While the British government puts huge amounts of pressure on ISPs to clamp down on file-sharers, it is doing some pirating of its very own. It seems that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s own website is in serious breach of copyright, as it is based on a ripped-off Wordpress theme.
The issue of copyright is a hot one in the UK right now and the government isn’t scared of getting involved. It has been putting huge amounts of pressure on ISPs to take action against alleged music file-sharers, so imagine, if you will, the beautiful crimson color Prime Minister Brown’s face will turn today when he is declared a pirate too.
Amongst other things, Anthony from antbag.com makes WordPress themes - he gives them away for free but if someone wants to donate, they can. His work is released under Creative Commons 3.0 license, which means that if someone wants to use a theme ‘as is’ or modified in some way, they are required to credit him. A link in the footer of every theme he creates points back to Anthony’s site - this is the minimum attribution he expects, which is pretty damn reasonable.
So imagine Anthony’s surprise when he discovered that his NetWorker theme for WordPress had been used by the British government without honoring the Creative Commons license. The theme has been heavily modified, including the removal of all links back to his site, but Anthony has been able to verify from the source files that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s own website is in fact built on NetWorker.
It is clear that Brown’s site indeed uses the Anthony’s theme - violating the Creative Commons license. Still, the site even claims it is protected by Crown Copyright - a quick look at the CSS for the theme should dispel that myth.
Anthony sent an email to the company who developed the site who claimed that although they did some testing on the NetWorker theme, they then rebuilt it from scratch. Unfortunately, according to Anthony “they failed to remove the credits in the CSS file that named the theme ‘NetWorker’ or to change the theme folder which is named ‘NetWorker-10′ (Networker version 1.0).”
There is a campaign running in the UK right now featuring “Knock-Off Nigel” along with cringe-worthy videos depicting this fictitious character as some kind of social outcast.
One would think that Mr Brown would avoid the sort of behavior that could easily make him the star of the next campaign but if it’s good enough for the MPAA, it must be good enough for him.
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
British Government Caught Pirating On Prime Minister’s Website
20.Aug.08 
TorrentFreak 
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This week, close to two million people have downloaded the Olympics opening ceremony, which makes it the most pirated TV-show of the week - again. The International Olympic Committee is not too happy about it, and they are urging the Swedish government to take on The Pirate Bay.
Last week we reported that the Opening Ceremony had been downloaded by more than a million people, and this figure has doubled over the past 7 days. However, there is less demand for the other Olympic events, as most of these get less than 20,000 downloads.
Compared to 2004, the availability of Olympic events on BitTorrent has grown significantly, both in quantity and quality. Interestingly, the demand for Olympic torrents is the greatest in China, as 65% of the people who downloaded the Openings Ceremony come from the host country.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is not pleased seeing their shows on BitTorrent sites though. Yesterday they even sent a letter (read it here) to the Swedish Minister of Justice, urging her to take on The Pirate Bay. From the letter, it looks like they have been reading last week’s article. “Our technical advisor Informs us that as many as 1 million copies of the Opening Ceremony have been illegally downloaded worldwide, with the most significant activity taking place through Pirate Bay,” they write.
The IOC claims to have contacted The Pirate Bay with a takedown request, but turned to the Minister when they got no response. The Pirate Bay denies this, and Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde writes: “The phone hasn’t rung. And I guess their e-mail probably got caught in the Chinese firewall, since TPB is blocked there.”
From the letter, it seems that the IOC is predicting that the Closing Ceremony will hit BitTorrent immediately after the fireworks. “We are also gravely concerned about the upcoming Closing Ceremony on August 24, as it is entirely predictable that illegal copies of that event will be immediately made available through the Pirate Bay.” They are right of course, and we’re afraid that the Swedish government can’t do much about it either.
Today, the Minister said in a radio interview that The Pirate Bay is not really good promotion for Sweden (although some would disagree), but that there is indeed little they can do to stop the tracker from hosting torrent files.
It is not clear why the IOC is going after the Pirate Bay, and not any of the other BitTorrent sites. Of course, they are the most outspoken, but the majority of all the Olympic torrents are downloaded from other sites. Most BitTorrent sites do take down torrents when they are asked to, so it might be a good idea to start there….
Below is this week’s chart of the most pirated TV-shows on BitTorrent, the Olympics Opening Ceremony tops the chart again. The data for the TV-torrent chart is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.
Top Downloads August 10 - August 17
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
Olympic Torrents More Popular Than Ever
19.Aug.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
In an official letter to the Swedish Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has asked for “assistance” from the Swedish government with preventing video clips from the Olympics in Beijing to be shared on The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay, however, does not plan to take anything down, and renamed their tracker to The Beijing Bay.
The IOC is getting used to censoring the Internet, and has asked the Swedish government to help remove Olympic torrents from The Pirate Bay - which they claimed have been downloaded more than 1 million times. IOC also wants the government to assist in preventing (!) clips from the Olympics closing ceremonies to be shared.
Apparently the IOC has been reading the article we wrote last week, which showed that millions of people are downloading the Olympic opening ceremony on BitTorrent. In the meantime, several other Olympic clips have been posted. Although these are not as popular as the opening ceremony, the gymnastics finals and other events get close to 50.000 downloads.
The press secretary of the Minister of Justice has stated that it is primarily clips from the Opening ceremonies that the IOC wants to stop. The Committee also questions the legal situation and wants to be informed on whether they can take measures themselves to prohibit videos of the Olympics to be shared.
It’s interesting that the IOC chose to contact the Swedish government, instead of The Pirate Bay. They probably realize that sending a takedown notice wouldn’t be that effective. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak: “I think it’s good that IOC understands that they will get nowhere with sending a legal threat to us. It shows they’re smart and without manners.”
“We were going to ignore the Olympics, but now we’re loading our cannons. Our weapons of mass distribution is pointed towards China.” The first action The Pirate Bay took is creating a new logo for the site, and renaming it to The Beijing Bay. In true Pirate Bay style the front page logo now links to the tag “give us the gold,” Peter said.
The tag refers to the incident with the Swedish wrestler last week, who tossed away his bronze medal after he lost his chance on a Gold medal because of an error made by the jury. Peter told us: “I also hope that the Swedish government will report back to them and tell them to give us the gold that the IOC stole from the Swedish wrestler. And to tell them to not host the Olympics in a country with poor respect for human rights.”
Most BitTorrent sites do take down torrents when they are asked to. However, none of the admins TorrentFreak spoke to received a takedown request so far. Of course, the solution to IOC’s BitTorrent problem is easy. By not televising the closing ceremonies, the IOC not only hinders filesharers, but also makes sure VHS tapers worldwide won’t be able to steal the Olympic spirit. Sounds like a winner.
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
IOC Wants Olympic Torrents Off The Pirate Bay
18.Aug.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
The team behind the Shareaza client have recently had a tough time, having been the victim of a music industry conspiracy to steal their brand name and destroy goodwill. Undeterred they are fighting back and today proudly announce the development of a brand new filesharing client with BitTorrent support - Project Panthera.
Since its release, the open source Shareaza has been downloaded an impressive 43,000,000 times from Sourceforge alone, making it one of the most successful filesharing clients. However, through no fault of the development team, its recent history is complicated and at times sinister.
After turning two other filesharing applications, Bearshare and iMesh, into pay services, a company called Discordia Ltd turned their attention to Shareaza. The company, which seems to be related to the recording industry hijacked the Shareaza domain and moved to seize the valuable Shareaza trademark as their own. Discordia even had the nerve to set their lawyers on the open source team. A summary of the entire scandalous story so far can be obtained here.
Back in May the Shareaza team announced “We’re fighting back!” and today we bring good news in the battle to neutralize the nefarious intentions of Discordia - the release of a brand new client. We interview Wout and Alex of Shareaza about their new baby: Project Panthera.
TF: The Shareaza client has enjoyed considerable success over the years. What inspired you to taper off the effort on the old software and embark on this huge effort of creating a whole new client?
Wout: Due to recent events beyond our scope of expertise, we were required to rethink our strategy surrounding Shareaza. Because we can count on the support of a massive userbase, we decided to create a new client, with some of the features requested most for Shareaza, but which we were never able to introduce.
TF: Shareaza is a very well known name in the P2P community - it’s been downloaded way in excess of 43 million times. What were the factors that led to the decision to create a fresh brand? (Project Panthera)
Wout: Well once again some people demonstrated how low a person is able to go. We learned that a company owned by Imesh (Discordia) filed for a trademark on the Shareaza brand name. Even though they have no ties to the program or the Shareaza brand. So in essence they are just doing it to benefit from the Shareaza name. This was also a factor in naming the application. We didn’t want them to benefit from our developers hard work yet again.
Alex: We basically got mugged by a gang armed with lawyers. This meant we had to reconsider our whole approach to managing Shareaza’s development to ensure the long term survival of the project. We can see a real danger that this may happen to other popular free software projects too.
Something interesting we’ve discovered: did you know that the United States Patent and Trademark Office aren’t connected to the Internet? When Discordia Ltd. filed for the trademark on our name, we wrote to the USPTO and pointed out that we’ve been using the Shareaza name for years. They said they can’t investigate sources external to their own database. We said “Couldn’t you just spend 30 seconds Googling the name of the application?” They said their procedures don’t allow them to do that. This rubbish is actually the basis of intellectual property law in the U.S. and many other western nations. Is it any wonder people are going out and creating their own licenses like the GPL and the various flavors of Creative Commons out of sheer bloody frustration with the IP laws?
According to Alex, “F**king heaps!” of time and effort have gone into the development of Panthera, “a massive job” which has been underway since April 2008, and in part personally financed by members of the team. As Panthera is (of course) an open source project and does not include any adware or bundled software, Wout told us that the team are counting on donations to help them make this software the best of its kind.
TF: What are the key features of ‘Panthera’ and why is this release superior to the ‘old’ software? Why should people switch?
Wout: Panthera has every feature Shareaza has and much more. Panthera includes decent BitTorrent support (libtorrent), skin support, proper Gnutella1 support, no use of the registry and a completely revamped media player. There is no denying it - we looked at Shareaza a lot when coding this app, and whenever we found some code that was interesting, we asked ourselves: “How can we make it better?”
TF: Panthera is a multi-network client, including BitTorrent. Tell us a bit more about the implementation and the support for other networks.
Wout: Panthera supports Gnutella1, Gnutella2, BitTorrent and ED2K (not in beta but it will be in final release). The BitTorrent in the beta release will be the default QT (more about this later) BitTorrent sample client. This is for testing purposes only. Once we have enough test data, we will replace this with Libtorrent from Rasterbar.
Alex: Shareaza has a long history with BitTorrent - we were the first client to experiment with decentralized torrents for example - but since the BitTorrent scene has just exploded, our home grown implementation has fallen behind the times which is why we’ve decided to implement the libtorrent library. One other reason is that as we’re free and open source, we figured it was about time we started taking advantage of our right to use other people’s free and open source code where its better than ours. Why reinvent the wheel when there is a perfectly good solution just sitting there waiting for people to use it under the same copyleft conditions we believe in?
TF: Panthera is multi-network, and multi-platform too. Tell us more about this.
Wout: Multi platform means more users, means more files, means more and faster downloads. No other P2P program allows to connect to virtually all the most popular networks on every operating system.
Alex: Linux especially is starting to become a viable alternative to Windows and many of our developers and supporters are either dual booting or have switched to Linux environments completely. The next logical step is native multi-platform support. As Wout says, broader coverage = win.
Clearly a project of such ambition can consume considerable resources. Wout and Alex agree that they will take all the help they can get, noting that they “absolutely need testers and feedback” and welcome anyone who is prepared to code, test or donate. In particular they would be very grateful for offers of help from developers - the program is based on the QT framework and is coded entirely in C++, and anyone with experience of Rasterbar’s Libtorrent.
It is possible that Discordia might just be successful in stealing the Shareaza brand name but the team remains upbeat and is full of enthusiasm for Panthera.
“It’s given us a chance to re-write a fantastic P2P app and make it even better,” says Alex, “which is a perfect example of the file-sharing Hydra in action.”
Panthera Project will be officially available on August 25th but in the meantime, temporary test builds are available here.
Anyone offering project support should contact the team on contribute@pantheraproject.com.
Those able to donate, should do so via donations@pantheraproject.com
Don’t forget, the real Shareaza project is located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/shareaza/
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
Shareaza Team Fights Back With Project Panthera
18.Aug.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
The top 10 most downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent, “What Happens in Vegas” tops the chart this week.
We do not link to actual torrent files because linking to files that link to files that may be copyrighted is something that might get us in trouble.
The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.
RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.
As of August 18, 2008…
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
Most Downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent (wk33)
18.Aug.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
In part one of our look into the anti-piracy efforts at universities, we saw that Missouri S&T used a simple home grown system, ignoring the favorites of the entertainment industry. In part two, we look at Ohio University, Texas A&M University, Tulane University and others that do use one of the methods preferred by the RIAA and MPAA.
Ohio University (OU) and 7 other universities decided that blocking the many legitimate uses for P2P is not the best idea. Instead they have decided to go the high-tech route instead. They went for the method touted by the music industry, and paraded by the RIAA around Capitol Hill in 2004. A ‘fingerprint’ recognition service called ‘Copysense‘.
Copysense works by listening in on ALL network traffic, and looking for data patterns that match signatures, or ‘fingerprints’ loaded on it. If it detects data packets matching one of its signatures, it terminates the connection by sending forged RST packets to both sides of the connection (Comcast anyone?).
Piracy detection services like Copysense are not cheap. Ohio University paid around $60,000 in 2007 for the system, and an additional $15,500 a year for updates and support. For this, they got a network monitoring box, and some questionable results that prompt more questions than answers, but we will discuss these another time.
There are more issues though, a system working in promiscuous mode is also a big security risk. Passwords, and user names, if transmitted unencrypted, are observable, as is any other traffic sent in the clear. When J. Brice Bible, the CIO at Ohio University, took up his post, it was in the wake of data security breaches. Now he has paid tens of thousands of dollars for a box that can potentially cause a similar breach. Of course, potentially any network client can do this, but only on their local network, not the entire university network.
Ohio University seems to be happy with the entertainment industry’s favorite anti-piracy system. Of course, the less skeptical amongst us would think that outgoing head of the WIPO being an alumni is pure coincidence, as is the CEO of Fox News. People with a strong pro-copyright agenda having contact with an early adopter of a technology pushed heavily by the MPAA and RIAA, is something that rose some eyebrows at the TorrentFreak office though.
Regardless, Ohio University claims the program has been a success. Speaking in the student newspaper, Bible said, “It works very well for today, (but) I don’t know if it will work well tomorrow or the next day or the year after. I want to hear from students … I think students should be engaged in this discussion—and faculty, too.”
If you’re a student at Ohio University, or one of the other universities that use Copysense, why not let him know, and get involved.
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
Tackling College Piracy: MPAA and RIAA’s Favorite
17.Aug.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
BitTorrent’s popularity is increasing with new sites seemingly launched every day. Usniff is one such site, offering a fast real-time torrent search engine where users can search four of the most popular BitTorrent sites.
Usniff combines a great looking design with fast, real-time search results. The site currently allows users to search The Pirate Bay, Mininova, isoHunt and BitTorrent, and the search results can be sorted by file size, torrent name, search engine, upload date, peers and seeds.
TorrentFreak asked Samo, the founder of Usniff, why he started the site. “My inspiration was YouTorrent.com, before it sailed to clean waters,” he told us. “It is simple to use, responsive and has loads of good results for almost any search query. At that time I didn’t know about other similar meta-search engines, so I decided i’d try to make one myself - mostly for fun.”
The list of sites that can be searched through Usiff is currently limited to four, but Samo told us he plans to add more torrent sites in the near future. “I have not yet made a complete wish-list, but btmon.com, bitenova.nl and torrentbox.com will definitely be added in September,” he said.
Usniff does indeed have a similar look and feel as the old YouTorrent design. YouTorrent, launched in January 2008, quickly becoming the most successful new torrent site. The site initially indexed all the popular torrent sites, but switched to purely ‘verified’ torrents this April, after receiving legal threats.
Samo anticipates legal threats, but that’s not going to hold him back. “I actually do expect legal problems,” Samo told us. He thinks, however, that his site is completely legal, as it does not link to copyrighted material. “Worst case scenario is that i’ll have to move it to a server in a less strict country.”
We’ve seen a lot of new BitTorrent meta-search engines this year. Sites like this are a great resource to search multiple BitTorrent sites at once. Never forget though, that meta-search engines like this depend heavily on public trackers and sites that host the .torrent files - BitTorrent’s backbone. There aren’t too many of those left.
Usniff search results
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
Usniff, Torrent Search Made Easy
17.Aug.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
If you can’t beat pirates, join them. This is Playlouder’s philosophy, a music download service that allows subscribers to download music from BitTorrent and other filesharing networks, while reimbursing the copyright owners. The concept sure is interesting, but the current setup is naive, flawed and doomed to fail.
Reports about the new and upcoming legal P2P service “Playlouder” are all over the news - again. Just like three years ago, Playlouder co-founder Paul Sanders manages to generate buzz for his legalized filesharing service. “We are confident that we will have something quite good to announce in the next couple of months,” he said, claiming that his company made a deal with one of the top ISPs in the UK.
The idea is simple; Playlouder plans to offer subscribers of one of the larger ISPs in the UK a service that will allow them to pirate as much music as they want, for a flat fee. Customers will be allowed to use the BitTorrent sites and filesharing applications they are used to. Through Deep Packet Inspection, Playlouder will check what tracks you download, so they can pay the rights holder accordingly.
The idea of creating a service where users can use BitTorrent sites without having to worry about legal repercussions is interesting. However, despite 5 years of development, the Playlouder team is overlooking some of the most basic features of file-sharing, which will render the service useless. Playlouder will allow its subscribers to download content from BitTorrent, but they won’t allow them to share the files with others who do not use the service. This restriction is needed because they want to prevent copyright infringement, but it causes a few problems too.
Thou shalt share
The number one rule for BitTorrent users is: Share. If you don’t share - upload files to others - your download speeds will reduce dramatically. This means that it could take hours instead of minutes to download an album from your favorite BitTorrent site. What Playlouder will offer is a highly degraded version of BitTorrent, and subscribers will not be able to get the great download speeds they are so accustomed to.
BitTorrent Abusers
Torrent sites are not too fond of people who aim to abuse the system. It wouldn’t surprise me if most trackers ban Playlouder customers from accessing the service, as they will seriously hurt the download speed of the swarm, and thus the average downloader. What they’re technically offering is a Freeleech service, one which doesn’t share back to the community. Together with the decreased download speeds, this means that Playlouder users will not get to enjoy the BitTorrent experience that everyone else gets. In fact, it will be almost impossible for them to download anything from BitTorrent.
Encryption
Another issue, not so much related to the user experience, is that Playlouder will not be able to track what people are downloading when they enable protocol header encryption. A significant number of BitTorrent users are using encryption to prevent ISPs from throttling their traffic, but since encryption obfuscates the protocol headers, Playlouder can’t track what their users are downloading. This then means that artists and labels will not be fully compensated for the tracks these users download.
Let us be clear, we do encourage the search for new business models here at TorrentFreak, where ideally, both artists and consumers benefit. However, in its current form the Playlouder service is not going to be a great success, if it is more than just another “vaporshare” service in the first place.
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
Legal P2P Music Service Doomed to Fail
16.Aug.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
U2 manager Paul McGuinness, who wants file-sharers to be disconnected from the Internet, has something else to complain about today. Four songs from U2’s upcoming album ‘No Line On The Horizon’ have been leaked online after Bono played them too loudly on his stereo - and a fan recorded them.
There’s little file-sharers like more than news of a little payback. Ever since U2 manager Paul McGuiness suggested that people using P2P should have their connection to the Internet severed, he has elevated himself into the ranks of ‘fair game’ in file-sharing circles - and therefore ripe to be pwned. After today, he’s going to want file-sharers executed - or worse.
Proving that if media can be seen, heard or touched it can be copied, songs from U2’s forthcoming album have been leaked online. Four tracks from the album, provisionally entitled ‘No Line On The Horizon’, have appeared on the Internet. The mechanism of the release is pretty comical - Bono blasted the tracks from a stereo in his villa in the South of France so loudly, that a passer-by recognized his voice and recorded them.
Four songs have been put online including the title track, the first single from the album ‘Sexy Boots’, ‘Moment of Surrender’ and ‘For Your Love’.
There’s no doubt that these cam-quality recordings will be particularly poor, but a large section of the file-sharing U2 fans won’t care about that. They have something that they’re not supposed to have and Mr McGuiness has had a bit of egg rubbed in his face - which probably holds more value to file-sharers than a pre-release FLAC rip of the entire album….
…which will appear online too of course, probably before the scheduled November release date.
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
U2 Tracks Leak After Bono Plays Stereo Too Loudly
16.Aug.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
Last Friday, Italian ISPs started to prevent their customers from accessing the Pirate Bay. Strangely enough, Pirate Bay traffic is not redirected to Italian authorities, but to the IFPI, the infamous anti-piracy lobby of the music industry. Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde is not happy, and says it’s a scandal.
For now, potential Italian Pirate Bay users are denied access to the BitTorrent tracker, and Italian authorities are investigating whether the site should be blocked indefinitely. The block totally missed its purpose though, as The Pirate Bay saw an increase in traffic from Italy instead of a decline.
The Pirate Bay has already taken several countermeasures to make sure Italians can access the site. These don’t work across all ISPs yet, and those users are redirected to the following page by their ISP. Interestingly, this page is hosted on a server that belongs to IFPI - a reverse IP lookup shows that the page is linked to www.pro-music.org, IFPI’s legal music site.
“I think it’s a scandal,” Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak in response to this remarkable finding. “I hope that people start noticing that IFPI gets more and more into bed with the police. It’s really disturbing that one side of an ongoing fight gets more authority without a legal basis.”
Peter finds it hard to believe that the IFPI now gets all the traffic destined for the Pirate Bay, without any legal grounds, and he urges Italian users to clear their cookies before the IFPI decides to steal them. We have to agree with Peter here, it is indeed very disturbing that the traffic is redirected to a site which belongs to an anti-piracy lobby, instead of diverting neutrally to the ISP or local authorities.
The IFPI was contacted for a response several days ago, but hasn’t replied so far. It’s not the first time that they’ve “hijacked” traffic from a torrent site. Last October they did the same thing with the OiNK domain. That instance was even worse, as they used the opportunity to threaten members of the BitTorrent tracker, in advance of any trial.
Last October, the IFPI lost their .com domain, which was mysteriously transferred to the Pirate Bay, who started International Federation of Pirate Interests. Even though the IFPI managed to get the domain back in their possession, the incident marked an increase in efforts from the organization to take out The Pirate Bay.
Thus far, only John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of the IFPI, has responded to the Italian move against The Pirate Bay stating: “This decision sends out a clear message that The Pirate Bay’s activities are illegal under Italian law. The Pirate Bay facilitates the mass infringement of copyright across music, film, television and games. Its very name shows the contempt its operators hold for the creators of legitimate content.”
Italy is trying hard to get rid of their fascist label, and some Italians were quite upset about the Pirate Bay calling their country a fascist state, but scandals like this don’t help to improve this image. Things get even worse if you take into account that the IFPI covered up the fact that the organization was founded in Rome, Italy, under the watch of Mussolini, one of the greatest fascist dictators. Enough said.
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
IFPI Hijacks Pirate Bay Traffic
15.Aug.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
