P2P // Current

Value of Unlicensed Music Worldwide in 2007 was US $69 Billion

The value of unlicensed (in some cases known as pirated) music trafficked on P2P networks in 2007 was US$69 billion, according to... more

bgonsoulin
added this

ThePirateBay raggiunge i 25 milioni di peers

Nonostante la granitica opposizione delle major internazionali e di molti governi, il P2P continua ad essere il mezzo di download... more

danito
added this

Have the French figured out how to stop internet piracy?

France is getting very close to passing and enforcing a new law that could change the way we steal media forever. In a significant... more

WaspintheLotus
added this

Francia, il Senato approva la dottrina Sarkozy anti-P2P

Il Senato francese ha approvato la cosiddetta Dottrina Sarkozy con cui si conta di affondare la pirateria con una manovra in 3... more

danito
added this

48 utenti italiani di P2P denunciati

Dopo indagini del Comando provinciale della Guardia di Finanza di Venezia e 50 perquisizioni domiciliari, 48 utenti degli ambienti... more

Szimpla
added this

Una Costituzione per il Web

Stefano Rodotà vuole dare ad Internet una Carta dei principi della rete ratificata dall'ONU, che valga a livello... more

Szimpla
added this

Il p2p aumenterà del 400 per cento in 5 anni

Nei prossimi cinque anni il peer to peer crescerà del 400 per cento. Questa è la rivelazione di un report dalla... more

danito
added this

Donate Your Piracy Savings to Reduce Poverty

If the MPAA and RIAA are to be believed, rather than buying media, file-sharers around the world are saving billions of dollars by... more

conscious_bluemonkey
added this

‘Heroes’ Causes BitTorrent Boom

Two fresh episodes of the US hit series ‘Heroes’ were released Monday night. In the day that followed each episode was... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
added this

European Parliament Says No to Three-Strikes Law

The European Parliament has voted in favor of an amendment that will prevent member states from implementing three-stikes laws. Disconnecting alleged file-sharers based on evidence from anti-piracy lobby groups restricts the rights and freedoms of Internet users, according to the amendment.

The power of anti-piracy lobbyists has grown significantly across Europe this year. In the UK, six major ISPs are working together with the music industry to start mass warning file-sharers. France has gone even further, and proposed a law that will enable the entertainment industry to disconnect alleged pirates on their third warning.

Both the MPAA and RIAA have pushed other countries to adopt similar legislation as well, but it will be hard for them to succeed in Europe. In April, the European Parliament spoke out against these anti-piracy measures, by saying it would be “conflicting with civil liberties and human rights and with the principles of proportionality, effectiveness and dissuasiveness”. Yesterday, this statement was backed up by an official vote.

The amendment, drafted by Guy Bono and other members of the European Parliament, was adopted by an overwhelming majority. 573 parliament members voted in favor while only 74 rejected. Satisfied with this outcome, Bono stated in a response to the vote: “You do not play with individual freedoms like that,” and said that the French government should review its three-strikes law.”

The vote was welcomed in other member states as well. Swedish EU parliamentarian Christofer Fjellner said in a comment: “What’s important about this decision is that now it’s clear that you can’t force [internet service] providers to ban people from the Internet without a legal process.”

It is scary to see how lobby groups are awarded powers that should only belong to law-enforcement agencies. Evidence should never be collectedly by parties who gather it in their own interests, and it is a relief to see that the European Parliament agrees on this.The European Parliament has voted in favor of an amendment that will prevent member states from implementing three-stikes laws.... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
added this

0 responses

1 month ago

Pirate Bay Wins Court Case, Italian Block Lifted

The Pirate Bay has successfully appealed the decision of an Italian judge who had ordered ISPs to block access to the popular BitTorrent tracker last month. The Court of Bergamo decided that this block was unlawful, and that Italian users should regain access to the site.

This August, out of nowhere, The Pirate Bay was “censored” in Italy following a decree from a public prosecutor. The block didn’t prove to be particularly effective, as traffic from Italy only increased. Nevertheless, The Pirate Bay was determined to reverse the decision, and in that mission they have succeeded.

The Court of Bergamo has now lifted the block, and ISPs are again allowed to grant their users access to the most frequently used BitTorrent tracker on the Internet. More details on the decision, and the reason why the block was reversed, will be made public later.

In a previous interview, Pirate Bay’s lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus and Francesco Micozzi described the order as “‘original’ or ‘creative’ at best,” and said it should not have been ordered in the first place because of the lack of jurisdiction. In addition, they argued that The Pirate Bay is not breaking any laws since it’s not distributing copyright infringing material.

The court’s decision might set an important precedent for BitTorrent sites in Italy, especially for Colombo-BT, the largest Italian torrent site, which was shut down by the same prosecutor responsible for the Pirate Bay block. The action against Colombo-BT was orchestrated by the anti-piracy outlet IFPI, which also hijacked all Italian Pirate Bay visitors following the block.

Visitors who were blocked from The Pirate Bay were redirected to an IFPI server, instead of a server operated by the Italian government. This is again an example of how lobby groups such as the IFPI, MPAA and RIAA are treated as government institutions. Since many Pirate Bay visitors claimed their privacy was violated, the Italian Pirate Party and Altroconsumo filed a complaint with the ombudsman earlier this week.
The Pirate Bay has successfully appealed the decision of an Italian judge who had ordered ISPs to block access to the popular... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
added this

0 responses

1 month ago

Trovare tutti i torrent più nascosti oggi si può

E’ inutile abbassare lo sguardo. Siamo in piena epoca internettiana dove la parola d’ordine è: condividere.... more

merlinox
added this

2 responses

1 month ago

Timbuktu, one of Swedens most famous artists, releases via ThePirateBay, legally.

Timbuktu is one of Swedens most famous artists - and we'd also like to say one of the smartest. Today we proudly release... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
added this

0 responses

1 month ago

Mininova Breaks Download Records, Thanks To Heroes New Season And The Likes....

Mininova, the most visited BitTorrent site, broke two download records today. Since its inception, the site has served 6 billion torrent downloads and today reached an all time record of more than 10 million downloads served in a single day. Has today been BitTorrent’s busiest day ever?

The BitTorrent popularity explosion is still underway, and it’s picking up speed with the start of the new TV-season. Several BitTorrent sites are now amongst the most visited sites anywhere on the web, and Mininova is believed to be the largest.

We’ve been reporting on Mininova’s download figures for a while now. In June 2007 Mininova saw its 2 billionth download. This figure has since tripled to 6 billion - an impressive figure for a site that has been around for less than four years.

Over the past months, the downloads have been growing steadily, and today, another record was broken. Over 10 million torrents were downloaded in a single day - 117.6 per second - a rate never achieved before. With many TV-shows debuting today, this has been the busiest day ever on Mininova, and probably on other BitTorrent sites as well.

While the movie and music studios are complaining loudly, TV-shows are getting the most downloads on BitTorrent. On average, half of all the BitTorrent downloads at any given point in time are TV-episodes. The availability of free-streams seems to bring this figure down a little, but only in the US.

Meanwhile, the Mininova team is focusing more on premium publishers. Last year the site launched a content distribution platform where publishers can offer their content to the millions of Mininova visitors without any charge. Mininova users can download these premium files at high speeds, and they even have the option to stream music and video.

Perhaps it’s a good idea if some of the TV publishers go talk to the Mininova team, and get an account there. We’re sure that they are welcome at their new office.
***********************

Remember too, some producers love to have torrent on their side, including Heroes....which was for most of the hub-ub or downloads.

An old article on how they agree :)
http://torrentfreak.com/heroes-producer-recognizes-benefits-of-bittorrent-080702/
Mininova, the most visited BitTorrent site, broke two download records today. Since its inception, the site has served 6 billion... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
added this

0 responses

1 month ago

The Pirate Bay Tops 15 Million Peers

Today, The Pirate Bay reached a new milestone, as they now have more than 3 million registered users. On top of that, they track... more

Nothingness
added this

0 responses

1 month ago

Keep Streaming Videos, the Tubes Are Fine: Report Finds

Pay no attention to rumors that the internet is getting full: the internet can eat 50 eggs.

In fact, over the last 12 months, international net bandwidth in backbone grew 62 percent, while internet traffic grew only 53 percent and filled only 43 percent of the tubes' capacity at peak times, according to a new report released by bandwidth-monitoring firm TeleGeography.

In short, the internet's tubes are growing faster than even YouTube videos can fill them, and they're in no danger of filling up anytime soon.

That's despite the occasional Chicken Little proclamation from ISPs, pending caps on 'unlimited' internet usage and hand-wringing over peer-to-peer file sharing of movies such as Cool Hand Luke.

In the same time period -- mid-2007 to mid-2008, Latin America and South Asia both doubled the capacity of their backbones -- the net's fiber-optic equivalent of a highway system.

Wholesale prices for sending and receiving data continue to fall, and with the cheapest prices in North America and Europe, where there's still more abundant capacity, the Global Internet Geography report found.

Though the report does not mention it, the expansion of global capacity -- especially fiber-optic lines that don't hit U.S. shores -- makes it harder for the U.S. government to wiretap the net, since increasingly net traffic stays local or takes a short route that doesn't go through the U.S.

But take all of the above with a pinch of salt, since the report isn't science.

Data on the net's size, capacity and even links are difficult to come by, since almost all of the infrastructure is privately owned, and there's little incentive and few requirements to share data with governments or scientists.

Without open internet data or even data about the data, there is no science.

Telegeography says it gathers its data at internet exchange points around the globe and from surveys. As for the future, the company says to expect much of the same: "strong growth and falling prices."

The full report will run you $5,000, but Telegeography offers the executive summary (.pdf) for free (http://www.telegeography.com/products/gig/samples08/gig.zip) .Pay no attention to rumors that the internet is getting full: the internet can eat 50 eggs. In fact, over the last 12 months,... more

goldenways
added this

0 responses

2 months ago

Parola d'ordine: scaricare sempre

RapidShare e MegaUpload non sono strumenti online illegali. Sono semplicemente siti che permettono di caricare online file di... more

merlinox
added this

17 responses

3 months ago

Biden: Let's monitor P2P for illegal files

A prominent Senate Democrat on Wednesday said federal and local police should use custom software to monitor peer-to-peer networks for illegal activity, and he wants to spend $1 billion in tax dollars to help make that happen.

At an afternoon Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about child exploitation on the Internet, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it's "pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation" simply by looking at file names. He urged use of those techniques by investigators to help nab the most egregious offenders.

The software, dubbed "Operation Fairplay," was developed two years ago by Special Agent Flint Waters in the Wyoming Attorney General's Office, who, by Biden's description, is considered an expert in the field. The application is currently being used by all of the regional Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task forces nationwide and internationally, Waters told the panel.

Waters describes the system as a "comprehensive computer infrastructure," housed in Wyoming, that grants law enforcement officers a "big picture" of what sort of child pornography file transfers are going on across the country. It's able to help investigators conduct undercover operations involving peer-to-peer file-sharing applications, chat rooms, Web sites, and mobile telephones, Waters said.

No one's trying to demonize those technologies, Waters said. "Blaming this problem on peer-to-peer innovation is like blaming the interstate highway system when someone uses it to transport drugs," he said.

But in 2008 alone, investigators using Fairplay have "seen" more than 1,400 IP addresses tied to swapping child pornography files on at least 100 different occasions, Waters said. He didn't say how he identified what he viewed as child pornography, which can include photographs of fully-clothed teenagers taken with their parents' consent. In addition, as critiques of a 1995 law review article pointed out, trying to guess the contents of a file based on its name can be a problematic process.

Based on Waters' statements to the committee, the system appears to work like this: Investigators log onto peer-to-peer file-sharing networks as any other person would and search for files containing certain keywords that are likely to indicate child pornography is involved. Then they download the files--frequently videos, sometimes as long as 20 to 30 minutes, with names like "children kiddy underage illegal.mpg" and much more obscene--to their own machines. They're able to use the Fairplay software to obtain the IP address of the file's sender and, in some cases, display its geographic location in map form.

Once armed with an IP address and date and time of the download, investigators can subpoena the Internet service provider for more information, such as name and address of the subscriber who was assigned it at that moment. "It's not necessarily the suspect but it tells us the physical location to start," Waters said. (He didn't say whether any wiretaps were conducted to monitor ongoing file swapping.)

Investigators use the IP addresses to keep track of offenders on a "daily" basis, Waters told CNET News.com during a break at the hearing. But in about half its cases, for purposes of longer-term tracking, the software captures "unique serial numbers" from the person's computer and keeps a tally of how many allegedly illicit files that particular user is trading.

Waters provided the committee with a chart that said, for example, law enforcement had "seen" one user in Pennsylvania exchanging those files 2,792 times, one New Jersey user swapping them 1,182 times, and so on. It wasn't clear whether the so-called serial number corresponded to IP address, P2P username, or something else, and Waters wouldn't elaborate.

More to read at the link....A prominent Senate Democrat on Wednesday said federal and local police should use custom software to monitor peer-to-peer networks... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
added this

1 response

3 months ago

Comcast Does About-Face: Declares Love for P2P

Comcast, perhaps the most aggressive opponent of file sharing after the RIAA, has seen the light. After testing P4P, an experimental file sharing architecture that reduces network costs and bandwidth usage, the company is closer to embracing file sharing on its own network.

"We are active members of [the P4P working group,] and our engineers are actively collaborating and engaging with other engineers on it. We're absolutely engaged and part of it," says Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas.

P4P, a next generation file sharing system, has garnered intense interest from ISPs -- such as AT&T, Verizon, Telefonica and Comcast -- as well as content providers. If the architecture becomes widely adopted by ISPs, it could change the face of file sharing; P4P lowers network costs for broadband providers by reducing the distance data travels on P2P applications. The upshot? File sharing won't hurt network performance. And as an added benefit, it could also increase downloading speeds for customers. The technology could be equally beneficial for content providers since it might help movie studios and music labels track legitimate media sales.

For Comcast, the adoption of P4P would be a dramatic shift in strategy. The company has made a practice of slowing down access speeds for active file sharers or so-called "bandwidth hogs." While Comcast argues that throttling is its God-given right, the FCC said otherwise -- the government agency ruled that Comcast violated federal policy when it slowed internet traffic for some subscribers.

But in July, Comcast tested the P4P protocol on its network, and saw dramatic improvements in network performance, according to Robert Levitan, CEO of Pando Networks, a content-delivery company that conducted the test for Comcast and AT&T.

In addition, the architecture increased download speeds for broadband subscribers,

The results -- though not made public yet -- "will easily blow away Verizon's results," says Levitan.

That says a lot. When Verizon tested P4P on its network in February, it saw an 80 percent decrease in the distance that P2P network traffic traveled, and the delivery speeds increased by up to 200 percent, according to Levitan. Meanwhile, a team of computer scientists are presenting those results at a conference in Seattle today.

Not only are ISPs showing the love for P4P, content providers are equally interested. The RIAA, which has made a hobby of suing little old ladies for illegal file sharing, has shown support for the technology.

Levitan says Carey Sherman, the president of the RIAA, was so impressed with the technology, he introduced Pando to several music executives. (The RIAA declined to comment.)

"The world is changing when the RIAA is introducing a P2P tech provider to music execs," says Levitan.Comcast, perhaps the most aggressive opponent of file sharing after the RIAA, has seen the light. After testing P4P, an... more

goldenways
added this

1 response

3 months ago

MediaDefender Walks The Plank to Bankruptcy

MediaDefender and parent company ArtistDirect have had some serious setbacks recently. Last September they suffered a huge security breach when internal emails and a phone call were leaked to BitTorrent. They received even more bad press recently for DDoSsing Revision3. As a result, MediaDefender’s parent company stock dropped from $2.00 down to just 16 cents.

mediadefender stockMediadefender has had a rough year, and the future isn’t looking much better. Last month, MediaDefender lost one of its larger customers. The business accounted for roughly 18% of MediaDefender’s revenues.

In a recent financial statement, the company stated that there is a decrease in interest for their anti-piracy services, and that the results of their p2p-advertising model are also disappointing. This news led to further decrease in the stock price, which was sitting at an all time low of just 16 cents this Monday.

Surprisingly enough, the company structurally fails to mention the email leak and security breach, which has cost them a significant amount of money. In September 2007, disaster struck. MediaDefender had made many enemies with its anti-p2p activities. One of them decided to teach the company a lesson by hacking into their systems and leaking their internal emails and closest secrets to the Internet. The effect on the company and its operations was dramatic.

In an interview with Portfolio, the hacker (using the pseudonym ‘Ethan’) explained how things led up to the leak. Ethan, a polite high-school student who lives with his family, was on his Christmas break when he first gained access to the anti-piracy company’s servers by exploiting a weakness in their firewall. This was at the end of 2006, at a time when business was still good for Media Defender with revenue standing at nearly $16m.

Soon after that Ethan got access to the company’s email, its networked resources and even its telephone system. Logging in a handful of times each month through the summer of 2007, he started to get bored with ‘Monkey Defenders’ - his pet name for the anti-piracy outfit. Deciding to go out with a bang, he and the Media Defender-Defenders gathered thousands of the company’s internal emails and published them on web.

Last November, MediaDefender said it lost $825,000 as a result of the leaked emails, and this amount has probably gone up significantly in the months after that. Its stock price is falling, and it’s beginning to look like the company won’t recover anytime soon. The Pirate Bay wished last year that MediaDefender would go bankrupt, and by the looks of it, they might just get what they hoped for… MediaDefender and parent company ArtistDirect have had some serious setbacks recently. Last September they suffered a huge... more