Two days ago, we revealed how a report on the economic impact of Internet piracy in Australia was so secretive that the journalists reporting on it hadn’t seen it. Even established researchers wrote in to TorrentFreak complaining about the secrecy.

It now seems that the building pressure has had an effect. After multiple phone calls, emails and even filing a freedom of information request with the Attorney General who quoted the report, it was finally made public a few hours ago.

So now that the report has been published, what are we dealing with? Well, it turns out that the ‘study’ is nothing more than a direct translation of one of the most questioned piracy reports that has ever been published.

It is entirely based on the EU-focused “Building a Digital Economy” report that was released by TERA Consultants last year. On the one hand this explains why a ‘real-estate” company could have easily penned it, as no original analysis was needed. But it also means that previous flaws were copied.

For one, the report suggests that there’s a direct correlation between Internet traffic growth and lost jobs. That is, the more traffic that is generated on the Internet, the more money will be lost. This correlation is 1 according to the report, which assumes that all growth in Internet traffic will increase piracy at the same rate.

Just to illustrate how twisted this line of reasoning is, by following the same logic one should conclude that by getting a 5 times faster connection, people will automatically watch 5 times more videos on YouTube, and visit 5 times as many websites. It’s easy to see that this makes no sense whatsoever.

This absurd logic is accompanied by the age old fable that there’s a direct correlation between piracy volume and lost sales. The report states that more traffic will mean more piracy and thus more lost revenue. It does not account for the fact that people might consume higher quality media which is greater in file-size. All projections are based on bandwidth and not the number of pirated goods.

For a complete list of fallacies, errors and misleading assumptions we refer to our previous coverage on the original report.

To us, it is absolutely incomprehensible that Australia’s Attorney General considers this report as a basis for shaping future copyright law. Aside from the fact that it was commissioned by the entertainment industry and carried out by a company that is not even four months old, it should be disregarded based on the horrible methodology.

The Australian Pirate Party, who helped with our attempts to uncover the report and the people behind it, has to be applauded for obtaining the report through a Freedom of Information request. We suspect that without this pressure, the document may have never been released so quickly.

“As taxpayers, as electors, we are entitled to transparency from our lawmakers,” Pirate Party Australia’s Rodney Serkowski told TorrentFreak.

“Now we see the reasons for their opacity. It is a study riddled with issues, and the Attorney General must now explain how he could be so easily mislead and rely on such industry propaganda, which is used as justification to impose stricter enforcement, compromising fundamental rights like privacy.”

The report, with all its flaws and shortcomings, once again reveals to what lengths the entertainment industry is willing to go in order to mislead politicians. A sad state of affairs, and let’s hope that now that it’s out, the Australian press will again pick up on it to address its validity.

TorrentFreak

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For the last two years the spectre of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA as it’s better known, has loomed large on the horizon. For many the Treaty stands as a threat and is synonymous with corporate control of the man in the street and his creativity. After becoming popular with filesharers through his open letter songs to Lily Allen and Peter Mandelson, today Dan Bull is back with a TorrentFreak interview and his brand new track D.O.A.C.T.A – Death of ACTA.

Although he has been hard at work and getting good reviews in both local and national media for some time, UK-based one-man music machine Dan Bull really hit the Internet conciousness in September 2009.

After Lily Allen stirred up a file-sharing hornet’s nest with her anti-piracy rhetoric, Dan put together ‘Dear Lily‘. This open letter received several hundred thousand views on YouTube alone and a month later Dan followed it up with a dressing down of Peter Mandelson over the Digital Economy Act.

In recognition of his ability to connect with an audience, Midlands-based Dan was soon commissioned by ISP TalkTalk to create a track to protest against the proposed disconnection of file-sharers.

Now, just over 6 months later he’s back again with a brand new track. ACTA is in the spotlight this time and as usual, Dan takes his subject matter apart with insightful and often biting lyrics delivered with expert clarity and timing.

But before we get our first taste of the track D.O.A.C.T.A (Death of ACTA) with its accompanying video, here is Dan with some thoughts on the Treaty.

TF: What are your feelings on how ACTA has developed and where it appears to be going?

Dan: ACTA is being worked on behind closed doors, in a totally undemocratic fashion. What we’ve seen so far is very worrying though. It’s clearly been put together by people who don’t know or care how the internet works. Not only that, but it means that you can be punished for a newly created crime without any evidence that you’ve committed it. Just an accusation from an industry lawyer is enough – and we’ve already seen with ACS Law how irresponsible and inaccurate they are. Do we really want companies like ACS Law given the power of judge, jury and executioner?

However, it’s not too late to contact your representatives in government – start putting the pressure on and let them know this kind of secret, unelected and irresponsible policy making is unacceptable.

TF: Do you think that ACTA will actually change anything?

Dan: It’s not going to change things in the way it’s meant to. Filesharing and piracy will carry on as before – the law is always one step behind technology. The only thing ACTA will do is stifle innovation and communication. How could sites like YouTube and Flickr exist if the owners of those sites are held liable for everything their users upload? It’s like saying that Bic is responsible if someone writes a death threat using one of their pens. It’s a load of bollocks.

The funny thing is that the entertainment industry is only a fraction of the size of the technology and communications industry. Yet this tiny sector is managing to force through ridiculously backward protectionist laws that make things harder for everyone else except themselves.

TF: How do you feel that the people will respond to ACTA’s introduction?

Dan: I can’t imagine there are many people outside the entertainment industry who support it. In fact I’m surprised the technology sector hasn’t rallied together to fight against it. People who don’t know the facts about it should be told, and people who know the facts should be gravely concerned.

TF: Do you think that legislation has the ability to mould and control people’s behavior and creativity?

Dan: Yes, but only in useless ways. Filesharers won’t be swayed, they’ll just find other ways to carry on doing what they were doing before. ACTA is going to damage creativity though – pretty much all creative work is derivative of previous work, so by criminalising copyright infringement, ACTA will bring us into a ridiculous situation where all artists are criminals. Even walking to work whilst whistling a tune you heard on the radio is technically an unauthorised performance of a copyrighted work, and once ACTA is in place, it’s a crime you could theoretically go to prison for.

TF: Tell us a little about the video that accompanies the song.

Dan: The video was filmed at The Golden Hinde in London, which is a replica of Sir Francis Drake’s ship. My friend Russ Houghton came up with the pirate ship concept, and also produced and directed the video, with the help of a couple of his colleagues, who work in television. Thanks very much to them for helping out.

TF: Cheers for chatting with us Dan, keep up the good work.

The MP3 of D.O.A.C.T.A can be downloaded here and you can follow Dan on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Beer money gratefully accepted here, along with any spare Flattrs.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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An indie game developer is doing rather well from approaching things just a little bit differently, and even winning over pirates in the process. Notch, the driving force behind the still-in-alpha game Minecraft, says there’s absolutely no point in fighting the Internet and “the biggest revolution in information flow since the printing press”. Results so far? 155,000 people have purchased a game that isn’t even finished yet.

Week in, week out, we sit here at TorrentFreak engaged in our never-ending task to document developments in BitTorrent, file-sharing in general but increasingly the online war against music, movie and software pirates. This war has been going on now for a decade or more and shows absolutely no sign of ending. The general consensus is that it simply cannot be won.

Or can it?

Last week TorrentFreak had a very civil email exchange with someone working for a very powerful media company with an almost unrivaled reputation for being tough against online piracy. Refreshingly we discussed ways of moving forward, and touched on the relationships big companies have with their customers. Sadly, big music and movie companies have a lot of ground to make up in the PR department – relating more closely to their customers and giving something back wouldn’t be a bad idea at all.

So how could this be achieved? We didn’t get that far – so often the all-important devil is in the detail – but the example shown by programmer Markus Persson might be a great pointer.

Persson, known online as ‘Notch’, runs a company called Mojang Specifications and has dozens of projects under his belt. For now, though, his main focus is a game called Minecraft.

The development of Minecraft, which is still in alpha, is being charted on the game’s dev blog and has already attracted an excited and enthusiastic fanbase. There are many popular videos detailing the game on YouTube which seem to have begun here.

Despite currently having graphics to make a 10 year-old machine blush, the refreshing approach to this game is clearly winning over hearts and minds in the target audience. The attitude of Notch, who yesterday revealed he’s a member of the Pirate Party, is even winning over pirates.

Although Minecraft already has 658429 registered players, due to the fact that it’s widely available on torrent and warez sites, many of these are unauthorized users.

But what’s most impressive is that at the time of writing, 155521 (23.62%) of these have already bought the game of their own free will. In the last 24 hours alone, a 11804 people registered to play, and 4910 of them bought the game. (updated stats here)

In an interesting piece yesterday, Notch went into some detail on his attitude to piracy.

“To people who want to get paid for their digital works, myself included, [piracy/copying] is a bit of a problem. All of society and economics is based on an old outdated model where giving something to someone would rid the original owner of their copy, so everyone who wanted a copy had to buy one from someone else who would lose theirs, and the only source of new copies was you.”

“There might be actual development costs involved in making these copies. For example, for every wheel in the market, someone had to make that wheel. With digital copies, you only need to make the wheel once,” Notch explains.

In contrast with the media exec TorrentFreak spoke with last week, Notch doesn’t try to analyze why people pirate and labels that a moot point, but notes that while this amazingly effective way of distributing culture is beneficial to humanity, it also clashes with current economical models.

“Piracy will win in the long run. It has to,” says Notch. “The alternative is too scary.”

While Notch acknowledges that if someone pirates Minecraft he may have lost some “potential” revenue, he is also very aware of the marketing potential that pirates could release.

“But what if that person likes that game, talks about it to his or her friends, and then I manage to convince three of them to buy the game? I’d make three actual sales instead of blocking out the potentially missed sale of the original person which never cost me any money in the first case.”

Wasting money on trying to stop pirates or laying a guilt-trip on them are not approaches favored by Notch. Instead he prefers to offer online-only services that will add something to the game experience including level saving, centralized skins, friends lists and secure name verification for multiplayer. He hopes that these subtle feature additions can help to tempt pirates into become customers.

Of course, Notch is also pragmatic when he notes that if he suddenly got a deal with a big company, they may demand a more aggressive stance against file-sharers. Nevertheless, he feels there are better ways to deal with them than by force.

“Why fight the biggest revolution in information flow since the printing press when you could easily work with it by adding services that actually add some value beyond the free act of making a digital copy?” he concludes.

After revealing his Pirate Part affiliations yesterday, Notch also revealed his secret admiration of file-sharing.

“Don’t tell anyone, but I actually kinda like file sharing as a concept,” he told everyone on Twitter yesterday.

“It’s like the replicators in Star Trek, but seedier.”

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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New York Daily News

Prince: Internet age is over, digital gadgets are no good T3 … time Prince has clashed with the online revolution. He's filed lawsuits against Pirate Bay, YouTube and eBay in the past, claiming misuse of his music. Prince: the internet's completely overTelegraph.co.uk Prince Troll Says That The Internet Is Outdated, While Computers And Gadgets …Soft Sailor (blog) Prince: 'The Internet is completely over'Metro Mashable (blog) -TorrentFreak (blog) -3News all 259 news articles »

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Telegraph.co.uk

Prince: the internet's completely over Telegraph.co.uk His battle began in 2007 when he famously announced his intention to file lawsuits against eBay, YouTube and the Pirate Bay for the misuse of his music. … Is the Web outdated, or is it just Prince?CNET Prince declares the internet 'over'3News Prince: “The Internet Is Over”Mashable (blog) all 109 news articles »

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As a mediocre filmmaker or musician there is little to fear from piracy. If people don’t want to pay for your content then they are not very likely to pirate it either. However, this doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to benefit from piracy.

Two years ago we reported on a case where an intentional leak was used as a promotional tool. When the band BuckCherry found out that their latest single had leaked on BitTorrent, they issued a press release instead of trying to get the torrents offline.

In the press release they reported how devastated they were that the single was up for grabs. However, it all turned out to be staged event as we later found out that the person who uploaded the torrent had the same IP-address as the band’s manager.

BuckCherry’s failed PR-campaign was pretty low, but Danish filmmakers have taken this particular promotional technique quite a bit further by blaming a third party for the leak. A few days ago the makers (Regner Grasten Film) of the film Winnie & Karina issued a press release in which they accused the Danish copyright reform group Piratgruppen of stealing the master DVD.

“Until now there has been no ransom demands, but Regner Grasten Film is willing to do all it can to avoid the film being made available for free online,” they wrote in the press release.

The film in question was a big flop in theaters but through the faked piracy threat they hoped to get some attention for the upcoming DVD-release. The press release was ignored by the media though, so they had to release another one a few days later.

In this new press release they went even further by claiming that Piratgruppen was threatening to leak the film on YouTube that evening. Again, the media didn’t pick it up and eventually the filmmakers came clean by stating that the whole story was made up.

In an email to Piratgruppen the studio’s boss Regner Grasten admits that he was desperate because of the bad reviews and disappointing ticket sales. Accusing Piratgruppen of breaking into their premises and stealing the master film was just a joke, Grasten explained in the email.

Piratgruppen couldn’t really see the humor in being accused of a serious crime and called it a “pathetic little media stunt”.

In the end the filmmakers got a bittersweet result, since although the Danish media finally picked up the story, their failure was exposed.

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

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Much like Google, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt are search engines that aim to index information posted on the Internet and make it findable to their users.

Google’s YouTube shows even more similarities to torrent sites as it allows users to submit content, with the only difference being that YouTube actually hosts the uploaded files whereas torrent sites only link to content indirectly through .torrent files.

In the last year, three of the largest torrent sites – The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt – were all taken to court by copyright holders for assisting in copyright infringement, and all three sites lost their cases to some degree. Strangely enough Google has never said a word about these cases other than to distance themselves from The Pirate Bay team after they were sentenced.

Despite this attempt at demarcation, three Google employees are now in a very similar position as the aforementioned torrent site operators. An Italian court just handed out suspended jail sentences to three Google employees for ‘allowing’ users to upload a video that invaded the privacy of a third person.

The three employees were not aware of the upload before they were notified by the police, but they made it possible, much like they make it possible to upload copyrighted content. The similarities with torrent search engines are striking.

It is needless to say that Google is not amused by the court ruling. While the company kept its mouth shut in response to the legal actions surrounding the torrent search engines, they now speak of an attack on “the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built.”

“Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming,” Google’s Matt Sucherman wrote in a blog post yesterday.

This response from Google does indeed seem logical, and we can easily apply the same reasoning to sites that index and host .torrent files. The operators of torrent sites and video sites can’t possibly verify and screen the content of all uploaded files. This is something the site’s users should be held accountable for.

This doesn’t mean of course that the site’s operators should ignore the law. The Pirate Bay for example has always been very responsive to requests from the police concerning illegal material linked to by the site. IsoHunt goes even further as it actively works together with copyright holders and Mininova even allowed copyright holders to prevent infringing torrents from being re-uploaded in the future.

According to Google such policies should be good enough to operate a site like YouTube without running into legal trouble.

“European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy,” Sucherman writes.

So here we have Google in a similar position as most torrent sites are in. Although the Italian verdict is outrageous the obvious upside is that unlike the torrent sites, Google has the financial power to successfully fight the verdict. According to former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde, Google got what it deserved.

“It’s good that someone takes on Google for a change. Let them take the heat for once – and let them make sure that other sites that they’ve previously had no problem filtering, that basically do the same as them, don’t end up in this shit the next time,” Sunde told TorrentFreak.

“I think it’s good that time has finally caught up Google. Maybe now we have a level playing field here. They have to take the fight as well. Previously they only said nice things about how important the Internet was, and then ignored all of the things going on. Even supporting them – China for instance,” he added.

“A big player like Google has the financial muscles to fight this thing. And we all know that Italy is just full of rules made by Berlusconi, for Berlusconi,” Sunde said, adding, “That fascist needs to go.”

Google has indeed committed itself, and said it “will vigorously appeal this decision.” The whole case revolves around the question of whether or not the operators of media portals and search engines should be held accountable for the actions of their users.

In recent months Italian courts have clearly answered positively to this question. They have opened the door for a nationwide block of file-sharing sites and with yesterday’s decision file and video hosting sites are not safe any longer either. So the next question is, can Google secure a safe haven for torrent sites?

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

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A recent survey among 1000 New Zealanders has revealed some interesting findings regarding the pleasures of the Internet. Of the polled group, nearly half (41%) thought that watching porn online is morally acceptable.

Downloading music illegally, or watching a movie online without paying, was okay with a much smaller group, 18 and 13 percent respectively.

In fact, hiding your online porn viewing habits from your spouse is still more morally accepted than downloading a movie or music album without paying for it. Of the respondents, 18 percent thought that is was fine to secretly watch porn in a marriage.

At first sight the results of the survey are not really that surprising. Downloading music and movies without consent from the copyright holders is in violation of the local laws in New Zealand and watching porn obviously isn’t. Still, a closer look at the findings reveals some remarkable inconsistencies.

Firstly, most of the adult entertainment is actually viewed on sites that are dominated by copyright infringing content. So, many of the people who watch porn online are actually pirating as well, without realizing it.

Another remarkable finding was that people seem to be fine with copyright infringement if it’s on a video streaming site such as YouTube. Of all respondents, 31 percent said that it is morally acceptable to stream copyrighted TV-shows on YouTube, while only 13 percent believed that downloading copyrighted video was morally okay.

Thus, streaming copyrighted content is somehow perceived as more acceptable for some odd reason. The 5 percent difference between the moral acceptability of music and video downloading is another mystery that is left unexplained.

Overall, this survey shows how malleable peoples’ perceptions are when it comes to copyright issues online, with approval rates swaying back and forth between different types of media and the various distribution platforms.

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

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BitTorrent was first released by Bram Cohen back in 2001, long before streaming video sites such as YouTube existed. At the time, those who wanted to watch high quality video on their computers sometimes had to wait for hours or days until a download finished.

Now, at the end of the decade where BitTorrent has become a synonym for file-sharing, hundreds of millions of people have high speed broadband connections at their homes. Downloading a popular movie or TV-series often takes less than an hour nowadays, but for the demanding web users of today this delay can still prove quite annoying.

Spoiled by the many streaming video sites that have surged in popularity since YouTube’s launch in 2005, many people simply want to start watching instantly. To satiate this demand the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent has now added streaming support to the uTorrent 2.0 release candidate, which allows users to play video files while they are downloading.

“Our hope is to transform getting media using uTorrent from a ‘load-wait-watch-tomorrow’ to more of a ‘point-click-watch’ experience,” Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management said in a comment.

Although several other BitTorrent clients have already implemented similar streaming capabilities, uTorrent will finally make BitTorrent streaming possible for the majority of BitTorrent users.

In our tests the new feature worked flawlessly on well-seeded torrents. Users simply have to click on the play button next to the download, and after a few seconds or minutes it will turn green, ready to be streamed.

By default the latest uTorrent release is configured to use the DivX web player to stream video. This works well for most files but for us it caused problems with some video formats. Changing it to VLC or any other media player is relatively easy though, by nominating a different streaming player in uTorrent’s preferences.

Aside from streaming regular downloads, uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. is also working on BitTorrent-powered live streams. BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen himself aims to develop a piece of code that is superior to all the other P2P-based streaming solutions on the market today.

“I think there’s a very large market for live [streaming] in general, and to date no-one has proven that a p2p solution can meet the real-world requirements for being an acceptable live solution. I intend on changing that,” Bram told TorrentFreak earlier this year.

For now, uTorrent users will have to settle for on-demand streaming. Those who do not intend to use the feature can be assured that the streaming implementation used by uTorrent is designed on the principles of tit-for tat sharing, meaning that it does not slow down regular downloads.

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

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The BBC is one of the media partners participating in the EU-funded P2P-Next research project, which uses BitTorrent technology to shape the future of web-based video delivery.

BitTorrent is very effective in reducing bandwidth costs and thanks to technology developed by the P2P-Next team, it can also be used to stream TV-shows. Today P2P-Next has launched a new trial where they stream an episode of R&DTV in high definition.

In collaboration with the BBC, who kindly provided a HD episode of R&D TV, the researchers of P2P-Next will use this experiment to gather user feedback and demonstrate that the technology will allow video to be streamed to the public, by the public.

If successful, following further optimization the technology will allow everyone with a standard Internet connection to stream high definition video to thousands of people without having to invest in additional hardware or bandwidth.

“Our ambition level is to craft the next-generation of P2P technology,” P2P-Next scientific director, Dr. Johan Pouwelse, told TorrentFreak. “We hope that our Open Source P2P technology can provide existing user-generated video communities with high quality streaming video.”

Indeed, with this BitTorrent-powered streaming technology it should be fairly easy to create a mashup between The Pirate Bay and YouTube. Thanks to BitTorrent the users take care of the bandwidth, which significantly reduces the costs involved with running a video streaming site.

The current trial is limited to Windows users only, but the streaming plugin will also be available for other platforms in the near future. In order to stream the episode directly from the trial website, users have to install a plugin first, then the R&DTV episode should start to play.

Pouwelse further encourages those who are able to participate in the trial to submit feedback and report bugs. As the technology is only in an early stage of development, problems with some video cards are expected to occur, but it should work fine with the majority.

Those who want to participate can check out the BitTorrent-powered episide of BBC’s R&DTV here. Details on the number of users connected and the bandwidth transferred can be found on the statistics page.

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

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