For years the entertainment industry has been lobbying for tougher measures against online piracy. In France this has resulted in the implementation of a ‘three strikes and you’re offline’ regime and many other countries are considering similar measures.

Thus far the United States Government has kept relatively quiet on this issue, but that doesn’t mean that such plans are not being discussed behind close doors.

According to Ari Emanuel, a famous Hollywood talent agent and the model for the character Ari Gold in the hit series Entourage, Hollywood lobbyists are working hard to convince President Obama and others to ram through similar legislation in the United States.

“We are in the midst of talking to the president and some attorney generals and [we are] trying to implement a three strikes and you’re out rule,” Emanuel said, while adding that this issue would most likely result in a “fight with ISPs”.

At this point it is impossible to assess the exact nature of these talks, but since Ari Emanuel is the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, there is no doubt that these talks are taken seriously. President Obama, who vouched to decrease the power of lobbyists in Washington, is not turning a deaf ear to this one for now.

Before even considering the implementation of a three-strikes model, United States lawmakers might want to take a good look at what’s happening in France. Unlike earlier projections that up to 95% of the file-sharers could stop downloading copyrighted content, the piracy rate has actually increased in the face of the new law.

The entertainment industry, nevertheless, continues to push legislation as the solution to online piracy, while ignoring their own role in the creation of the problem.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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In April 2009, all four defendants in the Pirate Bay trial were found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison and a fines of $905,000 each. The defense didn’t accept the decision, and went on to file for an appeal.

Their appeal is now expected to head to the Court of Appeal on 28 September 2010. Nine days have been allocated in all, and the last is due on 15 October.

The dates are not fixed in stone and could be changed if the plaintiffs or defendants have any objections, which even at this early stage seems to be the case.

Peter Sunde has already taken note that the provisional date is penciled-in for after the Swedish parliamentary elections which take place on 19 September 2010.

Sunde says that the four are only available for an appeal before the elections, commenting: “Who said this case is NOT political?”

If the appeal was heard before the elections, there would be a very real chance that an affirmation of the original conviction could turn into a major political issue in Sweden. Following the conviction of the ‘four’ in 2009, the Pirate Party received 7.1% of the vote in the European Parliament elections, receiving more votes from those under 30 than any other party in Sweden.

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Although it wasn’t yet evident, December 2009 appeared to mark the beginning of an effort to shut down the Greek BitTorrent scene. The Society for the Protection of Audiovisual Works (EPOE) conducted an investigation and moved in conjunction with the police to carry out the first action of its type against a BitTorrent site in the country.

The 285,000 member Greek-Fun.com carried around 14,000 torrents linking to music, domestic and international movies, software and computers games. Around 5,500 of these torrents are believed to have linked to material in the EPOE repertoire. As is usual with these cases, EPOE were quick to point to the financing of the site as an indication of criminal behavior. Like many private torrent sites, Greek-Fun offered benefits to users who donated to keep the site running although the admins denied profiteering.

In the end at least one administrator of the site, believed to be in his early 30’s, was arrested and several people were questioned with investigators linking site email addresses to Facebook accounts for evidence. EPOE said the site caused it 1.8m euros in damages.

As the bad news about Greek-Fun spread, Greece’s largest private tracker – the huge 898,000 member Gamato.info – also unexpectedly went down, officially due to “technical problems”. Whatever the reason, as can be seen by the graph below, the result was a massive drop in Greek Internet traffic. Gamato remained down for several weeks, only opening again during the first few days of February 2010.

Today, however, the site is down again, and the news is not good.

ELAS (Greek police) are engaged in an on-going operation to round up the administrators of the site. Already there are reports of 3 arrests in Athens (the capital and one of the world’s oldest cities) and 3 in Thessaloniki (Greece’s 2nd largest city). A soldier, a musician and a confectioner are among those arrested.

New information suggests that ELAS have alerted Interpol to arrest two further admins who are apparently reside outside the country. TorrentFreak has learned that they are located in The Netherlands and are being called “the brains” behind the site. The Gamato servers are also located there although it’s unclear at this stage if there is a connection.

“We host a lot of different sites and do not keep tabs on our clients as long as they comply with our Terms of Service, which includes confirming to the Dutch law,” Gamato’s host told TorrentFreak, adding: “As far as we and our legal counsel can see, this is the case with the site mentioned by you.”

It’s believed that police are looking for 11 individuals in total. Thus far, 27 hard drives, five laptops and more than 600 DVDs have been seized.

According to the police, file-sharing on Gamato was responsible for 80% of online piracy in Greece, with EPOE calculating its losses at the hands of the tracker at a staggering 1 billion euros.

Although Gamato was a private torrent site, it didn’t follow the usual format. It wasn’t “invite-only” – anyone could signup – and although sharing ratios were counted there were no punishments or rewards for the amounts shared. Furthermore, unlike Greek-Fun, Gamato did not accept donations from users.

The Society for the Protection of Audiovisual Works (EPOE) shot to fame in 2008 when virtually every site offering user-generated Greek subtitles (fansubs) for English language movies and TV shows became recipients of its legal threats. Within a very short time sites including greektvsubs.gr, subtitles.gr, greeksubs, subs4u.gr and apsubs.com had either closed down or removed all subtitles.

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For years the RIAA and other copyright holders have been sending copyright infringement notices to ISPs, requesting they forward them to their customers. ISPs including Comcast have always kindly complied with these requests, but remained a neutral party.

It therefore came as a surprise when we found out that three major US ISPs – Comcast, Cox and Warner Cable – have been funding research which aims to help copyright holders track down and gather evidence against BitTorrent pirates more efficiently.

Unlike most of the ‘passive’ BitTorrent tracking tools that are in fashion today, BitStalker uses an ‘active’ method through which they can actually prove that the BitTorrent client associated with an IP-address is sharing files. Where the passive methods wrongfully accuse 1 in 10 downloaders, BitStalker promises to avoid such false positives.

The researchers who developed BitStalker further claim (pdf) that their tool is much more effective than the current competition, as it would allow copyright holders to get information on 20 million BitTorrent users for a bargain price of $12.40. What remains unclear, however, is why three large ISPs are interested in funding this project.

It is no secret that the RIAA has been pushing Comcast, Cox and other ISPs to take stricter measures against copyright infringers, including the ultimate sanction of terminating customers’ Internet access. However, thus far the ISPs have largely maintained their neutral position as information carriers.

Whether the funding of BitStalker’s research is a signal that this may change is open for speculation. Another argument for ISPs to join could be that they want to protect their customers from receiving copyright infringement notices in error.

Regarding the BitStalker method of tracking BitTorrent users, we can say that it is not as revolutionary as the researchers portray it. TorrentFreak spoke to several people who are currently operating the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet and none of them was impressed by BitStalker’s technology.

If BitStalker is indeed implemented the large scale monitoring will have to be executed from thousands of IP-addresses. Most trackers have rules in place so that one single IP-address will be banned from the tracker if it connects to too many torrents.

Similarly, if BitStalker was put on a cloud service like the research suggests, it wouldn’t take long before these IP-ranges would appear in block-lists, rendering BitStalker useless.

If we add to this that BitStalker’s active BitTorrent tracking method will require users to be ‘connectible’, which a large percentage of users aren’t, this means that it will result in many false negatives. The researchers report that they could only connect to less than half of all available peers, which might be caused in the main by the connectability issue.

Whatever the motivations are for Comcast and the other ISPs to fund this project, the good news is that less people will be accused of uploading something they haven’t. Whether BitStalker will really be that more efficient depends on one’s definition of efficiency. For now, we doubt that it will result in a global BitTorrent crackdown.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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UseNeXT is a brand operated by Munich and London-based company, Aviteo Ltd. UseNeXT is one of the most popular Usenet services around today and has traditionally advertised extensively within the BitTorrent community and on many torrent sites.

On 19 December 2006, performing rights group GEMA, which handles the copyrights of more than 1 million rightsholders worldwide, filed for an injunction against UseNeXT. GEMA had earlier leveled accusations at UseNeXT’s advertising in which it said, among other things, the company claimed to offer 1 million MP3s through its service.

“[UseNeXT] advertised its fee-based access with unambiguous references to illegal exchange platforms. In particular it publicized the anonymity, speed and security of access to contents available on Usenet,” GEMA said in a statement, adding: “On top of that, the service also offers special, perfected search software that makes it easier to locate and manage musical works and other contents protected by copyright.”

On 18 January 2007, the Hamburg District Court issued a preliminary injunction against UseNeXT’s operators, which included instructions for it to change the way in which it advertised its product and barring it from providing musical works from GEMA’s repertoire. UseNeXT objected to the decision and disputed that it had ever encouraged subscribers to download copyright works, arguing that its use of the terms ‘unfiltered’ and ‘anonymous’ related to features inherent in the Usenet system.

On 17 February 2010, the Hamburg District Court handed down a preliminary injunction against UseNeXT which bars the service from offering a sample 100 musical works to which GEMA administers the copyright. The injunction also states that UseNeXT must go further than simply modifying its advertising in order to protect GEMA’s copyrights.

Although not necessarily liable for infringements, the Court said that Usenet providers would have to take responsibility for the services and environments they provide.

In a statement, GEMA said that the Court of Hamburg’s decision represents expanded liabilities for Usenet providers which go further than regulating their approach to advertising, but also apply when modified advertising proves insufficient to protect rights holders.

“The adoption of the preliminary injunction is a success in our commitment to the protection of copyright,” said Dr. Harald Heker, Chief Executive Officer of GEMA. “Second, the ruling also represents a further important step towards a comprehensive responsibility of the Usenet service operator for its offer.”

At this stage it’s unclear how UseNeXT will choose to comply with the injunction. Unlike services such as Rapidshare that operate their own servers and actually store content, UseNeXT are a reseller of the Highwinds Usenet service. UseNeXT does not store any content, Highwinds do.

UseNeXT used to offer a search engine and software interface to access Usenet, so conceivably something could’ve been implemented there to bar access to the GEMA titles mentioned in the injunction. However, recent changes to their service means they are no longer offering those solutions but suggesting the use of 3rd party software, with one particular solution from Tangysoft up front.

Nevertheless, the Court said that UseNeXT is responsible for the service it’s re-selling so the company will have to find an answer somehow. Many Usenet providers are already working with rights holders to automate the removal of content, so solutions are available. How quickly and comprehensively UseNeXT acts will remain to be seen.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Popularity: 2% [?]

September last year saw the passing of France’s controversial three-strikes ‘Hadopi’ law which allows the music industry to track down repeated copyright infringers with the ultimate goal of decreasing the country’s piracy rate.

Under the new law alleged copyright infringers will be reported to a judge once they have received three warnings. The judge will then review the case and hand down any one of a range of penalties, from fines through to severing the Internet connection of the infringer.

Proponents of the new law claimed that the law would convince millions of people to stop downloading copyrighted content through file-sharing networks. Most critics, however, doubted the effectiveness of the system and pointed out that there are many ways to circumvent the law.

A new study published by the University of Rennes shows that the critics are indeed right. The researchers looked into the habits of downloaders before and after the law was implemented. They found that instead of reducing piracy levels, the piracy rate actually went up by 3%.

This increase in piracy shows that the French are not changing their downloading habits much, despite the tougher legislation. There is, however, an interesting shift in the sources people use to download copyrighted movies and music. At an increasing rate the French are using streaming services along with file-hosting ‘cyberlockers’ such as Rapidshare and Megaupload.

These services are not covered by the Hadopi law and therefore ’safe’ to use. Conversely, usage of P2P services such as BitTorrent dropped from 17.1 percent to 14.6 percent between September and December last year. Overall the research seems to suggest that the looming disconnection threat has changed how and where people get pirated content, while the piracy rate itself increased.

Another remarkable statistic uncovered by the researchers is that half of all P2P users who download copyrighted content also buy digital content online. This means that if these users were disconnected from the Internet under the new law, the music industry would lose customers and thus revenue.

The overall message put forward by the research seems to be that it is hard to deter people from copyright infringement when there are plenty of alternatives to bypass the legislation. This does not only hold for the French case but can also be applied to the UK and other countries where tougher anti-piracy laws are implemented.

The answer to the increasing piracy rates worldwide is not legislation. Instead, the entertainment industry may accomplish much more by innovating and expanding their online business so that it meets the demands of today’s digital consumers.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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2009 was a breakthrough year for the Pirate Party movement. With more than 7 percent of the vote, the Swedish Pirate Party secured two seats in the European Parliament.

A few weeks later, the Pirates in Germany entered the local Parliament after a member of another party switched sides.

In 2010 the Pirate Parties hope to continue this hot streak, especially during the Swedish national elections later this year. However, Sweden is not the only country where a Pirate Party will end up at the ballot. In the UK the local Pirate Party hopes to compete as well and the Dutch party has now decided to do the same.

In recent months there has been a lot of political debate regarding Dutch copyright law which currently allows people to download copyrighted movies and music for personal use. Several established parties have shown interest in criminalizing file-sharers, something the Pirate Party hopes to avoid.

Instead, the Pirates would like to shorten the copyright term to 5 years and legalize sharing of all copyrighted material on the Internet. Tim Kuik, head honcho at the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN, is not afraid of politically organized pirates and described the Party’s plans as short sighted and unrealistic.

Samir Allioui, Chairman of the Pirate Party, told TorrentFreak that he’s very happy with Kuik’s negative comments. “He gives people a good reason to vote for us,” he said, referring to the negative view that most people have of BREIN.

If elected, the party will do everything it can to stop abuses of copyright, promote Net Neutrality and push for patent reform. The party is further committed to increasing transparency, strengthening fundamental rights and protecting privacy.

Despite the enthusiasm of the party’s members, there is still a long way to go before they can actually compete in the election on June 9th. One of the biggest hurdles is the requirement to deposit a sum of 12,000 euros, a barrier which is meant to prevent too many parties from entering the election.

Samir is confident that they will be able to raise the money in the weeks to come. He encourages all sympathizers to become a member of the Party and help to get the Pirate Party on the ballot.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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Around seven years ago when pressure was first starting to form against the then-fledgling BitTorrent scene, attitudes were pretty much as they are now. “They’ll never stop it, we’ll always find a way,” cried the masses grabbing music, movies and software for free, and few disagreed.

Of course, there will always be a way to acquire media free of charge, the last few decades have shown us that. But the media industries are now having to find new ways to defend their corner. There has always been talk of Big Movies or Big Music ‘owning’ politicians and lawmakers, but while this is true to the extent that their immense lobbying power allows, there has also been another more serious threat on the back-burner.

If the RIAA or MPAA owned – literally – all the major ISPs, they could affect the piracy landscape quicker than ever before. A simple rewrite or tweaking of subscriber’s Terms of Service would ensure that anyone proven to be a pirate could be ejected from the Internet in an instant, no laws needed. While this is unfeasible right now, there are easier ways of encouraging the same, like business partnerships and promises of profit.

According to a new study titled “Is There A Commercial Argument For ISP Music Services” commissioned by the BPI on behalf of Universal Music and carried out by industry analyst Ovum, if the UK’s most prominent ISPs all more or less immediately launched subscriber packages that included bundled music, they could generate new revenues of £103 million by 2013.

The BPI say this figure is based on a ‘medium adoption scenario’ and is an amount equal to 41% of the total 2009 digital music market. In an ‘accelerated adoption scenario’ the study says that the revenues could nearly double to £203m.

Aside from the profitability implied by these revenues, the report seems keen to offer other incentives to the major ISPs – Virgin Media, Sky, BT, O2, Orange and TalkTalk – to get involved in the music business. The study suggests that the inclusion of a music element to bundles would reduce subscriber ‘churn’ – the rate at which customers cancel their contracts. The example given is that an ISP with 3.5m customers could save £20m if the bundling of music cut churn by 10%, although there is no information to show that it actually would.

While suggesting good business is to be had in getting a little involved in the music business, the BPI is keen to point out that for ISPs, the more involved they get, the more they can make.

“The revenue prospects for bundled ISP music services would be substantially increased if services were offered to consumers in tandem with meaningful action to tackle illegal music downloading,” say the BPI.

We approached TalkTalk, an ISP referred to in the study, for a comment.

“TalkTalk thanks the BPI for its strategic business advice. Though some may question the value of such insight from an industry which has failed to acknowledge the impact of new technology on its own business models and is pressing the Government to criminalise its biggest customers,” a spokesperson told TorrentFreak.

Clearly TalkTalk doesn’t want to do the music industry’s dirty work for them, but if other ISPs got heavily involved in the music distribution business it might be considered natural for them to try and protect their revenues. That said, the leap from simple common carrier to having a vested interest could complicate their position.

Nevertheless, another issue the report highlights is that heavy competition is driving down the price of broadband services while consumer desire for bandwidth continues to increase. In any business working in plain commodities, the desire to bring in more profitable “added-value” products is strong.

“It’s increasingly clear that it isn’t smart to be a ‘dumb pipe’. This report shows that the revenue potential of digital music services alone makes sound economic sense for ISPs,” said BPI Chief Executive, Geoff Taylor.

So let’s imagine that the ISPs want to get involved in this market, offering bundled music for an extra £6.49 (the price level suggested in the report) – what would be so wrong with that? It’s pretty affordable after all, so why not give it a chance?

“With the right service platform, user experience and merchandising strategy, ISPs have an opportunity to reach a green-field digital music market that mainstream download-to-own services such as iTunes do not reach today,” explains report co-author and Ovum’s principal analyst, Adrian Drury.

So these suggested services aren’t of the “fill up your iPod” type, but of the “can only be used sitting-at-your-computer streaming services with limited download allocation” type. Surprised? Us neither.

Trying to convert those currently using file-sharing services over to paid models is already a big challenge. Trying to switch them to an inferior product whilst being hounded by their ISP on behalf of the music industry is a different matter altogether, and something TalkTalk refuses to be drawn into.

“Perhaps there is a goldmine for ISPs in legal downloads but that will not alter the fact that the copyright protection proposals being proposed threaten human rights,” their spokesperson told us. “They will penalise innocent broadband customers. They are expensive, unwieldy and utterly futile.”

If the record labels really did own your ISP, this is the type of environment subscribers would be pushed into. And you’d still have to fill up your iPod elsewhere at additional cost.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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This week there are four newcomers (three comebacks actually) in the top 10. New Moon is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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Tonight, Hollywoods biggest stars will walk the red carpet into the Kodak Theater for the Academy Awards ceremony.

In anticipation of the glamorous Oscar night, we enter the dark side of the movie business to find out which of the 10 nominees in the Best Picture category gets the vote from BitTorrent users. NewTeeVee asked us to rank the nominees by number of downloads and the results are finally in.

If every download on BitTorrent counted as a vote, District 9 would be crowned the winner, closely followed by Avatar. The least popular films according to the BitTorrent public are The Blind Side with 1,845,000 downloads and An Education with ‘only’ 683,000 downloads.

We have to note that comparing the downloads of each of the nominees is not really fair since some films have been available online for more than a year already, while others only leaked a few weeks ago. Avatar, which is second in the list with 11,326,000 downloads, became available in DVD-quality a month ago, while District 9 was already widely available last September.

As usual, all the nominated films are available online in various formats. For District 9 2,948 unique torrent files were counted, but the majority of these are inactive or have very few downloaders. Avatar beats District 9 in terms of availability with 4280 torrent files.

The data for this list is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all the large BitTorrent trackers. All release formats, including cammed versions, are counted. Afterwards, the data was carefully checked and possible inaccuracies were systematically corrected.

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