Leaked Oscar Screeners are BitTorrent Smash Hits
In a just a few days time the 2013 Oscar nominees will be announced and as usual there are plenty of great movies in the running. One of them, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, is currently getting a huge thumbs up from the Internet. Over the weekend a perfect review copy leaked online and in just 24 hours racked up 500,000 downloads. The Hobbit, currently the most popular Oscars leak, has more than 2 million downloads to date with a week’s head start over Tarantino’s western.
With the Academy Awards just weeks away, January is an exciting time for movie lovers around the world. In the run up to “Oscar Sunday” on February 24, this Thursday the nominees will be announced following the deliberations of 5,700 Academy members.
Some of those voters will have made their assessments from a trip to the theater but some highly privileged individuals will have received a piece of cinematic gold from the studios – access to pre-release copies of all the top movies “for their consideration.” Read more...
Internet Archive serves up 1.4 million BitTorrent downloads
The Internet Archive, a non-profit online library dedicated to the permanent preservation of information in digital form, has made nearly a petabyte of materials available via the controversial BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol.
For the project's launch on Tuesday, founder Brewster Kahle announced that the Internet Archive was hosting more than a million torrents, the small files that point to data accessible by BitTorrent clients. The collection has grown since then, and now comprises nearly 1.5 million torrents.
The majority of those torrents – more than one million – point to digitized books, while the others point to audio and video files. Read more...
Should Websites Charge A Fee To Process Copyright Takedowns?
Every day copyright holders send out countless notices which order BitTorrent indexes, cyberlockers, forums, blogs and search engines to remove links to allegedly infringing content. The process is time consuming for everyone involved. So, since time is money, shouldn’t those being burdened by the actions of third parties be compensated for their work? One anti-piracy company says charging for takedowns amounts to extortion.
The publication last week of Google’s Transparency Report gave us a clearer idea of the pressures the search engine is under from copyright holders. The report revealed that in a single month Google was asked to take down an astonishing 1.2m links to allegedly infringing material. Read more...
IP-Address Can’t Even Identify a State, BitTorrent Judge Rules
The mass-BitTorrent lawsuits that are sweeping the United States are in a heap of trouble. After a Florida judge ruled that an IP-address is not a person, a Californian colleague has gone even further in protecting the First Amendment rights of BitTorrent users. The judge in question points out that geolocation tools are far from accurate and that it’s therefore uncertain that his court has jurisdiction over cases involving alleged BitTorrent pirates. As a result, 15 of these mass-BitTorrent lawsuits were dismissed.
In recent years more than a quarter million people have been accused of sharing copyrighted works in the United States.
Copyright holders generally sue dozens, hundreds or sometimes even thousands of people at once, hoping to extract cash settlements from the alleged downloaders. The evidence they present to the court is usually an IP-address and a timestamp marking when the alleged infringement took place. Read more...
Major Book Publisher Demands Jury Trial Against BitTorrent Pirates
John Wiley & Sons, one of the world’s largest book publishers, is continuing its efforts to crack down on BitTorrent piracy. The company has now named several people who allegedly shared Wiley titles online, and is demanding a jury trial against them. If these actually go ahead it will be the first time that BitTorrent-related evidence is tested in a US court.
Last fall, John Wiley and Sons became the first book publisher to go after BitTorrent users in the US.
By filing a mass-BitTorrent lawsuit the company followed mostly in the footsteps of several movie studios, who together have sued more than 250,000 people in the US since early 2010. And the publisher didn’t stop at just one.
In recent months Wiley has filed more than a dozen mass BitTorrent lawsuits involving a few hundred John Doe defendants in total. The Does are all accused of sharing digital copies of titles including “WordPress for Dummies,” Hacking for Dummies” and “Day Trading for Dummies.” Read more...
Major Book Publisher Demands Jury Trial Against BitTorrent Pirates
John Wiley & Sons, one of the world’s largest book publishers, is continuing its efforts to crack down on BitTorrent piracy. The company has now named several people who allegedly shared Wiley titles online, and is demanding a jury trial against them. If these actually go ahead it will be the first time that BitTorrent-related evidence is tested in a US court.
Last fall, John Wiley and Sons became the first book publisher to go after BitTorrent users in the US.
By filing a mass-BitTorrent lawsuit the company followed mostly in the footsteps of several movie studios, who together have sued more than 250,000 people in the US since early 2010. And the publisher didn’t stop at just one.
In recent months Wiley has filed more than a dozen mass BitTorrent lawsuits involving a few hundred John Doe defendants in total. The Does are all accused of sharing digital copies of titles including “WordPress for Dummies,” Hacking for Dummies” and “Day Trading for Dummies.” Read more...
Turn Any WordPress Site Into A BitTorrent Tracker
A new plugin for WordPress allows anyone to set up a fully functioning BitTorrent site in just a few minutes. Whether it’s a totally public torrent index or a private torrent tracker with strict ratio enforcement, WP-Trader supports it. The project was born when the developers recognized a huge demand for a simple script that even relative tech novices can set up.
With WordPress pretty much anyone can set up a personal blog or small website in a few minutes, and thanks to the new WP-Trader plugin it becomes just as easy to start a fully operational torrent site.
The levels of work and expertise required to run a large torrent site shouldn’t be underestimated of course, but there are also hundreds of hobbyists out there who have the desire to set up a small torrent site of their own. WP-Trader is aimed at the latter, and it has a wide range of features that support the needs of every self-aspiring torrent site admin.
WP-Trader developer Andrew Walker told TorrentFreak that he saw the need for an ultra-simple torrent script through his half-decade long involvement in the forums of the popular Torrent Trader script. Read more...
Canadian Songwriters Want to Legalize File-Sharing
While most of the major entertainment industry companies wage war against BitTorrent sites, the Songwriters Association of Canada prefers to embrace file-sharing. Speaking with TorrentFreak, vice president Jean-Robert Bisaillon says that the Internet has revived the music business. Sharing music is part of people’s nature and the songwriters want to legalize file-sharing, while compensating the artists whose works are shared.
With prominent members such Bryan Adams, Eddie Schwartz, Randy Bachman and Carole Pope among its ranks, the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) is the voice of more than 1,500 Canadian artists.
In common with many of the groups tied to the music industry, SAC has a strong opinion about file-sharing. But unlike most of the others, they don’t want to shutter sites that allow people to share copyrighted music. Quite the opposite. Read more...