The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent. A lot of newcomers, while “Kung Fu Panda” 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. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.
RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.
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27.Oct.08 
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A Belgian ISP ordered by a court to stop all piracy on its network, only to discover that it was an impossible task, has seen that decision reversed. The court recognized that the anti-piracy solutions recommended by the music industry didn’t work, which left the ISP Scarlet in an impossible position.
In 2007 legal case involving Belgian ISP Scarlet and music copyright group SABAM, a court ruled that ISPs could be forced to stop people committing copyright infringement on P2P networks. The judge in the case took the advice offered by the music industry, who claimed it was possible for ISPs to stop illegal file-sharing using a system called Audible Magic. Scarlet was given 6 months to comply. It was to prove impossible.
A year later, Scarlet’s lawyers were back in court. The court previously ordered that Scarlet has to pay compensation of 2,500 Euros for every day they failed to stop file-sharers sharing files, but the company’s lawyers argued it was impossible to comply, since the anti-piracy system ‘Audible Magic’ they were told to use by the court (on the advice of the music industry and SABAM), simply did not work.
Now, having heard a lawyer for SABAM admit that they had misled the court over the effectiveness of Audible Magic, the judge in the case has reversed the ruling. The final ruling in the case is due in October 2009 at the court of appeal in Brussels, so until then, the judge decided that Scarlet are no longer subject to the 2,500 Euros per day fine, which had already reached around 750,000 Euros.
This year, several music industry lobby groups have spoken out in favor of content filters. They argue that ISPs have the responsibility to prevent their customers from accessing copyrighted works, and thus act as a virtual police force. Earlier this year, IFPI took the Irish ISP Eircom to court for this reason. In addition, IFPI asked the European Parliament to adopt legislation that would make such filters mandatory, and to block entire websites including The Pirate Bay.
Luckily, the European Parliament decided that anti-piracy filters were not appropriate. In addition, it later ruled that other anti-piracy measures, such as “three-strikes” laws are too strict as well, as such policies restrict the rights and freedoms of Internet users. In the light of these recent developments, and because it is simply impossible for any ISP to filter transfers of copyrighted works on their network, Scarlet has a good chance to win their appeal next year.
Post from: TorrentFreak
26.Oct.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
This year, several established bands have decided to give away their music for free, while giving fans the option to donate whatever they seem fit. For Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails it was a great success since they made more money from the donation model than they would have otherwise. However, it seems that this doesn’t hold for less established artists.
After hearing the success stories of Radiohead and NiN, several people opined that this should be the future business model of the music industry. Give your music away for free, and fans will line up in the donation queue. This should work, right? NiN made $1.6 million in the first week their album was available for download, and Radiohead said it made more money online than with all of their other albums combined.
The big advantage NiN and Radiohead have, of course, is that they already have a huge fanbase. From a standing start it would be difficult for relatively unknown bands to give their music away, and it would be much harder to get people to donate. To see if this would indeed be the case, and to get an impression of how much revenue an artist can generate from the donation model, we decided to crunch the numbers from Jamendo.
Jamendo is one of the largest music sharing sites where users have the option to donate to artists they would like to support. Since the site launched in June 2005, close to half a million users have signed up. In three years, the site has turned into one of the largest music sharing communities. However, it seems like the donate buttons are gathering dust.
Before we go into detail, we want to make it clear that Jamendo is one of the best free music services on the Internet, as it brings together artists and fans. This post is not an attempt to write about how Jamendo failed, because the site is much more than a ‘download and donate’ platform. What we want to show, however, is that donation based music models are not money magnets for the average artist.
We decided to examine the total number of donations up until October 25, 2008, and the results are quite revealing. Of the 423968 users, 1650 have donated something, little under 0.5%. In total, these users were good for 2712 donations adding up to just over $36,000. This translates into an average of little over $10 per donation. The largest donation on Jamendo thus far was 200 Euros ($250), impressive, but not as impressive as the $5000 NiN’s Trent Reznor donated when he downloaded his ‘free copy’ of Radiohead’s album.
The top grossing artist on Jamendo is Rob Costlow, with just over $1000 in donations over three years. On Jamendo, his two albums were downloaded more than 50,000 times, and over half a million people have streamed his music on the site. Jamendo currently has close to 10,000 artists (not all of them accept donations), and 648 of those received at least one donation. To some this all sounds quite disappointing, but does this mean that artists shouldn’t use donation based services such as Jamendo?
The answer to this question is simple. If their goal is to make thousands of dollars from it, probably not. However, that is not what most artists intend to do. They want their music to be heard, create an audience and pick up some fans here and there. The people who download their music for free, and like it, are potentially the people who visit their gigs, buy merchandising, and tell their friends about this great band they discovered. Lesser known artists will never be able to generate a decent income from donations, but making their music available for free sure is part of a viable business model.
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25.Oct.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
An animated Norwegian movie featuring sex, violence, stoners, a junkie elephant and even vegans, has been panned by UK critics. However, much to the dismay of the distributor, file-sharers don’t agree with this assessment and have downloaded it 500,000 times, which the movie’s producer thinks is ‘Great!’
The Times reviewer called it a “misanthropic and foul-mouthed movie” containing “the first graphic depiction of sexual intercourse between two CGI cartoon characters”. Hmmm, maybe not the first, but nevertheless the reviewer concludes “Like everything else in the film, a British-Norwegian co-production, it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.”
And that was one of the kind reviews. It’s fair to say that “Free Jimmy” hasn’t been well received by the British press reviewers, even though it features voice-overs from the likes of Woody Harrelson and Simon Pegg. However, does this mean that the movie has to fade away into obscurity? Not at all.
‘Free Jimmy’ was released previously in Norwegian language and features four stoners, five vegans, three mobsters and four hunters competing to free a malnourished and circus-enslaved Russian junkie elephant. Which element the British press objected to most is debatable but what is clear, though, is that even if Fleet Street’s finest think the movie is dire, not everyone does. Time Out called it “undeniably touching, poignant” and Internet pirates seems to like the prospect of animated sex, drugs and violence too. Quite a bit in fact.
The producer of the movie, Lars Hellebust, told Dagbladet that the UK distributor, in contrast to his own feelings, was pretty upset that the movie was being heartily pirated on the Internet: “The distributor in England called and was despairing over the fact that thousands of people had downloaded it, but I just said ‘Great!’”
It seems that Lars appreciates that, even though the critics have been a bit sniffy, there are other avenues to be explored when trying to get exposure. Lars says that the more people discuss the movie, the greater its potential audience and in this case, file-sharing really can be a useful promotional tool. So just how much exposure is this movie getting on BitTorrent?
Although ‘Free Jimmy’ only came out officially in the UK on October 17th 2008, it has been available on the trackers in DVDRIP form for roughly 500 days (16 months) already, clocking up very nearly 500,000 downloads. Clearly the presence of stoners, four letter words or even vegans in a movie isn’t enough to put pirates off. Hell no. The most popular pirate version of the movie came from the one and only aXXo, and those releases are always hot, no matter what the critics say.
However, Lars is still optimistic that people will dig deep. “If they really like it they won’t be satisfied just owning a computer file, they will also buy the DVD,” he said with his fingers crossed, hoping that any of the early downloaders can remember the movie from more than 16 months ago.
An official DVD will be released in time for Christmas. Just don’t send one to the kids.
Spare a thought for ‘Anne‘, the last remaining circus elephant kept captive in the UK, and forced to work in grim conditions for the last 50 years.
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25.Oct.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
Today, the latest edition of the Wikipedia school edition has been released by SOS Children’s Villages, a charity organization that aims to help orphans and vulnerable children worldwide. The 08/09 edition can be downloaded for free, via BitTorrent only, and comprises over 5500 hand-picked educational articles aimed at helping schools to enhance their curriculum.
This year’s Wikipedia edition for schools is the largest since the project started back in 2006. With 34,000 images and 20 million words, it is comparable to a twenty volume encyclopedia captured on a single DVD.
Without a doubt, it is the most successful “checked content” project based on the English Wikipedia, used by hundreds of schools in first and third world countries. The project was originally aimed at schools in developing countries, but because of the high quality articles - all based around the UK curriculum with an absence of adult content - it is often used on intranets in first world schools too.
To save on resources, Wikipedia for schools is only available online via BitTorrent, which practically reduces the charity’s distribution costs to zero. SOS Children CEO Andrew Cates, who is a Wikipedia administrator himself, said that they have no other choice than to use BitTorrent, since the 2.9 GB download would crush their server.
“BitTorrent was a bit disappointing in that it got us the only substantial criticisms we received online,” Cates said in an interview with Wikinews. “A lot of people find it too much effort to use. However for the period we offered a straight http: download we had huge problems with spiders eating vast bandwidth.”
“As per last year therefore our main two channels will be free download by BitTorrent and mailing the DVDs free all over the world. At a pinch we will (as before) put straight copies up for individuals who cannot get it any other way, and we have some copies on memory sticks for on distributors,” Cates added.
The .torrent file is available for download on the SOS Children’s Villages website. For those who don’t want to install a BitTorrent client, the DVD can also be downloaded from any web browser with BitLet.
A final word of advice from SOS Children’s Villages: “It helps our charity if you keep µTorrent running after your download is finished.”
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24.Oct.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
Sweden, home of The Pirate Bay and the most active pro-piracy lobbyists and politicians, is drafting a new law that would make it easier to go after individuals who share copyrighted files on filesharing networks such as BitTorrent. The new law, likely to be opposed by a large number of Swedes, will go into effect April 2009.
The law will make it easier for copyright holders to get a court order in order to force ISPs to release the customer info linked to a suspect IP-address. The Local reports that, although the law is based on a EU directive, the current draft goes further than that.
In order to obtain the personal details, copyright holders will have to prove that there is “probable cause” that a person, or rather an IP-address, has actually shared copyrighted material with others. With the current state of evidence gathering, where mistakes and false accusations are fairly common, this may not be that easy to achieve.
The many unsecured Wireless routers complicate the evidence gathering even further, and BitTorrent trackers have also implemented countermeasures of their own. Earlier this week we reported that the Pirate Bay tracker software automatically inserts several “random IP addresses” that are not actually downloading data. This is done on purpose, to pollute the evidence gathering of anti-piracy outfits.
The new law is also heavily opposed by Swedish Pirate Party Chairman Rick Falkvinge who told TorrentFreak: “These laws are written by digital illiterates who behave like blindfolded, drunken elephants trumpeting about in an egg packaging facility. They have no idea how much damage they’re causing, because they lack today’s literacy: an understanding of how the Internet is reshaping the power structures at their core.”
“We have good hope of putting an end to these ridiculous developments. Either the existing politicians start to understand what they’re actually doing at work all day, or they will escalate the conflict to the point where we’re replacing them in office. Either way, copyright will be scaled back,” Falkvinge added.
It is to be expected that opposition against the new anti-piracy law will be great, similar to the public outrage when Sweden introduced a wiretapping law earlier this year, and after the raid on The Pirate Bay in 2006. It wouldn’t surprise us if The Pirate Bay fights this battle at the front, clashing with local politicians and media once again.
‘Pirates’ demonstrating in Stockholm following the raid on The Pirate Bay raid in 2006
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23.Oct.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
Eventually, particularly when trying to download old torrents, most BitTorrent users find themselves with a transfer which stops due to the swarm having no seeds, not enough peers to cover the full release, or the tracker going down. btReAnnouncer is a handy site which could prove vital in reaching that magic 100%.
“I’m stuck at 49.1%, seed please!!” or similar comments are fairly commonplace on BitTorrent sites. Normally the case on older torrents, essentially all the full 100% seeds have gone, leaving people all stuck at the same amount completed. Without a seed reappearing, or many other users that between them have the remaining 50.9%, the download will not complete, which is pretty frustrating.
Of equal annoyance, is a new torrent which the user knows is well seeded, yet for one reason or another it is impossible to connect to the tracker in order to complete the download. Maybe the tracker has gone down or is simply too busy to accept the connection - either way, the download isn’t getting very far without it.
The good news is that with a little perseverance it’s possible to resurrect a seemingly moribund torrent. The key to bringing the torrent back to life is the hope that an identical release is available on another tracker, and in that swarm there people that have enough data to complete the download. But how is it possible to find the same release on other trackers?
There are manual solutions involving Google, but quick and easy is my preferred method and btReAnnouncer offers just that. The site is really easy to use, so, although it is well seeded, here is a walk-through to find more trackers tracking Michael Moore’s ‘Official’ ‘Slacker Uprising’ torrent - the same technique can be used for any release, especially ones with tracker or seeding issues.
First of all I downloaded the .torrent file from The Pirate Bay onto my PC and uploaded it to btReAnnouncer. Within a few seconds the site displayed the current primary tracker - http://tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce. However, it also displayed a list of 17 other tracker URLs identified as tracking the same torrent - any one or combination of which could help you to complete a stubborn download. Note that it doesn’t make sense to add more than one tracker from the same url (e.g. thepiratebay.org) because they often track the same peers.
At this stage it is possible to select a new primary tracker for the torrent by ticking the checkbox and pushing the ‘ReAnnounce’ button. Then check any of the other trackers in the list to be used as an alternative and click ‘ReAnnounce’ again. To finish up and start downloading the .torrent, download it by clicking on the hyperlinked text underneath ‘Download ReAnnounced Torrent…’ and import it into your favorite client, not forgetting to point it at your previously incomplete download.
btReAnnouncer can also be used to find public sources for otherwise private torrents, just don’t forget to remove any passkeys etc from the announce URL in the torrent. If your BitTorrent client doesn’t allow you to edit or add trackers manually, this can be achieved by using another online service, TorrentEditor.
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23.Oct.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
The Higher Education Opportunity (HEO) Act of 2008 requires US Universities and Colleges to undertake measures to reduce piracy, and go after students who use filesharing networks to share copyrighted files. A recent study found that, per institution, between $350,000 and $500,000 a year is spent tackling the piracy problem.
The methods universities use to reduce piracy on their networks have been scrutinized in our ‘Tackling College Piracy’ series. Most of them have been found to be technologically ineffective, working only at the psychological level. The main problem with the “technological approach” is that it’s impossible to distinguish authorized from unauthorized traffic on filesharing networks. Nonetheless, these anti-piracy efforts are quite expensive.
First of all, the amount of time spent dealing with allegations of infringement are huge, according to the study by the Campus Community Project. IT personnel alone spend a mean time of 750 hours at public universities, while private university IT personnel spend around 620 hours a year on this. The shorter time for private institutions generally comes about because of their smaller size, and so smaller search size, and less frequent notifications.
Overall, the costs that come with them are larger than most would expect. It was concluded that between $350,000 and $500,000 is spent annually per institution - directly and indirectly- dealing with copyright infringement notices. The quality of US education has already been questioned (most recently by US presidential candidate Barack Obama in the 3rd Presidential Debate), especially in contrast to the high cost of it. In this light, the costs incurred dealing with copyright infringements are nonsensical.
The study reports that 25% of public universities use a form of technological filtering, such as Copysense, to try and reduce infringements. As noted before, such measures are fairly inaccurate and rarely work. Less common are educational methods, which may be linked with p2p access, as at Missouri S&T. However, most universities and colleges simply disconnect pirating students from the network, and make them promise to never do it again when they want to get back on. Financial penalties are also given, but this is not yet commonplace. We will deal with this in an upcoming piece.
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22.Oct.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
Sandvine, best known for manufacturing the hardware that slowed down BitTorrent users on Comcast, has released an Internet traffic trends report today. The report shows that, on average, P2P traffic is responsible for more than half of the upstream traffic, but mostly the report seems an attempt to sell their traffic shaping products.
Over the years, many Internet traffic reports have been published. Back in 2004, long before the BitTorrent boom had started, studies already indicated that BitTorrent was responsible for an impressive 35% of all Internet traffic.
Since then, we’ve seen a couple of dozen reports, all with a totally different outcome. Some estimate that P2P traffic represents approximately 50% of the total traffic, while others go as high as 85%, or as low as 20%. The overall consensus seems to be that there is little consensus, or is there?
We think we might have spotted a trend, not so much in the data, but in the companies that publish these reports. Most Internet traffic research is conducted by companies that offer traffic shaping and broadband management solutions. Cachelogic, Ipoque, Sandvine, they all sell (or sold) products that help ISPs to manage their traffic.
Consequently, it is not a big surprise that their presentation of the results is often a little biased. After all, it is in their best interests to overestimate the devastating effects P2P traffic has, and convince ISPs that they need to throttle these awful bandwidth hogs.
Or as Sandvine co-founder Dave Caputo puts it: “Bulk bandwidth applications like P2P are on all day, everyday and are unaffected by changes to network utilization. This reinforces the importance of protecting real-time applications that are sensitive to jitter and latency during times of peak usage.”
In Sandvine’s report we see that P2P represents less than a quarter of all downstream traffic, and even less during peak times. Web traffic is most dominant and online media streaming sites take up nearly 16%.
On the upstream side, P2P traffic takes up 61% of all traffic (the black makes it even more scary), followed by web-browsing, tunneling and VoIP traffic.
Interestingly, the amount of bandwidth that is transferred on the Internet has more than quadrupled since the first reports came out a few years ago, and it is likely to quadruple again in only a few years. Unlike Sandvine suggests, throttling is not the solution. Investing in the network is.
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21.Oct.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
Today, Microsoft announced Global Anti-Piracy Day, to draw attention to the ever growing piracy problem. While Microsoft itself celebrates October 21st by launching anti-piracy enforcement actions in 49 countries, The Pirate Bay does so by linking to counterfeit Microsoft products on their frontpage - in every country in the world.
To celebrate Global Anti-Piracy Day, The Pirate Bay has decided to replace their well known logo with the mugshot of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Below the mugshot it reads “Bill Gates made me do it,” referring to his ‘criminal’ history.
Although the company does send out DMCA takedown requests to BitTorrent site owners, Millions of Microsoft products are being pirated on BitTorrent and other filesharing networks every year.
Of course, Microsoft is doing all it can to prevent people from installing illegally obtained copies of their products, with their ‘Windows Genuine Advantage‘ system as the flagship solution. Similar to most other anti-piracy measures, it also hurts honest customers, as it has a false positive rate of more than 20%. The pirates will get what they want one way or another.
What Microsoft does not do, however, is sue individual downloaders. Unlike the RIAA they don’t think that the people who are potential customers are the right targets in their battle against piracy. Instead, they mostly target resellers who sell illicit copies of their products. “Legitimate businesses struggle to compete against these illegal resellers who undercut their prices and contribute to the 20 percent software piracy rate in the U.S.,” the company states.
The Pirate Bay has no commercial interests, but contrary to what Microsoft would have hoped for, they are not very responsive to letters from Microsoft either. In addition, we seriously doubt that ‘Global Anti-Piracy Day’ is the success they want it to be, now Bill Gates’ is on the frontpage of the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet.
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21.Oct.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
