And BitTorrent’s Oscar Goes To…. District 9
Posted on: March 07, 2010
Tonight, Hollywoods biggest stars will walk the red carpet into the Kodak Theater for the Academy Awards ceremony.
In anticipation of the glamorous Oscar night, we enter the dark side of the movie business to find out which of the 10 nominees in the Best Picture category gets the vote from BitTorrent users. NewTeeVee asked us to rank the nominees by number of downloads and the results are finally in.
If every download on BitTorrent counted as a vote, District 9 would be crowned the winner, closely followed by Avatar. The least popular films according to the BitTorrent public are The Blind Side with 1,845,000 downloads and An Education with ‘only' 683,000 downloads.
We have to note that comparing the downloads of each of the nominees is not really fair since some films have been available online for more than a year already, while others only leaked a few weeks ago. Avatar, which is second in the list with 11,326,000 downloads, became available in DVD-quality a month ago, while District 9 was already widely available last September.
As usual, all the nominated films are available online in various formats. For District 9 2,948 unique torrent files were counted, but the majority of these are inactive or have very few downloaders. Avatar beats District 9 in terms of availability with 4,280 torrent files.
The data for this list is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all the large BitTorrent trackers. All release formats, including cammed versions, are counted. Afterwards, the data was carefully checked and possible inaccuracies were systematically corrected.
| rank | movie | downloads | |
|---|---|---|---|
| torrentfreak.com | |||
| 1 | District 9 | 12,639,000 | |
| 2 | Avatar | 11,326,000 | |
| 3 | The Hurt Locker | 7,930,000 | |
| 4 | Up | 5,437,000 | |
| 5 | Inglourious Basterds | 5,376,000 | |
| 6 | Precious | 4,922,000 | |
| 7 | Up In The Air | 4,855,000 | |
| 8 | A Serious Man | 3,836,000 | |
| 9 | The Blind Side | 1,845,000 | |
| 10 | An Education | 683,000 | |
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
http://feed.torrentfreak.com/~r/Torrentfreak/~3/HdRgSEsA6rQ/ Post LinkFrostWire Torrent Joint - Powered By Azureuz BitTorrent Technology
Posted on: March 07, 2010FirstWire, the popular free LimeWire alternative, is one of the best clients that support Gnutella, a decentralized file sharing network. Although unnoticed by many, FrostWire can also handle torrent files as it comes with built in support for BitTorrent protocol. However dedicated torrent clients such as Vuze and uTorrent sued to pwn FrostWire’s BT engine which was based on legacy LimeWire technology. However the FW team announced a major change to the software recently, dubbed...
BTArena’s Leaked Oscar Movies Project Is Back For 2010
Posted on: March 07, 2010If you’ve been following release blogs on the internet you probably already know about BTArena.org. It’s a popular site which provides information about latest scene and p2p releases along with a host of accompanying resources such as torrent/one click hosting links, trailers, NFO, video clips etc . Unlike most other release blogs which simply link to external sites, BTARENA hosts links, .torrent files, video etc on their own servers (links.btarena.org, tracker.btarena.org (their own BT...
RIAA Claims Music Pirates Hurt Haiti Fund Raising
Posted on: March 06, 2010
The original “We Are The World” single released in 1985 to help Africa was the first single to receive multi-platinum certification. It brought in millions of dollars for humanitarian aid and still holds the record for the fastest selling single in the USA.
Dozens of contributing artists waived their rights and performed free of charge to maximize the revenue for Africa. In an attempt to replicate this success, a group of artists recorded “We Are the World 25 for Haiti” following the devastating earthquake in Haiti, hoping to raise money to help those in need.
Although most people realize that donating directly to Doctors Without Borders or the Red Cross is a more efficient way to donate, the initiative was obviously started with the best intentions by most of the people involved. According to the RIAA however, there is also a group of people who deliberately try to “steal” from this fundraising campaign – music pirates.
In a recent blog post the RIAA dramatically claims that “the album is now widely available on illicit BitTorrent sites like The Pirate Bay, Torrentz and more. The posting highlights a truly ugly side of P2P piracy – the undermining of humanitarian fundraising efforts via online theft of the ‘Hope for Haiti Now' compilation.”
The RIAA basically says that pirates are purposely stealing money from Haitians. But are they?
In a response to the RIAA's writing, Music Ally dug up some numbers and they found out that compared to most other popular singles the number of downloads the song gets are really low. Aside from this, one has to wonder if those who downloaded the song would have paid for it if it was not available on BitTorrent. Perhaps they already donated through a more direct channel?
Techdirt further notes that the RIAA blames sites like Torrentz which doesn't even store torrent files, while they leave out Google, the site through which their source actually found the torrents.
What most people missed though, might make the RIAA's post look even more hypocritical. Charity singles such as “We Are The World” actually bring in a lot of cash for the record industry and related businesses. This could be easily framed as “Stealing from Haitians” as well.
Columbia Records fared well with the release of the first “We Are The World” single and the performance rights that still come in today continue to benefit the “copyright holders.” In addition, charity songs including “Do They Know It's Christmas?” ended up on thousands of compilation albums for which the charities probably never saw a penny.
We were unable to find out exactly how long the profits of the new Haiti single will actually go to Haiti, but we're sure that the music industry will take a cut regardless. Similarly, iTunes will give up their share for a few months but will be profiting from the single later on.
These examples show that reality is always a bit more balanced than how the RIAA portrays it. Nonetheless, those who actually like the song should definitely consider buying it or at least donate to one of the other charities that benefit Haiti.
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
http://feed.torrentfreak.com/~r/Torrentfreak/~3/MtNSOMfgn_A/ Post LinkPirate Bay Buyer Offered Millions to Mininova
Posted on: March 03, 2010When GGF announced that it would take over The Pirate Bay, the company bombarded the press with optimistic plans which indicated the site would become the largest online media store. The attention later shifted to the troublesome financial position of its CEO, but all along the company had confidence in its plans for the new and ‘legal’ Pirate Bay.
This fall, however, it all turned out too good to be true. After GGF’s shareholders agreed to acquire the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, the company had a month to come up with the proposed $7.8m (SEK 60 million). What followed was mostly silence and the deadline passed without an official response from the company.
From the moment it was announced the planned Pirate Bay acquisition had been surrounded by controversy. However, behind the scenes GGF CEO Hans Pandeya was drafting an even bigger deal with BitTorrent's number one indexer at the time – Mininova.
“We will try to buy as many torrent sites as possible,” Pandeya told TorrentFreak back in August. In common with their plans for The Pirate Bay, GGF hoped to turn these sites into large media stores where users could download content with the full permission of copyright holders.
Little information has been made public about the “other” sites Pandeya was aiming at and how serious this interest was. Unlike all the other plans and deals that leaked out previously, no other torrent site has been publicly connected to GGF, until today where Pandeya's connection to Mininova was exposed.
TorrentFreak has learned that GGF and Mininova already finalized a contract last summer to sell the torrent index for no less than 20 million Euros. This deal and the amount have been confirmed by several independent sources close to Mininova and GGF. One of the sources who confirmed the Mininova buyout plans was Hans Pandeya himself.
One of our sources further said that the deal had already been signed off by Mininova, and that GGF would wait for the verdict in Mininova's appeal with the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. This verdict was due one day before the GGF shareholders were set to give the green light on the Pirate Bay deal.
A positive outcome for Mininova in that case would have certainly made the site a valuable asset, but as we now know Mininova lost in court and was forced to proactively filter titles and remove a great number of infringing, and indeed non-infringing torrents to ensure absolute compliance.
Sources from within Mininova deny that a contract was already signed on their part. Instead, Mininova would have liked to see some proof that GGF could pay the proposed sum before signing.
Although there seems to be some disagreement on the details, there is no doubt that GGF had set course to get the two major BitTorrent sites in possession. In fact, Mininova was brought in during licensing negotiations with several senior executives at one of the major record labels.
During a meeting with the label in London, Pandeya was assisted by his short-lived business partner Wayne Rosso. In the meeting the executives were asking for some traffic metrics and out of the blue and to the surprise of Rosso, Pandeya picked up his mobile phone and rang a Dutch number, claiming that it was a “company of his” close to Amsterdam that could provide some insight into the traffic question.
The person on the other end of the line provided some information to the label execs and plans were made to head over to The Netherlands to do some due diligence. When Rosso later asked Pandeya about this mysterious Dutch company Pandeya revealed that it was in fact Mininova.
“It’s Mininova. I’m going to buy Mininova too and eliminate all the competition,” Pandeya told Rosso explaining the Dutch connection.
At the time of this meeting the contract was already drafted but not signed by both parties. If it would have gone through GGF would have had the option to buy out the two largest BitTorrent sites online. Of course we now know that the deal didn't go though. GGF didn't have the money and Mininova might not have been worth it after the negative verdict in their case against BREIN.
In the months that followed Mininova removed over a million torrent files making it a less lucrative asset for Pandeya. On the other hand it also shows that a torrent site with only “authorized” content will quickly lose most of its regular visitors. Despite this knowledge and all the failed attempts to pull investors in, Pandeya said a few days ago that we haven't seen the last of him yet.
“I have a lot of secret plans I'm working on,” he warned.
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
http://feed.torrentfreak.com/~r/Torrentfreak/~3/k7spAHZQ_lA/ Post LinkGoogle Removes BTJunkie From Search Results
Posted on: March 02, 2010Like most torrent sites, Google is no stranger to removing “copyright infringing” listings from its search results. Following up on complaints from the Chinese government and of course copyright holders, the company has been censoring its search results for years.
The filtering process is not automated and DMCA takedown requests are generally reviewed manually. Sometimes this leads to errors, such as when Google removed The Pirate Bay's home page from its search results last October.
The Pirate Bay homepage does not list any torrent files as most people know, so there was little doubt that the filter was applied in error. Google later admitted this mistake and after blaming it on an incorrect takedown request, the company finally said that an “internal error” was the reason behind the Pirate Bay ban.
As promised, The Pirate Bay homepage soon reappeared in Google's search results and things went back to the way they were. However, fellow torrent site BTJunkie is now in a similar position as The Pirate Bay was a few months ago. BTJunkie's homepage no longer comes up in Google.
“In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org,” Google explains at the bottom of the search results.
The DMCA complaint Google links to appears to come from Fox and refers to the blockbuster movie Avatar. At the time of publication the full complaint is not yet available so we were unable to verify whether it listed BTJunkie's home page.
Unlike The Pirate Bay, BTJunkie does list several torrents on its homepage including Avatar which is among the most downloaded torrents on the site. These lists are all dynamically generated and constantly changing of course, and it is unclear whether that will warrant a removal from the search results.
TorrentFreak discussed the issue with the owner of BTJunkie who told us that he has sent a counter notice to Google (picture below). Thus far Google has not responded on the issue, but we will update this article when there's an official statement on BTJunkie's removal.
BTjunkie's counter notice
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
http://feed.torrentfreak.com/~r/Torrentfreak/~3/Jxyt_hbadZs/ Post LinkThe Pirate Bay Torrents Remain Online Despite Court Order
Posted on: March 01, 2010
In the hope of dismantling BitTorrent's flagship The Pirate Bay, anti-piracy outfit BREIN took three of the site's founders to court this summer. BREIN won the case and Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter were ordered to prevent Dutch users from accessing the site, a decision appealed in October without luck.
In its verdict the Court ruled that the three defendants had to remove a list of torrents from The Pirate Bay that link to copyrighted works. The three defendants and the site itself were not found guilty of copyright infringement, but according to the Court, The Pirate Bay assists in copyright infringement by allowing and encouraging its users to share torrents.
The Court gave the defendants until March 1 to remove a list of infringing torrents and to block Dutch users from accessing parts of the site where (.torrent) links to copyrighted files can be downloaded. If the three did not comply they would face penalties of 3,000 euros per person, per day.
This ultimatum passed today and thus far no changes have been made to The Pirate Bay. Dutch users can still access all parts of the site and from the looks of it no torrent files have been removed. To the three defendants this comes as no surprise because they always claimed that they have no control over the site anymore.
Peter Sunde, former Pirate Bay spokesman and one of the defendants in this case, told TorrentFreak last week that he doubted that anything would change. Sunde also repeated what was said in Court by their lawyers. The three defendants are no longer in charge of The Pirate Bay and can't comply with the Court order even if they wanted to.
For BREIN, who celebrated the verdict as a grand victory, The Pirate Bay's continued operation in The Netherlands is likely to be received as a huge setback. TorrentFreak contacted BREIN director Tim Kuik for a response to the news but we haven't heard back from him at time of publication.
Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay remains the most popular BitTorrent site in The Netherlands where the site is listed in the top 50 of most visited sites on the Internet, beating Microsoft's search engine Bing.com.
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
http://feed.torrentfreak.com/~r/Torrentfreak/~3/l6KAf-fdIp8/ Post LinkCan Google Secure a Safe Haven for BitTorrent Sites?
Posted on: February 25, 2010
Much like Google, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt are search engines that aim to index information posted on the Internet and make it findable to their users.
Google's YouTube shows even more similarities to torrent sites as it allows users to submit content, with the only difference being that YouTube actually hosts the uploaded files whereas torrent sites only link to content indirectly through .torrent files.
In the last year, three of the largest torrent sites – The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt – were all taken to court by copyright holders for assisting in copyright infringement, and all three sites lost their cases to some degree. Strangely enough Google has never said a word about these cases other than to distance themselves from The Pirate Bay team after they were sentenced.
Despite this attempt at demarcation, three Google employees are now in a very similar position as the aforementioned torrent site operators. An Italian court just handed out suspended jail sentences to three Google employees for ‘allowing' users to upload a video that invaded the privacy of a third person.
The three employees were not aware of the upload before they were notified by the police, but they made it possible, much like they make it possible to upload copyrighted content. The similarities with torrent search engines are striking.
It is needless to say that Google is not amused by the court ruling. While the company kept its mouth shut in response to the legal actions surrounding the torrent search engines, they now speak of an attack on “the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built.”
“Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming,” Google's Matt Sucherman wrote in a blog post yesterday.
This response from Google does indeed seem logical, and we can easily apply the same reasoning to sites that index and host .torrent files. The operators of torrent sites and video sites can't possibly verify and screen the content of all uploaded files. This is something the site's users should be held accountable for.
This doesn't mean of course that the site's operators should ignore the law. The Pirate Bay for example has always been very responsive to requests from the police concerning illegal material linked to by the site. IsoHunt goes even further as it actively works together with copyright holders and Mininova even allowed copyright holders to prevent infringing torrents from being re-uploaded in the future.
According to Google such policies should be good enough to operate a site like YouTube without running into legal trouble.
“European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy,” Sucherman writes.
So here we have Google in a similar position as most torrent sites are in. Although the Italian verdict is outrageous the obvious upside is that unlike the torrent sites, Google has the financial power to successfully fight the verdict. According to former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde, Google got what it deserved.
“It's good that someone takes on Google for a change. Let them take the heat for once – and let them make sure that other sites that they've previously had no problem filtering, that basically do the same as them, don't end up in this shit the next time,” Sunde told TorrentFreak.
“I think it's good that time has finally caught up Google. Maybe now we have a level playing field here. They have to take the fight as well. Previously they only said nice things about how important the Internet was, and then ignored all of the things going on. Even supporting them – China for instance,” he added.
“A big player like Google has the financial muscles to fight this thing. And we all know that Italy is just full of rules made by Berlusconi, for Berlusconi,” Sunde said, adding, “That fascist needs to go.”
Google has indeed committed itself, and said it “will vigorously appeal this decision.” The whole case revolves around the question of whether or not the operators of media portals and search engines should be held accountable for the actions of their users.
In recent months Italian courts have clearly answered positively to this question. They have opened the door for a nationwide block of file-sharing sites and with yesterday's decision file and video hosting sites are not safe any longer either. So the next question is, can Google secure a safe haven for torrent sites?
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
http://feed.torrentfreak.com/~r/Torrentfreak/~3/X8IA5HBZfps/ Post LinkisoHunt to Appeal in MPAA Lawsuit, Sees The Lite
Posted on: February 23, 2010
Early 2006, the MPAA issued a complaint against isoHunt and its sister site Torrentbox, claiming that owner Gary Fung operated file-sharing services and profited from copyright infringement.
The lengthy legal procedure that followed came to a temporary end December last year, when a US Federal Court in California ruled that isoHunt was indeed guilty of violating US copyright law. 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.
That was not the end of the case though. Last month at the status conference the judge opened the door for an interlocutory appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. “Before we appeal however, we must undergo injunction motions and that's what we are doing now,” Gary Fung told TorrentFreak.
The MPAA has already filed its injunction and suggested that isoHunt should filter its search results based on generic keywords that may be used to describe copyrighted titles. In a response isoHunt has filed an injunction stating that such a feature is a bad idea for several reasons.
“The Plaintiffs' [MPAA studios] proposed injunction and its keyword type filter, in our view, raises serious issues on the balance between freedom of speech, fair use and copyright protectionism. Such a keyword filter is also impossible to implement if it's to have any sort of precision, nor can it avoid conflict with free use cases, free commerce, or extra-territorial law,” Fung said.
“If it were actually to be mandated and put into operation, plaintiffs’ proposed filter would make Swiss cheese out of the dictionary,” isoHunt's lawyer Ira Rothken writes in the injunction, arguing that a keyword filter would also censor a lot of legal content.
“If a new TV show title is based on a popular phrase that is already in the name of an amateur film or Linux program, distribution of the film or program will be blocked,” the lawyer added.
Instead of filtering isoHunt proposes to use a Lite version of isoHunt instead, a version of the site that no longer contains any of the red flags for inducement that were found at Summary Judgment. In other words, the ‘lite' version of the site is no different than search engines such as Google and Yahoo!, except that it's limited to torrent files.
“Should the Court accept a version of isoHunt Lite during the injunction phase, it may become the required interface for our US users,” Gary Fung told TorrentFreak.
It is noted in the injunction that Google and Yahoo! and other search engines can serve as torrent search engines also, and that most of the files that can be found via isoHunt are indexed by these other search engines as well. Gary Fung even conducted a test on a sample of torrent files to prove this point.
“This test shows that 95% of the torrent files indexed on isoHunt are equally available through the main search engines,” isoHunt's lawyer writes to the court.
With the Lite version of isoHunt Gary Fung hopes to prevent the site's closure in the US. If the Court somehow rules that it's still violating copyright law, one has to wonder what implications this has for Google, Yahoo! and other search engines.
The case continues.
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
http://feed.torrentfreak.com/~r/Torrentfreak/~3/jG6U3wxwlc8/ Post LinkLeechPack: MultiNetwork File Sharing Service Pack for File Sharing Freaks
Posted on: February 17, 2010
For file sharing enthusiasts, the ongoing search for quality downloads and the best transfer speeds possible through the myriad of dedicated services out there can sometimes become overwhelming and frustrating, not to mention time consuming and expensive. There are times when the drawbacks in the assiduous task of finding the right transfer link, combined with the long periods of lingering in front of the PC until the download is finally completed can be virtually discouraging. Even people who pay big money for premium access to multiple file sharing networks still stumble across some of these problems.
In my opinion, the whole idea behind file sharing should be about availability, cost-efficiency and obtaining what you want through as few steps as possible, so why does it have to be so hard then? Wouldn’t it be great to have someone do all the work for you? Fortunately, now you can have someone manage and assist your downloads all under one comprehensive dedicated service: LeechPack.com.
Designed by downloaders for downloaders, LeechPack is a growing collaborative service that primarily acts as a gateway between the most known file sharing systems. At present, the online service provides support for Rapidshare, Megaupload and BitTorrent, with HotFile, DepositFiles and many more to be added soon. With LeechPack, you can access the most popular file sharing sites from one single account, so you also save a lot of money.
From the user’s perspective, the way LeechPack works is simple: “Basically, you enter a link, or a set of links, in our LeechBox, the servers get it for you and give you a direct download link.You also have access to other downloads in real time and a powerful search engine, among many others kickass features!”, the site reads.
With LeechPack, there are only three steps to follow before you can enjoy the files you are after. First, you have to submit your Rapidshare, Megaupload or Torrent link into the “Links Manager” tool. From there, the site’s servers will handle everything for you and return a direct download link. Finally, you can use your favorite download manager to collect your links and download them straight to your PC.
What’s great about LeechPack is that it works offline, so you don’t need to leave your PC or laptop turned on all night anymore. Other promised features are high transfer speeds and download protection using a 256-bit encrypted connection.
So, how much do you have to spend to enjoy all this? LeechPack charges 9.99 euros for the minimum monthly pack, which includes 30Gb of traffic and 30Gb of space. From there, fees go up to 78.99 for the yearly pack, with 400Gb of traffic in addition to the 30Gb of space.
The downside of the service would be the effort it requires from you to create torrent files but for the file sharing freaks out there I guess that's not such a big problem after all.
Although at first glance, LeechPack’s offer may seem a little pricey, it stands out as a solid alternative to premium accounts on multiple file sharing networks and could prove to be a good investment on the long run judging by the benefits involved.
P2PON will be offering its readers 100 free invites to use LeechPack, and each free account will be capped to 1Gb for both disk and download quota. Once you reach that limit, you will have the option to buy more traffic from the site’s monthly traffic packages. Considering LeechPack is at its very beginning, you now have the possibility to be among the first who use the service, evaluate its pros and cons, send in your feedback and bring your contribution to promoting high quality downloads by helping the site grow.
Account data for leechpack login
Username: p2pon
Password:p2ponrocks
The Pirate Bay To Be Censored in Italy, Again
Posted on: February 10, 2010The Pirate Bay was first ‘censored' in Italy in the summer of 2008, when ISPs were ordered to prevent millions of Italians from accessing the world's largest BitTorrent tracker.
The Pirate Bay chose to appeal the decision and eventually 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 temporarily as the case was appealed once again.
A few weeks ago the Supreme Court reviewed the case and ruled that ISPs can be forced to block BitTorrent sites, even if they are not hosted in Italy or operated by Italian citizens. According to the decision by the Supreme Court, sites offering torrent files that link to copyrighted material are engaging in criminal activity.
This week the case once again appeared before the Court of Bergamo where it was decided that all Italian ISPs will have to deny their customers access to The Pirate Bay.
Pirate Bay lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus, Giuseppe Campanelli and Francesco Micozzi told TorrentFreak that the Court followed the same reasoning as the Supreme Court, and deemed it unnecessary to bring the case before the European Court of Justice.
According to the two lawyers The Pirate Bay is still considering whether to appeal this decision or not, but that will not prevent or delay the block. “We don't know when Italian ISPs will begin to re-apply the Pirate Bay filters, but we think that this will happen very soon,” Micozzi commented.
Aside from appealing to the Supreme Court, the Pirate Bay's legal team is also considering bringing the case before the European Court of Justice.
It is doubtful that the verdict will have a strong impact on the piracy rate in Italy. The proposed DNS-filtering scheme can be easily bypassed by Pirate Bay users and there are hundreds of alternative torrent sites that can replace The Pirate Bay.
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
http://feed.torrentfreak.com/~r/Torrentfreak/~3/GK--HePsl2s/ Post LinkMicrosoft Sues Prominent BitTorrent Tracker For $43m
Posted on: January 31, 2010
In recent years we've seen plenty of legal action against the owners and operators of BitTorrent sites, mostly initiated by the movie and music industries.
This week, Microsoft joins the fight as the software company announces that it will pursue LinkoManija's alleged operator Kestas Ermanas and his company in court.
The action against Lithuania's largest BitTorrent site, which is in the top 10 of the most visited websites in the country, has been approved by the US headquarters of the software giant.
The defendant and his company are accused of facilitating copyright infringement of Microsoft's Office 2003 and 2007 through their involvement with the BitTorrent tracker.
Together with local anti-piracy outfit LANVA, Microsoft has requested 107 million Lithuanian litas ($43 million) in damages at the Vilnius Regional Court. However, under Lithuanian law Microsoft can get up to $53,000 in damages at maximum.
In response to the demands from Microsoft, the assets of Kestas Ermanas and his company were seized and associated bank accounts frozen.
TorrentFreak briefly spoke with the defendant who is pretty shaken up by the news, but is claiming Microsoft sued the wrong people. We were told that as of 2010, he and his company no longer run LinkoManija. Kestas and his company operated the site until December last year.
Kestas further told us that Microsoft's move surprised him, as the company has never sent a torrent takedown request to the popular BitTorrent tracker. “We informed them that we wanted to cooperate with them, they just had to give us the links to the infringing torrent files,” Kestas said, adding “they never wrote back to us.”
In addition to Kestas and his company, Microsoft is also pursuing legal action against LinkoManija's users. In November last year, 106 users of the site were reported to the police and one of them will go on trial next month.
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
http://feed.torrentfreak.com/~r/Torrentfreak/~3/dy_E_ZS1lYY/ Post LinkSearch Torrents Easily With TorrentFetcher
Posted on: January 07, 2010If you want to make your Torrents search a little bit easier, just go with TorrentFetcher that is a handy utility program. It contains both torrents search engine and the results lists. You can enter a search phrase and start the search for torrents right away. Moreover, you can configure advanced options like the number of results that you want to have or a specified category. This tool will bring up to 1000 search results. Meanwhile, the categories include the usual games, TV shows, Movies, Software and Music. Moreover, the search results will contain the names, size, seeders, peers and date. As the Torrents are color coded, you can see on the very first glance if a torrent is well seeded or not.
Some Important Features:• Search through multiple pages of torrents at once.
• Automatically move downloaded torrents to a specified output directory (good for bittorrent clients that monitor a specific folder, like uTorrent).
• Automatically launch downloaded torrents.
• Know which torrent files you already have in your downloaded folder through automatic highlighting.
• Results highlighting lets you know if a torrent is well or poorly seeded or if it has negative comments left about it.
• Automatic detection and removal of “denis stalker” trackers using the MonoTorrent library.
• Minimize-to-tray option to keep the utility handy at all times.
• This download is freeware. All features of this program are available for all to use freely.
Download
[Source]
BitTorrent's Future? DHT, PEX and Magnet Links Explained
Posted on: December 19, 2009 |
With many BitTorrent trackers closing down due to legal pressure or financial difficulties, analysts predict the end of torrent files altogether. New and old technologies such as DHT, PEX and magnet links are being mentioned as possible successors. |
Bit Comet Review
Posted on: September 23, 2009BitComet is a powerful computer application that is used for transferring large files across the network. It is not just a BitTorrent client, but also a HTTP and FTP client. The term BitTorrent refers to a protocol for sharing large files across the network.
This application has been updated frequently and it is not just a P2P client, but a download manager that is multi threaded as well as it incorporates multiprotocol for file sharing. This feature makes it a very unique application, since a file can be downloaded by sharing parts of it from different P2P sources and Client-Server protocols.
Internet explorer browser is embedded inside the application to assist users to search torrent files without needing to open a web browser from outside. It supports all the features present in other BitTorrent clients like UPnP Gateway configuration, Scheduling, NAT traversal, Web seeding and protocol encryption etc.
Bitcomet has few innovative features. This application prioritizes the beginning and the ending portions of the media related files so that they can be previewed before they are fully downloaded. So, the user can stop the download if there is any problem with the file. In addition, a trackerless mode is available to track peers if tracker is offline. It supports plug-ins from Firefox and Internet explorer.
This application comes with an integrated flash player to play .flv and .swf files. This can also be downloaded individually and used without the main software application. A plug-in is available to connect to the vast eD2K network.
Bitcomet is written in C++ and currently supports only windows operating system. It is available in 52 different languages and is a freeware. It has a proprietary license and consists of adware.
Some of the important features of BitComet are
- Embedded search engine -google.atcomet.net
- Hash reporting
- It is loaded with adware
- Supports DHT
- Superseding
- Port mapping
- Protocol Encryption
- Scheduling
- File recovery
- Supports many features that are present in P2P clients and FTP clients
This software also supports FTP (file transfer protocol) and HTTP (Hypertext transfer protocol) for sharing large files.
You can download the client by visiting the link.
Bitcomet, Bitcomet Download, Bit comet, Bitcommet
COPYRIGHTED 2009 Bittorrent-uTorrent.com
BitTorrent The Oldest Peer to Peer Client
Posted on: September 18, 2009BitTorrent is a computer application that is used to transfer large files using peer to peer protocol. This is the first peer to peer client that was developed by Bram Cohen, who was the brain behind the peer to peer technology. Bram authored the P2P protocol, which made transferring of large files very simple affair. Scalability issues faced by traditional way of transferring files across the network were overcome by P2P technology. This application is also known as Mainline.
P2P protocol is nothing but a set of rules that enables you to connect with others in the peer to peer network. The advantage of this network is that you will be downloading and uploading at the same time. In addition, even a computer which is low on resources and bandwidth can participate without facing any problems. Therefore, this method is used to transfer very large files (like Linux OS) efficiently. Of course, it is faster and cheaper also.
BitTorrent client implements P2P protocols so that your computer connects with other computers in the network. This application is written in C++ and is available for Windows as well as MAC users. This is a global standard for transferring large files across the network. It is estimated that there are over 160 million clients worldwide and it is still growing.
The application started as an open source and until recently, it was converted into a closed source. The earlier versions of this software were written in python and were available with open source license.
BitTorrent software application allows the user to search for torrent files and download files. Torrents are small files that consist of all the details regarding the location and size of the files.
Some of the features of this client are
- Multiple parallel download;
- Graphical, Tubular and statistical views that allow users to clearly understand what is happening;
- Detailed information regarding the speed, the peers information and their bandwidth that is being used;
- Auto recovery system in case of a data crash;
- Supports ISP protocol encryption and all other features present in other P2P applications.
Download the client from here.
COPYRIGHTED 2009 Bittorrent-uTorrent.com
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