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Archive for December, 2009

TV-shows are gaining popularity on BitTorrent year after year. In 2009 a new milestone was reached; for two shows in the top 10 – Heroes and Dexter – the number of downloads on BitTorrent has exceeded the average viewership on US television.

The rise of unauthorized downloading of TV-shows is a signal that customers want something that is not available through other channels. Availability seems to be the key issue why people turn to BitTorrent, and this is also reflected in the fact that most downloads occur from countries where the show has yet to air on TV.

Outside the US, fans sometimes have to wait for weeks or even months before the show airs on TV in their own country. Many of them are simply not that patient or willing to torture themselves, and turn to BitTorrent in desperation.

Despite massive piracy of TV-shows, there are plenty of opportunities for distributors and broadcasters to win viewers back. The piracy figures simply show that TV viewing habits are changing. There is a huge interest in on-demand TV and there are millions of viewers that can potentially bring in millions of dollars in revenue.

Below we have compiled a list of the most downloaded TV-shows, together with the viewer average for TV in the US, based on data from Nielsen. The data for the top 10 is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers. All the data is carefully checked and possible inaccuracies are systematically corrected.

Most downloaded TV-shows on BitTorrent, 2009

rank	show	downloads	est. US TV viewers
torrentfreak.com
1	Heroes	6,580,000	5,900,000
2	Lost	6,310,000	11,050,000
3	Prison Break	3,450,000	5,300,000
4	Dexter	2,780,000	2,300,000
5	House	2,590,000	15,600,000
6	24	2,440,000	12,620,000
7	Desperate Housewives	2,180,000	15,500,000
8	Terminator The Sarah Connor Chronicles	1,960,000	6,340,000
9	Grey’s Anatomy	1,740,000	15,640,000
10	True Blood	1,600,000	12,400,000

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In the fall of 2002, just months after Bram Cohen released his first version of BitTorrent to the public, and at a time when there were only a few BitTorrent sites on the Internet, a new website called Suprnova.org was born.

Suprnova was founded by Andrej Preston, a Slovenian teenager better known as Sloncek, who started the site as a fun project to show off to some friends on IRC. The site started off with a very primitive setup, hosted on a Linux box at Sloncek’s home.

In the weeks that followed, word of the “Universal BitTorrent Source” spread like wildfire. It was no surprise that the traffic generated by Suprnova quickly maxed out the meager 16kb/s upload capacity Sloncek had at home.

The increased popularity of Suprnova came around the same time as other torrent sites like donkax.com, bytemonsoon.com and torrentse.cx, decided to quit. These sites were more or less forced to go offline, either due to bandwidth constraints or cease and desist letters. But Suprnova made it very clear that it wasn’t going anywhere.

Suprnova continued to grow, and Sloncek spent most of the time looking for mirrors to guarantee that the site stayed up. At its peak it indexed almost 60,000 torrents and served around 1.5 million visitors per day. Suprnova had a very active community, and its forum was among the biggest on the Internet.

In November 2004, Suprnova’s ISP told Sloncek that the servers had been taken into custody by the Slovenian police. The raid was initiated by the French anti-piracy lobby RetSpan. The police never contacted Sloncek about this personally, but it was a sign that things were about to change.

Around the same time, Reuters wrote about Sloncek and his rapidly growing site in one of their articles, which soon after spread out to the Slovenian press.

This was the turning point for Sloncek. He later said: “So I ended up reading about myself in Slovenian newspapers. And right about that time, I had a feeling something was wrong. I do not really know what the feeling was or where it was coming from, but I decided it was time to take Suprnova.org offline.”

Sloncek eventually pulled the plug on December 19, 2004, which marked the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one.

The fall of Suprnova resulted in an avalanche of new sites that aimed to fill the gap. Among these new sites was Mininova, which despite its name outgrew Suprnova within a year, establishing itself as one of the leading torrent sites for nearly five years.

In 2007, Suprnova returned to the BitTorrent stage, resurrected by the folks behind The Pirate Bay. The site never even came close to what it was though, and as of today it is just serving a few torrents a day to some lost souls.

Sloncek himself moved on with his life. He moved to San Francisco in 2007 where he’s attending the Academy of Art University. He didn’t cut his BitTorrent roots completely though, as he’s currently directing TorrentFreak TV in his spare time.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

If you have trouble sleeping, you'll have even more after you watch Paranormal Activity on DVD. Available now, the DVD is just as terrifically terrifying as the big screen version was. There's something delightfully evil about this movie, and with its realistic, down-n-dirty look at possession,

A few years ago, when community toolbars started to pop up at several torrent sites and elsewhere on the Internet, we decided to create a TorrentFreak toolbar featuring our RSS feed.

The toolbar was never promoted in public, because it was just as useless as most toolbars, and, up until today, it had just one install.

In fact, we totally forgot that it still existed until Conduit sent us an email yesterday, which informed us that our Publisher Agreement had been terminated for using inappropriate words. Apparently Conduit has decided that the ‘torrent’ in TorrentFreak is a direct violation of their terms and conditions.

“It has recently come to our attention that the name and the content of the community toolbar that you publish contains materials (such as marks, signs, images, or texts) that are not allowed in the Conduit platform, and specifically: Torrent, Emule and P2P,” Conduit wrote TorrentFreak in an email.

The company further stated that using such words is considered as a violation of the terms and conditions of the publisher agreement, and that our long-standing and fruitful relationship would be terminated immediately.

Just out of curiosity and to find out what terms or conditions we could possibly have violated, we skimmed through the agreement, but to no avail. There is no mention of a list of forbidden words mentioned in the Publisher Agreement.

Not every ‘torrent’ toolbar is considered evil though. The popular Torrent Search Bar and Torrent Toolbar, that both use Conduit, still seem to be working. Similarly, Mininova told TorrentFreak that they haven’t been contacted by Conduit either.

Of course we don’t mind that Conduit pulled the plug on our toolbar, but the reason for the termination is just so ridiculous, we simply had to bring it up. We can only hope that other companies will refrain from using such arbitrary ban lists.

Conduit has been contacted for a comment on their radical censorship policy, but thus far we haven’t heard back from the company.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

A few years ago, when community toolbars started to pop up at several torrent sites and elsewhere on the Internet, we decided to create a TorrentFreak toolbar featuring our RSS feed.

The toolbar was never promoted in public, because it was just as useless as most toolbars, and, up until today, it had just one install.

In fact, we totally forgot that it still existed until Conduit sent us an email yesterday, which informed us that our Publisher Agreement had been terminated for using inappropriate words. Apparently Conduit has decided that the ‘torrent’ in TorrentFreak is a direct violation of their terms and conditions.

“It has recently come to our attention that the name and the content of the community toolbar that you publish contains materials (such as marks, signs, images, or texts) that are not allowed in the Conduit platform, and specifically: Torrent, Emule and P2P,” Conduit wrote TorrentFreak in an email.

The company further stated that using such words is considered as a violation of the terms and conditions of the publisher agreement, and that our long-standing and fruitful relationship would be terminated immediately.

Just out of curiosity and to find out what terms or conditions we could possibly have violated, we skimmed through the agreement, but to no avail. There is no mention of a list of forbidden words mentioned in the Publisher Agreement.

Not every ‘torrent’ toolbar is considered evil though. The popular Torrent Search Bar and Torrent Toolbar, that both use Conduit, still seem to be working. Similarly, Mininova told TorrentFreak that they haven’t been contacted by Conduit either.

Of course we don’t mind that Conduit pulled the plug on our toolbar, but the reason for the termination is just so ridiculous, we simply had to bring it up. We can only hope that other companies will refrain from using such arbitrary ban lists.

Conduit has been contacted for a comment on their radical censorship policy, but thus far we haven’t heard back from the company.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

by Samantha Stollenwerck

by Kendra Jade

Following the messy death of Napster in 2001, the continued rise of file-sharing services took many by surprise. It took very little time for users to adapt to other sharing techniques and before long, services such as Kazaa, eD2K and BitTorrent were the hottest property on the net, gathering a momentum that would prove difficult, if not impossible to stop.

Dozens of notable BitTorrent sites have emerged since things really began to take off in 2002/2003, and literally thousands of lesser known private communities have flourished. But in terms of sheer volume of torrents, users and mainstream awareness, a trio of sites have stood head and shoulders above the rest.

By scale and exposure, The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt became the three most prominent BitTorrent sites in the latter half of the decade, serving billions of torrents to multiple millions of BitTorrent users.

Due to this massive and unprecedented level of interest, it became increasingly clear – the movie and music industries, just as they did with dozens of sites and services before them, would move to crush or suffocate them into submission. 2009 became a painful year for all three of them.

The Pirate Bay

On April 17th 2009, after being hounded continuously by the combined might of the movie and music industries, the four defendants in The Pirate Bay trial were eventually found guilty.

While the court said that it was the users of The Pirate Bay that committed the first infringements by sharing copyright files, it went on to dismiss most of the technical details, and judged the case on intent. It was declared that the intention of the defendants was to facilitate the sharing of copyrighted works.

Categorizing the infringements as ’severe’, the court said the team of four were well aware that copyrighted material was being shared using The Pirate Bay and that they made it easy for the users and assisted the infringements. The lack of a ‘notice and takedown’ certainly did not help the defense.

The four defendants were sentenced to one year in prison and a fines of $905,000 each. The case will be appealed.

The crushing verdict did not close the site, however, despite further legal attacks on its bandwidth infrastructure and bans forbidding the founders from operating the site.

Indeed, with adaptation, the site remains alive and fully operational today, proving that in The Pirate Bay’s case, suffering pain is not a terminal condition.

Mininova

After operating for almost five full years, the BitTorrent giant Mininova also succumbed to relentless entertainment industry in 2009, deleting over a million torrent files and shutting down the majority of its website.

Mininova was left with little choice, being forced into these drastic measures following a negative verdict in their court battle with the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN in the summer.

The Dutch court told Mininova that it must remove all infringing torrent files from its index on pain of huge fines, but as this proved technically unfeasible, the site’s owners took the decision to remove all torrents uploaded by regular users, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all. This proved disastrous to the site. As a force to be reckoned with, Mininova has been taken back to the stone age.

isoHunt

In 2006, several Hollywood studios filed a complaint about then US-based site, isoHunt. In common with claims against The Pirate Bay and Mininova, the studios stated that the site’s owner was guilty of profiting from, and inducing, copyright infringement.

Just 8 days ago, on December 21st 2009, a US federal court in California ruled that isoHunt was indeed guilty of inducing copyright infringement, stating that the site’s operators had engaged in “purposeful, culpable expression and conduct, aimed at promoting infringing uses of the websites.”

Since the circumstances of the case were so similar to earlier ones involving Napster and Grokster, the judge decided there was no need to have a full trial and instead granted a summary judgment against isoHunt.

No damages awards against the site have yet been announced and isoHunt remains fully operational at the moment, pending an appeal. In common with The Pirate Bay, isoHunt has not yet succumbed to the pain of its court defeat, despite overwhelming odds.

Lessons to be learned and the future of torrent sites

While Mininova is almost certainly out for good, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt remain active, despite their losses. Nevertheless, there are plenty of lessons to be learned from the court defeats of all three sites. Although some may believe that the negative verdicts point to the illegality of torrent sites, that is not the full picture.

In all three court defeats – notably in three distinct jurisdictions (Sweden, The Netherlands and United States) – indexed content aside, none of them stated that torrent sites are illegal. However, fingers were pointed firmly at the operators and their conduct when running their sites.

Being prepared to filter out fakes and malware from sites but not having a ‘notice and takedown’ system for copyright holders can prove fatal. But in the cases of Mininova and isoHunt, who both operated such systems and even co-operated with copyright owners, participating in discussions about copyright infringement on their forums can undo all the hard work.

In future, if site owners are to reduce liability, they will have to remain a lot more detached from their operations than they have been previously. The lessons to be learned are many, a few of which are detailed here.

Already TorrentFreak is informed that next-generation torrent sites are in development, meaning that 2010 will prove yet another interesting year.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

FrostWire is a popular free and Open Source P2P client supporting both Gnutella and BitTorrent downloads. Last year, the client introduced its FrostClick service through which it promotes independent artists.

All featured artists get a 7 to 10 day feature on the welcome screen of the Frostwire client. The promotion includes a direct link to the album that users can download at their convenience. All albums are totally free and released under a Creative Commons license.

The service has been a great success thus far with between 35,000 and 100,000 downloads per album in just a week. It shows once again that BitTorrent can actually be a great tool for artists to promote their work, and build a larger fanbase.

To celebrate these great results, FrostWire has now released a compilation album featuring music from the 21 featured artists that achieved the first million downloads through the FrostClick project.

“In only 21 weeks we had our first 1,000,000 copies distributed, some artists reaching over 75 thousand downloads during their promotion, nowadays FrostWire artists can get over 100 thousand downloads during their runs on the FrostWire welcome screen,” the FrostClick team says.

Unlike most digital music albums, the compilation includes a very complete and high resolution virtual booklet. “For each artist we’ve included 2 high resolution booklet pages with information about the artist, song, license, number of downloads, facts and where available we’ve even put the lyrics of the song to sing along.”

More info on the compilation album, the torrent and the featured artists can be found on the FrostClick website.

Disclaimer: Frostwire is one of TorrentFreak’s sponsors.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Over 90 minutes, Katie Featherston gets closer to the devil than most people do during a lifetime. In Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity, Katie and her boyfriend Micah square off against a demon that wants more than just to disrupt their sleep. During the course of the movie, the evil within their

Social news sites like Reddit carry great influence and the capacity to mobilize thousands of people for causes deemed important by the masses. A perfect example of the efficiency and speed of Reddit users became apparent a few days ago when a group of Redditors decided that the community should have a private BitTorrent tracker, exclusive to respected Reddit users.

On Christmas day the idea was born and just a few hours later the tracker named ‘BaconBits‘ was already up and running, with the first torrents being uploaded by an enthusiastic crowd. The day after Christmas the number of users who signed up at BaconBits had already exceeded 2000, and more were coming in nearly every minute.

When the tracker’s founding member deemed that BaconBits was stable enough, an announcement was made on Reddit under the title “Sharing is caring: Late Christmas Present, Fresh BitTorrent Tracker For Redditors,” which was upvoted by nearly a thousand Redditors.

In the announcement the tracker staffers explained that BaconBits is meant to be a private BitTorrent tracker for established Reddit users only. “The site will only accept Reddit users who have been signed up for at least 3 months, have at least 100 comment karma, and have at least 1 link Karma,” they explain.

Reddit users who meet these requirements can send a private message to the user baconbitsinvites on Reddit, and if deemed eligible, will then be invited to join the tracker.

Unlike most other trackers, BaconBits does not have any ratio requirements, instead trusting that the Reddit-sourced community will be sufficiently self-motivated to share. “The site does not require a minimum ratio, we trust that most Reddit users will upload as much as possible,” they say.

Currently the site has more than 1300 torrents being shared by nearly 3500 peers, 3000 of which are seeding.

The swift emergence of the tracker and its democratic nature are not the only surprises. Ironically, a vote among the site’s users has resulted in a ban on adult content. In contrast with the “no censorship” stories that often surface on the Reddit frontpage, the community decided to censor itself, much like the Australian democracy did.

The enthusiasm of the people involved in the project is skyrocketing and appears to be highly contagious, with dozens of people contributing to the site’s overnight success. That said, the emergence of the tracker came about so rapidly that it may cause problems in the long run.

Talking to some of the staff members, TorrentFreak learned that not all of the people involved fully understand the risks involved with running a BitTorrent tracker. Some staff members are openly uploading copyrighted files under the same name they use on Reddit, and hosting and payment issues weren’t thought through beforehand.

With operators of other BitTorrent trackers being arrested left and right, a bit more caution might be appropriate here or the ‘fun’ will end prematurely.

Nitpicking aside, BaconBits may have set a new trend where social networks and communities form the basis of private BitTorrent trackers. Niche BitTorrent trackers that specialize in specific types of movies, TV-shows or musical genres have grown significantly throughout 2009, and community based trackers may become a new niche.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Infected Mushroom could turn any dance floor into a moshpit. Their brand of electronica is laced with metallic speed and tension that makes them just as incendiary as any hard rock or trance act on the scene. At the same time, Infected Mushroom know how to hook a listener. Their latest disc,

Paper Tongues want to take you on a ride. There's something propulsively moving about each and every song on the Charlotte North Carolina band's A&M/Octone debut, due out this winter. First single, "Ride to California," is a sparkplug of an anthem that'll make you shake, but it'll also make you

Paper Tongues want to take you on a ride. There's something propulsively moving about each and every song on the Charlotte North Carolina band's A&M/Octone debut, due out this winter. First single, "Ride to California," is a sparkplug of an anthem that'll make you shake, but it'll also make you

This week there are four newcomers in the top 10. Avatar is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Week ending December 27, 2009

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(2)	Avatar (TS)	8.9 / trailer
2	(…)	The Invention of Lying	6.7 / trailer
3	(3)	2012 (R5)	6.7 / trailer
4	(…)	Dorian Gray	6.7 / trailer
5	(1)	This Is It	7.4 / trailer
6	(…)	Invictus (DVDscr)	7.8 / trailer
7	(5)	Inglourious Basterds	8.6 / trailer
8	(6)	Funny People	7.2 / trailer
9	(…)	Couples Retreat (TS)	5.5/ trailer
10	(8)	Law Abiding Citizen (R5)	7.3 / trailer

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The music industry’s own research indicates that, on a ridiculous ‘one download equals one lost sale’ basis, losses to online piracy will amount to £200m ($319.67m) in the UK during 2009.

Labeling the claims “melodramatic,” in September boss of ISP BT’s consumer division, John Petter, warned that proposed measures to tackle these supposed loses would prove costly for ISPs – a staggering £365m ($583.4m) a year.

Today, according to a new report, government ministers have admitted that the costs will amount to £500m ($799.2m).

ISPs say that issuing warnings will cost every customer £1.40 ($2.24) and otherwise meddling with accounts at the behest of the music industry will add £25 ($40) total to an annual subscription.

Worryingly, ministers say that this extra cost will force 40,000 UK households offline, with BT’s John Petter calling the plans “collective punishment that goes against natural justice.”

Jeremy Hunt, the Shadow Culture Secretary, said that it is “grossly unfair” for the government to force all broadband customers to foot the bill, and noted that forcing tens of thousands offline will go against government targets of increasing Internet take-up among the most disadvantaged communities.

“We are confident that those costs will be a mere fraction of the stratospheric sums suggested by some ISPs,” a BPI spokesman told The Times, adding, “..and negligibly small when set against their vast annual revenues.”

British music churned over £3.6bn in 2008, up by 4.7%. In the same year British films accounted for 15% of worldwide box office takings, totaling £2.6bn ($4.2bn) – an increase of $1bn over 2007.

So, if this anti-piracy scheme really is destined to bring them an extra £1.7 billion extra in media sales over the next 10 years, why don’t they offset these “negligibly small” costs against their own “vast revenues” ? Because they can get the customer to pay, of course.

When this £25 charge is added to customer accounts, ISPs up and down the UK should put the amount separately on the bill as an extra item which clearly reads “Music industry surcharge.”

Let’s see how that affects piracy and, indeed, the attitudes of people who now quite rightly feel they should at least be getting some music for their money.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 broke records this year as the biggest ever entertainment launch in history. With 4.7 million units sold in the US and UK during the first 24 hours, it pulled in revenues totaling $310 million.

In five days the game’s worldwide sales climbed to $550 million, crushing previous record holders Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (only $394m) and The Dark Knight (just $203.8m).

“In just five days of sell through Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has become the largest entertainment launch in history and a pop culture phenomenon,” Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said commenting on the game’s success. This is, of course, reflected in the number of pirated copies being traded on BitTorrent.

With 4.1 million unauthorized downloads of the PC version alone, the game more than doubles the achievement of last year’s ‘winner‘ Spore. Modern Warfare 2 leads both the PC and Xbox 360 lists, by a landslide.

The overall trend across all platforms is that, unlike last year, all of the games are 2009 releases. What makes Modern Warfare 2’s chart-topping even more impressive is that this has been achieved after just two months of availability. We further see that the figures for the most downloaded titles have more than doubled compared to last year, equaling the growth in uTorrent users.

PC games are by far the most downloaded titles, with on average more than three times the number of downloads compared to Xbox 360 and Wii releases. As expected, Mario titles are in high demand on the Wii.

The data for these lists is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers. All the data is carefully checked and possible inaccuracies are systematically corrected.

as of December 27, 2009

#	game	downloads	released
torrentfreak.com
1	Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2	(4,100,000)	(Nov. 2009)
2	The Sims 3	(3,200,000)	(June. 2009)
3	Prototype	(2,350,000)	(June. 2009)
4	Need For Speed Shift	(2,100,000)	(Sept. 2009)
5	Street Fighter IV	(1,850,000)	(July. 2009)

as of December 27, 2009

#	game	downloads	released
torrentfreak.com
1	Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2	(970,000)	(Nov. 2009)
2	Street Fighter IV	(840,000)	(July. 2009)
3	Prototype	(810,000)	(Feb. 2009)
4	Dirt 2	(790,000)	(Sept. 2009)
5	UFC 2009 Undisputed	(720,000)	(Mar. 2009)

as of December 27, 2009

#	game	downloads	released
torrentfreak.com
1	New Super Mario Bros.	(1,150,000)	(Nov. 2009)
2	Punch-Out!!	(950,000)	(May. 2009)
3	Wii Sports Resort	(920,000)	(July. 2009)
4	The House of the Dead: Overkill	(860,000)	(Feb. 2009)
5	Mario Power Tennis	(830,000)	(Mar. 2009)

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The Supreme Court ruling follows a nationwide block of The Pirate Bay In August 2008, when a decree from a public prosecutor instructed ISPs to censor the site. As a result, millions of Italians were banned from accessing the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.

The Pirate Bay chose to appeal the decision and won the court case. The Court of Bergamo ruled that no foreign website can be censored for alleged copyright infringement and the block was lifted. However, two months ago the Supreme Court nullified this victory, opening up the possibility for anti-piracy groups to censor The Pirate Bay and many other torrent sites in Italy.

This week the Supreme Court detailed its decision. According to the verdict, BitTorrent sites that host torrent files are playing a significant role in the downloading and uploading process of their users. By doing so they are more than an agnostic search engine such as Google.

The fact that a site is not hosted in Italy or operated by Italians is irrelevant according to the court. The site is visited by many Italians who (in part) use it to share copyrighted material, the Supreme Court argued.

With this verdict in hand, copyright holders can now request The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites to be filtered by Internet service providers. The Pirate Bay is first in line, as its case has now been sent back to the Court of Bergamo.

Pirate Bay lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus, Giuseppe Campanelli and Francesco Micozzi have informed TorrentFreak that the site will remain accessible for now. “There will be another hearing before the Court of Bergamo,” they told us, “which will have to decide again whether to block The Pirate Bay in Italy or not.”

“We will go again before the Court of Bergamo, where we will have ample grounds to defend The Pirate Bay,” the lawyers noted, adding “And we could even appeal the new decision before the Supreme Court.”

The Supreme Court decision has nevertheless set a dangerous precedent. If The Pirate Bay loses its case it is expected that many other BitTorrent sites will face a shutdown order in the future.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

UK law firm ACS:Law has made quite a name for itself in recent times. Representing companies such as Germany’s DigiProtect and their pornography business partners, ACS:Law has sent out many thousands of letters to individuals it claims have been sharing their clients’ movies illegally online.

Their scheme has attracted much negative press, even provoking statements from Members of the House of Lords in the UK.

“Of late, we have seen a proliferation of lawyers’ letters, acting for the pornography industry, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, pointed out, often against innocent people asserting copyright claims and threatening court action,” said Lord Clement-Jones recently.

Now there has been a surprising “Christmas update” from ACS:Law. Referencing earlier legal threats they made to thousands of individuals in the UK (you’ve been caught file-sharing, we can prove it, and if you don’t pay up we’re taking you to court), the law firm has announced that it will drop many of its cases.

As Christmas approaches, here at ACS Law we have been working hard dealing with our file sharing projects. We have been reviewing all cases which are currently open, and a good number of these cases have been dropped, where we do not either consider litigation to be a viable option or to be beneficial to our clients.

So, despite the “forensic” standard proof the company claims to hold on individuals, it appears that, as we’ve said many times here on TorrentFreak, this scheme is all about money. If individuals have no money to pay, ACS:Law cannot get blood from a stone.

Furthermore, when trying to force others to pay up who may actually have the money, faced with holding a single IP address as evidence and absolutely no way of identifying a specific individual sitting at a keyboard and conducting or authorizing the actual infringement, they have little choice but to back down.

James Bench, who works with Being Threatened, a consumer group which offers resources to individuals who are targeted by ACS:Law, says that those accused are becoming increasingly empowered by the knowledge currently available.

“Recently leaked documents exposed the inner workings of the process, dubbed by some ‘speculative invoicing,’ showing that claims are assigned a ‘litigation rating’,” he told TorrentFreak.

“Factors affecting the rating tended not to be based on the evidence supporting the claim but on the appointment of legal representation, technical ’savvy’ and the finances of the client – or lack thereof,” he added.

So does this mean that ACS:Law will be backing down completely? Hardly. The law firm says that following the court orders they obtained in November, more threatening ‘pay up or else’ letters will be sent out in January 2010.

Anyone receiving a letter from ACS:Law should refrain from replying to the company until they have spoken to the support team at BeingThreatened.com, who will give completely free advice.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Earlier this year several publications claimed that P2P and BitTorrent were dying because of the increased popularity of streaming sites. In reality, BitTorrent is about to close a record year in terms of traffic and usage.

The misleading reports all based their conclusions on data supplied by a network-management firm, which showed that of all Internet traffic, the percentage consumed by P2P has slowly declined. However, those who take a closer look at the data will find that in absolute traffic, P2P continued to grow, with bandwidth used by streaming just growing a little bit faster.

BitTorrent is by no means dying, nor is there a decline. Quite the opposite. All the major BitTorrent sites saw a significant increase in visitor numbers over the past months. TorrentFreak asked Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management, if this growth is also reflected in the usage stats of uTorrent.

“Probably the emergence of things like Hulu and continued growth of Youtube make it seem like Bittorrent is not the only thing driving demand for consumer bandwidth. But we see no evidence whatever that BitTorrent clients are any less popular,” Morris told TorrentFreak.

Around this time last year uTorrent had 28 million unique users a month, and by November 2009 this figure had almost doubled to 52 million monthly users. And things have been going equally well for uTorrent’s little brother, BitTorrent Mainline.

“In addition to this, at the start of this year we saw almost 5 million monthly users of BitTorrent Mainline,” Morris said. “In November 2009 we saw over 10 million.”

These statistics show that despite the legal setbacks The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt have faced in court, the number of people who are using BitTorrent has continued to grow significantly. There is no indication that this growth will slow, let alone stop, in 2010.

The uTorrent development team also has some major improvements in the pipeline. Last week streaming support was added to the client, and in the coming year it will add file security features and the option for torrent site owners to promote their content within the client.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In September 2006, just months after the infamous Pirate Bay raid, the US movie studios turned their attention to isoHunt and other associated websites. Columbia, Disney, Tristar, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal and Warner Bros issued a complaint, stating that isoHunt owner Gary Fung operated file-sharing services and profited from copyright infringement.

On December 21st 2009, a US federal court in California ruled that isoHunt is indeed guilty of violating US copyright law by way of inducement, with the operators having engaged in “purposeful, culpable expression and conduct, aimed at promoting infringing uses of the websites.”

In noting the similarities between this case and earlier ones involving both the Napster and Grokster file-sharing services, Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that a full trial was not required and granted the plaintiffs request for summary judgment.

As noted by Michael Geist, the court also concluded that inducement liability and the safe harbor provisions under the DMCA are incompatible. In this case it means since isoHunt was found to have induced infringement, it did not qualify for safe harbor.

In common with the Mininova court defeat earlier this year, the court was critical of isoHunt (and associated sites) staff actions on the site and in their forums.

The court said the clearest instance of encouraging users to commit infringements was the ‘Box Office Movies’ section of the site. These pages listed the top 20 highest-grossing movies in the US, for which users were invited to upload associated torrents.

“By implementing this feature,” said the court, “Defendants engaged in direct solicitation of infringing activity.”

Furthermore, when isoHunt generated torrent categories, such as ‘Top 20 Movies’, the court said that the fact that these lists “almost exclusively contained copyrighted works and that Defendants never removed these lists” indicated that isoHunt knew about ongoing infringement yet failed to take action to stop it.

Several other instances of staff members giving users advice on how to download copyright movies (including providing .torrent links), rip copyright DVDs and use software such as PeerGuardian were also cited.

Even the forum user ranking system didn’t escape criticism. Since user ranks included titles such as “I pir4te, therefore I am” and “All Day I Dream About W4rez,” the court concluded that the Defendants “promoted their users’ infringing activities by consciously fostering a community that encouraged – indeed, celebrated – copyright infringement.”

The court’s judgment can be downloaded here, or viewed online here. At 46 pages long it’s a pretty heavy read, but contains essential information for anyone interested in what can’t be done when operating a torrent site or other similar service in the US.

At this stage it’s unclear if isoHunt will appeal the US decision, but of course, in the meantime the site is fully operational in Canada, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

When The Pirate Bay started back in 2003 the hardware setup was initially really primitive. The site was hosted in Mexico, where Gottfrid hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time. The site later moved to Sweden, where Fredrik hosted the tracker on his laptop for a while, but, as the site grew, it had to move on to a more powerful setup.

By the end of 2004, a year after the site launched, the tracker was already tracking a million peers and more than 60,000 torrent files. Around the same time the founders also became aware that it wasn’t just Scandinavians showing an interest in their site. Because of increasing worldwide popularity, The Pirate Bay team completely redesigned the site, which became available in several languages from then on.

This change was much appreciated by the site’s non-Swedish speaking users, but hated by anti-piracy outfits. They saw the tracker as a serious threat, and in response launched a dozen lawsuits to have it removed from the Internet. Today, while nearing the end of the decade, The Pirate Bay has changed its homepage back to its 2003 look, Swedish only.

Despite all the legal trouble, the buyout soap and the decision to close the tracker, The Pirate Bay website is still around at the end of the decade. According to the Pirate Bay team, they are not yet ready to give up or throw in the towel.

“We believe that we have changed something. Not just us, but all of us. The Pirate Bay has always been something extra. We didn’t just wanna run another tracker. We wanted it to mean something. And you our users have helped us with that. The history of the bay is still being written, it’s way too early for a conclusion,” The Pirate Bay team writes.

“2010 has no room for boring debates about old worn out values that old rotting industries try to shove down your throats. 2010 will be the year of the hydra. Let thousands of new exciting projects emerge,” they add.

The past has indeed shown that with every setback the Hydra grows stronger. More new sites and trackers will emerge in the new year while old favorites fade in the background.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

by Samantha Stollenwerck

by Aaron Carter

Although it won’t ring any bells with the ‘younger’ torrenters, the name Mongo56 will certainly bring back some great memories for BitTorrent veterans who have been around for more than four years.

In 2005 the site was one of the largest BitTorrent trackers around, operating without a searchable index of torrent files much like OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent are doing right now. As of today there are still a few older torrents floating around that use the tracker which has been unresponsive for years.

However, back in the day its role with most BitTorrent users was vital, since clients did not support more than one tracker for a torrent, which meant that a download would simply stop working if the tracker was experiencing downtime.

During 2005, Mongo56 broke several records. It was the first XBNBT based tracker to run with more than 100,000 peers connected, and it broke the XBTT tracker record when it hit 763,000 peers. Great times were ahead, so it seemed, but continuous attacks on the tracker caused it to close prematurely.

“As of December 1st 2005 Mongo56.org will no-longer exist. I am sorry about this, but after over a month of battling flood attacks and the like it’s time to kill the tracker,” the site’s owner informed its users.

Since Mongo56 went down, thousands of new trackers have come and gone, and now, at the end of 2009 where standalone trackers have had somewhat of a revival, the name Mongo56 has resurfaced.

The operator of the new tracker hosted on the Mongo56.co.cc domain has no connection with the operators of the old tracker, but simply wants to reintroduce the brand name. “I used the name simply because I loved how much of a following they had, and I knew that domain would bring back good memories,” TorrentFreak was told.

Unlike most other standalone trackers, the new Mongo56 uses the PeerTracker software, and seems to be running smoothly for now. But, with DHT, PEX and multitracker torrents, tracker uptime is not as crucial as it was back in 2005. Nevertheless, Mongo56’s introduction is a welcome one – BitTorrent users can never have too many options when it comes to finding other peers.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Kid Cudi knows how to make jaws drop. In fact, after an hour-plus set at Club Nokia in Los Angeles last night, the capacity crowd was left collectively speechless. Witnessing Cudi live is like seeing Jay-Z, Notorious B.I.G. or Eminem in the early days. He doesn't need to do much to impress;