It is hard to make a definite list of the most popular BitTorrent sites. Over the years we’ve made quite a few lists, and reported some of the latest trends. Most lists we published were based on Alexa’s ranking, mainly because it was pretty much the only traffic source that was available. Recently, however, Google started to rank websites as well, including a traffic estimate.

So, let’s see how well Google does, and how their traffic estimation and ranking compares to actual traffic data and Alexa’s ranking respectively.

One of the interesting features of Google’s site comparison is that it gives an estimation of the daily traffic when you’re logged in on a Google account. The data used for the traffic statistics comes from Google analytics, consumer panels, and other third-party market research.

The traffic data seem to be quite accurate, for some sites at least. The daily (absolute) unique visitors for Mininova, for example, is estimated to be slightly above 2 million a day, which matches with real traffic stats we got from the Mininova team.

As we look at the graph below we can clearly see that Mininova is in the lead judging by the number of visitors, followed by The Pirate Bay. isoHunt and Torrentz compete for the third place. After these four sites there is a huge gap to other BitTorrent sites such as BTjunkie, TorrentReactor and TorrentPortal.

It is interesting to see how many similarities there are between Google’s ranking, and the daily reach according to Alexa.

The regional differences in popularity of the sites are also worth mentioning. The Pirate Bay, for example, is more popular than Mininova in the US, and especially in Sweden. Torrentz, on the other hand, does really well in India, while isoHunt has a relatively large fanbase in Japan.

Overall it seems that BitTorrent sites are still growing, especially The Pirate Bay, since they nearly doubled their traffic in a yeah. This is pretty much in line with the growth in the number of peers on The Pirate Bay trackers, which went from 5 to well over 10 million in the last 12 months.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Top Torrent Sites Ranked by Google

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Top Torrent Sites Ranked by Google torrent downloads.

Mediadefender has had a rough year, and the future isn’t looking much better. Last month, MediaDefender lost one of its larger customers. The business accounted for roughly 18% of MediaDefender’s revenues.

In a recent financial statement, the company stated that there is a decrease in interest for their anti-piracy services, and that the results of their p2p-advertising model are also disappointing. This news led to further decrease in the stock price, which was sitting at an all time low of just 16 cents this Monday.

Surprisingly enough, the company structurally fails to mention the email leak and security breach, which has cost them a significant amount of money. In September 2007, disaster struck. MediaDefender had made many enemies with its anti-p2p activities. One of them decided to teach the company a lesson by hacking into their systems and leaking their internal emails and closest secrets to the Internet. The effect on the company and its operations was dramatic.

In an interview with Portfolio, the hacker (using the pseudonym ‘Ethan’) explained how things led up to the leak. Ethan, a polite high-school student who lives with his family, was on his Christmas break when he first gained access to the anti-piracy company’s servers by exploiting a weakness in their firewall. This was at the end of 2006, at a time when business was still good for Media Defender with revenue standing at nearly $16m.

Soon after that Ethan got access to the company’s email, its networked resources and even its telephone system. Logging in a handful of times each month through the summer of 2007, he started to get bored with ‘Monkey Defenders’ - his pet name for the anti-piracy outfit. Deciding to go out with a bang, he and the Media Defender-Defenders gathered thousands of the company’s internal emails and published them on web.

Last November, MediaDefender said it lost $825,000 as a result of the leaked emails, and this amount has probably gone up significantly in the months after that. Its stock price is falling, and it’s beginning to look like the company won’t recover anytime soon. The Pirate Bay wished last year that MediaDefender would go bankrupt, and by the looks of it, they might just get what they hoped for…

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

MediaDefender Walks The Plank to Bankruptcy

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MediaDefender Walks The Plank to Bankruptcy 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.

Post from: TorrentFreak

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Court Deems Pirate Bay Block to be Illegal 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.

Post from: TorrentFreak

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The Pirate Bay Removes Fake Trackers from Torrents 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.

Post from: TorrentFreak

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

The Web Sheriff announced today that Michael Jackson joined the Village People, UB40 and the rights holders of Bob Marley’s music, in an attempt to get compensation for the losses they allegedly suffered at the hands of the popular BitTorrent website.

Pirate Bay’s Brokep commented on the announcement by saying: “The common thing for all of these artists of course is that no one listens to them anymore.”

This is not the first time the Sheriff, aka John Giacobbi, has clashed with the Pirate Bay folks. Last November he announced that he planned to sue them in the U.S., France and Sweden for infringing the rights of Prince.

Web Sheriff will demand $100 million dollars in compensation, slightly less than the MPAA asked for last week. Adding them both together amounts to a record breaking claim. “The good thing about this is that we just broke TorrentSpy’s lawsuit. Maybe time to call Guinness, we like to break world records and we just broke one I think,” Brokep writes.

In the meantime, The Web Sheriff is still trying to get ABBA on board. “It would also be good/appropriate if the members of ABBA could take up the fight against these pirates, as they personify the Swedish music industry’s successes and are renowned ambassadors for Sweden, contrary to The Pirate Bay.” he said previously.

Again, Brokep disagrees, he sees The Pirate Bay as Sweden’s new ambassadors. “All over digg.com and other cool social networks there is always the comment “last place on earth with true freedom is Sweden” or ‘I really want to move to Sweden’,” he wrote a few months ago.

It will be interesting to see how this develops, for now, all the Web Sheriff has ever done is making threats. You would think that he must know by now that this has no effect on The Pirate Bay team.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Michael Jackson to Take on The Pirate Bay

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Michael Jackson to Take on The Pirate Bay torrent downloads.

Back in February we reported on the IFPI forcing, via the Danish courts, an ISP to block its subscribers from accessing The Pirate Bay. This case was the third occasion where an industry lobby group had flexed its muscles to block a website, a similar measure was used to block allofmp3.com and mp3sparks.com. However, the legality of these actions under European law, specifically the Infosoc directive, is dubious at best.

Nevertheless, two of the largest opposition parties in Danish parliament think it is a good idea – despite the ineffectiveness of the block – to streamline the process, making it quicker and easier to do. A proposal (Danish) before the government seems to create a tribunal to handle these cases.

Whereas in the past cases have involved a rights holder suing an ISP and forcing a block through the courts, this proposal creates a tribunal to do it instead. This tribunal will apparently consist of members appointed by government ministers, who will then rule on blocks with no judicial oversight. Any sites blocked would have to go through the courts to appeal and the site would remain blocked unless and until successful.

If that was not bad enough, there is also talk of a secretariat that would handle ’simple’ cases, so the appointed tribunal would not even have to hear the majority of cases. Cases would be put to the tribunal by copyright holders that feel they have had their rights infringed by the target site. As with the court cases, though, it’s extremely unlikely that the accused site will be invited or even made aware of any such proceedings, and allowed to state their case.

“This is a wet dream for organizations like IFPI,” is the view of Ole Husgaard, chairman of the Danish Pirate Party. “This isn’t even a law proposal, so there is not all the work usually done in our parliament when passing laws; this can be passed in a month or two. If it is, I would guess that we will have at least 2000 sites on the blocking list within 12 months - without a single court case having been decided, if any get started at all.”

He’s not alone in his pessimism. “It’s blatant censorship of course.” is the opinion of The Pirate Bay’s brokep. “It’s not in the interest of the citizens, so I hope the government understands that if they go against the people like that, they should be replaced. It is also not a huge step before they start censoring other stuff - let’s say political parties that have thoughts about changing the current government.”

As analysis of the Pirate Bay block has found it contrary to EU laws, it’s curious as to the motivation behind this proposal. The only rational one would be bribery – either legal or not – and so the question we are forced to ask is, are Danish politicians cheaper to buy than those in New York?

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Danish Copyright Censorship Proposal Revealed

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Danish Copyright Censorship Proposal Revealed torrent downloads.

The Pirate Bay is the second BitTorrent site that has managed to get a spot among the 100 most visited (97) domains on the Internet. The BitTorrent tracker has good company in this prestigious list, as it brushes shoulders with sites such as Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia.

Of all BitTorrent sites, Mininova is currently in the lead, ranked 52th according to Alexa’s new and improved statistics. The Piratebay comes second, before isoHunt, Torrentz.com and btjunkie. It is estimated that The Pirate Bay has close to 100 million unique visitors per month.

It is not only the web traffic that got a traffic boost, the number of people using the Pirate Bay tracker has quadrupled compared to the population in December 2006, and is now at 12 million. The number of torrents has grown from 600,000 to 1,200,000 in the same period.

Hollywood is doing all it can to force The Pirate Bay offline, but it seems that the site only grows more and more, perhaps because of the extra publicity generated by anti-piracy activities. We saw a similar pattern two years ago, when the Pirate Bay nearly doubled their traffic after the raid by the Swedish police.

The expansion of The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites shows that BitTorrent’s popularity continues to grow, and there is no sign that this will stop anytime soon.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

The Pirate Bay Enters List of 100 Most Popular Webites

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The Pirate Bay Enters List of 100 Most Popular Webites torrent downloads.

Like most of the music industry associations around the world, the IFPI claims to champion the cause of the artist, by promoting them and protecting their interests. One such artist is Max Peezay, a Swedish hip-hop artist who is mentioned in the IFPI legal case against The Pirate Bay. It’s claimed that money was lost as a result of Max’s music being available for download via the site.

The thing is, the CEO of the IFPI in Sweden, Lars Gustafsson, never asked Max Peezay if he wanted to be used in the case against The Pirate Bay. If he had, he might’ve been clear on Max’s views on this matter, in that he wants nothing to do with it.

Brokep of The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak: “He’s pro-file sharing. Some of his lyrics already state that. And he’s not willing to feel like a sell-out to please Ifpi - who never actually asked him for his permission to sue in his name.”

Characteristically over-stepping the mark, the IFPI forgot a little detail when putting Max Peezay forward in The Pirate Bay case says Brokep: “In fact, they [IFPI] didn’t even own the rights to his music.”

According to a SVD report, due to the refusal of Max to being involved in the case, the IFPI have reduced the amount of money they are claiming from The Pirate Bay by roughly 12,000 EUR (apprx $19,000), which unfortunately won’t reduce the $2.5m total claim by much.

Brokep has a message for all of the other pro-filesharing artists: “What we’re waiting for now is all of those other artists to speak up as well. We know many of the artists actually put up their albums on The Pirate Bay themselves - and we’re really happy about that! And we know that you don’t like to be abused by the record labels in this farce. So we want you to show your support. Not necessarily for TPB but for your fans. It’s an important message to send to the community.”

The Pirate Bay case will generate huge amounts of publicity when it kicks into high gear so it’ll be interesting to see where the artists really stand on this issue and who they align themselves with, the IFPI - or the public.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Hip-Hop Artist Refuses To Stand Against The Pirate Bay

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Hip-Hop Artist Refuses To Stand Against The Pirate Bay torrent downloads.

It turns out that the MPAA will do pretty much anything to obtain information about BitTorrent sites and its users. Back in 2006, they made a deal with a “hacker”, better known as Robert Anderson, to steal e-mail correspondence and trade secrets from TorrentSpy.

The hacker later admitted that this was indeed true, and in a surprising turn of events, he switched sides, and joined TorrentSpy. The court case between the MPAA and TorrentSpy eventually led to the downfall of TorrentSpy, but it turned out that the MPAA was also interested in intel on The Pirate Bay.

Cnet cites court documents showing that Anderson wrote to the MPAA: “We can provide the names, address, and phone (numbers) of the owners of Torrentspy.com and Thepiratebay.org — along with evidence, including correspondence between the two companies.”

In addition, the court documents reveal that MPAA’s Dean Garfield stated: “We were going to get information about the location and identity of the people who were running Torrentspy, as well as information related to a general conspiracy and relationship between Torrentspy and a number of other prominent services including ThePirateBay.”

The Pirate Bay has always been one of the main targets of the MPAA. In 2006, John Malcolm, Executive Vice President of the MPAA wrote a letter to Sweden’s State Secretary in which he urged the authorities to take action against the site: “It is certainly not in Sweden’s best interests to earn a reputation among other nations and trading partners as a place where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated.”

It is of course interesting to see that the MPAA is interested in the identities of the Pirate Bay founders, but they could have easily done a Google search, because that info is pretty much public information. I guess they rather use a hacker.

The Pirate Bay website is offline at the moment, unrelated to this news, as they are doing some server maintenance.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

MPAA Hacker Spied on The Pirate Bay

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MPAA Hacker Spied on The Pirate Bay torrent downloads.

Yesterday, The Pirate Bay filed an appeal against the decree that forced Italian ISPs to block the BitTorrent tracker. Pirate Bay’s lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus and Francesco Micozzi are convinced that they have a strong case. “The decree can be defined as ‘original’ or ‘creative’ at best” they told TorrentFreak.

The Pirate Bay administrators are accused of making copyrighted material available on the Internet for commercial purposes. Giovanni and Francesco told us that this is a strange accusation, considering the nature of the site. “…even the judge who issued the decree states that no infringing material is hosted on The Pirate Bay, which provides just a tracker search engine,” they told us.

“The judge tries to ‘create’ a sort of contributory infringement accusation against The Pirate Bay,” the lawyers explained. It is alleged that the tracker and the search engine are absolutely necessary for the users to “search and locate the content on single computers”. That’s not all, the judge goes even further by stating that the name of the site, ‘The Pirate Bay’, signals intent to infringe copyright.

The lawyers think that because of the lack of jurisdiction, the block should not have been issued in the first place. They also dispute the claim that The Pirate Bay is distributing copyright infringing material. “We will bring all our arguments before the Tribunal, and we are confident of the Tribunal’s decision,” they said.

In previous articles, we suggested that the IFPI, Pirate Bay’s arch rival, might have had a hand in the block. The reverse DNS of the ‘blocked page’ pointed to IFPI’s servers, although they have changed that now. This is suspicious to say the least, and Pirate Bay’s lawyers told us: “It is clear that this decree has been strongly backed up by FIMI (the Italian IFPI),” citing a press release FIMI published where they applauded the Pirate Bay block.

A Tribunal of three judges will now look into the appeal, and a decision is expected in a few weeks. After that, the decision of the Tribunal can be further appealed by both parties before the Higher Court.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

The Pirate Bay Appeals Italian Blockade

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The Pirate Bay Appeals Italian Blockade torrent downloads.

After a two year investigation into The Pirate Bay, Swedish authorities filed charges against four people. Now, eight months later, there is still no date set for the trial.

“The process has taken a lot of time. First, it took time serving judicial summons to the defendants and then we had to gather damage claims from the complainants,” Anita Thimberg, a clerk at the Stockholm District Court, told DN.se.

Several of the lawyers, defendants and complainants apparently have fully-booked agendas, and it is difficult to schedule a date when everyone can participate. At the moment, it is still unclear how many days trial it will take once it starts. “We’re approximating between six to ten days,” Anita Thimberg said.

January 31st, four individuals - Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and businessman Carl Lundström were charged with facilitating copyright infringement. The prosecutor asked for a $188,000 fine for each - and the confiscation of their computers. The four also face up to 2 years in prison, but this is very unlikely based on the evidence gathered by the authorities.

That’s not all though, as the entertainment industry has also filed for damages. This spring, the MPAA demanded $15.4 million from The Pirate Bay, to cover the damages they suffered from 4 movies and 13 TV-episodes that were made available via the BitTorrent tracker. In addition, the IFPI claimed $2.5 milion in damages and Antipiratbyrån asked for $1.1 million.

Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde has always been positive about the outcome. Even in the worst case scenario the tracker and the site will remain online, Sunde told TorrentFreak. “In case we lose the pending trial (yeah right) there will still not be any changes to the site. The Pirate Bay will keep operating just as always. We’ve been here for years and we will be here many more.”

For now, the wait continues.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Trial Against The Pirate Bay Delayed

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Trial Against The Pirate Bay Delayed torrent downloads.

When this article is published, The Pirate Bay now tracks nearly 1,288,514 torrents and 14,786,539 unique peers. As a comparison, in December 2006 they tracked 576,080 torrents and 4,274,698 peers, so today’s figures represent quite an increase.

TiAMO, one of Pirate Bay’s co-founders and the one responsible for keeping the hardware up and running, is happy with the traffic increase, and writes:

“A big thanks to all our users helping to make the site what it is. We’ll keep growing for as long as you keep using the site, filing it with content, sharing.”

This traffic increase is apparently placing quite a lot of stress on their server park. In July, the site went offline for more than a day, as the server setup had trouble keeping up with the ever-growing demand. It is estimated that The Pirate Bay currently returns results to between 7 and 8 million searches per day, roughly 230 million a month.

The popularity of The Pirate Bay hasn’t gone unnoticed with artists either. Timbuktu, a well known Swedish rapper released his latest single exclusively on The Pirate Bay earlier today. Free of DRM, high quality and free to share and remix of course.

Post from: TorrentFreak

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The Pirate Bay Tops 15 Million Peers torrent downloads.

The Swedish book publishers organization recently issued a report in which they revealed that 85% of the best-selling books in Sweden are available on The Pirate Bay. Not really shocking news, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak he’s actually “a bit sad that it’s not 100%.”

Perhaps of more interest is the technique used by the publishers’ organization to gather their data. In the report they write that they had to code a specialized tool to scrape the Pirate Bay database for book titles, since there were no ready-made tools available.

Peter Sunde is now arguing that they were breaking the law by scraping the site multiple times without permission. “The Pirate Bay actually owns the copyright to its own database of torrents,” Sunde writes on his blog. Sunde further refers to the Pirate Bay’s Usage Policy, which the book publishers organization has violated.

In true MPAA style, Sunde is determined to fight for his intellectual property. “I called them up and asked them to present more information about the technical things, so we can send them an invoice if they don’t want to be dragged into court,” Sunde told TorrentFreak in a comment.

Meanwhile, the true reason behind the real book publishers’ study remains vague. As we’ve pointed out many times before, piracy can actually boost book sales. One of the prime examples is best-selling author Paulo Coelho, who said he sold thousands of extra copies because he pirated his own books. Coelho’s success later inspired the publisher and Leander Kahney - the author of the two books - to do the same, with several others following this example. Particularly for book authors, piracy seems to be a useful promotional tool, rather than a threat. For now, that is.

We can’t foresee what will happen if someone launches a Kindle ready pirate site. More on this later, for sure.

Post from: TorrentFreak

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The Pirate Bay Clashes with Book Publishers torrent downloads.

Kopit.se found out yesterday -through the police officer’s facebook profile- that Keyzer was recently employed by Warner Bros, one of the plaintiffs in the prosecution against The Pirate Bay. Keyzer has deleted his facebook profile, but confirmed that he indeed works for the company now.

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde (brokep) stated: “He [Keyzer] confirmed that he is an employee there and we can’t see it in any other way than this being the reward for a work well done from the new employer of the police, the entertainment industry”

“This is a legal outrage. Talk about biased,” Sunde continues. “Keyzer is in charge of the investigation. No matter the reasons to switch employer, this investigation has not been fair. We have felt that the investigation has concentrated on trying to locate something to point out as wrong with The Pirate Bay instead of determining if the activities of the site are unlawful or not,” he added.

“This is pure, classic corruption,” says Rickard Falkvinge leader of the Swedish pirate party. “Big companies from foreign nations trying to affect the outcome in a Swedish Court of Justice with straightforward bribes. Now the copyright lobby is showing its true face”

Peter Athlin, Sunde’s laywer, thinks that the consequence of the new information could be that the investigation -which took nearly two years- has to be redone. If so, this will be a huge setback for the Swedish police.

The legal investigation into the Pirate Bay started nearly two years ago, after the controversial raid on the Pirate Bay in May 2006. At the time the Swedish police confiscated 180 servers, most of which had nothing to do with the BitTorrent tracker. Last December the investigation finally came to an end, resulting in 4,000 pages of legal paperwork.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Pirate Bay Trial Star Witness Employed by Plaintiff

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Pirate Bay Trial Star Witness Employed by Plaintiff torrent downloads.

The Pirate Bay is known for defending people’s right to freedom of speech on the Internet, and this is exactly what motivated them to start this new blogging service.

Brokep, one of the co-founders of the site, told TorrentFreak that the idea to start a blogging service came up when the weblog of one of his friends was taken down from Wordpress recently, for linking to copyrighted material.

This, of course, goes against the “uncensored web” philosophy of The Pirate Bay team, and they didn’t hesitate to start their own blogging service, Baywords, using Wordpress as their blogging engine.

On the frontpage of the newly launched service Brokep writes: “Many blogs are being shut down for uncomfortable thoughts and ideas. We will not do that. Our goal is to protect freedom of speech and your thoughts. As long as you don’t break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it”.

In a response, Matt Mullenweg from WordPress told TorrentFreak that he supports Pirate Bay’s Baywords, but he assured us that Wordpress.com would never take down a blog for posting deviating thoughts or ideas.

“WordPress.com supports free speech and doesn’t shut people down for “uncomfortable thoughts and ideas”, in fact we’re blocked in several countries because of that. However as a US-based companies we must comply with US laws, which means if the primary purpose of a blog is distributing illegal material it’s not a good fit for WordPress.com,” Matt said.

Baywords is currently working on expanding the feature list to include support for domain redirects and improved stats. The service is ad-free for now, but Brokep told TorrentFreak that there will be ads blended into the blog design later, to cover the expenses.

This is not the first time The Pirate Bay has launched a service where people can publish whatever they want, without being censored. They have already created an image hosting service for this reason, and a YouTube competitor is soon to follow.

For people who are considering moving their Wordpress or Blogger account over to Baywords, importing is pretty straightforward and compatible with all the popular blog platforms. Don’t forget to add TorrentFreak to your blogroll!

Update: Matt Mullenweg’s response was added to the article after publication.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

The Pirate Bay Launches Uncensored Blogging Service

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The Pirate Bay Launches Uncensored Blogging Service torrent downloads.

In February, a Danish court ordered the ISP “Tele2″ to block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay. The decision, which is currently under appeal, once again heated the debate on ISPs Internet filtering.

The court case was initiated by the IFPI - the infamous anti-piracy organization that represents the recording industry. The IFPI later tried to use the “landmark decision” to force Swedish ISPs to do the same, but failed. In fact, it seems that filtering traffic to The Pirate Bay is actually illegal according to European law.

Pirate Bay’s Brokep told TorrentFreak that they will file a complaint, and ask for compensation for the time they were blocked in Denmark. The Pirate Bay already fought back by launching The Jesper Bay, giving affected customers detailed instructions on how to regain access to The Pirate Bay. However, they think that it is only fair to ask compensation for the inconvenience the IFPI block has cost .

The money, which will be managed by the Danish Piratgruppen, could be used to fund Danish artists who want to share their music, according to Brokep, who assured us that they will only ask for a reasonable amount of money, unlike the IFPI. “The grant will give out money to Danish aspiring artists for making music and releasing it for free. And all will be sponsored by IFPI since they tried to fuck those people over. Poetic justice.”

Strangely enough, The Pirate Bay was never heard in the IFPI vs. Tele2 case. “Nobody ever asked us what we think about the block, although it does affect only us and we’re the reason for the lawsuit,” brokep said.

This is not the first time The Pirate Bay has fought fire with fire, last year they took legal action against 10 major media companies, including Paramount Home Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox and Universal Music Group, for using MediaDefender to sabotage their BitTorrent tracker.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

The Pirate Bay Demands Compensation for IFPI Block

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The Pirate Bay Demands Compensation for IFPI Block torrent downloads.

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde (brokep) said in a response to the unusual move by the officer: “He [Keyzer] confirmed that he is an employee there [Warner Bros’] and we can’t see it in any other way than this being the reward for work well done from the new employer of the police, the entertainment industry”

In the days to come new information surfaced, as it became clear that Keyzer was not quitting his police job, but that he was only hired by Warner Bros. for six months. Unsurprisingly, the rumors that the job at the movie studio was a reward for his investigation into The Pirate Bay, became even stronger.

In a short statement, Warner Bros. state that the investigator was not employed or paid by the movie studio while he was still working on the case. A spokesman says the claims of the policeman having affected the investigation for his own ends is pure speculation.

Warner Bros. refuses to comment on questions regarding the job and salary negotiations, which must have started before the investigation came to an end. This is not the first time the copyright industry has hired filesharing investigators from the police, and in some cases the job negotiations indeed began while the investigations were still ongoing.

According to prosecutor, Håkan Roswall, this is exactly what the Swedish anti-piracy organization Antipiratbyrån did a couple of years ago. “That policeman was recruited during the investigation as well, so this is nothing unusual. He testified at the trial and the court didn’t take that into consideration,” Roswall said.

When asked why these companies are so interested in hiring the police investigators, Roswall said: “Because they are exceptionally skilled people.”

“It could be seen as a positive thing that the policeman has worked for Warner. That will broaden his competence in filesharing cases.” he added. Perhaps The Pirate Bay should hire an IT-forensics specialist from the police as well?

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Pirate Bay Investigator to Cash in Temporarily at Warner Bros.

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Pirate Bay Investigator to Cash in Temporarily at Warner Bros. torrent downloads.

Today, The Pirate Bay announced that they have achieved an amazing 12,000,000 peers on the tracker, surpassing the previously-amazing 10,000,000 announcement just a short while ago.

Interestingly, and particularly so for fans of private trackers, brokep announced that since 2004, there has been a massive increase in the number of users actually seeding files, rather than just being regular peers. In 2004, around 20% of the tracker population were seeds and by 2005 this had increased to 25-30%. By 2006, the seeders had increased to an impressive 35% and 2007 saw further gains to 40%.

In 2008, the seeders amount to an impressive 50% of total tracker peers, further indication if it was needed that the desire to share clearly trumps the efforts of anti-piracy agencies.

Brokep of The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak: “We have more seeders than leechers now. It was like 25% seeders 75% leechers [in 2004/2005], since then it’s gradually shifted over to 50/50″

But a measly 12,000,000 peers isn’t enough for the Pirate Bay crew. They want more - and more. And we end with a call out to the community from Brokep: “What we want you to do is to spread the word to your friends and make more people share files! Let’s break 15 million - and 20!”

It won’t be long in coming.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

The Pirate Bay Smashes 12,000,000 BitTorrent Users

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The Pirate Bay Smashes 12,000,000 BitTorrent Users torrent downloads.

Shocking, yes. But what if there were two similar events, on subsequent days?

Today it has been revealed by Computerworld that the expert witness - the ONLY expert witness - in the Danish Pirate Bay blocking case, was previously employed by the IFPI, a fact revealed through his LinkedIn social networking page.

Kristian Løkkegaard is now working for DtecNet Software, an anti-piracy company. DtecNet Software originally stems from Antipiratgruppen (Danish Anti-Piracy outfit) and Johan Schlüter Law Firm, where several of the partners are co-owners of the internationally successful firm.

Kristian Løkkegaard had also been employed for two years at Johan Schlüter Law Firm, which has the IFPI as a client, something which many find shocking, like Morten Agervig Helles who represented Tele2, the ISP ordered to block The Pirate Bay in Denmark. “I couldn’t in my wildest dreams believe that they would use a witness that had previously been employed by them” he said.

The court in Frederiksberg probably had no knowledge of that fact when it ordered Tele2 to block The Pirate Bay in February this year, however that doesn’t change the fact that Løkkegaard had a conflict of interests. Right now, the court doesn’t wish to comment on this situation.

According to Lars Bo Langsted who is a lawyer and faculty-leader at Aalborg University, witnesses must be objective. He says that there is a difference between a representative for one of the sides in a trial and an objective witness. “If you give testimony as an objective profesional and not as a representative of one of the parts in the trial, then you give testimony as an independent expert. In relation to that, it is of course very important that it is clear weather the person in question is capable of that or not.”

In the interests of transparency, this information about previous employment should have been known to the court but it is nowhere to be found in the court documents. Morten Agervig Helles, who represented Tele2 says this is also news to him: “I didn’t know that. No one told me. Neither that he had interests in the case nor that he had been employed.”

Kristian Løkkegaard said that he only appeared in the courtroom for very limited time: “I do not remember how exactly it went, but normally the judge or a clerk asks who I am, what my background is, my employment and so on. And then I answer those questions.”

He says that because of his expertise he has been called as an witness in similar cases by Johan Schlüter Lawfirm. “I wasn’t in the courtroom during the whole hearing,” he said “and I cant remember exactly which questions they asked. But this is not something I want to try to hide or have tried to hide.”

Thanks to Peter_Pan

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

IFPI Expert Witness in Pirate Bay Case Worked for IFPI

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IFPI Expert Witness in Pirate Bay Case Worked for IFPI torrent downloads.

Best selling author Paulo Coelho posted several of his books on BitTorrent, which boosted his sales significantly. The success of Coelho later inspired Leander Kahney, the author of “The Cult of Mac” and “The Cult of iPod”, to do the same.

A recent discussion on the positives and negatives of piracy confirms changing attitudes towards it. The “behind the scenes” thread on O’Reilly Radar was started by Eric Freeman, who wrote:

“Any thoughts on the rise of Head First titles (mostly HFDP and HTML) on Pirate Bay? I’m trying to just take it as a sign there is strong interest in the books still.”

The consensus among the authors who replied seems to be that having one’s book listed on BitTorrent sites is a good thing, and might actually generate more sales.

Nat Torkington wrote in a reply:

“So long as the royalty checks are strong, take BitTorrent as a sign of success rather than a problem. A wise dog doesn’t let his fleas bother him.”

Phil Torrone of Make magazine added:

“Yup - seeing your books / magazines on Pirate Bay is always a good thing.”

Piracy is less of a threat to book publishers than it is to the music industry though. As Nat Torkington notes, most people still prefer printed copies: “The HF books work really well as books, so at best the torrents act as advertisements for the superior print product.”

For music it’s different, as most people now prefer MP3s. The music that is offered on filesharing networks is superior to the DRMed alternatives that are available through music stores such as iTunes. The only option for the music industry is to adapt to the needs of their customers and start competing with pirates.

In related news, our very own Matt Mason just got his book “The Pirate’s Dilemma” leaked on BitTorrent. Matt announced that an official “free” version will be available for download later, but I’m sure that he doesn’t mind people sharing this pirated copy.

(Via O’Reilly TOC)

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Book Authors See BitTorrent As a Promotional Tool

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Book Authors See BitTorrent As a Promotional Tool torrent downloads.

The movie titles they are claiming damages for are Harry Potter, Syriana, The Pink Panther and Walk the Line and the 13 episodes of the popular TV-show Prison Break. MPAA demands 222,50 kronor ($37) for each download. For Harry Potter, 261,50 kronor ($43) and for the first season of Prison Break 416 kronor ($68).

‘The Pink Panther’ is the most popular title among Pirate Bay users; the least popular, by a mile, is ‘Syriana’. The movies have been downloaded 49,593 and 3,679 times respectively, according to MAQS, the law firm which represents MPAA.”

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde (Brokep) is not impressed by Hollywood’s claims, he told TorrentFreak in a response: “They know they are losing, and try to make us look like big criminals by adding some zeros to a claim for a made-up crime.”

“The worst thing is that I lost 100 kronor on a bet on the number they would come up with,” Sunde added. “And, it sucks that they didn’t claim more than for Napster and the other sites. It’s cooler to break the record.”

When Monique Wadsted, MPAA’s lawyer and a talkshow host, was asked whether the MPAA really thinks every download is a lost sale, she said: “We don’t know that, but the copyright law doesn’t care about that. It says that if you have downloaded something illegally, you must pay regardless if you would’ve bought it or not.”

Wadsted expects the worst now she has announced the claims, even being hacked by Pirate Bay fanboys: “I know that they have an increased interest in my person and that they try to ridicule me. I also count on having my computer hacked. As a business lawyer, I’m not used to these kinds of reactions.”

MPAA is not the only organization claiming damages. A month ago, IFPI claimed $2.5milion in damages and earlier today Antipiratbyrån asked for (1.1 million. This January, prosecutor Håkan Roswall asked the court for a $188,000 fine for four individuals - Fredrik Neij (”TiAMO”), Gottfrid Svartholm (”Anakata”), Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström.

There is no date set for the court case yet, but it will probably take a few more months before the trial starts.

To be continued.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

MPAA Demands $15 Million from The Pirate Bay

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MPAA Demands $15 Million from The Pirate Bay torrent downloads.

The Pirate Bay case hasn’t even got to trial yet and already the controversy surrounding it is building up like some Hollywood plot.

Not only was the police star witness against the Pirate Bay previously employed by one of the plaintiffs, Warner Bros., but it was revealed that after this work he would return to his job as a police officer. Highly suspect to say the least, but not unusual in this case - the IFPI’s expert witness used to work for them too.

Various media and anti-piracy agencies all want a large piece of the Pirate Bay crew and between them are demanding millions of dollars in compensation, a point that is contested by Brokep: “In fact, they owe us a shitload of money. All the time we’ve spent on being called criminals and hunted down by private investigators and getting our stuff stolen by them - it’s gonna be expensive for them.”

Brokep says their initial target is police officer and IT forensics expert Jim Keyzer, who they clearly see as corrupt:

“We reported the police officer yesterday. For a lot of different reasons, at least three criminal complaints were filed. But you know what? It’s illegal to bribe the police as well. So more people have been reported to the police.”

The Pirate Bay crew say that when the case is over, they will demand compensation for all the time and money they have invested in this “media circus”.

Brokep is clearly in defiant mood: “So who’s the fucking criminals really? Hey Hollywood assholes - Be afraid. Very afraid. The law is coming to serve justice.”

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

The Pirate Bay File Police Bribery Complaints

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The Pirate Bay File Police Bribery Complaints torrent downloads.

The raid on the Pirate Bay took down the site, but not for long. Within three days the site was back online, and much to the dislike of anti-piracy outfits, its traffic had doubled thanks to all the media attention.

At the time, the Swedish police confiscated 180 servers, most of which had nothing to do with The Pirate Bay. Last December the investigation finally came to an end, resulting in 4,000 pages of legal paperwork. Prosecutor Håkan Roswall later announced that four individuals involved with The Pirate Bay are being charged with “assisting copyright infringement” of 4 software applications, 9 films and 22 music tracks.

After the raid, it became clear that the US had threatened to put Sweden on WTO’s black list if they refused to deal with the Pirate Bay problem. Even the MPAA was involved, as John Malcolm, Executive Vice President of the MPAA wrote a letter to Sweden’s State Secretary in which he stated, “It is certainly not in Sweden’s best interests to earn a reputation among other nations and trading partners as a place where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated.”

The users of the site don’t have to worry that the site will be taken offline though, no matter what the court decides. “In case we lose the pending trial (yeah right) there will still not be any changes to the site. The Pirate Bay will keep operating just as always. We’ve been here for years and we will be here many more,” Sunde said earlier.

In a blog post, The Pirate Bay team now suggests to make May 31rd a day of celebration for pirates: “Let today be the pirates independence day! Today we celebrate the victories we’ve had and the victories that will come. Today we celebrate that we’re united in our efforts. Keep on seeding!”

Happy Pirates independence day!

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

The Pirate Bay: Two Years After the Raid

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The Pirate Bay: Two Years After the Raid torrent downloads.

Next week, the Swedish parliament will vote on a new “wiretapping” law that may severely invade the privacy of Swedish citizens. If the new law is passed, all email, web traffic and phone calls will be monitored by the FRA, the National Defence Radio Establishment, without the need for court orders or similar authorization.

As always, one of the arguments in favor of such legislation is that it will be easier to hunt down terrorists. However, there’s a huge fear this will be used in the wrong way, to track down whistle-blowers for example.

That aside, the law is also a huge invasion of people’s privacy, both online and offline. The Swedish parliament will vote on this proposal on June 17th, and The Pirate Bay is urging their Swedish users to make their voices heard on this issue.

“We want to let you understand more and read up on what this means - and make your voice heard about this! This is a major threat against our civil rights and we must act. We must act now!” they write on the Pirate Bay blog, pointing their users to a website where they can take action.

Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Swedish Pirate Party is with the Pirate Bay on this issue, as he told The Local: “Democracy is reliant on the transparency of power, not the transparency of citizens. All places where the opposite has been the case - where it has been impossible to examine the powers that be, while citizens lack any right to a private life - have been really nasty places to live.”

Let’s hope members of Parliament come to their senses, and make the right decision next week. To be continued.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

The Pirate Bay Takes Stand Against Wiretapping Law

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The Pirate Bay Takes Stand Against Wiretapping Law torrent downloads.