Tag archive: BitTorrent

The Dutch government is moving to crack down on illegal file-sharing, but it's going after Internet service providers rather than individual file-sharers. A new proposal, due to be submitted to the Dutch Parliament by the middle of the year, would make it illegal to provide access to Web sites and services that facilitate copyright infringement. If ISPs fail to comply, they would be subject to penalties of €10,000 a day, up to a maximum… Read More

On a day when so much of the Internet is participating in a debate about the proposed U.S. SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy legislation, Sweden's torrent tracking site The Pirate Bay—one of the Internet's most infamous tools for setting hands on pirated copyrighted materials—has announced a new initiative called The Promo Bay. The Promo Bay invites independent artists—whether musicians, videographers, painters, cartoonists, comedians, or… Read More

According to BitTorrent news site TorrentFreak, the fifth entry in the Fast and the Furious franchise took the top spot on the most pirated films of 2011. Fast Five, starring Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, had over nine million downloads over the course of the year. Close behind in second and third place, The Hangover Part II and Marvel's Thor each had over 8 million downloads each. Other films on the top ten list included Source Code, I Am… Read More

Rounded up in TorrentFreak's annual Top 10 list of the most pirated television shows, Showtime's Dexter has taken the top spot this year. The show details the life of a serial killer that works for the Miami police department as a blood spatter analyst while also juggling a family life. Dexter pushed HBO's Game of Thrones to the number two position, but both shows had more illegal downloads of episodes than estimated U.S.… Read More

Comedian Louis C.K. did an amazing thing today: He released his newest stand-up comedy special, Live at the Beacon Theater, exclusively through his website, for the fair price of $5. There's no limit to the number of times you can watch it. It's DRM-free, so you can even burn it to a DVD, if you like. Most importantly, there's no middle man — Louis C.K. paid for the entire thing himself, and all the proceeds go straight to… Read More

Two of the founders of the notorious Pirate Bay BitTorrent file sharing site have launched a new file sharing service: Bayfiles. However, rather than being a one-to-everyone file sharing service like Pirate Bay, Bayfiles follows a model more similar to RapidShare or MegaUpload: a user uploads data, it doesn't get put into a public pool that anyone can search and download. Instead, the user receives a private URL they can share with… Read More

In a move supported by movie studios, record labels and the Obama administration, Internet providers have banded together to form a universal policy that imposes penalties on illegal downloads. The system allows for six strikes on an account with warning levels. The process starts with emails that require acknowledgement from the account holder. If the warnings are completely ignored, the final strikes result in decreasing Internet speed and… Read More

We have a new winner in the race to make movie fans give up on Hollywood altogether. The producers of Oscar award-winning film Hurt Locker have now sued a record-breaking 24,583 people for allegedly illegally downloading the movie over a peer-to-peer filesharing network, reports Torrent Freak. Voltage Pictures hopes to recover millions of dollars in damages from the defendants for money lost due to piracy. This lawsuit, headed by Washington,… Read More

Peer-to-peer networking pioneer BitTorrent has unveiled Project Chrysalis, a new beta BitTorrent client that adds personal content channels and social features so users can share large files with friends and family via the Internet and comment on them in real time amongst themselves. Users just create a personal channel of their own, invite their friends to it, and then use BitTorrent's distributed networking technology to deliver the… Read More

Earlier this week, the largest BitTorrent lawsuit ever was lodged against an alleged 23,000 file sharers. Now it appears that Internet Service Providers, including Comcast, may actually be actively preventing their users from attempting to illegally share or download content. Reports were flooding in this morning that users were unable to access The Pirate Bay’s site. According to TorrentFreak, numerous Comcast subscribers are complaining that… Read More

If you downloaded a copy of Sylvester Stallone action flick the Expendables through BitTorrent, you may soon find yourself in the hot seat of the biggest illegal-downloading case in US history, reports Wired. A federal judge has agreed to a request from the US Copyright Group, which is representing the producers of the Expendables, to subpoena Internet service providers to cough up the identities of everyone who downloaded the 2010 Hollywood… Read More

Why buy an electronic book from an ebookstore when you can get it for free via BitTorrent? That's the idea behind the peer-to-peer file sharing service's new initiative: they're offering Megan Lisa Jones' political thriller Captive as a free download in both PDF and ePub formats, along with a video introduction with the author. The move markes BitTorrent's first book release, complementing offerings from musicians… Read More

Customers of Canadian ISP Rogers have been complaining for months that performance of the MMORPG game World of Warcraft has been poor and sluggish even though Rogers' network appears to be operating just fine. Canada's Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) sent a formal inquiry to Rogers asking what was going on, and now Rogers has come out with a flat-out admission (PDF): it is using traffic management… Read More

Market research group NPD has released on update to its Music Acquisition Monitor survey, and finds that the number of U.S. Internet users getting music via peer-to-peer file sharing networks has reached an all time low. According to the figures, just nine percent of American Internet users got music via P2P services in the fourth quarter of 2010—that's down from 16 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007. And NPD doesn't… Read More

Hollywood and BitTorrent have never really seen eye to eye. This is largely because your average Joe Internet User can make use of the file-sharing protocol to download pirated movies with relative ease. It isn't right but it happens, and frequently, so the powers-that-be in Hollywood have taken a generally aggressive stance toward BitTorrent. With good cause too. Which makes today's news all the more noteworthy. In an industry… Read More