Tag archive: Torrent

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

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

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 were uncertain that the digital world has decided to take on piracy this year, it should be pretty clear now. First Nintendo announces the “heyday of piracy” has come and gone, and today Google has turned off its Autocomplete feature when it comes to searching for anything involving illegal downloading, making good on its vow to fight BitTorrenters everywhere. Searching for BitTorrent, RapidShare, uTorrent, Megaupload, and torrent will… Read More

A Swedish appeals court has upheld (Swedish) the 2009 rulings against three out of the four founders of the now-defunct Pirate Bay. However, the appeals court altered the convictions by reducing the sentences of three of the four men convicted for operating the service while increasing monetary damages they must collectively pay from 30 million Swedish kronar to 46 million kronar (about US$6.5 million). The Pirate Bay remains one of the most… Read More

Bit torrent networking has become the most popular form of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. Most people consider bit torrent sharing as a form of piracy—but if you ask any college student, it’s just another way to help your underpaid fellow-man enjoy some quality entertainment. Bittorrents (synonymous with “torrents”) download in small bits of files from many different web sources at the same time, making it extremely easy to use and… Read More

“No two ways about it: Piracy is legally and morally wrong.” We’ve all heard it a million times. We’ve heard the analogies to walking out of a store with a CD under your jacket, sending software developers straight to the unemployment line or ripping food right out of a poor key grip’s mouth. And for some of us, we’ve even seen people we know ensnared by the law when they finally get caught gorging on free motion pictures and music. Like… Read More