links to the torrent pages. The site kept the top-list on their TV schedules page, with a link to The Pirate Bay’s front page instead.

“We are removing the direct links since they may be illegal and it’s not our intention to challenge copyright law. However, half of the Swedish population downloads from the net and I’d love to have a partnership with The Pirate Bay,” said Douglas Roos, chairman of the Nyheter24 board.

If Henrik Pontén decides to pursue the matter, and file charges against Nyheter24 on the same basis as he went for The Pirate Bay, he will have a familiar face to battle in court. Nyheter24’s legal representative is none other than Monique Wadstedt, better known as the MPA’s judicial representative in Sweden and Pontén’s sidekick in their Don Quijote quest against The Pirate Bay.

“These boys will go to jail,” she said in January when charges were filed against The Pirate Bay. “I have no comments. I won’t answer further questions,” she said on Friday when asked for a comment about the criticism from her partner Henrik Pontén about her other partner Nyheter24.

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News Site Criticized for Linking to Pirate Bay Torrents torrent downloads.

Darren Bousman, director of Saw II, III and IV, and no stranger to scenes of slaughter, has been caught up in his very own BitTorrent bloodbath. On the official forum for his up-coming movie Repo! the Genetic Opera, Bousman has been rallying support among his forum fans (known as the ‘Repo Army’) to become some kind of highly motivated, organic peer-to-peer version of MediaDefender.

Bousman details his brilliant plan in the forum post:

People will copy and burn the REPO CD and put it out on the web on something called TORRENT SITES. What this means to the movie is devastating. Basically - those who MIGHT have bought the soundtrack will instead download it for free… Thus hurting the soundtrack, and the movie. So what can you do?

Upload FAKE REPO albums to TORRENT sites under the REPO name. Meaning basically people will go online to a TORRENT site and try to search for REPO. They will find it - but alas it wont be REPO. It will be something else… If enough people do this - it becomes harder to STEAL the album.

Pain, something found in abundance in the Saw movies, was evident in the disorganized battle-plan that followed. Technical discussion began, noting the need for a good fake album to have the same number of tracks as the real version. Other suggestions to thwart the evil pirates include renaming and seeding random songs, and uploading audio recordings which preach the importance of buying the album.

After someone pointed out that people would complain about fake torrents in the comments section of torrent sites, solutions offered included the Army posting its own comments saying that the fake isn’t really a fake, and posting on real torrents to say that they were the fakes. Both techniques were doomed to fail before they began.

One of our favorite posts was the user who offered to spam the Ares Galaxy network on her own, and unwittingly came up with the basis of a usable slogan for the fakes campaign: “Wait a minute, did Darren just ask us to essentially Rick-Roll people in the name of Repo? Hell yes.”

Sadly, even with an army of completely well-intentioned and dedicated fans plus a great slogan, victory isn’t guaranteed. After posting some fake torrents on The Pirate Bay, it didn’t take long for the negative comments from regular Pirate Bay users to build up, and the torrents were removed. Despite many attempts by the Army at countering with some fake comments of their own. The ranks of the general public Repo Army went into battle against just a few pirates but were completely unprepared, and suffered a bloody end that would’ve made Jigsaw proud.

One user seemed to be a bit more aware, posting, “You can keep it secret or whatever method you want, it’s not going to work. You can’t fool a pirate that easy, if we just could get scene access and pre it, so it looks real.”

Right now, the fans have regrouped and are currently marking real Demonoid torrents as containing a virus, in order to get them removed. It doesn’t seem to be working.

The Repo Army doesn’t act purely against BitTorrent, since it had been previously ordered to “Attack YouTube” by messaging anyone on the site who uploads any part of the album, and ordering them to take the clip down. Some fans are even creating Repo anti-piracy videos:

In the meantime the fans have ensured that the soundtrack in question, Repo! The Genetic Opera, is currently at 22 in Amazon’s bestsellers chart, largely thanks to 25 five-star reviews, which currently represent 100% of the total reviews on this album. Apparently it’s easier to fool Amazon than the average BitTorrent site.

Thanks to Charax

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“Saw” Director Recruits ‘Army’ to Post Fake Torrents torrent downloads.

When Michael Moore released his latest movie, Slacker Uprising, he made it clear that not only would the movie be completely free, but he also wanted everyone to “email it, burn it, and share it with anyone and everyone”. However, there was one rule - this generous offer from Moore would only apply to people living in the United States and Canada.

As we reported earlier, the decision to use BitTorrent for facilitating distribution of the movie made a bit of a mockery of the limitations of Moore’s offer, since using The Pirate Bay’s tracker sent the movie worldwide. So, even for a completely free movie, it seemed inevitable that the legal profession would get involved at some point, it was just a question of time.

It didn’t take long. In a letter dated September 25th, lawyers representing Westside Productions LLC, owner of the Slacker Uprising copyright sprang into action, demanding the removal of a torrent linking to the movie. However, they managed to make a novice error. Instead of contacting the host of the torrent site in question, the Swedish-hosted BTJunkie, they actually sent the US copyright takedown request (email & fedex) to their DNS provider, easyDNS.

easyDNS are based in Canada and, just like BTJunkie in Sweden, are not subject to the laws of the United States, although most lawyers don’t seem to understand this. Furthermore, since easyDNS aren’t even BTJunkie’s host, they are in no position to do anything about the torrent anyway.

Mark Jeftovic, a co-founder of easyDNS wrote: “But really, come on folks, please tell us that isn’t the basis for this take down request. Anybody with half a clue knows the net doesn’t work like that. In any case, I’ve sent them our standard ‘we’re not the web host, we’re just the lowly DNS service’, but I did point out this seeming contradiction in Michael Moore’s message vs his lawyer’s actions.”

Now that the lawyers managed to get a grasp of the role of a DNS server, they have withdrawn the complaint against easyDNS. They state that the problem is due to the fact that the infringing .torrent was hosted outside of the US and Canada, a situation which for some reason is unacceptable to their client and a ‘problem’ worth spending large sums of money on to remedy. Let’s be clear - no amount of money will solve this issue and it is absolutely absurd to even try.

“I’ve replied that they [the lawyers] should know it is highly impractical to attempt to impose geographical constraints on otherwise freely available files,” said Mark at easyDNS, “but I guess they want to give it a shot.”

Meanwhile, the admin of BTJunkie told us he has not yet received a takedown request.

Mo(o)re money down the drain….

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Slacker Uprising BitTorrent Takedown Sent to DNS Provider torrent downloads.

Sony is following in the footsteps of established anti-piracy lobbyists. The IFPI, for example, has been lobbying politicians to force ISPs to identify, filter, block and remove copyright infringing content from the Internet. For their part, the RIAA has suggested similar measures for the upcoming Anti-Piracy Trade Agreement Wishlist (ACTA).

Thus far, these attempts haven’t been particularly successful. ISPs worldwide are refusing to cooperate, mainly because they feel such actions violate the privacy of their customers. In addition, last week the Belgian ISP Scarlet - previously ordered to stop illegal file-sharing on its network - told the court that it is simply impossible for it to do so.

Nevertheless, Sony’s John McMahon said in his keynote speech at the Broadband World Forum, that he would like ISPs and copyright owners to cooperate in order to reduce piracy. According to McMahon, the entertainment industry is losing more than two billion dollars a year because of piracy, but he believes this number can be reduced significantly with the help of ISPs.

Interestingly, McMahon also said that customer frustration with DRM is one of the main reasons why people turn to file-sharing networks, instead of legal alternatives. Sony recognizes, but at the same time ignores these signals from their customers, as they are not planning to get rid of DRM. Instead, they are investing in a new and improved DRM, the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE).

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Sony Urges ISPs to Cooperate Against Piracy torrent downloads.