ARTISTdirect, the company that owns infamous anti-piracy spoofing company MediaDefender has just announced that it has acquired SafeNet’s anti-piracy tracking company, MediaSentry.
Following the departure of its two founders, MediaDefender CEO Dimitri Villard said MediaSentry had been bought for $936,000, comprised of $136,000 in cash and an $800,000 1 year note.
“The combination of MediaDefender, the leader in Internet Piracy Prevention (IPP) with MediaSentry, the leader in business and marketing intelligence derived from P2P channels, creates a true powerhouse in the field of intellectual property protection,” Villard said. “This acquisition will enable MediaDefender to dramatically expand its effectiveness by providing customers with a wide range of options to meet the constantly evolving challenges in copyright protection and enforcement.”
Among file-sharers, MediaDefender grew to become one of the most hated anti-p2p companies but always maintained that it did not track individuals or report them to the authorities or copyright holders. With its acquisition of MediaSentry, a company designed to do just that, MediaDefender now boasts the full range of tools to hinder, mislead, track, monitor and report copyright infringers.
Previously a SafeNet Inc. subsidary, MediaSentry became well known as the RIAA’s main anti-piracy partner, providing crucial support to the lobby group during its aggressive litigation campaign against file-sharers. The RIAA dumped MediaSentry in January, choosing to work with Danish tracking company DtecNet instead.
MediaSentry is best known for harvesting IP-addresses of alleged copyright infringers but their methodology has been questioned in court by several experts. On top of that, Mediasentry’s investigation tactics were deemed illegal in several states because it operated without the appropriate and required paperwork. According to some, this was why they were ditched by the RIAA.
Post from: TorrentFreak
03.Apr.09 
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Glickman, head honcho at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), is in an unenviable position. As head of the MPAA he helped lead the organization into a crusade against millions of people around the world, pushing strategies which can, and often were described as draconian.
Glickman’s departure comes as many see current MPAA tactics starting to backfire. In the important teen and twenties demographics the MPAA’s messages are not getting through, and in many cases are driving resentment against them. The negative PR generated by The Pirate Bay case, initiated after intense pressure was put on the Swedish government by the MPAA (via the White House) has also worked against them, as have various pushes globally to get ISPs to agree to a 3-strikes (or ‘graduated response’) policy. Others claim that Glickman’s leadership has been lackluster, his public speaking gigs ‘bad’ and ‘boring’, and hint that the short contract extension is because of this.
MPAA’s Dan Glickman speaking (yawn)
Of course, there is also precedent for the head of the MPAA being let go after embarrassing or damaging public relations activities. Glickman’s predecessor, Valenti, retired not long after a showdown between the MPAA and studios over an MPAA screener ban in late 2003. In that case the MPAA backed down after a court injunction went against them, and before a massively damaging antitrust lawsuit could be brought.
In the last few years, the MPAA has become the source of much derision. In choosing a successor for Glickman, the selectors will have to look hard to find someone able to bring the industry into the 21st century (or even the latter half of the 20th) and recapture the trust and credibility of the general populace. Meanwhile, to Glickman, we utter the words made famous by MPAA member NBC, “You’re Fired!”
Post from: TorrentFreak
02.Apr.09 TorrentFreak Comments Off
The controversial Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) has gathered opposition from various sides, most notably half of the Swedsih public. In a response to the new law The Pirate Bay introduced their anonymity service IPREDATOR last week, which is scheduled to open up to the public soon.
Now, a day after IPRED came into force, data from the Netnod Internet Exchange shows a significant drop of 30% in Swedish Internet traffic. This impressive figure seems to suggest that the amount of traffic generated by filesharing has dropped even more.
The IPRED effect?
“Most experts (including more neutral ones) judge it as an initial scare effect that will wear off after a week or two,” Swedish Pirate Party Chairman Rick Falkvinge told TorrentFreak, adding “This is what disturbs me the most — that the industry thrives on scaring the common citizen.”
Scaring the public is what they do indeed, with Lars Gustafsson, operating manager of IFPI Sweden estimating that there will be at least 100 cases in court this year.
Henrik Pontén from Antipiratbyrån - the Swedish anti-piracy office - sees the traffic drop as an indication that the new law is working. “The majority of all Internet traffic is file-sharing. Because of that, there’s no other explanation for the decrease in traffic than the IPRED law,” he stated.
The traffic drop is indeed significant, but that doesn’t mean people have stopped sharing. In the past 24 hours 384,657 Swedes were connected to the Pirate Bay tracker alone. That is close to 5% of the Swedish population, and no less than before.
On top of that, many people are looking for ways to hide their identities online. Thousands of new customers have visited new anonymizing service mullvad.net. “It’s beyond all expectations,” said Fredrik Strömberg, one of the two owners. We’ve received e-mails from all kinds of people. Mothers in families, young people, older people, all kinds. And everyone is swearing at the copyright lobby. It’s not good PR for them.”
In a few weeks more details on the filesharing habits of Swedes will surface, so then we’ll know whether or not IPRED changed anything, apart from the annoyance levels of the public.
Post from: TorrentFreak
02.Apr.09 TorrentFreak Comments Off
The movie industry’s new approach to delivering the anti-piracy message in the UK seems notably more subtle than in previous attempts and is much less up-front in dealing with the issue of piracy directly. Instead of attempting to insult would-be pirates, it looks to instill a sense of responsibility in the viewer, reminding him or her that handing over their hard earned money ensures Hollywood can make quality movies. In order to prove it, they show what the 1975 classic ‘Jaws’ would’ve looked like, had it been starved of money at the hands of pirates.
In a recent interview, Eddie Cunningham, president of Universal Pictures International said, “Your campaigning needs to evolve over time and have an appropriate message for today,” while denying that previous more-flashy campaigns had failed to deter piracy.
So is this a new, more sensitive approach from a movie industry looking to make friends rather than enemies? In part, yes. The movie industry does want to appear nicer to the public, after all they aren’t likely to be the main targets in the next phase in the war on piracy. That unenviable position is reserved for the ISPs - and it’s back to the old style when Cunningham speaks of them.
“If you or I owned a house in which prostitution was taking place, or where drug dealing was happening, we’d be responsible,” he said, implying that the ISPs are making money from serious crime while doing nothing about stopping it. Cunningham seems oblivious to the fact that if he plans to make a partner out of ISPs, you don’t start the relationship by referring to them in public as some sort of digital pimp.
But perhaps his most curious comment is that he feels that society is turning against piracy, viewing it as something going out of vogue. “Research shows us that most people now find it unfashionable - there’s been a gradual change in attitudes,” he said.
Quick - someone tell the Wolverine downloaders…
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02.Apr.09 TorrentFreak Comments Off
April 1st. What fun. Everywhere you look torrent sites and release sites are being shut down, that’s if they aren’t teaming up with the movie studios. But what if there’s some really serious news to report? What if one of the summer’s biggest sci-fi movies leaked out onto the Internet way before its release, and before it was even completed? Still unconvinced?
This is the reality today with Fox’s ‘upcoming’ X-Men Origins: Wolverine and it’s spreading with determination on BitTorrent. At the time of writing there are three different ‘workprint’ versions, presumably from the same source. One is reported to be a few minutes longer than the others but all are missing special effects. The film, penned for a May 1 2009 release, was due to compete alongside the likes of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Star Trek in this year’s summer blockbuster campaigns but has ‘premiered’ a little earlier than planned.
Since the movie hit BitTorrent just a few hours ago it has been downloaded at least 75,000 times, which is a rate comparable to that of the DVDrip ‘release’ of The Dark Knight. Interest is likely to be significant. X-Men’s target audience are tech-savvy people who are likely to have heard about BitTorrent. Multiply this by the desire to see something unusual and something you’re not supposed to have (like an unfinished Hollywood sci-fi movie) and things got hot - quickly.
The leak is the source of much speculation, but one particularly interesting discussion surrounds the source of the leak of this ‘workprint’ copy. Many early ‘reviewers’ of the movie noted that not only was the video and audio of a high quality (screenshots), but there were no ‘watermarks’. This is not strictly true. A little way into the movie from the top of the screen pops a very brief message which names Rising Sun Pictures and a date, 2nd March 2009.
Founded in 1995, Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) is an Australian visual effects company which has previously worked on the Harry Potter, Superman and Batman movies, so they have quite a pedigree. Of course RSP would absolutely not endorse any leak and the leak could have happened before the print even reached them, but somehow a print marked with their company name has made it onto the Internet and the downloads are mounting quickly.
Another interesting development is that Devin Faraci over at Chud.com said that he’d been told that the Wolverine DVD had been “switching hands” over the last couple of weeks.
TorrentFreak contacted Rising Sun Pictures but as yet we’ve had no response.
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01.Apr.09 TorrentFreak Comments Off
The deal, worth over $13 billion (10 billion euros) came about after the recent performance at the Pirate Bay trial gave strong indications that the judgment would go against Warner Bros. For the Hollywood movie studio, it seems that acquiring The Pirate Bay was the only option left.
In the press release, both groups gave a positive outlook to the deal. “The Pirate Bay team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Warner Bros’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” said Jim Kjeyzer, Chief Executive Officer of Warner Bros.”
Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm was similarly forward looking saying “Our community has played a vital role in changing the way that people consume media, creating a new hip culture. By joining forces with Warner Bros, we can benefit from its global reach and technology leadership to deliver a more comprehensive entertainment experience for our users and to create new opportunities for our partners.”
A press conference will be held later today to discuss the finer aspects of the acquisition. The conference will be broadcasted live on the Internet and details for access to the webcast are included in the press release.
How the Pirate Bay’s users will deal with this deal is the only wild-card. Will it be another Exeem, or will it blossom into something powerful and progressive. Only time will tell.
The Pirate Bay’s new love advertised on their homepage
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31.Mar.09 TorrentFreak Comments Off
Back in 2007, TorrentFreak reported on ‘The Biggest BitTorrent Leak‘, as anti-piracy company Media Defender was hacked and their internal emails went public. Since then, just about every movie, album and game has leaked to BitTorrent before their official release dates, but nothing has really eclipsed the MediaDefender fiasco - until now.
Back in early March 2009, Michael Jackson biographer Ian Halperin said he had proof that the ‘King of Pop’ had recorded as many as 100 unreleased tracks but was keeping them locked away. He claimed that upon Jackson’s death, the tracks would be made available to his children - Prince aged 11, Paris Katherine aged 10, and five year old Prince Michael II. The speculation was that despite Jackson’s turbulent financial situation in life, after his death these tracks would secure an inheritance for his kids.
Halperin’s credibility had already been called into doubt after he claimed variously that Jackson could barely speak, suffered from emphysema and had lost 95% of the vision in his left eye, which prompted the Jackson camp to issue a scathing denial. “Concerning this author’s allegations, we would hope in the future that legitimate media will not continue to be exploited by such an obvious attempt to promote this unauthorized ‘biography,’” it said.
Although it denied Halperin’s claims regarding the ‘Thriller’ star’s health, Jackson’s camp never denied the existence of the plan behind the unreleased songs. Now, unless Jackson really has died (which we very much doubt) that plan appears to have suffered quite a setback. Just a few hours ago, dozens of previously unreleased tracks leaked to BitTorrent prompting a swift reaction by Jackson’s legal team and anti-piracy partners who struggled to plug the leak.
At the time of writing, only one tracker appeared to be still tracking the torrent (a 645mb RAR archive), which could be a risky business indeed. Sources told TorrentFreak that the leak is believed to have occurred when Jackson’s Neverland Ranch was undergoing “financial reorganization” earlier in 2009. Indeed, that same “re-organization” resulted in Jackson losing control of his famous sequin glove and the robotic head from his movie, Moonwalker. The auctioning of these items is scheduled to take place April 22nd and is the subject of a Jackson lawsuit.
Nearly 2000 people have downloaded the torrent already, and the comments on Mininova suggest that it is indeed the real deal. Michael Jackson’s management was contacted for a comment, but thus far we haven’t received a reply.
More updates as we get them.
Update: The torrent contains only 74 tracks, not 100 as previously reported. Many tracks are simply numbered rather than named, but others have titles including Past Friends, Tears Don’t Change A Thing, Next Time Like the Last and Growing With the Truth.
74 unreleased Michael Jackson tracks
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31.Mar.09 TorrentFreak Comments Off
Statistically, it is simply impossible for all members of a private BitTorrent tracker to maintain an upload/download ratio close to 1. However, even the less strict ratios of 0.4 or less are hard to maintain for newcomers with limited upload speeds, a notion that has now been confirmed scientifically.
Researchers from the Tribler P2P team at the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands, took an in depth look at the ‘ratio economy’ at various private BitTorrent trackers. Interestingly, they found some striking similarities between this virtual economy and some of the recent events in the global financial system.
In the paper, the researchers looked into the BitTorrent share ratios of members of a private TV-torrent tracker. They found that the current ratio system is heavily skewed towards a small group of people with a lot of upload capacity, often armed with seedboxes. These greedy ‘rich peers’ take away a disproportional of the available upload ‘credit’ so that new peers, or poorer ones have trouble keeping their ratio above the required figure.
In addition, several variations of swarm populations were simulated to see what their effect is on the users’ share ratios. Overall, the researchers found evidence of a credit crunch in the current ratio tracking schemes currently employed by most private BitTorrent trackers. Even when everyone has similar bandwidth limits this credit shortage still occurs.
“We discovered a strange phenomenon in existing private BitTorrent communities,” Dr. Johan Pouwelse told TorrentFreak. “Lack of credit is hampering performance. We have been able to reproduce this effect in a simulator to further understand it. It has many similarities with the credit crunch where the greasing oil of the world economy is drying out.”
“Lack of credit makes for bankrupt states and poorly functioning BitTorrent communities,” Pouwelse added. While it is unlikely that the trackers will collapse from it, the paper indeed shows that the current emphasis on share ratios is not fair to all members of the community.
Previously, Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol has spoken out against share ratios. “A better approach would be to not count it against people when they download from heavily overseeded torrents. Or to just not use total upload/download ratios at all, or if you do only make them advisory and not a source of banning,” he said at the time.
There are indeed hundreds of alternatives to the current ratio calculation, and most of them will indeed guarantee a healthier sharing environment (less favorable towards ‘rich peers’). In the paper, the researchers show that a ’seeding bonus’ where peers get more credits for their uploads may help and others have suggested to use the total seeding time instead of the upload/download ratio.
While the paper presents some interesting findings, it doesn’t say much about download speeds on private trackers, which tend to be much higher than on public trackers. The parallels with our collapsing financial system are interesting, and with the only difference that a ‘bailout’ or ‘bonus’ would actually help the poor peers on private BitTorrent trackers, we can’t be too sure if that’s also going to work in the real world.
Post from: TorrentFreak
31.Mar.09 TorrentFreak Comments Off
The most recent torrent uploaded by aXXo dates back to March 11. In the days that followed, millions have been waiting anxiously for fresh content, performing their daily aXXo search on their favorite torrent sites in vain.
The aXXo brand has achieved cult status and for some has become synonymous with quality. Over the years aXXo has grabbed the attention of scammers, the mainstream press and even documentary makers. So, when he goes silent it is quickly noticed and the demand from his fans for news or an update quickly grows.
This isn’t the first time that aXXo has taken a break from releasing. Last year there were no new releases for a full four months but eventually aXXo made a glorious return with the topical release of “I Am Legend.” Little is known about the reasons behind aXXo’s current absence, although he has not disappeared completely.
We can confirm that aXXo has been logging into his account at Mininova, which means that we can safely conclude that aXXo is still among us. When he plans to surface again is unclear, but time will tell.
It is fascinating to see how aXXo has gathered a following of millions of people in the years after he started uploading his first torrent. As always, opinions differ and controversy always surrounds aXXo. He is God to some, while others despise him for his lack of crediting ‘The Scene’ but it’s difficult to criticize his commitment or appreciate the pressure he is undoubtedly under on a daily basis.
Fact is, however, that every aXXo upload is good for a guaranteed entry in our movie download charts, adding up to millions of downloads in a few weeks. It may be Hollywood’s worst nightmare, but many independent film producers will dream of having their films ripped by aXXo, ensuring that they are associated with a global brand with an unprecedented reach on BitTorrent.
Post from: TorrentFreak
31.Mar.09 TorrentFreak Comments Off
Every week we take a look at the most downloaded TV-Shows on BitTorrent. Heroes is leading the chart this week, followed by Lost. Both episodes were downloaded well over a million times.
The data for the most recent TV episodes listed below are collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only. The data for the second list based on the total number of downloads (not only recent episodes) of all shows in the past week is provided by ShowInsider.
Most Downloads (recent episodes)
March 23 - March 29
| ranking |
(last week) |
show |
est. downloads |
| torrentfreak.com |
| 1 |
(…) |
Heroes |
1,740,000 |
| 2 |
(1) |
Lost |
1,610,000 |
| 3 |
(4) |
24 |
670,000 |
| 4 |
(3) |
Desperate Housewives |
640,000 |
| 5 |
(6) |
Family Guy |
510,000 |
| 6 |
(9) |
How I Met Your mother |
495,000 |
| 7 |
(…) |
Gossip Girl |
490,000 |
| 8 |
(7) |
Smallville |
470,000 |
| 9 |
(…) |
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles |
440,000 |
| 10 |
(…) |
Supernatural |
420,000 |
Most Downloads (all episodes)
Post from: TorrentFreak
31.Mar.09 TorrentFreak Comments Off
