The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is refusing to die. It’s been the largest and one of the most popular torrent trackers in the world for a few years now. But its notoriety and ability to taunt copyright owners meant trouble was never far away.

The Pirate Bay’s legal woes came to a head in February when a three-year investigation into the site arrived in court. By April, the four defendants had been found guilty and it looked as though this was the beginning of the end for TPB.

The TPB Tracker Is Dead

The last few months have seen The Pirate Bay tracker unavailable at various times as copyright owners managed to pressure its ISPs to cut off service to the site. But instead of fighting against it, TPB has decided to roll with it.

As announced in a blog post today, The Pirate Bay has now shut down its tracker completely, and there’s no going back. However, this doesn’t mean the end of the site and the end of torrents.

Decentralizing Power

The Pirate Bay claims that torrent trackers are now unnecessary. In its place comes trackerless solutions such as distributed hash tables (DHT) and peer exchange (PEX).

These methods mean that instead of locating .torrent files from a central repository, files can be found simply by querying other peers in the swarm.

In essence, this removes the central power needed for torrents to be shared over a network. And that has clear (positive) legal ramifications for The Pirate Bay and could make the IFPI and MPAA’s mission to control filesharing an impossible one.

The Pirate Bay is now offering magnet links, hence the new logo as seen above. These simply direct a BitTorrent client to the BitTorrent peers which contain the file in question.

Conclusions

This is a genius move on the part of The Pirate Bay as it appears to throw a very large spanner in the legal victory celebrated by copyright owners earlier this year.

I doubt they’ll give up without a fight but they’re now fighting an activity that is impossible to track and is clearly not going to cease anytime soon.

KickAssTorrents.com is a new player in the torrent search space creating an easy and currently ad-free way to search for music, TV shows, movies, eBooks, and software.

The torrent portal launched publicly back in February 2009 and in under 10 months has quickly become a serious player in the torrent space.

KickAssTorrents has told WebTVwire.com that it receives over 100,000 visitors each day. A quick look at the traffic growth on Alexa confirms this:

[source]

Sweet Usability

Upon arriving on KickAssTorrents.com you’ll instantly notice the clean design, ease of use, and obvious absence of advertising.

Torrent sites have become the underground playhouse for scammy advertisers promising russian wives, instant weight loss, hot girls in your area, and seedy work from home opportunities.

It is a breath of fresh air to see a torrent site that lacks advertising, but the site is still young and KickAssTorrentz could yet be seduced by the promise of ad-revenue checks.

However, right now KickAssTorrents is probably the most friendly torrent search engine out there, and with ThePirateBay having no end of trouble KickAssTorrents is filling in the gap.

The aggressive and tech-fearing rights holders still haven’t quite grasped that taking down one great torrent site will just give birth to another.

KickAssTorrentz is also pushing forward with some interesting innovations and community features such as ajax comments preview, a firefox search plugin and last.fm and imdb integration.

However, legal pressure is still the biggest threat to any torrent site, and the owners of KickAssTorrents, like many other torrent sites, look to be trying to divert attention away from themselves and remain a hidden hand behind the Torrent portal.

KickAssTorrents Interview

I had the pleasure of being able to interview KickAssTorrents and dig deeper into this promising Torrent portal.

What caused the very recent, sudden and powerful jump in traffic for KickAssTorrents at the end October 2009?

It happened because of a number of different factors. From the inside we started a new marketing campaign, re-launched our blog, made a lot of small changes, etc.

From the outside we got recognition from the torrent community, landed on few top lists, got some good reviews, became listed on torrentz.com and torrent-finder.com and here we are. And yeah we became the default search engine for Vuze.

What do you believe it is about KickAssTorrents that sets it apart from other Torrent sites?

Skill + Creativity + Work. All the popular trackers are old and really lack usability, most of the new trackers/torrent search engines lack creativity and just intend to copy the existing trends.

We instead tried to create something more interesting. Our developers used latest search technologies and our designers did their best to make the site both easy to use and good looking.

We also added various features like direct http download of selected torrents, last.fm and imdb integration, customizable user area and many small things like ajax comments preview. And of course we constantly improve KickAssTorrents to make it even better.

I saw some potential evidence that the owners of KickAssTorrents are based in the Ukraine. Is this true? If not where are the owners/company based?

We prefer to say that the owners are based online. During our work KickAssTorrents was intended to be a torrent search engine of tomorrow, and in future the country where you are based is irrelevant.

The biggest threat to any Torrent site is legal issues which can result in the site been taken down. What are you doing to protect yourself from this?

We have a disclaimer concerning copyright issues and we are open to communicate with any copyright holders. But we will remove content only if these companies or individuals provide enough legal basis for removal and most important a properly filled DMCA request.

I noticed there were no adverts on the site which is rare for a torrent site. Why have you done this and do you intend to continue this no-ad policy?

We removed ads to make the site more usable and less annoying. And yes we plan to continue this policy. We are simply not interested in fast ad-money, our goal is to establishing a good torrent site.

What role do you see P2P file sharing having in 10 years time and how do you envisage rights holders and P2P networks could work together?

In 10 years time P2P file sharing will be popular, huge and wireless. If not there will be some other new type of file sharing.

As for right holders the ones who are interested in profit and not in legal issues, will change their copyright policy and work together with P2P networks.

I mean look at the news, this band released their music on BitTorent, this company shared a special version of their game through file sharing network.  In few years this will be normal and for copyright holders P2P networks will become an ally and not an enemy.

Torrent Sites

What are torrent sites used for? Many of you would have answered that it’s pretty much all pirated content being shared via torrents. And while there is a lot of copyrighted material being shared illegally on them, there is also much that is legal and copyright-free.

There are very few companies and organizations who have taken advantage of the technology as a way to distribute content thus far. But VODO is one of these, allowing and encouraging filmmakers to use torrent sites to seed their features and get them out there being watched.

NRK and Blank

In January 2008 we looked at how the Norwegian broadcaster NRK was utilizing torrent sites to distribute a show called Nordkalotten 365. The experiment worked, with multi-platform distribution making the show a success outside of its native Norway.

Earlier this year we saw filmmaker Rick L. Winters and his company Annodam Productions choose to distribute Blank via torrent sites at the same time as releasing it on DVD. Donations were asked for but not mandatory.

VODO

VODO, a British organization which endeavors to help budding content creators find an audience, is taking a similar approach. It releases features on torrent sites such as Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, Miro, and Vuze and lets the rest fall into place.

VODO requests a donation (VODO stands or VOluntary DOnations) if you download a feature from a torrent site. There’s also the option to subscribe to the site itself in order to gain access to more films and fund new projects which will end up being made available for free on torrent sites.

VODO’s founder is Jamie King, who enjoys a certain amount of notoriety for his pro-piracy Steal This Film documentaries. Us Now and In Guantanamo are the two features currently being promoted via torrent sites.

Conclusions

This kind of effort isn’t going to either interest or affect Hollywood but independent filmmakers are a whole other kettle of fish. And VODO, along with NRK, Annodam, and the like are proving that torrent sites aren’t the bid, bad wolves they’ve been painted as.

Tech Dirt said it best with its reason for why VODO is such a good idea, suggesting it’s because it helps “filmmakers who recognize that obscurity is a much bigger threat to their efforts than piracy.”

[Via NewTeeVee]

Piracy Peaks

The people who run the big media companies clearly have a vested interest in keeping everything the way it is, or at least was maybe a decade ago.

While piracy has always existed in some form or another, the popularizing of the Internet and the trend for file-sharing saw the “problem” get a little out of control as far as those in charge are concerned.

If It Don’t Work, Don’t Fix It?

The problem is, rather than embrace the new technology or even trying to fight piracy by offering innovative and fair alternative means of obtaining digital copies of movies, television shows, music, games, etc. they try to maintain the status quo. Even though the horse bolted a long time ago.

The latest attempt at locking the stable door is to change the terminology used from “anti-piracy” to “content protection” and to push even harder against illegal file-sharing. Because that will clearly work.

New Faces, Old Ideas

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is the trade body of Hollywood whose mission it is to look out for the interests of the film studios under its protective wing. In terms of Internet piracy, it has several people assigned to the task of stopping it happening. And they have clearly been doing a fantastic job.

According to CNET, the studios have realized the current strategy isn’t working, and so the MPAA has let three people go, including Greg Goeckner, the MPAA’s general counsel.

Unfortunately, this isn’t in order to usher in a new way of doing things. Rather than a roster of proactive measures such as offering new, improved, and reasonably priced ways of offering movies to people over the Web, the same old reactive measures will be enforced. Just more harshly.

Conclusions

This latest chapter in the life of the MPAA is both sad buy hilarious at the same time. Changing the name of its efforts is absolutely pointless. And it still hasn’t figured out the undeniable truth that piracy is here to stay.

Some will argue its efforts have been mildly successful – with the victory against The Pirate Bay the most obvious example – but do those people seriously think for one moment that the people who used to use TPB have stopped downloading movies from the Web?

How long is it going to take for both the MPAA and the movie studios it serves to stop fighting a losing battle and look at how to take advantage of the very system and practice it is currently desperate to stop?

After The Pirate Bay lost its high-profile court case, the end was nigh. And the founders took the easy way out of the situation, agreeing to sell the property lock, stock, and barrel.

The Acquisition

The people behind The Pirate Bay agreed to sell the site at the end of June for $7.7 million to a Swedish software company, Global Gaming Factory X AB. GGF planned to turn the site into a legitimate business, working with rather than against the same media companies who fought TPB just month before.

However, CNET reports that the acquisition is far from complete, with Global Gaming’s financial affairs coming under scrutiny. Trading in the company’s stock was halted on Friday morning and there are even questions being asked about possible insider trading.

All of this means GGF’s acquisition of The Pirate Bay is anything but clear. The deal was meant to go through by the end of August but that time scale looks very optimistic at this stage of proceedings.

The Torrent Copy

Meanwhile, fans of The Pirate Bay have been making sure they’re not going to be left high and dry if and when the acquisition and legalizing of the site goes through. TorrentFreak reports how an anonymous user copied the site in its entirety and has now made it available as a torrent in its own right.

It’s a hefty 21.3 Gb file and contains the code for the site and all 873,671 torrent files The Pirate Bay was listing at the time the copy was made. This effectively means that The Pirate Bay will live on no matter what GGF do with it.

The Alternatives

Assuming you want to move away from The Pirate Bay and use an alternative site, Gizmodo has listed the top 5 Web sites where torrents can be obtained.

There is Demonoid, which boasts a good community and high-quality torrents. However, you’ll need an invite to join the site. Then there is Mininova, which is actually the biggest torrent site in the world. The only downside is the copyright filter which is slowly being integrated, meaning the chances of obtaining pirated content through the site is lessening all the time.

ISOHunt is another alternative, as are BTJunkie and EZTV.

Unfortunately for those people keen to download and share files on the Internet, the choices for doing so are becoming few and far between. Even some of the sites listed have had trouble staying online and the chances are they’ll eventually be taken down or sold just like OiNK, Suprnova, TorrentSpy, and The Pirate Bay.

So the advice has to be to enjoy them while you can.

Illegal File-Sharing

The music, television, movie, gaming, and software industries pretty much see illegal file-sharing and peer-to-peer networks as the devil’s own work. Those who download these media files are the devil’s spawn, while those who make the files available to others are akin to Beelzebub himself. Which is understandable seeing as these activities do undermine each of the industries mentioned.

However, what those same industries and the content owners who operate in them need to realize is that most people only partake in illegal file-sharing due to a lack of other options. Give consumers what they want, which is affordable access to the content they desire, and the problem of illegal file-sharing goes away.

Free Music Streaming

A recent survey of 1,000 teenagers by MusicAlly revealed that the number of youngsters illegally downloading music over the Internet has dropped substantially over the last two years. It’s not the teenagers are listening to less music, it’s just that instead of turning to file-sharing networks first they are now streaming tracks and albums from services such as Spotify, Last.fm, and We7.

These services mainly operate with a free, ad-supported business model, sometimes with a premium paid option also present which gives those willing to subscribe additional benefits. Consumers are happy because they have immediate access to the music they like, the record labels and artists are happy because they are getting paid, and the middle men are happy because they have a legal business out of the deal.

Free TV Streaming

Obviously, the television industry is slowly starting to embrace services which work in a similar way. In the U.K., the BBC has the iPlayer, Channel 4 has recently opened up its archives with 4oD, and there’s the ITV Player. While in the States, Hulu continues to build an audience by offering premium shows streaming online for free. Even Hollywood is getting involved with Epix and the like.

However, in the same way that the music streaming service are being controlled by overzealous content owners, so are Hulu and the like, with restrictions being placed on content at every turn. Then there is the obvious problem of territorial rights licensing which means people in the UK can’t watch Hulu and people in America can’t watch the iPlayer.

A Business Model That Works!

Now just imagine a Spotify/Last.fm inspired TV streaming service! Consumers would eat it up and it would be a far more powerful weapon against piracy than futile DRM. To top it off the service could also embrace user-targeted advertising and less intrusive (but engaging & effective) internet ads as a highly effective monetization model.

A service like Last.fm doesn’t give an on-demand service but allows users to skip and ban tracks, and generally presents them with music they will like – put simply it’s personalized radio. A TV service working in the same way would give users the TV they wanted and introduce them to new TV shows they’ll probably like while not giving away a whole series. This would encourage DVD sales, rentals etc. and introduce audiences to new shows.

Ultimately this is a business model that could work.

Conclusions

The television and movie industries could severely cut the use of file-sharing networks for illegal downloads by embracing streaming services in a big way. If the correct strategy was put in place then content could be made available without harming the content owners bottom line. In fact, the right free TV streaming strategy could help promote shows and increase viewer numbers and DVD sales.

Things happen fast in the world of peer-to-peer torrent tracking. Just a few days after unveiling The Video Bay, a new streaming video site based on open source video standards, The Pirate Bay had even bigger news to announce this morning: it’s selling out.

Sold Or Sold Out?

The Swedish press broke the news story first, forcing The Pirate Bay to confirm the truth in a blog post earlier today. The Pirate Bay has been bought by Swedish software company, Global Gaming Factory X AB.

The price, a cool $7.7 million, is enough to pay the $3.6 million in fines racked up by the four co-founders of the site in their recent court case, and have enough left over to ensure they never have to work again, or at least be able to walk away from the whole thing better off than when they began.

The Facts

What we know for sure is that Global Gaming Factory X AB has bought The Pirate Bay, including the site, the torrent tracker, and the millions of users that come with it. The company also acquired a company called Peerialism which, unsurprisingly given its name, is a file-sharing firm which has recently developed a new P2P distribution tool.

GGF is listed on the Swedish stock market, and its shares have gone through the roof since news of the acquisition of The Pirate Bay broke. Whether this is an important element of the story or not is yet to be clear but it does warrant mentioning.

The Non-Facts

Everything else surrounding this deal, which is due to be completed in August, is confused by half-truths, conflicting statements, and differing ideas of what to expect. TPB is suggesting this is a good deal for everyone, even the users, with the site being decentralized in order to survive whatever attacks are thrown at it in the future. At least according to TorrentFreak.

The blog post from TPB was vague and non-committal, while the statement from GGF seemed to spell out a very different future for The Pirate Bay than the one I’d have imagined ever happening a few days ago, with talk of introducing “models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.”

The Future

The truth has clearly yet to come out. Maybe the two companies are still discussing the direction The Pirate Bay will take in the months and years to come. But it looks as though The Pirate Bay has committed to taking the money and running without ensuring how things are going to be run in the future.

Maybe this will end up being a good thing for The Pirate Bay. But I doubt it very much. If the site goes legit, with the illegal torrents which make up a large proportion of the site removed, and paid downloads introduced, then those millions of users who populate the site at the present time will disappear to a rival which hasn’t yet sold out. Mininova is about to get very much larger.

Internet Piracy

The Internet has been a boon in so many aspects of our lives. But for the entertainment industry, it has meant a sea change in terms of the battle it faces over piracy. A guy selling knock-off DVDs down the pub is one thing, a system which allows the whole world to freely share brand new release movies with each other is another altogether.

Faced with this onslaught of the file sharing of copyrighted material, which is what it amounts to whether you believe it to be right or not, the entertainment industry is reliant on the laws backing its position and the courts upholding these laws. Which they don’t always do.

The Pirate Bay Trial

The Pirate Bay recently lost the case it was battling over claims it assists in copyrighted file-sharing. The case was heard in Sweden, where The Pirate Bay was founded and is now based. But Sweden is no longer the safe haven for pirates it was once assumed to be.

The laws upholding the rights of copyright holders have been strengthened in recent years, not just in Sweden but right across Europe and the rest of the world. The outcome of The Pirate Bay’s ‘Spectrial’ was proof of this. Even if the judge’s impartiality has since been called into question.

Moving To Spain

There’s still a strange unevenness in how piracy and the sharing of copyrighted files is dealt with in different countries. According to TorrentFreak, a Spanish man who was taken to court after being accused of downloading 3322 copyrighted movies was let off by the judge, his case dismissed by the Criminal Court of Pamplona.

The reason the man effectively got away with not even a slap on the wrist is because he was deemed not to have profited from the activity. There was also a lack of evidence he had shared the files with others, which as most people know is where the real crime lies. Downloading movies is one thing, sharing them with others is quite another.

The judge even conceded that the file-sharing had taken place, with the man having downloaded the files “without consent of the copyright holders.” However, because the files were for “private use or sharing with other Internet users,” no crime had been committed, at least not one that the judge felt was grave enough to warrant action being taken.

Conclusions

This means Spain is probably the place to head for if you’re a fan of Internet piracy but are getting increasingly concerned about getting caught partaking in the frowned-upon activity. But it also means Spain is pretty much out there on its own in terms of how it deals with copyrighted file-sharing.

Being part of the EU, it’ll be interesting to see if it manages to deny the efforts to universalize the laws across the whole continent.

The Internet Is For Porn

There’s no way to get around the fact that one of the most popular aspects of the Internet is for porn. The Avenue Q song, The Internet Is For Porn, rather says it all. Not only is it hugely popular but it’s also one of the most profitable slices of the Internet, whether your morals tell you that is right or wrong.

BitTorrent companies, on the other hand, may provide a service which many of us use on a regular basis but making money is a little trickier. As the four founders of The Pirate Bay will attest, the money made doesn’t cover the cost of the fines meted out when your company is taken to court for copyright infringements.

Vuze Offers StudioHD

However, according to NewTeeVee, Vuze (formerly Azureus), a BitTorrent client feeling the pinch from increasingly popular competitors such as uTorrent, may have found a solution. The company is offering an adult video download service called StudioHD, which offers all the porn you could handle for a set monthly fee. And all in high-definition too.

StudioHD is listed alongside the ‘Sexy’ video category, is accessible to anyone running Vuze who verifies they are over 18-years-of-age, and is willing to pay the asking price of $25 a month. For that, they will gain unlimited access to around 300 high-def porn videos,not lumbered with DRM and available on up to three computers at once.

The Problem – Free Alternatives

P2P networks are literally infested with pornography of all kinds so offering a premium, paid for service would seem to be a logical step for a company such as Vuze. Torrents are notoriously hard to monetize and so setting up more legitimate businesses around the technology and charging for them is sensible.

However, the big problem may be how popular porn is in the first place. It’s estimated that 60 percent of video content downloaded via peer-to-peer is of an adult nature, and most of that is obviously pirated and therefore free to obtain. When you consider that the section dedicated to HD porn on The Pirate Bay runs to 600 clips, the problem becomes obvious.

Conclusions

The reasons for Vuze doing this are obvious – it’s struggling to make any serious revenue and failing to obtain any more mainstream offerings from media companies. When in doubt, target people where they’re weakest, which for most men is the libido. Whether these men (and women) will want to pay for something they can get for free elsewhere remains to be seen.

The History Of The Case

Less than a month ago at the time of writing, the four defendants in the Pirate Bay ‘Spectrial’ were found guilty on all charges of breaking copyright law. The three-years in the making court case began in February and lasted three weeks – three weeks in which The Pirate Bay seemed to be gaining the upper hand.

When the trial came to a close and we all patiently awaited the outcome for over a month, many people felt The Pirate Bay actually stood a good chance of winning the case. In the end though, the judge, Tomas Norström, handed down guilty verdicts along with heavy fines and time in prison for all of the accused.

To Appeal Or Not To Appeal?

Immediately upon hearing the verdict, the four defendants made clear their intentions of appealing. This was always going to be the case because the four defendants were hardly about to take the fines and prison time in their stride, admit wrongdoing, and submit to the wills of the copyright-holders they’ve been winding up for years.

But is there justification for a retrial? And if so, what is it?

Controversy Uncovered

About a week after the verdict was announced, it was disclosed that the judge who oversaw the case had close ties with the copyright industry. He was discovered to be a member or to work for the Swedish Association of Copyright, the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property and .SE (The Internet Infrastructure Foundation). One of his colleagues at the latter is a certain Monique Wadsted, the lawyer who represented the copyright-holders at the trial.

This is clearly not on but just the fact Norström belonged to these organizations doesn’t prove there was a mistrial or the verdict was wrong. Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundström are going to have to put a case forward explaining how they feel they didn’t receive a fair trial.

Sunde Speaks

In a recent blog post, Sunde said:

“Too many people have ties to our opponents and have been proven to be on the payroll or promised to become employed in the future. We want everything to be in the eye of the public so that we can get help to see that everything is correct.”

Conclusions

Norström has previously insisted his work with the formerly mentioned organizations wasn’t a problem and didn’t mean the case had been unfairly handled. The problem is that by sharing his knowledge of the laws in this area with organizations who are completely one-sided in their views on the subject, he has opened himself up to these accusations.

Svea Hovrätt, Sweden’s high court of justice will decide the four men’s fates and I fully expect them to be successful in appeal proceedings. Whether you love or abhor The Pirate Bay, justice surely demands a fair trial is carried out to sort out the rights and wrongs of the way it conducts business.