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Archive for the ‘P2P and Filesharing’ Category

Last Thursday, both the PC and Xbox360 versions of the upcoming Mass Effect 2 game leaked to BitTorrent, which didn’t go unnoticed by the masses.

The game is scheduled to be sold in stores starting Tuesday in North America and Friday throughout Europe, but many curious customers couldn’t wait until then and have downloaded an unauthorized copy instead.

At the time of writing, tens of thousands of people are downloading the game, which is more than 14 gigabytes worth of data for the PC version and over 13 gigabytes for the Xbox360 version. According to the latest statistics gathered by TorrentFreak, more than 300,000 people started downloading the files in the past days.

All purchased copies of Mass Effect 2, developed by BioWare and published by Electronic Arts, will come with a ‘Cerberus’ Network Card. The card is required to download in-game items and new missions that will become available when the game is officially released, but it’s possible to play the game just fine without it.

According to reports from many downloaders, the game lives up to its expectations. Hundreds of people have reported their successful completion of the game already, in playing times ranging from 10 hours to well over 30 hours.

Although the ‘Cerberus’ Network Card might not prevent people from grabbing an early copy of the game on BitTorrent, it might help to convert illegal downloaders who like the game into buying customers, if it’s not hacked or cracked itself.

Whether Mass Effect 2 will come close to the massive popularity of Modern Warfare 2 among BitTorrent users is doubtful, but the game will certainly make an appearance in the 2010 most pirated games list later this year.

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

In an attempt to take a stand against the labels, several well known artists including Radiohead formed the Featured Artists Coalition last year, a lobby group that aims to end the extortion-like practices of record labels and allow artists to gain more control over their own work.

Radiohead and others are unhappy with the fact that the labels, represented by lobby groups such as the RIAA and IFPI, are pushing for anti-piracy legislation without consulting the artists they claim to represent. Radiohead, who used BitTorrent to leak one of their songs, went as far as being willing to show up as a witness against the RIAA in court.

In a new MIDEM interview, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien stands up for file-sharers once again, stating that piracy is not killing the music industry in his view.

O’Brien is no stranger when it comes to piracy. “There’s a very strong part of me that feels that peer-to-peer illegal downloading is just a more sophisticated version of what we did in the 80s, which was home taping,” he said, something the music industry strongly discouraged at the time.

“If they really like it, some of them might buy the records,” he said, adding that if they don’t buy the albums they might buy a concert ticket, t-shirt or other merchandising.

“I have a problem about it when people in the industry say ‘it’s killing the industry’, it’s the thing that’s ripping us apart’,” O’Brien said, adding: “I don’t believe it actually is.”

According to O’Brien the music industry is using analogue business models in a digital age. “You’ve got to license out more music, more Spotifys, more websites selling more music. You’ve got to make it slightly cheaper as well to get music in order to compete with the peer-to-peers.”

Radiohead’s guitarist says he’s surprised that the music industry is still struggling with the digital transition, and urges the labels to “move quicker” and get their content out there at a fair price.

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

Founded in 2003, UK-based FileSoup was one of the original torrent sites. Online for longer than even the mighty Pirate Bay, the site developed a great reputation and a warm community.

After many years of keeping a low profile, on Monday 27th July 2009, police and the MPAA-funded anti-piracy group FACT conducted a raid on the home address of the owner – known to all in the torrent community as ‘TheGeeker’.

It didn’t matter that since 2005 FileSoup hadn’t operated a tracker and never hosted any copyrighted content, Geeker’s offense was initially labeled as “Distribute Article Infringing Copyright”. The full details of the raid and aftermath can be read in our previous article.

Despite all the turmoil, Geeker was never asked or told to close down the site, so naturally it stayed open, supporting the loyal and passionate community it had built over the previous 6 years.

But then, on January 6th this year, without warning FileSoup simply vanished. Of course, as the days went by there was the usual speculation, but the reason for the disappearance was not as sinister as some believed.

A few days before FileSoup went down, TorrentFreak was told by a number of readers that a company they had rented seedboxes from had simply stopped responding. Despite their claim to offer “premier customer satisfaction,” JMHServices.com disappeared leaving many of its customers out of pockets, some by hundreds of dollars. In an email, NetDirekt, a provider that JMH co-located with, confirmed that the company had not been paying their bills.

Unfortunately, JMHServices was FileSoup’s host too, and when they went down, so did the site.

On Monday 11th, Geeker returned to the police station to answer his bail and was again interviewed at length about FileSoup. Various items that were originally seized were returned, including a mobile phone, sat nav and video camera.

Understandably this experience with the police is proving upsetting for Geeker, the JMH situation was yet another kick in the teeth and for a while it looked like FileSoup would be no more, such is the pressure.

Geeker told TorrentFreak that the goal for FileSoup right from the very beginning was always to be a really friendly and open community site all about BitTorrent and filesharing – a place where people could come and find out everything they needed to know in a fun and helpful atmosphere, not just to get torrents.

“It is so upsetting for me and for every member I’ve heard from since Filesoup went offline, to think that we’re all going to lose the friends and the site we all worked so hard to build up over the last 6+ years,” Geeker explains.

But things are looking up.

The hunt is now on to find people with the necessary expertise, knowledge and free time to bring FileSoup back as a great community site.

“Over the next couple of weeks, I’m hoping to find and speak with some like minded people to help me, so fingers crossed, if everything works out well, Filesoup could be back online again real soon,” he told us.

Geeker’s new bail date is currently set for Tuesday 13th April. I’m sure our readers will join us in wishing him well.

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

Have you ever heard one of the major movie studios complaining about the decrease in sales of VHS tapes? We haven’t. The music industry on the other hand continues to blame the decrease in physical sales on digital piracy, ignoring the fact that there’s a generation growing up that has never owned a physical CD.

Yesterday the music industry lobby group IFPI presented its 2009 figures, again putting the blame for decreased physical sales on file-sharers. Unfortunately, most mainstream media outlets simply reposted the IFPI press release and their flawed analysis. In general, no effort is made to actually balance out or check the message being sent out to millions of readers.

In their annual Digital Music Report, IFPI states that file-sharers are half as likely to buy physical CDs than the average music buyer. Although the report is about digital music, they carefully avoid saying anything about file-sharers and digital sales. That would actually show a completely different picture as we will explain below.

The music group made this statement based on an IFPI-commissioned study that was executed by Jupiter research. Although IFPI refused to share the entire research report with TorrentFreak, we can conclude the following from the two pages that were published online.

Compared to music buyers, music sharers (pirates) are…

* 31% more likely to buy single tracks online.
* 33% more likely to buy music albums online.
* 100% more likely to pay for music subscription services.
* 60% more likely to pay for music on mobile phone.

These figures (as reported by the music industry) clearly show that file-sharers buy more digital music than the average music buyer. In fact, the group that makes up the music buyers category actually includes the buying file-sharers, so the difference between music sharers and non-sharing music buyers would be even more pronounced.

How can this be true and why was there no mention of this in the Digital Music Report? They must be spending less on digital music then, right? But again, this is not the case at all. On average, file-sharers actually spend more than non-sharing music buyers. At least that’s what Mark Mulligan, Vice President and Research Director at Forrester Research who conducted the study for IFPI told us.

Mulligan has his hands tied and couldn’t say much about the findings without IFPI’s approval, but we managed to get confirmation that paying file-sharers are the music industry’s best customers. “A significant share of music buyers are file sharers also. These music buyers tend to be higher spending music buyers,” Mulligan told TorrentFreak.

So why do file-sharers download music without paying? According to the annual IFPI report, one of the main reasons people share music is because it’s free. This leads the music industry group to conclude that they are cheapskates and not willing to pay for music at all. But, as the above clearly shows, they are misinterpreting this finding, and we’d like to explain why.

In the digital age, people’s demand for music has changed significantly, but their budgets are still limited. The average file-sharer is currently spending $100 a year on music according to IFPI’s own research, not really a group that can be classified as freeloaders. However, their demand for music simply exceeds their budget and that’s where they start downloading music on file-sharing sites, because it’s free.

Just to be clear on our motivation to balance the ‘facts’ as reported by IFPI. We are not advocating that all music should be free and neither do most of the music lovers who share files online. However, the music industry continues to ignore that file-sharing is much more of a signal from the market that it is the increased demand for music that fuels piracy.

The solution to the problem is relatively easy. Start offering more unlimited and unrestricted music services and piracy will go into a free-fall. File-sharers are already paying for digital music, and they pay more than the average music consumer. File-sharing is simply a market signal showing that there is a need to compensate for the lack of high quality and affordable subscription services.

If anything, the music industry should have more respect for file-sharers, as they are their most valuable consumers. They are ahead of the curve and actually leading the way for the future of digital music, buying more digital music than anyone else. It’s the music industry that has to change, not the other way around.

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

Campaigns about copyright infringement, particularly those relating to online file-sharing mechanisms such as BitTorrent, are nothing new. They have, however, escalated in recent years and now regularly appear in the mainstream press, even penetrating our schools.

An insider at a US base in Japan has been in touch with TorrentFreak to tell us of a new initiative underway which is being operated by the Department of Defense. The campaign is running in overseas bases and is targeting members of the military currently using BitTorrent and other P2P software to obtain media.

While millions of regular US citizens also use file-sharing to acquire tv shows, movies and music, we’re told that military personnel overseas have a unique problem – their physical location excludes them from obtaining media from US-based services.

“For years many of us have spent time and money, hand over fist, looking for ways to work around IP blocks placed by companies operating from the states to access services such as NetFlix, Amazon, and others, to enjoy the same level of access as anyone living in the US does,” the insider told TorrentFreak.

“We have offered money to the companies in exchange for lifting the blocks and have offered up information as to how to allow military members into their content while strictly enforcing the contract,” he added.

However, the pleas to the various media companies appear to have fallen on deaf ears. Our contact believes that the content providers must have no interest in the business available from overseas military personnel, as they continue to block them from accessing content legitimately.

In a response to this inaction, we’re told that US military personnel have stepped up their campaign to download as much content as they can using BitTorrent.

“We have sent letters to the RIAA and the MPAA repeatedly letting them know that our downloads are a direct representation of their failure to allow us to be good consumers as others in the US can be,” our military insider explained.

Of course, the response from these groups has been predictable. On a daily basis, the MPAA and RIAA send copyright notices to military personnel via their base ISPs. In turn, the personnel are threatened with account suspension and in serious cases, disconnection.

“Sucks, but all of us have kept doing it [file-sharing] as we have made every reasonable attempt to gain access to the content legally as any person living on US sovereign ground can,” says our clearly frustrated contact.

While there is an apparent crackdown on online file-sharing, there is an interesting footnote to this story. TorrentFreak is informed that when personnel are deployed, they have access to sanctioned “Morale” hard drives which are allegedly filled with copyright materials acquired by “nefarious” means, and available for anyone to download and keep.

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

Spotify is a music streaming service that allows users to access a huge library of ad-supported music for a small monthly fee. It is in use by hundreds of thousands of users and has even managed to convert some BitTorrent users who otherwise downloaded their music from unauthorized sources.

The application, which has streaming capabilities partly supported by P2P technology, is being developed by a team that includes uTorrent creator Ludvig Strigeus. Unfortunately, the P2P angle is not appreciated by everyone.

Last week the IT-department of Oxford University pulled the plug on the popular application because it relies on P2P technology.

“Spotify is a music streaming service. It relies on a peer-to-peer system for distribution of content, and its use is therefore forbidden on the University network,” was the explanation given.

Students are outraged by the University’s decision to put a ban on their beloved application. One Oxford student describes the drastic measure as “discrimination against music lovers, adding: “I hoped that it was a technical glitch, and that the university would be able to fix it. I never realized it was against the rules.”

The local IT-manager, however, justifies the move by saying that Spotify “cannot be justified as being educational,” which means that it would be a waste of the tax payer’s money. Not everyone agrees with this assessment.

A first-year music student claims that the application is one of his most valuable research assets. “I use it loads. It’s the most comprehensive collection of classical music in one place. Much better than Naxos,” the student said.

Spotify is partly owned by the major record labels who all bought a stake in the music startup. Sony BMG bought 5.8% of Spotify for 2,935 Euros, Universal Music got 4.8% for 2,446 Euros, Warner Music paid 1,957 Euros for 3.8% and EMI pocketed 1.9% for an investment of 980 Euros.

Neither the labels nor Spotify have responded to the ban in Oxford thus far, but we assume that they are not amused since it was hailed by most users as one of the few competitors to downloading music illegally.

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

In recent years, Sweden has become somewhat of a battle ground against unauthorized file-sharing. Home to a BitTorrent site so famous that in most cases it’s not even necessary to name it anymore, this Scandinavian country has made sharing files part of its culture. Moves to stop this phenomenon have been met with widespread opposition.

So maybe it comes as a surprise to learn that, according to new figures released by the IFPI in Sweden, music sales were up 10.2% in 2009. According to the group, this represents the first increase in revenue since 2000.

While physical CD albums sales managed a 1.9% increase over the previous year and still accounted for 80% of total industry revenues, the digital realm provided all the excitement.

The digital market place provided 16.3% of total sales in 2009, an increase of 98.6% over the previous year. 46.1% of digital sales came from streaming services such as Spotify, up from 17% in 2008, with the remaining 53.9% coming from other Internet sources.

According to IFPI, the main factor influencing these good results is a better offering to the public.

“I think the main reason for the increase in revenue is the availability of better legal services,” said chairman Ludvig Werner.

Indeed, increased availability has to help. The digital market has been resisted by the industry for such a long time, arguably enabling illicit file-sharing services to gain traction. Now that some effort is being made to compete with these unauthorized sources, the benefits can be seen.

Arguably it was the very existence of unauthorized music sources that prompted the industry to sit up and take notice of the digital market place in the first instance, but IFPI warns that these newer official outlets can only operate successfully in a market free from competing illegal file-sharing.

While Werner says that he feels that the introduction of the anti-filesharing IPRED legislation back in April 2009 had helped sales, Måns Svensson, PhD in Sociology of Law Lund University, advises to proceed with caution.

“I do not think we should exaggerate the effect. In our studies, we see that there are many who still share files. But it mostly affects the sales of physical copies where there has been a very small increase,” he told Metro.

“The increase in digital sales over the net, I think we can see continuing in parallel with file-sharing. I believe the growth would have been there even without IPRED,” he added.

Daniel Johansson, a researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, believes that the availability of streaming services may have affected the habits of younger people – the biggest music sharing group.

“There have been a lot of surveys over the last year and an important factor is a change in music behavior in the younger groups who are the biggest file-sharers,” he said.

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

A recent survey among 1000 New Zealanders has revealed some interesting findings regarding the pleasures of the Internet. Of the polled group, nearly half (41%) thought that watching porn online is morally acceptable.

Downloading music illegally, or watching a movie online without paying, was okay with a much smaller group, 18 and 13 percent respectively.

In fact, hiding your online porn viewing habits from your spouse is still more morally accepted than downloading a movie or music album without paying for it. Of the respondents, 18 percent thought that is was fine to secretly watch porn in a marriage.

At first sight the results of the survey are not really that surprising. Downloading music and movies without consent from the copyright holders is in violation of the local laws in New Zealand and watching porn obviously isn’t. Still, a closer look at the findings reveals some remarkable inconsistencies.

Firstly, most of the adult entertainment is actually viewed on sites that are dominated by copyright infringing content. So, many of the people who watch porn online are actually pirating as well, without realizing it.

Another remarkable finding was that people seem to be fine with copyright infringement if it’s on a video streaming site such as YouTube. Of all respondents, 31 percent said that it is morally acceptable to stream copyrighted TV-shows on YouTube, while only 13 percent believed that downloading copyrighted video was morally okay.

Thus, streaming copyrighted content is somehow perceived as more acceptable for some odd reason. The 5 percent difference between the moral acceptability of music and video downloading is another mystery that is left unexplained.

Overall, this survey shows how malleable peoples’ perceptions are when it comes to copyright issues online, with approval rates swaying back and forth between different types of media and the various distribution platforms.

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

In part due to legal troubles, BitTorrent could, in time, be forced to move away from a centralized approach where torrent files are stored on a central sever, and centralized trackers are used to facilitate communicate between peers.

Last November The Pirate Bay shut down its own trackers, arguing that they have been made redundant by DHT and PEX. At the same time, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering Magnet links instead.

These are all interesting developments, but to really decentralize BitTorrent one has to take it up a notch. The way most torrent sites are setup makes them vulnerable to legal action from copyright holders, so the real solution might be to move away from web-based torrent indexes.

A rather primitive way to do this is to share torrents over another file-sharing network, and this is exactly what the Gnutella/BitTorrent client Frostwire has now made possible. Without any public announcement and stuffed away in the changelog of FrostWire’s upcoming release we find the following lines:

- New Feature: Gnutella Torrent Search. FrostWire now can search for .torrent metadata files in the Gnutella network.
- Upgraded feature: Optionally FrostWire will copy all .torrent meta files to a shared torrent folder.

Technically speaking these are just minor adjustments to the file-sharing application, but the implications could trigger a revolution in how torrents are shared in the future.

When FrostWire users start downloading a torrent with FrostWire, the client will keep and share the .torrent file on Gnutella. The idea is that as time goes by and more users download more torrents, even if torrent websites are shutdown, all the torrents will live on the P2P network forever.

To make it easier to find torrents on Gnutella, FrostWire also added a specialized “Torrent Search Mode”. As more users install this and later versions – and keep downloading more torrents – the richer these search results will be.

Now FrostWire only needs to offer support for trackerless torrents and they will have completely decentralized the BitTorrent operation with just a few simple adjustments.

Although we believe that FrostWire’s approach is interesting, it will also introduce one major problem. It is relatively easy to make a P2P-powered torrent index, but keeping it clean and malware-free will prove to be very difficult.

Most people might not even be aware of it, but one of the benefits of most torrent sites is that they remove thousands of torrents linking to spam and fake files every day. This will be much harder to do in a P2P-based environment, but not entirely impossible.

Over the last five years the Tribler BitTorrent client has been working on a decentralized torrent index that would make BitTorrent sites obsolete. Unlike simply sharing the torrent files among users, the upcoming release of the Tribler client has built in several spam control and moderation options that allow users to keep the network clean. In addition, newly created torrents can be shared with peers, instead of uploading it to a central server.

We don’t know if FrostWire has plans to implement similar moderation options, but they are absolutely required for a fully decentralized BitTorrent environment.

It will be interesting to see if the idea of a P2P powered and searchable BitTorrent index takes off. For now there are still plenty of good and reliable torrent sites out there, but with continued pressure from the entertainment industry they are not to be taken for granted.

Disclaimer: FrostWire is a TorrentFreak sponsor.

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

Let’s be clear from the start. People who share music on the Internet actually buy more than those who don’t. The music library of the average music fan may have expanded a bit in the last decade thanks to file-sharing, but in the same time the number of sales have also skyrocketed.

Despite this, there will also be labels that perform badly for unrelated reasons. How convenient is it then, to blame evil file-sharers for your disappointing results. The Finnish hard rock label Lion Music is doing just that, with rather dramatic consequences.

Because of all the stealing and looting by Internet pirates, the label has decided not to sign any new acts until politicians have found a remedy.

“We are NOT able to sign more artists. No demos or masters you send us will be considered for release. We will NOT listen to any mp3 files or check out your websites and we will NOT respond to questions regarding releasing your album,” the label’s bosses write on their website.

“The illegal file sharing on the net is killing independent music. We are sorry about this situation but we are sure you are aware of what is going on,” the dramatic rant continues.

“Our demo policy will not change before our politicians have stopped the P2P sites. Illegal file sharing is not just about stealing from rich major companies. It is about killing independent music and making it impossible for many great musicians to have a chance to release albums and have a musical career even as a part time job.”

“Next time you consider downloading an album for free or adding new torrents please think of the impact you are having on the artists – would you like it if we came into your home and stole your pay check?”

The label’s bosses then go on to show various statistics of how many times the albums of their artists were pirated though an unnamed BitTorrent site, arguing that these downloads are responsible for their disappointing results.

To add to the drama the label has asked their musicians to write up their thoughts on piracy in a section called “The Murder of Music.”

One of the artists that penned up his thoughts on piracy is guitar hero Borislav Mitic. Mitic is just as gentle in his commentary as the label’s bosses.

“Just because you CAN download music for free today on the Internet doesn’t mean you SHOULD,” he writes. “You CAN also beat up an old lady on the street and steal her pension from her wallet … but somebody CAN beat you up too and do the same to you. Would you like this?”

According to Borislav, illegal downloading will lead to a “society of filthy, wild savages.” To those people who dare to continue stealing through BitTorrent sites he adds, “the blood will be on your hands…”

Those who have the courage to read the rest of the artist entries will be amazed at the hostile tone towards the readers, who they assume are pirates.

Don’t get us wrong. Despite research that points in the opposite direction, it could be that piracy is hurting the sales of Lion Music. But even if this was true, their way of bringing the message across is not going to help their cause, it will only alienate the fans.

A label taking completely the opposite stance, embracing both file-sharing and their fans, is Thorny Bleeder Records, who have just released the second volume of their free download series. Entitled Get Thorny 2, the album features new music from seventeen independent Canadian artists. (link to torrent on Mininova)

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

Journalist, TV presenter and Internet entrepreneur Martin Lewis is a pretty popular guy in the UK. Known to millions as the “Money Saving Expert,” he has regular slots on TV and radio where he shares tips on how people can make the most of their cash and fight back against corporate and retail might, by reversing bank charges, getting tax refunds and slashing credit card bills.

His first website, Moneysavingexpert.com, was founded in 2003 for around £100 but has since grown to receive around 7.5 million users each month. Lewis’s new venture, Tunechecker, is designed to help music fans get the best deal from online music stores.

Recent research by the site has revealed some alarming differences in prices for exactly the same products. Downloading all of 2009’s top 40 albums from the cheapest retailers would cost £864 less than if they were all bought from iTunes. That’s a lot of money.

When looking at singles, specifically last week’s number 1 record in the UK, the cheapest retailer offers the track for 29p, while iTunes wants 99p – nearly two and a half times more. The cheapest retailer sells Michael Bublé’s number 1 album at £5, while the iTunes price is £7.99.

Not surprisingly, recent research by TorrentFreak and millions of users worldwide reveals that the biggest savings are to be made on file-sharing networks, where all tracks by all artists, big and small, on any label, in any country, are to be found for free.

These are savings that Lewis can only dream about, but being realistic, most people recognize that the labels, musicians and the companies behind them have to earn a living. Lewis notes, as we did yesterday, twice, that the solution lies with competing with piracy.

“The music industry needs to wake up and embrace price competition. it’s facing annihilation from illegally download tracks, yet there are still remnants of an attitude that price doesn’t make a difference.

“If it promoted cheaper, legit music it’d mean fewer illegal downloads.”

Yet while millions flock to file-sharing networks and the knowledge on how to use them continues to spread, there is still a huge and largely untapped market out there, eager to funnel money through the official channels.

“Since we launched the TuneChecker.com a month ago we’ve had 400,000 users, an indication there’s a real appetite to download music at the lowest price,” concludes Lewis.

We get the feeling it’s is going to be a recurring theme in 2010. Pressurizing ISPs, monitoring Internet users and throwing around meaningless warnings is going to do little to bring customers back to the music industry.

The solution, the only solution, is good product, available now – right now, at a fair price. But that’s not going to happen, not for a long time yet.

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

The list of most pirated eBooks of 2009 is mostly filled with geek manuals, dating tips and self-help guides. At the end of the year, Dan Brown, Stephen King, Stephenie Meyer and J.K Rowling were the only best selling authors that made it into the top 25.

One of the explanations for this apparent ‘lack of piracy’ is the fact that eBook readers are still an exclusive gadget. When compared to uptake of MP3-players, only a tiny fraction of the online population has an eBook reader, which makes it a niche audience.

Theoretically the piracy figure could explode when eBook devices become both affordable and desirable to the mainstream public, especially if the publishing industry makes the same mistakes as the major record labels did. Let’s take a look at how they’re doing thus far.

Before we start it’s worth noting that three of the classic mistakes discussed below are made by the publishers or authors whose books were pirated the most. Coincidence?

DRM

DRM doesn’t work. It only takes one person to strip the DRM from an eBook to make it available to millions, but it also prevents legitimate customers from using the book they way they want to. Unfortunately not all book publishers have learned from the music industry’s DRM failures.

According to CNN, Hachette Book Group, publisher of the ‘Twilight’ series, “considers copyright protection to be of paramount importance,” claiming that “piracy is a serious issue for publishers.” You can almost hear the fear in these statements, fear that will most likely result in a strong focus on DRM instead of offering a great service to readers.

Stephenie Meyer, the author of the ‘Twilight’ books, is even more pro-DRM than her publisher. After one of her forthcoming books leaked onto the Internet in 2008, she simply cancelled the book. You can’t get more restrictive than that.

Delay

Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Stephen King’s ‘Under the Dome’, delayed the release of the eBook version for a few weeks, allegedly because they feared that it would cannibalize hardcover sales. This is one of the stupidest mistakes a publisher can make. The only thing it does is annoy customers, guaranteeing less sales.

Those interested in a digital version of the book could get one on file-sharing sites anyway. Within days, scanned versions of ‘Under the Dome’ surfaced online, and even perfect replications of the book in text format. The result for the publisher is that tens of thousands of people have downloaded the unauthorized eBook versions, many of which might have bought it if it was available.

Digital Ban

J.K Rowling is copying the Beatles by refusing to make her Harry Potter books available in digital form. As a result her books are among the most pirated titles year after year. Every single book from the Harry Potter series is available digitally, either scanned or transcribed by fans.

Luckily, there are also publishers who have learned from the mistakes made by the music industry. CNN quotes Ana Maria Allessi, publisher for Harper Media, who focuses on the upside of digital books. According to Allessi, new technologies will offer benefits to consumers, authors and publishers.

“Consumers who invest in one of these dedicated e-book readers tend to load it up and read more,” she added. “And what’s wrong with that?”

Alessi’s right. The focus should be on offering an outstanding product and user experience. Give consumers what they want, for a decent price, and don’t let those music industry folks scare you.

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

“A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us,” writes the Irish rock star, listing his top 10 desires for the next decade.

It might not come as a surprise to most people, but Bono’s wish is a little out of touch with reality. By mimicking the words of the record label bosses high up the food chain of the music industry, he fails to see where the real problem lies.

Over the last ten years the RIAA mounted the most aggressive anti-piracy campaign against file-sharers seen anywhere, collecting millions in settlements from thousands of households. The songwriters didn’t benefit much from that.

The RIAA also collected as much as $400m from settlements from the likes of Napster, KaZaA and Bolt. That money was supposed to go to the artists whose rights had been allegedly infringed upon, but the labels weren’t that keen to hand any of that over either, even when faced with the threat of lawsuits from the artists themselves.

The major labels, Warner, Sony, EMI and Universal, are currently being sued by another group of artists over sales of compilation albums featuring their music for which they haven’t been given a cent. The money they’re owed collectively is a staggering $6 billion. Looks like the ‘little guy’ is in trouble without the assistance of file-sharing.

While one set of corporates ripping off musicians doesn’t get a mention in Bono’s top 10, other supposed evil-doers do. Singing from the same sheet as his paymasters at Universal, Bono also takes aim at ISPs, claiming that their “swollen” profits “perfectly mirror” the lost revenues in the music business.

This “blaming of the messenger” will be a continuing theme in the next decade, and one which Bono dwells on for a moment, noting that if it’s possible to crack down on online child pornography in the US, and China has the ability to suppress online dissent, then it’s also perfectly possible to track downloads of copyrighted music.

Well, yes, of course it is. That’s been perfectly possible for the last decade, but what good does it do? The RIAA has largely given up suing individuals and even when countries like France pass fairly draconian legislation to have people removed from the Internet for sharing content, there are plenty of ways around it.

“The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files,” says Bono. “The immutable laws of bandwidth tell us we’re just a few years away from being able to download an entire season of “24” in 24 seconds. Many will expect to get it free.”

While it’s true that we are only a couple of years away from being to download huge amounts of data in just a few seconds and that will have an impact on the volumes of movie and TV show downloading, we can’t actually watch a full season of “24″ in 24 seconds. Real-time will suffice, though.

Right at this moment via sites like Watch-Movies-Online, it’s possible to view the very latest movies instantaneously. With the new streaming functionality available in the latest beta of uTorrent, the same can be achieved via torrent swarms.

Bono, the future is now. Suing Internet users does not work and blaming the ISPs will only prove counter-productive. Monitoring the Internet will prove futile. The only way to deal with piracy is to compete with it.

As we pointed out in our article covering the most downloaded TV shows of 2009, there is huge interest in on-demand TV and there are millions of viewers that can potentially bring in millions of dollars in revenue.

The growth in unauthorized downloading of TV shows and other media is a sign that consumers want something currently unavailable through the official channels, and while price is a factor, it is not necessarily all about ‘free’.

Serving the insatiable demand during the next decade at a reasonable price should be the main aim of the media industry, as locking down the Internet will not only suffocate their customers, but also their own business. That definitely won’t help the songwriters.

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

After some epic legal wrangling, vote after vote, and protest upon protest, the French government finally got their way. In 2010, those caught sharing files illegally in France will be subjected to the much-touted “3 strikes” regime.

When ‘caught’ uploading copyright works for the first time, the owner of the Internet connection used for the alleged infringement will receive an email warning. On allegations of a second offense, a physical letter will drop through the door. On the the third, the account holder will be summoned to appear before a judge who will have the power to fine, or even disconnect them from the Internet.

French senator Michel Thiolliere has told the BBC that the so-called Hadopi legislation will have the desired effect, with nearly everyone warned a second time abandoning illegal file-sharing for good.

“What we think is that after the first message… about two-thirds of the people (will) stop their illegal usages of the internet,” he explained

“After the second message more than 95% will finish with that bad usage.”

It is, however, much more likely that after getting a first warning, or even before, French Internet users will try to find a way round this system. They will discover that it’s surprisingly easy.

6 Ways Savvy Internet Users Will Neutralize Hadopi

Free options

MP3 Search Engines

One of the simplest ways to find music online is to use an MP3 search engine. That won’t be difficult as there are dozens to choose from. Sites like Skreemr, Songza, beeMP3, MP3Realm and AirMP3 are very simple to use and since there is no uploading, they drive a cart and horses through Hadopi. For those who don’t mind getting their hands dirty, Google offers similar functionality with their filetype: search operator.

Direct Downloads

During 2008 and 2009, the continued rise of blogs and forums that link to music, movies, tv shows and games stored on so-called cyberlocker sites was difficult to ignore. Although links can get taken down very quickly by copyright holders, they are often replaced just as swiftly by the communities that frequent such sites. The international music industry is particularly worried about the phenomenon, as tracking those that download from sites such as Rapidshare and MegaUpload is completely impractical.

Of course there are also perfectly legal alternatives, such as the excellent Jamendo.

Streaming Music and Video

While there are dozens of sites to visit directly, for those who really can’t be bothered to look any further and don’t mind closing a couple of slightly annoying popups, OVGuide is a huge portal to thousands of movies, TV shows and general video. With the assistance of the DivX plug-in, most content can be streamed directly in compatible web-browsers.

Music fans who don’t mind to stream tracks in their web browser actually have a few dozen legal alternatives. Grooveshark is one of the most elaborate music services. It holds more content than the average download store, supports playlists and it will roll out an iPhone app.

Premium options

Overseas MP3 Sites

Just over the English Channel from France lies the UK. Research carried out there recently by the BPI indicated that usage of MP3 pay sites had increased by 47%. While users do have to hand over money to use these services, at a tiny fraction of prices they would pay in their homeland they prove attractive to those on a tight budget.

Newsgroups

Using Usenet, or newsgroups as they are commonly known, is one of the most secure ways of downloading movies, TV shows, music and video games.

While the learning curve on Usenet is considered by many to be quite steep, once an individual discovers .NZB files – the .torrent of the newsgroup world – everything is hugely simplified. Within seconds of starting a transfer, the user’s connection will be completely maxed-out.

On a practical basis, and certainly as far as Hadopi is concerned, paying a few euros each month for a decent newsgroup account means that French citizens need never fear being disconnected from the Internet. Indeed, not even the first warning email will arrive.

Anonymous VPN

While the above options require that Internet users modify their behaviors, by spending a few euros a month on an anonymous VPN account they won’t have to change any of their habits at all. They can continue to use BitTorrent, eD2K or any other P2P method of file-sharing.

Once subscribed to a service such as Netherlands-based ItsHidden (who also offer a free, but speed-limited service), Hadopi file-sharing investigators will believe that the user behind that IP address is from another country and simply move on.

As the failed and now largely abandoned campaign against file-sharers in the United States proved, scare tactics simply don’t work. There are millions of file-sharers in France and many will simply carry on their activities in the belief that the odds of being caught are extremely slim.

And they would be absolutely right.

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

The last year has been one of the most hectic in BitTorrent’s short-lived history. While the three largest BitTorrent sites – The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt – all faced setbacks in court, the number of BitTorrent users continued to steadily grow.

The new year starts without The Pirate Bay tracker, which was closed in November, and also without Mininova, which saw its site being censored and stripped down by a Dutch court. To counter these losses, several public tracker-only services have made a comeback along with multiple torrent-only storage sites.

Where do we go from here? Let’s make some predictions.

Prediction 1: The Pirate Bay will cease to offer torrent links

After closing its tracker in 2009, The Pirate Bay will further evolve by removing all torrents from its index in the new year. The site will be reduced to a BitTorrent platform that no longer stores torrent files. Users will still be able to submit torrents through a third party service such as Torrage, but instead of linking to these torrent files, The Pirate Bay will list only Magnet links.

During the second half of 2010, The Pirate Bay four will appear before the Appeal Court. They will be found ‘not guilty’ and walk away free. Shortly after this victory in court, Pirate Bay’s YouTube killer The Video Bay will be released to the public.

Prediction 2: A BitTorrent client will be dragged to court

In 2009, the entertainment industry and authorities took legal action against various BitTorrent users and numerous sites. They left BitTorrent clients alone, but this will change in the new year. A coalition of copyright holders will file a lawsuit against one of the major BitTorrent clients, in an attempt to stop the ever increasing piracy rate.

The copyright holders will argue that BitTorrent clients play a vital role in downloading and uploading copyrighted files, and that the software is assisting in copyright infringement. They will demand that the torrent client implements a filtering mechanism to prevent users from downloading movies, music or games without the permission of the copyright holder.

Prediction 3: More people will use BitTorrent anonymously

2010 is the year where copyright holders gain more control over the Internet. Three-strikes legislation will be rolled out in various countries and global trade agreements such as ACTA will result in humongous fines for casual downloaders.

As a result of this newly founded Internet police state, millions of BitTorrent users will take measures to hide their identities online. By the end of the year, a quarter of all BitTorrent users will use a VPN service or similar anonymity software, with another quarter looking to do so in the following 12 months. This will make new legislation ineffective, and lead to further lobbying by the entertainment industry for even harsher anti-piracy measures.

This cycle will repeat itself until the entertainment industry decides to innovate.

Prediction 4: BitTorrent (live) streaming will take off

Advances in technology and growing broadband penetration have brought us to a point where BitTorrent-powered streaming solutions have become reality. BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen is working on a streaming implementation and experiments have shown that it is possible to stream high definition content.

In the second half of 2010, the first BitTorrent-powered YouTube competitors will be launched. These new BitTorrent sites will mainly offer streams of pirated movies and TV-shows. Live BitTorrent streaming will gain worldwide traction during the 2010 soccer world cup in South Africa. In the second half of the year, commercial implementations will follow, allowing broadcasters to stream live content at zero cost.

Prediction 5: uTorrent will become a resource hog

In 2010, uTorrent will be transformed from a lightweight BitTorrent application into a media portal similar to its nemesis, Vuze. Unlike Vuze, BitTorrent Inc. will continue to offer a lightweight uTorrent version for the the people who don’t want to make this switch, preventing a revolt among conservative uTorrent users.

The new uTorrent will be a resource hog, featuring a full blown search engine, video conversion, iTunes integration and a video player. The browser interface will allow uTorrent to be put on set-top boxes, which opens up the possibility for BitTorrent Inc. to reopen a new and improved version of their video store that can be easily hooked up to TVs.

Due to the changes, uTorrent will obviously have to remove its tagline ‘a (very) tiny BitTorrent client.’

—–

Happy new year to all of you from TorrentFreak. Let us know what your predictions are for 2010 in the comments below. We will feature the best on our side-blog FreakBits during the coming days.

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

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.