This week, many thousands of warning letters will be received by people in the UK accused of sharing files. Each recipient will get the smallest possible slap on the wrist. Yet today another police bail deadline will come and go for six people accused of doing exactly the same on OiNK. Don’t they deserve letters too?
Today, Alan Ellis, the owner of OiNK, will have his bail extended for an amazing fifth time.
Cleveland police, having originally stated that the charges against Alan would be revealed December 2007, extended the bail for another for two months, only to extend it again until May and then again until the end of June.
When they still weren’t ready to charge anyone by this date, they extended bail again until July 28th 2008. However, today, the police has extended the date again for Alan, and the other six arrested in connection with the case.
The six who were arrested, five men aged between 19 and 33, and a 28-year-old woman, were done so on suspicion of “Conspiracy to Defraud the Music Industry”, and other copyright offenses.
Repeated in the mainstream press such as the BBC, these allegations of serious fraud take on a really sinister tone, but the reality is somewhat different. At most these individuals did what an estimated 6 million others do in the UK on a regular basis - they simply shared files. None of the six are accused of anything more than offenses linked to the uploading of a single album each, yet today they will report again to the police, their lives on hold.
Elsewhere today in the UK, will be the characteristic sound of letters dropping through the front door onto the mat. Some people will be getting bills, others direct mail and junk. Some will be getting well wishes on a happy occasion. Others will be opening an unexpected letter from their ISP which claims they have been caught uploading music by the BPI, that they’ve been very naughty and shouldn’t do it again.
After long negotiations between the music industry and ISPs, along with a considerable amount of government ‘encouragement‘, sending out educational letters was considered a proportionate response to the ‘problem’ of file-sharing. Even the disconnection of uploaders was considered draconian, and there is certainly no suggestion of police involvement.
Shouldn’t the six OiNK uploaders be getting a “friendly” letter and a slap on the wrist too?
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
Where’s the Warning Letter for the OiNK Uploaders?
28.Jul.08 
TorrentFreak 
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ImageShack, one of the largest media hosting websites, has implemented some significant upgrades to their torrent download service. One of the most innovative new features is the “video preview”, which allows users to browse through stills of the video they are downloading, to get an impression of the quality of the file.
ImageShack, as the name already suggests, is best known for their image hosting. However, the site has more to offer, like their torrent download service for example.
ImageShack allows its users to upload a .torrent file to the site, which will then be downloaded to the ImageShack servers. After the download is complete, the files can be easily downloaded via a http link in any browser. The service is ideal for people who have throttled connection, and those who don’t want to give out their IP address to the public.
In April we reported that ImageShack had rolled out the BETA version to the public but since then some exiting features have been added. One of these new features is the video preview feature. When you add a popular video torrent to your download queue, it will show you a time-line of image stills, so you can verify the content and the quality of the file. Below is an example of such a time-line.
Torrent download services are not new, but there are only a few that don’t change any money. Jack Levin, the founder of ImageShack explained to TorrentFreak why he started the project: “We think its going to be a great service for users, especially in the light of ISPs rate-limiting torrent traffic. There are a lot of free and legal torrents out there that people should have easy access to too. We have the capacity to do it, and the world needs it.”
Although the service is free, there is a storage limit of 5GB and a transfer limit of 10GB per month. Users that would like to use the service more intensively will have to pay a subscription fee, starting at $10 a month for 10GB disk space and 15GB bandwidth.
Initially, we had some concerns about the service, because it did not support seeding. The torrent simply disconnected as soon as the download was finished, which hurts the overall swarm speed. This has changed as well, as ImageShack now allows users to seed files up to 150%.
The torrent downloads are pretty easy to manage, and the site provides some basic details about the progress of the downloads. Under the “status” link it lists information about the download progress, connected seeds and leechers, share ratio and more. Other great features are selective downloading, which is ideal if you only need one file from a big torrent, and the ability to request an email notification when the download has finished.
It’s doubtful that Hollywood will like the service. However, Levin is not worried about this: “DMCA applies, so, if we get reports from copyright owners to take down content, we will comply,” he told us earlier. Overall we would say that the service does what it promises, it downloads files much faster than most residential connections would, and has become more friendly to the torrent community now it allows seeding. Worth a try.
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
ImageShack’s Free Torrent Download Service Expands
27.Jul.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
This week, ISPs agreed to work with the BPI to reduce file-sharing in the UK. When someone gets ‘caught’ the ISPs will send out a warning, 100% based on music industry provided ‘evidence’. Not even the ISPs know if the claims of the BPI are true, so the evidence is totally unchallenged, a perfect position for the music industry.
On Thursday, every type of media outlet in the UK - newspapers, Internet, radio shows, TV and teletext all bristled with the same news. Six major ISPs had agreed to start sending out warning letters to alleged file-sharers after the government ordered action to decrease online piracy.
Most people seem to be interested in what happens after a letter is received, but who decides who gets a letter in the first place? Well, that’s the self-appointed job of the BPI (the British Phonographic Industry), a completely commercial organization set up to serve the interests of the music business and they don’t want you to know (in any detail) how their file-sharing tracking systems work. The same systems would’ve been used should they have been successful in their demands for “3 strikes and you’re out” yet there is zero transparency - everyone is supposed to blindly accept what they say as truth and that simply can’t be healthy.
In recent comments, a Carphone Warehouse spokesman further indicated that it is expected to take action against its customers based purely on the ‘evidence’ provided by the BPI. “What we have agreed to do is to write to our customers and advise them there’s been an alleged infringement,” he said. “We’re very clear that we don’t know if that’s the case or not, we’ve just been told there has been and we want to advise them of that.”
So in a nutshell, the BPI provide all the ‘evidence’, and the ISPs have to blindly believe it and take action against their own customers. To think that a commercial organization like the BPI is allowed to provide its own unchallenged allegations in such a completely non-transparent manner is the real outrage in all of this. If the BPI is to be trusted with such power, it has to be held accountable. If it is to remain credible in its role as the “UK MP3 Police” its systems must be opened up to public scrutiny. Once they are proved to be accurate by a panel of independent experts, then all well and good, but the fact remains that the BPI only give a vague indication of how they operate and have no intentions of elaborating.
Matt Philips, Director of Communications at the BPI refused to tell TorrentFreak how they gather their evidence, so any right-minded individual with an interest in this issue might find themselves asking: “What exactly are they afraid of?”
Clearly, it should be possible from their detailed records for an ISP to confirm or deny the technical evidence provided by the BPI. However, they aren’t in a position to do this since it would be a massive breach of customer privacy. Instead, the word of the BPI is taken at face value.
In a response, some Swedish ISPs have voiced their opinions too. “We don’t want to act like police and feel that a system similar to that in the UK is a deep invasion of privacy,” said Annika Kristersson of Tele2, adding: “It would entail us having to spy on our customers.”
Everyone makes mistakes and no system is flawless so it’s essential to have a verification process before throwing accusations around. Until then, take comfort in knowing that the file-sharing equivalent of home-made, untested, uncalibrated police speed cameras of unknown design and ability are operated by people with a vested interest and are passing judgment on you, your children and potentially (should the BPI get its way) your whole Internet future. A little transparency to inspire confidence isn’t too much to ask.
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
UK “MP3 Police” Evidence Unchallenged, Not For Public Consumption
26.Jul.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
Last week, we wrote about the new attempt to invigorate video distribution, by mixing torrents with streaming video. Our piece piqued the interest of the leading TV-torrent distribution group – EZTV – and just a few hours ago, they launched a live-beta test of the technology for their ‘warez’.
TorrentFreak likes to be right there reporting important news, but it’s not that often that we are the catalyst for P2P developments. This, however, is one of those times. EZTV administrator ‘Novaking’ told TorrentFreak that the decision to start experimenting with Swarmplayer came after reading about the technology here last week, and it left him “intrigued”.
The Swarmplayer EZTV is experimenting with uses slightly modified torrent files (.tstream), which make it possible to stream video files using the BitTorrent protocol. This new technology allows publishers to offer video steams without having to pay for expensive bandwidth. Theoretically, you can watch all torrent files with the player but it’s recommended to use newer releases, as they often offer a higher swarm speed. Streaming the typical TV show will run to around 100kb/sec, a speed unattainable with their older television torrents due in part to the low peer numbers, as much as the larger piece size used in the pre-stream torrents.
Novaking isn’t too worried about the sequential piece transfer, and loss of the tit-for-tat impacting the speeds of the swarm for those not trying to stream. “The spread will be so wide in the first week,” he tells us, “that it won’t affect it greatly. Of course it’s impossible to tell until it’s fully live and working.” Currently, only their own torrents will be available via .tstream files, but the hope is that should the test prove successful during the next week, to have them for the torrents from their partner sites, such as MVgroup as well.
BitTorrent streaming is the ideal low-cost distribution model for online video. Here at TorrentFreak we have been testing out the Swarmplayer since its very early beta days with Mininova, and it does look to be a very promising development. However, the client does not (yet) have an option to keep a fully saved copy of the file on your system for later re-watching, and it also doesn’t allow you to change the port it uses. But these are minor issues that should be solved easily.
It is interesting to see that this multi-million dollar research project collaborates with torrent sites like Mininova, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC. Could this be the future of television? It is at least a possibility, and something for major networks to look at, as some already are (the BBC is a member of the group behind P2PNext, for example). EZTV’s Novaking certainly seems to think so. “We are hoping that TV networks start seeing this as a method to provide people with what they want”.
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
EZTV Trials TV-Torrent Streaming
26.Jul.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
The Pirate Bay is messing with Hollywood again, as they’ve put up a new logo which links to pirated copies of the blockbuster movie “The Dark Knight”. Although Warner did all it can to protect the film from leaking, a Cam version leaked onto BitTorrent sites soon after it premiered.
The Dark Knight has been a huge success in theaters. In its first weekend, the film grossed a record breaking $158.4 million, and it’s currently on top of IMDB’s top 250 movies of all time with an average rating of 9.3.
The Pirate Bay now joins the hype, as the renamed their site into “The Pirate Bat“, and put up a new logo that links to a search for “The Dark Knight”.
A week ago the police arrested a man who tried to record the movie with a camcorder. However, they couldn’t stop all cammers, and it didn’t take long before a leak got onto various BitTorrent sites. Rlslog reported last week that a copy of “The Dark Knight”, was published by a release group called “TradingStandards”. As usual, reports say that the quality of the leak is pretty poor. There has since been a Telesync of the movie released, which means if nothing else, the sound will be better.
This is not the first time that The Pirate Bay has rebranded its site to piss off content owners. When Apple’s OSX x86 leaked. in July 2005, they renamed the site to the Pear Bay, and linked to the leaked torrent. Back in July 2005 The Pirate Bay put up a logo inspired on Grand Theft Auto for the release of their new website, the Grand Theft Bay. Apart from being creative with their logo’s TPB is known for their hilarious responses to copyright owners who request takedowns.
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
The Pirate Bay Promotes “The Dark Knight” Leak
25.Jul.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
Court documents show that a hacker, hired by the MPAA, offered to reveal the identities of the Pirate Bay founders. The hacker, who also retrieved private information from TorrentSpy, was paid $15.000 for his efforts.
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 and site upgrades. They will be back soon.
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
MPAA Hacker Spied on The Pirate Bay
24.Jul.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
Torrentz.com, the largest BitTorrent meta-search engine, celebrates its 5th anniversary today. The site, one of the oldest torrent sites around, has evolved quite a lot over the years. Let’s take a look at how it all started.
Back in 2003, torrent sites came and went like the wind. Since most sites were hosted on home connections or shared hosting accounts, they were struggling to stay online. And, with the MPAA keeping a close eye on every newcomer, legal pressure ended the aspirations of some webmasters.
Nonetheless, during July 2003 a new BitTorrent site by the name of “Torrentz” was launched. Initially, Torrentz was hosting torrent files, the opposite of its position today. The first torrent file - “X-Files [1x01] - Pilot” - was uploaded July 24, 2003, 1:28PM, exactly 5 years ago. Although the torrent file is no longer available the site is still going strong and the visitor count is growing every day.
Torrentz went live only a week after torrentse.cx, one of the largest BitTorrent sites at the time, chose to pull the plug. Like many others, torrentse.cx decided to shut down their site after they received a warning. At the time, one of the administrators stated: “The site torrentse.cx received a cease and desist letter during the day of Wednesday, July 16, 2003 for copyright infringement. The entire website has been removed and will not return.”
Another popular BitTorrent site, bytemonsoon.com, threw in the towel around the same time. “Due to excessive bandwidth usage, lack of a stable host, consistent dos attacks, and lack of other options and as I’m leaving in 5 hours and haven’t slept yet, I have no other choice but to shut the site down,” the admin wrote. Those were turbulent times, and SuprNova.org was pretty much the only large site left. However, the sites that went down were soon replaced and these new sites were growing fast - so did Torrentz.
The screenshot below was taken in August 2003, only two weeks after the site went public. As you can see, most torrents had only a handful of peers. Now, five years later, Torrentz has over a million visitors a day, while it indexes more than 10 million pages.
Torrentz in 2003
Happy Birthday…
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
Torrentz Celebrates 5th Anniversary
24.Jul.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
According to initial reports, an announcement due later today will state that major ISPs in the UK have reached an agreement to work with the music industry to start mass warning file-sharers. The deal, brokered by the government, will see hundreds of thousands warned but not disconnected.
In what will be seen by the British Phonographic Industry as a partial victory in its war against file sharers, major ISPs in the UK have agreed to music industry demands to start sending out warning letters to those it accuses of sharing its copyright works.
The report states that the deal was agreed by six of the UK’s most prominent Internet Service Providers following intense government pressure. It’s estimated that these as-yet unnamed ISPs will send out hundreds of thousands of letters to suspected uploaders of music. The ISPs - thought to include Virgin Media and BT - will have their names revealed later today when an official announcement will be made.
Demands from the music industry to disconnect uploaders from the Internet on a “3 strikes and you’re out” basis have not been met by the ISPs nor insisted upon by the government.
A Memorandum of Understanding drawn up by the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR) and signed by all six ISPs states that not only must the ISPs commit to a “significant reduction” in music file-sharing in the UK but they must also help develop legal music services too. All this will be backed up by an educational campaign to ensure that every customer knows that it is illegal to upload copyright music.
More on this breaking news as we get it during the day
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
ISPs To Send “Hundreds of Thousands” of File-Sharing Warnings
24.Jul.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
Comcast is facing a nationwide class action lawsuit for cutting off the BitTorrent traffic of their subscribers. The lawsuit aims to stop the misleading advertising used by Comcast, and to compensate BitTorrent users for the disruption to their service.
August last year we reported - based on findings from network expert Robb Topolski - that Comcast actively disconnected BitTorrent users. Comcast initially denied our allegations, even though we had proof to back up these claims, and they continued to do so for months. Now, a year later, there is no doubt that Comcast offered a degraded service to BitTorrent users, and they now face a nationwide class action lawsuit (doc).
“Comcast surreptitiously installed receiver packets to keep people from using file-sharing programs when it promised it wouldn’t,” Alyson Foster, an associate at the law firm Gilbert Randolph alleges. “Of course the competition is fierce in telecommunications, but they were trying to get an unfair leg up.”
Robb Topolski, who is now the plaintiff in the nationwide class action lawsuit against Comcast, told TorrentFreak at the time: “We have had two Comcast techs confirm Sandvine in use, but neither confirmed or denied its connection with the RST interference. For me, seeding is possible. I can reach my upload speed limit, but there sure is a lot of interference. Since your article came out, I too have received many reports of seeding being impossible. I’m not sure if it’s regional, or what!”
These reports however, were soon picked up by the mainstream press, and eventually led to an investigation by the FCC. Two weeks ago, the FCC announced that it will order Comcast to stop interfering with BitTorrent traffic. FCC chairman said that Comcast slows down BitTorrent users independent of the amount of traffic they use, and that the company failed to communicate their network management practices to their consumers.
It is now up to the federal court to decide if Comcast’s BitTorrent users deserve to be compensated, and whether the company need to stop their misleading advertisements. Foster said the amount of the damages has yet to be estimated, but the alleged damages are expected to exceed $5 million.
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
BitTorrent Users Seek Compensation from Comcast
23.Jul.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
Some artists, bands and labels claim that their lives are ruined by their material being available on P2P networks. BuckCherry are complaining that a track from their latest album has leaked to BitTorrent. How do they complain? Via an Atlantic Records press release. I smell a rather large free-publicity rat.
Leaks of pre-release material onto the Internet are pretty normal events these days. Even the mainstream media are happy to cover the big leaks, usually while portraying file-sharers as the son of the devil. In the past many file-sharing news sites have covered such leaks of movies and music as a matter of course, but as they become more prevalent, less people report on them.
Normally the approaches of the mainstream (and the bands, artist and labels) and that of the file-sharing community are pretty much opposite. On the one hand piracy is killing everything it touches. On the other hand, the file-sharing hand, it’s something totally different - free promotion and all-important publicity for the artists.
Our regular readers will know that the relatively unknown Indiana Gregg did rather well from her recent experiences with piracy, thanks largely to The Pirate Bay, TorrentFreak and dozens of other sites. And she’s not on her own, many other artists have benefited from piracy.
Some of these people are openly happy with their ‘piracy’ successes, others complain like crazy. Interestingly (and this is an opinion piece so feel free to disagree) we now appear to have a third type of piracy complainer - the complain-like-crazy-but-secretly-love-it type.
Enter ‘BuckCherry‘. I haven’t been (un)fortunate enough to hear anything from them but according to Wikipedia they are a hard/alternative rock band. They claim to be pretty mad that a track entitled “Too Drunk…” from their latest album “Black Butterfly” has started cropping up on BitTorrent sites, way in advance of its September 15th release date. This is what the band has to say:
“Too Drunk…,” a featured track from “BLACK BUTTERFLY,” recently appeared online at a number of BitTorrent sites. Buckcherry has released an official statement regarding the song’s unscheduled arrival, declaring, “Honestly, we hate it when this s*** happens, because we want our FANS to have any new songs first.”
There is an old saying, “Least said, soonest mended“, but clearly BuckCherry have never heard of this saying or the concept, since they didn’t just comment casually on the leak, but shouted it from the rooftops in a fully-blown Atlantic Records press release. They mention the leak in the opening paragraph:
Buckcherry Reveals “BLACK BUTTERFLY”; Platinum-Certified Hard Rockers Announce New Album as “Too Drunk…” Appears Online;
…and then go on to mention the actual network (BitTorrent) in the second paragraph detailed above, which is not a particularly smart move if you’re trying to dissuade file-sharers from the inevitable free download. Adding further fuel to the already smoldering pile of suspicion is the fact that it’s possible for fans who preorder to get the “Too Drunk…” track for free.
I may be completely wrong in coming to the conclusion that BuckCherry has (cleverly?) manipulated 30 million world-wide file sharers into sampling their work through their faux displeasure in this press release. I may be wrong that Indiana Gregg is quietly enjoying all the extra publicity afforded to her by piracy.
But of course, the BitTorrent community wouldn’t fall for such a cynical ploy and the file-sharing press wouldn’t fall for it either, we’re not that stupid.
Hmmmm….
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
Does BuckCherry Think The BitTorrent Community is Stupid?
22.Jul.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
