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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.

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

The Death Force unleashed by M.D. Geist are scouring the planet Jerra for humans, exterminating them as a part of a plan to rid the world of all life.

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.

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