A high-profile defender of artists' rights is calling for a "full-blown criminal investigation" into what happened during the Article 13 'copyright filters' vote earlier this month. Lawyer Chris Castle, who has an impressive music industry track record with various labels and groups, says that Google backed an "attack" on the European Parliament "for the purpose of policy intimidation". With YouTube now a major force when it comes to online music distribution, recording labels and artists are striving for a better deal. While YouTube compensates labels for views of authorized content, the labels say the existence of unlicensed content uploaded by users means that the Google-owned video giant gains an unfair negotiating position. In an effort to tighten the noose on YouTube and owners Google, the music industry lobbied hard for new EU legislation (Article 13) that would see user-uploaded content platforms compelled to install filters to detect infringing content before it gets made available to the public. Earlier this month and after much heated debate, the wind was taken out of the music industry’s sails when the European Parliament said “no” to the Copyright Directive mandate. The debate leading up to the vote was messy, with extremist claims on both sides doing little for the quality of the discussion, particularly on social media. As the vote neared, however, claims that somehow the campaign wasn’t being fought fairly came to the fore. Two days before the vote, UK Music CEO Michael Dugher launched a scathing attack, describing Google as a “corporate vulture feeding off the creators and investors” while claiming the search giant had pumped €31 million into lobbying against the legislation. “These new figures expose the fact that Google is acting like a monolithic mega-corp trying to submerge the truth under a tsunami of misinformation and scare stories pedaled by its multi-million propaganda machine,” Dugher said. “Instead of mounting a cynical campaign, motivated entirely out of its self-interested desire to protect its huge profits, Google should be making a positive contribution to those who create and invest in the music. MEPs should ignore the big money lobbying from big tech and back fair rewards for creators.” Whether Google’s lobbying efforts amounted to unfair practice will be for history to decide but if music industry veteran Chris Castle has his way, no stone should be left unturned in establishing the facts. Castle is probably best known online for editing the MusicTechPolicy blog but he’s also the founder of his own law firm and has held lofty positions at Sony and A&M. This busy industry man has little time for Google and its practices. “[T]here have been incredible and probably illegal uses of the Internet to overwhelm elected officials with faux communications that reek of Google-style misinformation and central planning in the hive mind of the Googleplex,” he writes. “We saw this again with the Article 13 vote in Europe last week with what clearly seems to be a Google-backed attack on the European Parliament for the purpose of policy intimidation. “That’s right – an American-based multinational corporation is trying to intimidate the very same European government that is currently investigating them for anticompetitive behavior and is staring down a multi-billion dollar fine. Vindictive much?” Last week the EU Commission did indeed fine Google €4.34 billion regarding the use of Android mobile devices to strengthen dominance of its search engine (a matter it reportedly tried to settle), but what about this attack on the EU Parliament? Castle doesn’t go into much detail on the precise mechanics of what Google is supposed to have done but he describes the company as engineering “DDOS-type stunts capitalizing on what seems to be the element of surprise.” This appears to be a reference to the numerous automated web-based forms that were made available online by various organizations, which enabled the public to make their voices heard by the decision makers about to tackle Article 13. The forms were used, apparently a lot, to send messages to MEPs but whether this was simply a passionate and genuine response or more cynical organized chaos will be a matter for the parties to argue over. In the meantime, Castle strongly feels there is a case to answer. The lawyer believes that Google is using its dominant position online to gain an unfair advantage in what should be a democratic process. “[T]he most important thing for the European Commission to take into account is that a company that is the target of multiple investigations is using the very market place monopoly that caused the competition investigations to intimidate the European government into bending to its will on Article 13,” he writes. “The European Commission needs to launch a full-blown criminal investigation into exactly what happened on Article 13, particularly since there is another vote on the same subject coming in September. Properly authorized law enforcement acting swiftly can set sufficient digital snares to track the next attack which surely is coming while they forensically try to figure out what happened.” It remains to be seen whether these strong words from Chris Castle and those who share his sentiments will have any effect on the ground but the fact that these accusations are now being made openly is likely to throw more fuel on an already super-heated debate. Finally, it’s perhaps worth noting that the companies and groups in the image below, which together claim to “represent 4.5% of EU GDP and 12 million European jobs” (and were in favor of Article 13), were apparently outgunned by Google. Or, perhaps they were simply outgunned by people who just didn’t like the idea of Article 13? Only a couple of months left for round two – it could be a bumpy ride

BitTorrent Inc, the parent company behind the popular file-sharing client uTorrent, has confirmed its acquisition by the TRON Foundation. This means that the company, which once was one of Silicon Valley's hottest newcomers, will now officially merge with the cryptocurrency startup. In May, TF broke the news that Justin Sun, the entrepreneur behind the popular cryptocurrency TRON, was in the process of acquiring BitTorrent Inc. The San-Francisco based file-sharing company confirmed the interest from Sun and while details leaked here and there, there was no official confirmation from the parties involved. That changed today. This morning both BitTorrent Inc. and the TRON Foundation confirmed the acquisition. This means that the file-sharing company, with uTorrent as its flagship software, will be part of the TRON team going forward. “We are excited to announce that TRON has officially closed its acquisition of BitTorrent,” BitTorrent Inc. just announced. “With this acquisition, BitTorrent will continue to provide high quality services for over 100M users around the world. We believe that joining the TRON network will further enhance BitTorrent and accelerate our mission of creating an Internet of options, not rules.” BitTorrent will keep its current product line intact and will be operating from TRON’s San Francisco office going forward. Both teams will merge and together they plan to take the technology behind TRON to a new level. BitTorrent + TRON TRON’s Justin Sun sees BitTorrent as a great fit for the foundation’s goal to decentralize the web. The legacy BitTorrent protocol will remain, but TRON hopes to bring new life to it. “The BitTorrent acquisition embodies TRON’s ‘All-In Decentralization’ strategy. TRON and BitTorrent share the same vision for a decentralized Web. I believe BitTorrent will gain new life from integrating into the TRON ecosystem, and TRON will continue BitTorrent’s protocol legacy.” It’s unclear how BitTorrent technology will be integrated into the TRON network. No concrete details have been announced but both parties have decentralization as their main pillars, and that won’t change. “With the integration of BitTorrent, TRON aims to liberate the Internet from the stranglehold of large corporations, give data rights back to the individual, and reignite the early 21st century vision of a free, transparent, decentralized network to connect the world, because the internet belongs to the people,” Sun notes. No financial details relating to the acquisition have been released but it was previously reported that Sun had agreed to pay $140 million for BitTorrent Inc. and its assets. While the acquisition has been causing shockwaves in the already volatile crypto market, BitTorrent’s users have been relatively quiet. Aside from a few confused uTorrent users, who feared that their clients would turn into cryptocurrency miners, the issue has not been widely discussed. Those worried users can rest assured, though, as the uTorrent team stresses that they have no intention to change, or mine. “We wish to reiterate that BitTorrent has no plans to change what we do or charge for the services we provide. We have no plans to enable mining of cryptocurrency now or in the future,” the uTorrent team said previously.

Doing nothing about online lawlessness chills free speech, the MPAA has told the NTIB. To improve the situation, online platforms should take more responsibility for illegal content and domain names should be off limits to pirate sites. On top, some Kodi addon makers and repositories should be targeted by criminal enforcement action. Early June, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the agency that acts as the President’s principal adviser on telecommunications policies, requested comments for its Inquiry on International Internet Policy Priorities. “Recognizing the vital importance of the Internet and digital communications to U.S. innovation, prosperity, education, and civic and cultural life, NTIA has made it a top priority to encourage growth and innovation for the Internet and Internet-enabled economy,” NTIA wrote. “Towards that end, NTIA is seeking comments and recommendations from all interested stakeholders on its international Internet policy priorities for 2018 and beyond. These comments will help inform NTIA to identify priority issues and help NTIA effectively leverage its resources and expertise to address those issues.” The MPAA has responded with a 38-page document detailing what it believes to be key issues facing the Internet and its users. It makes for interesting reading. Increased cooperation from online platforms The first issue, to which the movie group dedicates close to half of its response, centers on online platforms being shielded from responsibility for harms stemming from use of their services “even though most other businesses can be held culpable for such harms in similar circumstances.” The MPAA doesn’t mention any particular platforms by name but it can be safely assumed that Google, YouTube, Facebook and similar services are in the crosshairs when it says that positive aspects of these sites are “increasingly clouded” by bad actors using them as “powerful tools for harmful and illicit ends.” So what can be done? The MPAA says it’s not advocating for any particular solution but notes that it could be as simple as platforms agreeing to become more accountable while dealing with abuse on a voluntary basis. Claiming that dominant online platforms are facilitating everything from intellectual property theft to malware propagation, cyberespionage, sales of drugs and trafficking of minors, the MPAA says that platforms themselves are best placed to get their own houses in order. “The rationale is that the responsibility for harm prevention is more appropriately borne by the businesses than the customers who might be harmed, or that the businesses should at least take a prominent role in mitigating risk,” the MPAA notes. “Often, businesses that serve as ‘platforms’ for illegal activity are better situated — and have more expertise and resources — to identify potential problems and take precautionary or remedial measures. “They can more readily avoid what could be catastrophic consequences for the individuals, as well as help absorb what could also be catastrophic costs. And since the businesses are profiting from the public marketing of goods and services, there is an equity in expecting them to take on certain responsibilities and act with a requisite amount of care.” Given past criticisms, the MPAA’s submission seems keen to dispel what it sees as the misconception that online enforcement is incompatible with free speech and the free flow of information. Tackling the illegal activities detailed above is no more a violation of free expression online as it is in the physical world, the group notes, adding that platforms that refuse to deal with these problems are actually operating counter to these ideals. “In fact, curbing such illicit activity promotes free expression by creating a safer, virtual forum where individuals feel comfortable to engage and communicate. In this sense, it is leaving lawlessness and bullying unchecked that is chilling free speech,” the MPAA adds. Restrictions on domain name use for illegal sites, better WHOIS access Most websites benefit from having a memorable domain name and pirate sites are no different. The MPAA believes that illegal sites shouldn’t have access to domain names and asks the NTIA to do whatever it can to prevent that from happening in future. “[W]e hope the NTIA will help ensure ICANN, registries, and registrars are enforcing obligations that prohibit domain holders from using domain names in connection with illicit conduct. Doing so is critical to ensuring the multistakeholder model maintains the security, stability, and resiliency of the internet domain name system,” the MPAA writes. The Hollywood group says that the contractual obligations for this to happen already exist, created through the multistakeholder process, in some cases as far back as 2001. Mechanisms are in place to prohibit domain name holders from using domains for unlawful activity, including via suspensions after a review process. “Failing to enforce these provisions jeopardizes the credibility and accountability of ICANN and the multistakeholder governance model, and invites government intervention,” the MPAA warns. Another thorn in the side of the MPAA is the current state of access to WHOIS data. The group urges the NTIA to advise Congress on legislation that will ensure the collection of accurate WHOIS data while providing access to such information in appropriate circumstances. The MPAA says that WHOIS data is a “cornerstone of online accountability”, one which assists with public safety, consumer protection, dispute resolution, and enforcement of rights. Access to this data is currently under threat, not least due to the requirements of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The MPAA reports that its inquiries into 30 pirate site related domains in June yielded WHOIS data for just one, with all others denied, refused without a court order, or hindered by a domain privacy service. “Except for the data behind privacy proxies, this information would ordinarily have been public, and even in privacy proxy cases, we sometimes had agreements in place to gain access to the underlying information to address piracy issues,” the MPAA says. In conclusion, the Hollywood group is calling for a GDPR-compliant framework that allows access to WHOIS records for legitimate purposes such as intellectual property rights enforcement. Criminal enforcement actions to deter the distribution of illicit streaming devices The rise of illicit online streaming is showing few signs of slowing down so it’s no surprise that the MPAA is seeking assistance from the NTIA on this front. Specifically, the MPAA wants to see strong measures taken against those who promote and/or distribute so-called “fully loaded” set-top devices that are pre-configured for infringing purposes. Given its track record of equating online piracy with other crime, it’s no surprise that the MPAA leads with the claim that pirate sites help to spread malware “into living rooms” due to the prevalence of streaming piracy devices. “The issues relating to illegal streaming sites, devices, and applications — as well as the surrounding piracy ecosystem more generally — are thus closely linked to broader issues of cybersecurity. Combatting the former may well make significant contributions toward the latter,” the MPAA advises. Highlighting the only major security event in recent memory (which was quickly fixed, incidentally), the MPAA makes much of an exploit that targeted how some media players handled subtitles. Last month the MPAA’s affiliates promised to detail more security issues but thus far has failed to deliver. But aside from the somewhat transparent effort to paint pirate consumers as vulnerable victims, it’s clear that the main aim of the MPAA is to starve pirate operations of both cash and exposure by targeting everyone from sellers, payment processors and advertisers, to domain and hosting providers. On top, it also wants some heavy-duty action by the authorities. The suggested targets are likely to send a shiver down the spines of many involved in the third-party Kodi addon community. “Combatting the growth of streaming piracy requires coordination among all parties in a position to make a difference, including civil and criminal actions against creators of pirate add-on software and the repository websites that host them, against distributors of the preloaded devices, and against the entities streaming the content.” As part of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, the MPAA is already undertaking civil action against various pirate box vendors. However, what it really wants is for the government to bring deterrent criminal prosecutions in order to shock some offenders away from the market. Citing the shutdown of Megaupload and a reported 6.5 to 8.5 percent increase in digital sales for three major studios in its wake, the MPAA says that similar results could be achieved if the government took a more active role against players in the streaming market. “We would welcome the NTIA’s voice in urging its sister agencies to bring criminal actions, as well as its consulting with the Customs and Border Patrol about the possibility of interdiction of illicit streaming devices entering the country from abroad,” the MPAA concludes.

Concerns are mounting after Voksi, the infamous games cracker that has hit Denuvo-protected games hard in recent months, disappeared early yesterday. Normally a short hiatus wouldn't result in too much worry but the Bulgarian's site has disappeared too and now diverts to the Ministry of the Interior in Bulgaria. Late last week, the now-infamous cracker known as Voksi hit the headlines once again after defeating the latest variant of the Denuvo anti-tamper technology. The 21-year-old Bulgarian has made it a personal mission to bring down the world’s most hated anti-piracy system and regularly sets to work when a protected game is released. Last week’s successful attack on Sonic Mania Plus was an important step but those who know Voksi best understand the guy rarely rests. Soon after he cracked the Denuvo protection on Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia, the latest updates of Tekken 7 and Injustice 2, and delivered a new crack for Prey and its latest DLC. “There is no point of using Denuvo anymore,” he told us late last week. This unprecedented level of activity has led some to joke that Voksi’s not a human but some kind of robot that’s around all the time and doesn’t need to sleep. However, throughout the course of yesterday concerns have been mounting that all is not well in Bulgaria. Voksi was last seen online very early yesterday morning. He’s not been seen in any of his usual hangouts since and no one we’ve spoken to has heard or seen any news. While this isn’t alarming in itself, other developments seem more serious. Voksi is the leader of cracking group REVOLT which has its home at the Revolt.group forum. Yesterday and seemingly coinciding with Voksi’s disappearance, the REVOLT forum disappeared without warning. Again, this isn’t extraordinary when taken on its own but real concern is building over what appears to have replaced it. Instead of being greeted by the familiar forum, visitors to Revolt.group (RVT) are now being redirected to mvr.bg, the domain that identifies the website of Bulgaria’s Ministry of the Interior. Obviously, this link with the authorities is not what most people hope to see when they try to visit Voksi’s home. Definitely not the Revolt forum While domain redirects in the case of coordinated anti-piracy busts are fairly common, they are usually more informative than simply linking to the homepage of a government site. They tend to point to a specific message which can be both informative and a means to inform visitors that the game is up. The way things stand, that doesn’t appear to be the case here. As far as we can see, the Ministry of the Interior site doesn’t carry any message or announcement that can be in anyway connected with some kind of raid or bust so it’s possible that something else is going on. Previously, the Revolt.group domain pointed to an IP address in Sofia, Bulgaria. Now, however, it redirects to an IP address/server registered to SoftLayer in the United States which appears to be responsible for the redirect to the Ministry of the Interior. When taken together, none of this fits any expected patterns. TorrentFreak has spoken with individuals concerned about Voksi’s whereabouts but all say (including some close to him) that they have no idea what has happened to him or the Revolt forum. Directly, we have two key ways of contacting the cracker and thus far, neither has been met with any success. So, for now at least, it looks like a waiting game. We can confirm that Voksi is a real person so it’s possible he’s taken a break from his 24/7 cracking activities to recharge his batteries. Sadly, that doesn’t explain the issue with the forum. Other possibilities are also under consideration, including some kind of hack, hoax, or pending surprise reveal. Only time will tell. Update: Voksi informs TF that he was raided by Bulgarian cyberpolice following a criminal complaint filed by Denuvo. His cracking days are now officially over. TF will have a more detailed report in the coming hours.

Mozilla sees intellectual property legislation as a threat to the open Internet because it stifles creativity and innovation. The foundation, best known for its development of the Firefox browser, is now asking the NTIA to shield the Internet from bad policies while reforming outdated laws. Last month, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) asked the public for input for its International Internet Policy Priorities. The NTIA has an important role in President Trump’s administration, acting as a principal adviser on telecommunications policies. In recent weeks various stakeholders submitted their input. Yesterday, for example, we highlighted the MPAA’s submission which argued that action is required as the current “lawless” Internet chills free speech. However, not everyone agrees with this stance. Mozilla, the creators of the Firefox browser, sees regulation and copyright legislation in particular, as one of the largest threats to an open Internet. In its submission, Mozilla’s Senior Policy Manager Heather West asks the NTIA to help preserve the Internet’s openness. “One of the key elements that makes the internet an incredible global resource is its openness. ‘Open’ means that anyone can publish or invent online without asking for permission, and that the technologies used to run the Web are transparent and understandable.” More restrictions are a threat to the open Internet, Mozilla argues. It specifically highlights intellectual property laws, which include copyright, as one of the dangers. These laws restrict people from using the full potential of the Internet. Instead of more restrictions, Mozilla promotes the idea of a more flexible approach, such as Creative Commons licenses. “Intellectual property laws stifle creativity and innovation if they are too restrictive about sharing and remixing – particularly for educational and non-profit use, which would be permitted under ‘fair use’.” “We need to reform laws that are outdated, and support the growth of licensing alternatives like the Creative Commons,” Mozilla adds. Mozilla agrees with the MPAA that copyright legislation in the US and abroad hasn’t kept up with the pace with the Internet. However, both groups clearly have different ideas on how to move forward. Where MPAA and other pro-copyright groups want stricter copyright regulation, Mozilla wants fewer restrictions, and both ask the Government for support. “Internationally, the NTIA and Department of Commerce should support efforts to keep the internet open. Open innovation on the internet is threatened by bad policies, the devaluation of common standards, and the fragmentation of the global internet.” As an example of present threats, Mozilla mentions the EU’s copyright modernization proposals, which would increase liability for online services and introduce a so-called ‘link tax’. “It is clear that leadership is necessary; the EU is currently in the final stages of negotiation on a copyright proposal that would threaten the future of the internet,” Mozilla warns. Mozilla notes that the challenges ‘we’ face are complicated, but that they can be tackled if all stakeholders collaborate to find the right solutions. However, if the NTIA submissions show anything, it’s that this will be nearly impossible. On one side there are groups such as Mozilla, EFF, Public Knowledge, Center for Democracy & Technology, the Internet Association, Cloudflare, and Google, warning against the adverse effects of restrictive regulation. On the other, there are copyright holder groups such as the MPAA, RIAA, The Software Alliance, the Copyright Alliance, and others, urging for better protection for creators. Both argue that they want to protect freedom of expression and the free flow of information, but they differ greatly in how this goal should be achieved.

The rivalry between Voksi and Denuvo appears to be over. Early Tuesday morning, up to six officers including two from Bulgaria's General Directorate for Combatting Organized Crime, raided the 21-year-old's home. Voksi informs TorrentFreak they were acting following a criminal complaint filed by Irdeto, the company that bought Denuvo earlier this year. Yesterday morning we reported how concern was mounting for infamous games cracker ‘Voksi’ after he uncharacteristically failed to appear online. Fears only increased when his REVOLT forum began diverting to the Ministry of the Interior in Bulgaria. While some of his fans thought it was some kind of elaborate joke, those closest to him suspected that something had gone terribly wrong. And it had. Speaking with TorrentFreak last evening, an obviously emotional Voksi told us that early Tuesday morning he received unexpected visitors to his home in southern Bulgaria. Five or six officers, including two from Bulgaria’s General Directorate for Combatting Organized Crime (GDBOB) and others from a local police station, appeared at his door. They clearly had one thing in mind – his anti-Denuvo activities. It appears that Denuvo’s new owner, anti-piracy outfit Irdeto, had filed a criminal complaint against Voksi with Bulgarian authorities. How police found him isn’t clear but Voksi told TF that he had at least one piece of loose information out there that would’ve made it easy. Perhaps surprisingly given the powerful response, Voksi wasn’t arrested at his home. He had equipment seized (his main PC and a server) but even when he attended the local police station to make a statement later in the day, he remained ‘free’. Clearly concerned about what will happen next, Voksi didn’t want to go into too much detail about his statement. However, we get the impression that he didn’t make it difficult for authorities and was as straightforward as possible with what probably amounts to a confession. Voksi also wasn’t clear on what the charges against him might be, if there are any. He knows that the police spoke about the damage he had done to Denuvo but beyond that, details in respect of specific laws aren’t readily available. Voksi also told us that during Tuesday he took the opportunity to contact Denuvo with some kind of offer to bring the whole situation to a peaceful conclusion. The Bulgarian didn’t want to go into details on how the discussion went or what was said but he suggested that Denuvo felt the final decision might not be entirely theirs, considering the local prosecutor is now in charge of the case. What happens to Voksi in the immediate future isn’t known but it’s clear that he won’t be continuing with his cracking work. For his REVOLT forum, the game is also over. Voksi informs TF that the authorities have already seized the domain so the site won’t be coming back. Finally, Voksi has had zero representation so far. We double checked – no lawyer was provided to him before, during, or after questioning. He’ll be needing someone to help out in southern Bulgaria, close to the city of Plovdiv. “If you are a lawyer or someone who wants to fight, or just someone who wants to express his feelings, you can contact me currently over the RVT Discord or personally on Discord – Voksi#3486,” he concludes.

Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music and Universal Music have teamed up to demand that Sky Ireland implements a so-called "three strikes" regime to deal with pirating subscribers. Its understood that Sky has no objection to disconnecting persistent copyright infringers but will not do so without a court order. A report suggests that Vodafone is also being targeted. At the turn of the last decade, the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) ended legal action against local ISP Eircom when the provider agreed to implement a so-called “three strikes” regime. The agreement saw member labels including Sony, Universal, and Warner tracking allegedly-infringing Eircom subscribers online and Eircom forwarding infringement notices. Those caught three times would be eligible for disconnection from the Internet. Under an agreement to give Eircom a level playing field, the labels targeted another ISP, UPC (later taken over by Virgin), with a demand to implement the same scheme. UPC dug in its heels and the case dragged on through the legal system. In 2015, the High Court ruled in favor of the labels, rejecting complaints from UPC that it’s not an ISP’s job to police its subscribers’ activities online. Now, more than three years later, the labels are back again with a renewed effort to have the graduated response scheme introduced more widely in Ireland. This time around, Sony, Warner and Universal are targeting Sky Ireland. According to the Irish Times, Sky has told the labels it will comply with their demands but has asked that they obtain a court order first. Sky, which is already collaborating with the Premier League to block infringing streams, said that it was “actively working” with the industry to deal with online piracy. “It’s therefore important that companies like ours do what they can, alongside the Government and the rest of the media and technology industries, to help protect copyright,” Sky said. “Copyright holders who believe broadband users have unlawfully shared content online have the option of taking their cases to court. If the order is granted, the service provider must comply and Sky would, of course, comply with any such order.” Asking for a court order to be produced is standard form in such cases but given Sky’s track record in such matters, it probably won’t be putting up much of a fight. The issue of costs is likely to be a matter for dispute but putting the regime in place is unlikely to be a sticking point. In response, the labels (under the Irish Recorded Music Association umbrella) initiated a claim in the High Court this week, with supporting papers filed by IRMA chief Willie Kavanagh. IT reports that IRMA is also in talks with Vodafone Ireland to implement the same anti-piracy scheme but the ISP has “raised technical concerns and sought more time.” In any event, Vodafone is extremely unlikely to begin disconnecting customers without a legal basis so a court order will be required in this case too.

The music industry faces piracy adversaries of all shapes and sizes. While most pirate sites and services simply offer all the music they can find, there is a mysterious group that has a more narrow focus. Music Mafia specializes in selling access to some of the hottest unreleased tracks and other inside information, which prompted the RIAA to launch an investigation. From BBSs, through Napster, torrent sites, and stream rippers, there’s been no shortage of targets over the past decades. Despite efforts from the music industry to counter these ever-emerging threats, people who want to access music for free now have more options than ever. While piracy is bad enough, there’s one thing that music insiders fear even more; pre-release leaks. So, when a website trades in these kinds of leaks in the open, alarm bells go off. This was the case around a year ago when the mysterious “Music Mafia” group entered the stage. The group gained mainstream attention when two unreleased Kanye West tracks appeared online, way ahead of schedule. The tracks soon made their way to YouTube, with many pointing out Music Mafia as the source. More than a year has passed and the Music Mafia site is still up and running. In exchange for Bitcoin, it auctions and sells unreleased tracks, demos, and unreleased music videos. Even email addresses and phone numbers of artists are on the menu. In the site’s “assortment” you’ll find popular names such as Beyonce, Coldplay, Drake, Hardwell, Justin Bieber and Katy Perry. The list of unreleased material is impressive as well, with dozens of records from David Guetta, Kanye West, and Travis Scott, among others. Some of the unreleased tracks are auctioned off on a regular basis while others can be bought directly. The most exclusive releases are sold behind the scenes, all traded for Bitcoin. Buy now The music industry sees the anonymous group as a severe threat, something which pushed it onto the RIAA’s radar. A few weeks ago the music group obtained a DMCA subpoena (pdf) from a federal court in the District of Columbia ordering Tonic Domains Corp, the registry of Music Mafia’s .to domain, to identify the associated registry. “We have determined that a user of your system or network has infringed our member record companies’ copyrighted sound recordings,” RIAA wrote to the registry, requesting information. “As is stated in the attached subpoena, you are required to disclose to the RIAA information sufficient to identify the infringer. This would include the individual’s name, physical address, IP address and e-mail address.” Whether Tonic Domains Corp complied with the request is unknown. However, a few weeks have passed now and MusicMafia.to is still up and running as usual, trading unreleased music for Bitcoin. One of the most intriguing questions is where this group gets its booty. Is it connected to rogue music industry insiders? Are they skilled hackers who get their treasure through digital means? There are some hints that support the hacker theory. For example, last year Drake posted Music Mafia’s website address on Twitter. This tweet was swiftly removed and some suggested that the account had been hijacked. Without more details, it’s hard to tell what’s going on precisely. What is clear, however, is that they are not bluffing. But neither is the RIAA…

Sky is required to block pirates sites after the Premier League obtained an order from the High Court. While the ISP was a defendant in that case, it appears that as a broadcaster it's prepared to push the boat out to protect its own football subscription revenues. According to a new report, Sky is using Google Cloud to crunch 500 billion data records to continuously identify pirate sites. During March 2017, the Premier League obtained a blocking injunction from the High Court which compelled ISPs including BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media to block ‘pirate’ football streams in real-time. Due to its reported success, the Premier League applied for a second order which was handed down in July 2017. It ran from August 12, 2017 to May 13, 2018 and contained a renewal clause. The Premier League was successful in its latest application, obtaining a new order from the High Court last week. This extension applies to BT, EE, Plusnet, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media, with all of the ISPs required to work with the Premier League to stop pirate content from reaching their subscribers. While all will do so, it’s clear that some are a little keener than others. Sky, BT, and Virgin are all football broadcasters in their own right, so have a vested interest in complying with the High Court order. How they go about that has never been revealed in public but a new report from ComputerWorldUK shows how much effort Sky are prepared to put in. Speaking during Google Cloud Next in San Francisco this week, Mohamed Hammady, CTO at Sky UK revealed that his company spends close to $8 billion a year on content, with broadcasting rights of the Premier League ($1.6 billion) representing the “crown jewel” of its sports spending. To protect that investment (while complying with the Premier League’s High Court order), Sky has turned to Google Cloud technology. Hammady said that the team at Sky collected its NetFlow traffic information as a means of “sampling the traffic on our core network.” This sampling produced 500 billion data records in a year, a volume best handled by the professionals. “Using BigQuery and an in-house algorithm – which cost $10,000 (£7,500) to develop – we are now able to continuously study traffic patterns with an always up to date list of suspect pirate sites,” Hammady said as quoted by CWUK. “Once they have been confirmed as illegal they are shut down. Hammady said running a query on Google Cloud takes Sky less than 30 seconds and costs the company just 23 cents, a good deal according to the Sky CTO. “The result is a phenomenal reduction in pirate sites in the UK,” he said. While the High Court order was obtained by the Premier League and Sky was a defendant in that case, it’s clear that rather than opponents, these content companies are working hand-in-hand to reduce piracy. Also, from the little we know, it seems that Sky is also happy to obtain data from the network traffic generated by its customers in order to target pirate sites. It’s a somewhat unusual situation to hear discussed in public, given that most ISPs prefer to be seen as content agnostic “dumb pipes” that seek no control (or awareness) of what their customers might be doing online.

The major record labels are willing to settle their 'piracy' lawsuit with Internet provider Grande Communications. The RIAA members made an offer two months ago but the ISP says it requires more time for a thorough response. If the sides fail to reach an agreement, the labels promise to continue their "vigorous prosecution." Last year several major record labels, represented by the RIAA, filed a lawsuit against ISP Grande Communications accusing it of turning a blind eye to pirating subscribers. According to the labels, the Internet provider knew that some of its subscribers were frequently distributing copyrighted material, but failed to take any meaningful action in response. Grande refuted the accusations and filed a motion to dismiss the case. The ISP partially succeeded as the claims against its management company Patriot were dropped. The same was true for the vicarious infringement allegations, as the court saw no evidence that the ISP had a direct financial interest in the infringing activity. The labels disagreed, however, and were not ready to let any claims go. In May they submitted a motion for leave to file an amended complaint including new evidence obtained during discovery. Among other things, they argued that Grande willingly kept pirating subscribers abroad, to generate more revenue. While both sides were going head to head in court, the labels also attempted a peace offering. Court documents submitted this week show that the record labels offered a settlement agreement to the ISP two months ago. Per the court’s scheduling order, Grande was required to respond to the offer within a month, but thus far a response has yet to come in. In a new status report submitted his week, the labels say they are still open to a settlement. “Plaintiffs remain ready and willing to participate in a meaningful attempt to resolve the case without further litigation, including through a mediation, which Plaintiffs previously proposed to Grande and Patriot Media Consulting, LLC,” the labels write. “Otherwise, if Grande and Patriot have no interest in discussing settlement, Plaintiffs will continue vigorous prosecution of this case to recover damages for Grande’s and Patriot’s extensive and harmful infringement of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings.” The details of the settlement offer remain unknown, but it’s likely that they will come at a cost for the ISP. Grande’s attorney informed the labels that more time was needed to prepare a thorough response, something the company also told the court this week. “Due to the nature of Plaintiffs’ written offer of settlement, Grande notified Plaintiffs that it would require additional time to prepare and transmit its official written response.” Grande’s attorney notes. The ISP now expects to have its response to the settlement offer ready next week. Given that it took nearly two months to reply, this will likely be more complex than a simple yes or no.

In the UK, UEFA has obtained an extension and expansion of the High Court injunction which requires ISPs to block servers streaming live European football matches without permission. The order is directed at several major ISPs and following the success of the initial order, it now covers more pirate servers and additional football competitions. Now that the World Cup is over, football teams in Europe are slowly starting to get ready for the new season. This is also true for UEFA, the international body that governs football throughout Europe. These preparations take place on the pitch, but also in the online arena and the courts. In the UK, UEFA successfully applied for an extension and expansion of the pirate stream blocking order the High Court handed down late last year. Under this order, ISPs are required to block pirate streams of several of the most popular games. The order for the upcoming season was issued by High Court Justice Arnold. It received no opposition from the ISPs and some, likely those who have skin in the game, supported the renewal. The evidence provided by UEFA convinced the High Court that the initial blocking order was a success, without it resulting in any meaningful collateral damage. “The evidence filed by UEFA in support of this application demonstrates that the First Order was very effective in achieving the blocking of access to the Target Servers during UEFA matches,” Justice Arnold writes. “Moreover, no evidence has been found of overblocking despite checks having been undertaken. There was one incident on which a stream was erroneously blocked, but it was not a case of overblocking because it was in fact an infringing stream although not covered by the terms of the First Order.” As with the Premier League blocking renewal, which was issued last week, there are also some small changes. The number of targeted streaming servers has expanded, for example, and there’s a shorter delay in notifying the affected hosting provider to prevent the targets from circumventing the measures. In addition, UEFA was also granted permission to expand its blocking efforts to protect additional UEFA competitions. The affected streaming servers and competitions are not mentioned by name in the order. It’s likely, however, that several major competitions such as the Champions League and the Europa League are covered. The blocking extension and expansion covers all the major UK ISPS including BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media and will remain in place for the months to come. If it remains successful, UEFA is likely to request another update after that.

This week UK non-profit Internet Matters published a new guide designed to protect children from the apparent perils of using pirate sites. Like several before it, the report claims that pirate sites are the most common source of malware infection on the Internet and that streaming pirated media puts devices at risk. TF called in security experts - they do not agree. Protecting children in our society is one of the noblest things one can do. In both the physical and digital worlds, children need high-quality guidance. While most of this support should come from parents and others closely involved with a child’s upbringing, groups like UK non-profit Internet Matters are there to provide advice when the adults around need help themselves. This week the London-based group teamed up with the Mumsnet website to publish a guide titled “Internet safety and the dangers of digital piracy.” Perhaps unsurprisingly given recent trends, the report focuses on the apparent threats posed by “fully-loaded” set-top boxes running Kodi and similar applications. “f your children stream illegal content online, also known as digital piracy, it can expose them and you to cyber threats, disturbing pop-ups and unexpected harmful content,” the guide notes. “The risks typically associated with digital piracy can take place on dodgy websites and preloaded streaming devices, sometimes known as Kodi boxes, but they can also occur through any number of illegitimate apps on mobiles, tablets or smart TVs.” While some of the claims made in the guide are overly generic, it does make some very good points. Accessing content from illegal streaming sites rarely comes with the age restrictions available on services such as Netflix, for example, so parents should always be aware of the risks and act in a supervisory role. “Explicit adverts may pop up and there’s no standard organization of age-restricted content, meaning 18+ films like Fifty Shades can sit right next to U-rated content such as Finding Nemo,” the guide notes. The guide also correctly states that some fully-loaded devices can come with porn apps installed. Again, it’s the responsibility of the parent to ensure that their children aren’t left unsupervised to use such a device, particularly (given their child’s age) they were probably the one to buy it. There are few complaints when it comes to the guide’s legal advice either. As part of the EU, streaming copyrighted content in the UK is illegal, as is marketing and selling pre-loaded devices configured for piracy. All ok so far, but then the guide mixes apples and oranges to spook the unknowledgeable reader. “Whilst families haven’t yet been the target of police investigations, the consequences of watching pirated content should be considered, both from a legal standpoint and the inappropriate content children could be exposed to,” the guide notes. “For example, a man was recently hit with an £85,000 demand for sharing his stream of a pay-to-view boxing match on Facebook with over 4,250 people.” The kind of person who can get value from this kind of basic guide isn’t going to appreciate the differences between someone who streams to the public and someone who watches a stream at home. Simply reading “£85,000 demand” might be enough for them to throw their device in the trash (which may have been the intention), but perhaps we’re being a little bit picky here. Statements like these, however, deserve no such leeway. Like the majority of claims in the guide, this statement is offered without citing a source. So, we contacted Internet Matters to ask where this information had been obtained. Unfortunately (and despite having several days to do so) they didn’t respond. The reason we asked is simple: we don’t believe either element of the claim is true. So, we approached some experts for their opinions. We asked two questions based on the precise wording of the Internet Matters claim. 1. Are pirate sites the most common source of malware infection? If not, what is the most common source/vector? 2. Does streaming pirated media put devices at direct risk of infection? The first responses came back from respected security expert Mikko Hypponen from F-Secure. “Pirate sites are not the most common source for infections, and it hasn’t been since the early 1990s. Today, the most common ways of getting infected are via malicious email attachments, browser plugins and extensions and web exploit kits,” he told TorrentFreak. “Streaming pirated media is not a security risk, as long as the user does not install additional applications, browser plugins or codecs to stream.” We also received a detailed response from Luis Corrons, Security Evangelist at Avast, who told us that the Internet overall is the most common source of malware, but websites are not the sole driver. “If we look at some of the biggest malware outbreaks, like SQLSlammer, Blaster or the recent WannaCry attack, they all are network worms that have infected millions of computers without having to visit any webpage,” Corrons explained. “The problem with pirate sites is that it’s hard to know who is behind them. If you visit YouTube or Vimeo, most people are familiar with their parent companies. But in the case of some obscure websites, there’s a chance they could have been built by cybercriminals looking to infect visitors, steal credentials and personal information.” While it’s certainly possible that pirate sites can be a source of malware, Bogdan Botezatu, Senior E-Threat Analyst at Bitdefender, told us it is extremely difficult to assess the amount of malware on pirate sites, not least since many sites come and go on a regular basis. However, he did indicate that when content from pirate sites is consumed via set-top devices, there’s less of a risk than when people access it via a web browser. “Since these web services offer streaming through Kodi add-ons, the user never really get to interact with their home page, but rather with the Kodi dashboard. Most of these addons load content from [pirate] websites and stream it via Kodi. This dramatically minimizes the chances of the user interacting with rogue ads or deceptive links,” Botezatu explained. So does Botezatu agree with Internet Matters when they claim that streaming pirated media itself “puts devices at direct risk of infection”? “No, not directly, although I would not recommend anyone to resort to this,” Botezatu said. “With extremely few exceptions where some vulnerabilities in the user’s video player could be exploited to run arbitrary code, media streaming is safe. I am unaware of any campaigns that use movie files for malware dissemination other than the Wimad Trojan back in 2012.” The stance that streaming media is not inherently dangerous is shared by Corrons at AVAST. “Streaming media does not pose any particular risk level of infection. It doesn’t matter if the media is pirated or not,” he said. While it’s a bit of a shame that Internet Matters had to claim things that aren’t true to drive its point home, they’re by no means the only organization to do so. Earlier this year, the Industry Trust for IP Awareness made a similar claim, noting that “Illegal streaming websites are now the number one propagation mechanism for malicious software as 97% of them contain malware.” With assistance from Adam Kujawa, Director of Malware Intelligence at Malwarebytes, we debunked that statement back in February. It’s disappointing but not entirely surprising we’ve having to do so again several months later. There are plenty of valid reasons for not letting kids loose with piracy-configured boxes, not least since they could see content that adults might prefer them not to. Notably, however, the exact same thing can be said about YouTube and Facebook, or even the Internet in general. When anyone uses the Internet for anything there are security risks, so parents should always tell their kids to be cautious when they’re online, no matter what the device or content being consumed. Surprisingly, the Internet Matters report – which has a strong focus on malware – doesn’t even mention installing anti-virus or anti-malware software to protect devices. Concerned parents should note that both can be obtained for free and are easy to install.

Technology isn't inherently good or bad; it depends on how it's used. Peer-to-peer file sharing is one technology that has potential good uses but is often used for bad ones. The BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol is no exception. Created in 2001 by a computer-science student as a way to share files while saving bandwidth, BitTorrent suffers from a bad reputation because it is often used for piracy. Thanks to its popularity, however, BitTorrent does consume a lot of bandwidth. Cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks estimates that BitTorrent consumes 3.35 percent of the total worldwide bandwidth and is responsible for half of all file-sharing traffic worldwide. BitTorrent has gotten a bad rap because so much of its use is, and has been, for piracy. Some of it is flagrant, as in the case of <a href="">The Pirate Bay and other piracy-related torrent indexing sites. Yet BitTorrent has plenty of legitimate uses, and is even used by the piracy-plagued software and entertainment industries. What is BitTorrent? BitTorrent was created by programmer Bram Cohen, who had previously worked for a company called MojoNation — an early effort at distributed downloads by breaking large files into encrypted chunks and distributing those pieces via multiple computers. This made it different from other peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa and eMule because those options were peer-to-peer, so your download source was a single PC that could go offline at any time. Like Napster, Kazaa and eMule, BitTorrent used a client to manage the downloading of the file(s) as well as the sharing of them, since as soon as you began downloading, you became a "seeder" (i.e., you give as you take). It's considered good etiquette to leave your BT client running for a day or so to seed to other people. The difference between BitTorrent and P2P networks, aside from their distributed nature, is that you don't download the file immediately. Instead, you download a .torrent file that's only a few kilobytes in size. All these files contain is the metadata tracker information, which is where the files you wish to download are located, and information about thetracker, which is a computer that coordinates the file distribution. So, the tracker tells your BT client which other peers have the files you want. There are two types of trackers: open and private. Open trackers are freely accessible by all, and usually, anything goes. You find all kinds of content and malware to go with it. That's the bulk of what's referred to as the BitTorrent network. Private trackers, in contrast, are managed and closed off, requiring, at the very least, an account, if not a paying account. Private trackers control their network of seeders more rigidly, which means there are a lot fewer malware threats. But some of them are like elite clubs; in fact, many are invite-only. Malware threats What about malware? Your first line of defense is common sense. What is the source of the torrent? About.com has an excellent list of 30 reliable torrent sites, but it also has piracy sites. Piracy is pretty much a fact of life, unless you use the Internet Wayback Machine BitTorrent site, which archives the content from the history of the Web. Malware is more easily attached to executable files than to data files, like MP3s or video files, although the latter can still carry malware. Most, but not all, malware needs an executable to run — and audio or video files are not that — so you are safer, but never 100 percent safe. Whatever you do, never accept an .exe download that's billed as a downloader or accelerator. Your BT client is all you need. When torrents are created, metadata and a hash are generated. So if someone tries to add malware after the fact, the torrent protocols will discard it. It's difficult to add malware to an existing torrent, but you can always add it when the torrent is made. In many torrent sites, there is a comment section below the .torrent download. Read the comments closely; you may find a malware warning. Finally, make sure you have good antivirus software, because pretty much any good antivirus program checks every file as it lands on your PC, or even before. So, if there is malware in the torrent, as the files are written to disk, they will (in theory) be caught. Legal uses of BitTorrent BitTorrent has a reputation as a piracy device, and it's not unfounded. The Pirate Bay is the best-organized and highest-profile site that hosts pirated content. However, there are plenty of legitimate uses by musicians, movie studios, game companies and software developers for the exact reason BitTorrent is so popular: It avoids a single server choke point. For a while, game developer Blizzard used a hybrid HTTP/BitTorrent protocol for distributing patches and updates to Diablo III, StarCraft II and World of Warcraft, although it's now unclear what protocol it uses. CCP, the Iceland-based company behind EVE Online, last year announced it would revamp its patcher software to use BitTorrent as well. And Canonical, maker of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, makes new releases available via BitTorrent along with HTTP and FTP downloads. Recently, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke released his first solo album via BitTorrent. You could get two songs for free, or buy the whole thing for just $6. This was the first time someone tried selling music directly via BitTorrent. Usually, albums were sold by their labels, not directly by the artist. Sub Pop Records, the indie label that launched the grunge revolution in the early 1990s, used to distribute albums via torrents but no longer does. In addition, Canada's CBC, Norway's NRK and Holland's VPRO broadcasting networks are all distributing selected content via torrents. By and large, though, commercial torrents are still rare. Most of the nonpirated content tends to be free, open-source or public-domain material. BitTorrent software setup To access torrents, you'll need to download and install client software, which is the easy part. For security and privacy reasons, you may have to do some fiddling with your router, and that might be a challenge. When you launch a BitTorrent client, it opens a network port so that other BitTorrent clients can connect and your computer can be a part of the sharing. Firewalls can block nearly all of the ports used by peer-to-peer clients, owing to the dangers many of these apps have in both malware and the potential for intrusion. In many instances, your BitTorrent client will work just fine. But for some people, BT downloads either don't work or downloads are painfully slow. That means you have to do something called port forwarding: Go into your router's settings, and open the ports for BitTorrent. The BitTorrent company has a nice guide on port forwarding, and there is a whole site dedicated to it called Port Forward. All routers are different, and they use different terms and put port-forwarding settings in different menus. Usually, though, they can be found under the Advanced menu. Now, you need to look for terms like "port forwarding," "port mapping" or virtual servers. For help, look up your router or modem on Portforwarding.com. Once you've set up the port forwarding in the modem or router, open your BitTorrent software and enter that same port number for the "private" or "local" UDP/TCP fields. In µTorrent, for example, you will find this under Preferences > Connection.

eBay has been exploring the potential benefits of incorporating peer-to-peer transport technologies into our network topology. We’ve begun to use BitTorrent for index distribution, and we’ll soon use it for build distribution as well. In this post, we discuss our experience with BitTorrent and the problem of package distribution within the enterprise environment. Typical enterprise requirements are for replicating packages of medium to large size (a few megabtyes to several gigabytes) across a large number of target nodes, with high transfer reliability and often within stringent time lines. Use cases having such requirements include the following: Rollout of versioned software packages Fan-out of data packages across distributed grids for downstream processing About BitTorrent BitTorrent (BT) is a popular peer-to-peer (P2P) transport protocol that is commonly used across the Internet to transfer packages such as audio, video files, and data sets. According to a comprehensive 2008-2009 study of Internet traffic in eight regions of the world, BitTorrent traffic represents not only a lion’s share of all P2P traffic, but also a significant portion (20-30% or more) of all Internet traffic. BT works well due to the distributed nature of the transfers among the nodes; since a single server, or a few servers, do not need to transfer to all nodes across the grid, BT is efficient for distributing large packages to a large number of nodes. BT splits the packages into pieces that are shared between the peers. A tracker maintains and provides a list of peers that are interested in a particular package. A peer first acts as a client. Once it receives a full piece, it acts as a server for that piece. The peer discovers other peers via one or more trackers. Information about trackers, pieces, and their checksums is stored within a “.torrent” file, which is typically a fraction of the overall file size. Before BT transfers can be initiated, the “.torrent” file is distributed to the peers using HTTP, SCP, or other client/server means. The BT specification and protocol details are described at theory.org. The P2P technique, particularly the BitTorrent protocol, is well studied. Two key strategies for efficient BT content replication have been found to be piece selection and peer selection (see the 2006 paper, Rarest First and Choke Algorithms Are Enough). BT uses rarest first as the piece selection strategy, and the choke algorithm as the peer selection strategy. The rarest first strategy, as the name suggests, involves peers targeting the rarest piece for transfer. The choke strategy is based on fairness, speed, and reciprocation of uploads. The content distribution problem has also been studied from a theoretical perspective (see Optimal Scheduling of Peer-to-Peer File Dissemination). Optimal distribution choices, comparing performance using a client/server mechanism versus P2P transfers, are described below. Protocol Transfer time Client/server t * N P2P with a single piece t + t * log2(N) P2P with multiple pieces t + t * log2(N) / R where: N = Number of nodes R = Number of pieces that the package is split into t = Time to transfer a complete package from one node to another BitTorrent within the enterprise environment BitTorrent has been used to a limited extent in large-scale web services to distribute files. Facebook uses it for file sharing, and Twitter for code deployments. The BitTorrent protocol is designed for Internet scale with slow, unreliable, far-away and greedy clients in the presence of ISP throttling. BT-style distributions are desirable in enterprise environments, where large data sets of increasing size need to be transferred to a large set of nodes. In some ways, the problem of data transfers (fan-out) within a data center is simpler with reliable, managed, fast, and low-latency nodes. However, the demands of predictability, scalability, manageability, and efficiency are higher in such environments. We now turn to optimization options, on top of regular BT transfers, for improving efficiency and predictability Configuration The general BitTorrent configuration is designed for Internet scale with slow and unreliable clients. This configuration can be adapted to work better in the enterprise environment with homogenous clients. The upload and download parameters and piece sizes can be adapted to improve transfer rates and reliability in an enterprise environment. The tit-for-tat strategy as a part of the choke algorithm, throttling, and encryption of payload may not be needed in enterprise environments. Peer selection When distributing pieces between peers, it is efficient to pick peer nodes the closest to each other. In enterprise environments, the server topology may be available beforehand and easily leveraged in the algorithm to pick nearer neighbors. We find that closeness of IP address can often be used as a reasonable approximation. Cross-data-center transfers When distribution topology extends across multiple data centers, it is useful to limit cross-data-center transfers due to bandwidth constraints–limited and/or expensive bandwidth. A naïve approach to reducing cross-data-center transfers is to perform them in two steps. The first step is to transfer a package to one or a few nodes in each data center. The second step is to initiate BT transfers within each data center such that package transfer takes place between the initial nodes and the rest of the nodes in that data center—in effect, one BT transfer session per data center. This two-step scheme increases the overall transfer time. Peer selection based on closeness of IP address can be an effective way of conducting transfers in a single step, with all nodes participating in the torrent session. Package transfer steps When the source package is in HTTP, HDFS, or custom storage, BT distribution requires sequential execution of steps as follows: Before initiating the BT session to download a package, the additional steps that need to be executed are downloading from the package store, generating the “.torrent” file (assuming it was not previously generated), and seeding the package. Each step requires the sequential reading or writing of the data. It is common to find that the time taken by these steps is comparable to actual download time. As multiples of these steps need to be performed in sequence, the best way to simplify the distribution is to avoid some of the steps altogether. Web seeding HTTP-based web servers are popularly used to host packages. Clients connect to one or a handful of these servers to download a package. Even when using BT, it is common for the initial “.torrent” file to be downloaded from an HTTP server. The “.torrent” file contains package meta-information, including the location of trackers and piece-by-piece checksums. Web seeding is an attempt to host packages on web servers so that they can be used for seeding. This technique avoids the need for a separate BT seeding process, as web servers can double up as seeders for hosted content. BitTorrent web seeding has two distinct and incompatible specifications. The BitTornado specification is based on a custom URL scheme to download specific pieces. The GetRight specification relies on the basic HTTP 1.1 download mechanism using byte serving (byte range queries). We find that the HTTP byte-serving method is more convenient, as it simply requires hosting packages behind an HTTP 1.1-compatible server. We recommend hosting both the “.torrent” file and packages on the same server. The “.torrent” file can be created at the same time that the source package is generated, thereby avoiding the need for a separate step to create it later during BT transfer. In this scheme, BT seeders are not used; instead, BT clients use HTTP range queries to download pieces from a web server. Once one or a few peers have a piece, the distribution of that piece takes place between peers without a request to the HTTP server. Note that this scheme requires BT clients to support both the BT and HTTP protocols. Here is a summary of the benefits of using web seeding: HTTP server-hosted packages can be used for both HTTP and BT transport. Web seeding allows the HTTP packages to be transferred using the BT protocol; when distributing to a few nodes, HTTP transport works well. BT seeding requires the additional step(s) of downloading the package (if the seeder is different from the HTTP package store), and then seeding it before the BT transfer can be initiated. As explained above, web seeding avoids these steps and saves time. When we have a large number of packages, any of which can be downloaded using BT, serving via BT seeding requires an always-on seeder—which means having a separate seeding process (a process or thread per package). Even when transfers are inactive, these processes or threads need to be running. By contrast, HTTP transport does not require any activity when package download is not occurring. With traditional BT seeding, the seeder periodically communicates with the tracker on its status and progress, so that tracker logs can be mined for network utilization, the time taken by nodes, and other package transfer details. If the BT seeding session is left active to support any future BT downloads, it continues communicating with the tracker whether or not there is any download activity. The result is communication overhead and cluttered logs. Web seeding avoids these disadvantages because it does not involve communicating with the tracker. HDFS-based seeding Hadoop and HDFS are becoming increasingly popular in enterprise environments to store large data files. In HDFS, large data files are split into several blocks, copies of which are stored on multiple nodes to provide reliability and fail-over capability (default block size is 64 MB). Distribution for HDFS-hosted packages can borrow ideas from the web-seeding approach, as HDFS supports retrieval of arbitrary portions of packages. The “.torrent” file can be generated in a parallel manner, with piece checksums being computed as a map/reduce task. In order for the map/reduce task to work efficiently, the BT piece size can be chosen such that one or multiple BT pieces equate to a single HDFS block. This strategy helps with torrent generation and BT distribution, as BT pieces wouldn’t spawn across HDFS blocks. The use of HDFS-based seeding has the following advantages (some of which are similar to those of web seeding): The source package may be stored across HDFS nodes. Downloading it on a single seeder node requires download and aggregation of HDFS blocks before BT seeding. This step can be avoided with HDFS-based seeding. BT seeding traverses through the entire package, validating checksums, before seeding. The HDFS-based seeding approach both avoids a sequential read of a large package and provides an always-on seeder. Using traditional BT seeding with large HDFS packages requires keeping multiple versions of the packages on seeder nodes—and consequently extra bookkeeping, space management, and cleanup. HDFS seeding avoids this overhead. Dealing with deltas When clients have an earlier version of a package with some overlapping content, efficiency improvements can be achieved by downloading less of that package. The rsync algorithm is one of the commonly used techniques for dealing with package deltas. This algorithm uses a combination of strong and weak checksums to determine the deltas. A modified scheme, called zsync, is used for delta computation in a distributed manner. The zsync scheme works nicely with HTTP 1.1 and byte range queries. We suggest a combination of BitTorrent and zsync as a way to transfer packages with some overlapping content. As clients may have different versions of a package, each client identifies and reuses common parts of the package by employing small “.zsync” files that contain weak and strong checksums. When using zsync in combination with the BitTorrent protocol, a client can download the modified portion from other peers if peers contain the piece. If other peers do not contain the piece, the client can default to web seeding and use HTTP 1.1 byte range to download that piece from source. The amount of overlap between package versions would depend on the package format as well as the changes compared to the earlier version of the package. The package producers are likely to know whether such overlap is expected. The presence of a “.zsync” file can indicate whether a previous version of the package should be scanned to determine overlap. In the absence of a “.zsync” file, the BT client can fall back to the case where no common parts are shared with the previous version. BitTorrent test results To optimize transfer time, we ran a series of experiments using a small cluster of 16 nodes. The results discussed below are captured in a data center environment with fast connectivity (1 Gbps) between nodes with low latency (less than a few milliseconds). We used BitTornado for our experiments. The peer nodes are homogenous, running the same BT client version with identical configurations. This first table shows the actual and theoretical times taken to transfer a 30 GB package as the number of nodes is varied: Number of nodes Theoretical client server (minutes) Theoretical P2P best (minutes) – B Actual transfer time (minutes) – A Ratio (B / A) 1 4 4 11 0.36 2 8 4 12 0.33 3 12 4 13 0.31 4 16 4 13.5 0.30 6 24 4 16 0.25 8 32 4 16 0.25 16 64 4 17 0.24 The theoretical times are computed using the formulas described earlier with t = 4 minutes and R = 3840. The actual time taken is the time for all nodes to receive the full package. The theoretical client/server time shows a linear increase as the number of nodes is increased. The theoretical P2P best time is constant at 4 minutes. The data shows that the actual transfer times are better than the theoretical client/server times when the number of nodes increases beyond 3-4. While the actual time taken increases as the number of nodes increases, the rate of growth decreases. The ratio between theoretical best and actual times indicates the efficiency in transfer compared to the theoretical best. The ratio, and thus efficiency, decreases as the number of nodes increases—going from 36% to 24% as the number of nodes increases from 1 to 16. The low efficiency suggests potential improvements with an optimized BitTorrent implementation or use of other P2P schemes. The following table shows the time taken by the different steps in downloading and transferring the 30 GB package to a 16-node cluster: Step # Step Time taken (minutes) 1 HDFS download 6 2 Torrent generation 6 3 Seeding 6 4 Package transfer 17 The time for actual package transfer (step 4) is comparable to the combined time of the three prior steps. Web seeding or HDFS-based seeding would avoid steps 1 and 3. Step 2 can be performed during package creation or as a map/reduce task for HDFS packages. Because steps 1 through 3 are executed sequentially, HTTP- or HDFS-based seeding can achieve substantial gains for package transfer. The following graph shows the amount of piece sharing that happens in the swarm of 16 nodes. The data depicted is captured from tracker logs at the end of a BT transfer. graph of piece sharing with 16 nodes The download figures are not very interesting, as each peer needs the entire package. Thus, download is 100% for peers while 0% for the seeder. The amount of upload varies between the seeder and the peers. The seeder needs to upload all pieces at least once, and thus its upload would be 100% or more. The results show seeder upload of slightly more than 100%, while peer upload ranged from 75% to 125%. Thus, all peers participated in uploads such that the original seeder did not upload a disproportionately high amount of the package bytes. Summary For the package fan-out problem in enterprise environments, BitTorrent-based distribution is a good solution. The problem of package transfers is simpler in enterprise environments, with their fast, reliable networks and homogenous clients. Web seeding and HDFS-based seeding can be used to avoid some of the steps and increase the speed of package transfers. Deltas across package versions can be dealt with effectively by using an approach that combines zsync and BitTorrent mechanisms.

To many people, BitTorrent is synonymous with piracy. It is, after all, the technology that allows illegal services like Popcorn Time to thrive and survive. But that isn’t completely true. BitTorrent is certainly used for piracy, but it’s also used for many legal things. If we banned BitTorrent tomorrow and removed it from the internet, many legitimate organizations, businesses, and content creators would have to scramble to replace it. Like HTTP, which your browser uses to communicate with websites, BitTorrent is just a protocol. You could use your browser to download pirated content, just as you could use a BitTorrent client to download pirated content, but that isn’t the only possible use. So while BitTorrent may primarily be used for downloading unauthorized content, that’s far from its only use, and the protocol still has a lot of value to people who don’t pirate. 1. Game Updates and Downloads 8 Legal Uses for BitTorrent: You'd Be Surprised starcraft II downloader Blizzard Entertainment uses its own BitTorrent client to download World of Warcraft, Starcraft II, and Diablo III. When you purchase one of these games and download it, you’re actually just downloading a BitTorrent client that will do the rest of the work. When an update is available, the BitTorrent client built into the game’s launcher automatically downloads it for you. This allows Blizzard to save money on bandwidth and offer faster download speeds to its many players. Players can choose whether they want to contribute their upload bandwidth to speed things up for other people. 2. Facebook and Twitter Use BitTorrent Internally bittorrent-facebook Facebook and Twitter both use BitTorrent internally to move files around. Ars Technica revealed Facebook’s usage of BitTorrent: Moving a 1.5GB binary blob to countless servers is a non-trivial technical challenge. After exploring several solutions, Facebook came up with the idea of using BitTorrent, the popular peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. BitTorrent is very good at propagating large files over a large number of different servers. BitTorrent is designed to distribute large files to multiple different computers, allowing each system to contribute some of its own bandwidth to speed up the process. This makes it useful for any situation where you want to transfer large files as fast as possible in a scalable way. 3. The Internet Archive internet-archive-torrents The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that preserves content and makes it downloadable on the Internet. It’s known for its Wayback Machine, which stores copies of websites and allows you to go back in time and relive the past. The organization also offers a huge archive of public domain media — recordings of live concerts, eBooks, old movies and TV shows, and other audio recordings. Go Back In Time: How 10 Big Websites Looked 15 Years Ago Go Back In Time: How 10 Big Websites Looked 15 Years Ago The year was 1997. Apple was a struggling computer company, AOL was a booming Internet service provider, Microsoft was on the verge of releasing Windows 98, and the Web was a very different place. Through... READ MORE The Internet Archive recommends people use BitTorrent to download its content, as it’s the fastest method and allows the non-profit organization to save on bandwidth costs. 4. Government Uses nasa-blue-marble In 2010, the UK government released several large data sets showing how public money was being spent. To make these available, they offered them via BitTorrent. This allowed the government to save on bandwidth costs. And, let’s face it — BitTorrent is also the fastest way to make such documents available to the largest number of people possible. NASA has also used BitTorrent to make a 2.9GB picture of the Earth available. 5. File Syncing With BitTorrent Sync bittorrent syncapp BitTorrent, Inc., the company behind BitTorrent, recently released BitTorrent Sync. BitTorrent Sync works differently from standard BitTorrent clients. It’s entirely private: you install the client, choose one or more folders to share, and then link it up with other computers. Files anyone places in their copy of the shared folder are all automatically synced with all other copies of the shared folders. In this way, BitTorrent Sync is a lot like Dropbox. Unlike Dropbox, it doesn’t store your files in a centralized server online — it just syncs them between computers you own or computers your friends own. This means that it offers easy file sharing over the Internet and, unlike Dropbox, you can sync an unlimited number of files as long as you have the space on your computers for them. BitTorrent Sync could be used to share pirated content, but that would be silly when pirated content is available in so many public BitTorrent streams. It’s a great way to roll your own Dropbox-like service and share files across the Internet without trusting them to a central server or being limited by the size of your cloud storage account. Dropbox vs. Google Drive vs. OneDrive: Which Cloud Storage Is Best for You? Dropbox vs. Google Drive vs. OneDrive: Which Cloud Storage Is Best for You? Have you changed the way you think about cloud storage? The popular options of Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive have been joined by others. We help you answer which cloud storage service should you use. READ MORE 6. Linux ISOs If you’re familiar with BitTorrent, you’ll know that BitTorrent users always say they’re downloading “Linux ISOs” as a joke when they’re actually downloading pirated content. This may be a common joke, but it’s also a good excuse — Linux ISOs are a common use for BitTorrent. Whether you’re downloading the latest release of Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, or any of the other best Linux distributions, there’s a good chance you’re getting it via BitTorrent. These distributions offer themselves for free to everyone and they’re often 1 GB or larger. BitTorrent can help them save on bandwidth costs and speed up downloads. The Best Linux Operating Systems The Best Linux Operating Systems There are Linux distros available for every purpose, which makes choosing one difficult. Here's a list of the very best Linux operating systems to help. READ MORE 7. Distributing Videos and Music bittorrent-bundles If you want to make media available—perhaps you’ve produced a documentary and want to release it for free or you’re a band that wants to release free music as a promotion—BitTorrent is one of the best ways to do it. If you hosted the files yourself, you’d have to pay for a lot of bandwidth. If you make the files available via BitTorrent, you’d save a lot of bandwidth by letting your fans contribute their bandwidth as they downloaded your content. You’d also receive press just for making your files available via BitTorrent. The official BitTorrent website has a list of “bundles” of music and videos artists make available to hook fans, just as radio was used to offer free music to large number of people in hopes that they’ll attend live shows and buy albums. 8. Distributing Any Large Data BitTorrent is a great way to distribute any large chunk of data as fast as possible, saving money on bandwidth. In addition to all the uses above, BitTorrent has been used to share large scientific data sets with anyone interested. Any large chunk of data that’s free for anyone to access can be distributed publically with BitTorrent. So What Does This Tell Us About BitTorrent? If we look at the examples above, we can see that BitTorrent is very useful in several situations: Public distribution of data that’s free for anyone to access. Whether it’s public domain videos, Linux ISOs, scientific data sets, or high-resolution pictures of the Earth, BitTorrent is an effective way to distribute the content. Even Blizzard doesn’t care if people use its BItTorrent clients to download its game files — they have to authenticate online before they can play the games, so Blizzard is happy to provide its game files to anyone. Private distribution of data among a few trusted sources. Whether it’s Facebook and Twitter using BitTorrent to update their servers or average people using BitTorrent Sync to move their personal data back and forth between their computers, BitTorrent is a fast way to leverage multiple computers’ Internet connections and quickly sync data. BitTorrent is a tool, and a particularly useful one — that’s why it’s so widely used for piracy. There was piracy before BitTorrent and there would be piracy after BitTorrent if BitTorrent died tomorrow. BitTorrent also allows the Internet to be more participatory, enabling average people to share their files without paying for massive amounts of bandwidth and contribute their own bandwidth to share other people’s files.

Torrenting definition torrenting: [tore-rent-iing] noun. Torrenting is the act of using computers to download or propagate files through a peer-to-peer network that uses the BitTorrent protocol. This protocol allows for file sharing between many computers spread across the internet. Torrenting involves a potentially huge number of participating devices simultaneously sending and receiving small fragments of the same file or files, which are reassembled when fully downloaded to form a complete file. Because the distributed nature of torrenting means participating computers do not need an entire file to share (AKA seed) it, torrent participants can download pieces of the same file from many sources scattered across the internet at the same time. Therefore, torrenting provides a mechanism to get around limitations on typically slow internet upload speeds on individual connections, making torrenting a quick and efficient way to distribute large quantities of data by enlisting the help of many computers and internet connections at once. To participate in torrenting, a computer can run a BitTorrent client application, such as μTorrent, that manages communications with and data transfers between the other computers sharing the same file(s). Torrent clients also parse torrent files, which contain metadata on the file or group of files being shared within a torrent as well as information that can be used to locate other computers in the same peer-to-peer torrent network. A computer can participate in multiple torrents at once: For example, one torrent for sharing a video file and another for sharing several PDF files. Torrenting analogy The classic analogy for torrenting is that of photocopying a book at a library. Imagine you have a 24-page book and you wanted to distribute copies of it quickly to many people. Now imagine that you're in a library with one copy machine and you're the only person that can use it. Every time someone wants a copy of your book, you individually copy every page, then staple the copies of the pages together and hand it to the recipient. This method, which is similar to the traditional client-server file sharing model, works fine but isn't necessarily the fastest way to share a book. Additionally, because you're the only person that can copy the book, it will be difficult for others to obtain a copy once you decide to stop sharing it. Now imagine you're in a library with 24 copy machines that everyone can use. To speed the copying process up, you rip out all of the pages of your book and hand a single page to 24 different people who can then make copies of their respective page. Now, anyone that wants the book can get a copy of each page from these 24 people, then staple the complete contents of the book together to form the complete book. The original 24 people can also trade copies of pages with each other, until they have the complete book as well. Once someone has a more complete book, they can provide a copy of any of the pages they have to other recipients. So even if some of the original 24 people decide to stop sharing, recipients can still get the full book from others sharing the book. This example approximates how torrenting works on the internet. Torrenting concerns While the idea behind torrenting is pretty useful, torrents are often viewed by IT departments as a potentially dangerous nuisance for several reasons. And according to Spiceworks research, the vast majority of companies monitor IT usage of users to some degree, for example, to protect networks against online threats. Below is a list of concerns around torrents. Torrents present a security risk The sites that host torrent files often try to trick users into downloading spyware and malware, and often hackers create fake torrent files with links to phony installer files in an attempt to get users to install viruses on their computers. Torrents are bandwidth hungry BitTorrent clients often try to use all available download and upload bandwidth on a network. This means that torrenting in an office environment can bring internet connection speeds to a crawl, potentially affecting critical services and degrading quality of service for everyone. Additionally, if torrent usage goes unchecked, businesses might have to pay more unnecessarily for a faster internet connection. Torrents are a legal liability We've already established that torrents provide a great way for users to download and share large amounts of data quickly. This has led to BitTorrent clients becoming a popular way to distribute copyrighted music and movies, or even material that's inappropriate for the workplace, which can create legal problems for companies, such as lawsuits from content owners. Blocking torrents There are many ways to prevent users from torrenting on company networks. Here are a few of the methods you can use to stop the practice so you can protect your network from security threats, conserve bandwidth, and avoid legal issues: How to block torrents Install application-level firewall filtering to block torrents Enable user access controls that prevent users from installing torrenting apps Run a packet sniffer like WireShark to detect torrent activity Use network management tools like Spiceworks to detect instances of torrent clients Prevent users from visiting sites that host torrent files Block downloading of files with the .torrent extension Use a network bandwidth monitor to find heavy bandwidth users

You've probably got that tech-savvy friend who gets movies on his computer weeks before they officially come out on DVD. Or maybe he's acquiring books and albums put out by independent artists who actively encourage people to download their output for free. Odds are that this is being done via BitTorrent , a highly effective way to transfer files over the Internet. Here's what you need to know. BitTorrent If the Internet is a highway, then there are many different ways of transporting files down that highway. FTP (file transfer protocol) is a way that content creators put media online for people to access. HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) is what transports files to your computer so you can read this very webpage. BitTorrent is simply one more way of moving files around the Internet. Before delving into how it works, let's learn some BitTorrent-specific vocabulary. Torrent file A torrent file is a piece of data that you download and feed to a BitTorrent client. It tells you what data is being downloaded and it tells the client where to go to find the data. Client A BitTorrent client is a piece of software that accepts a torrent file and begins downloading the data associated with it. The same way that you use a web browser like Firefox or Chrome to browse the web, you need a BitTorrent client for your computer to make sense of a BitTorrent file. There are numerous clients out there, but our favorite is Transmission . Seeders and leechers A seeder is a person who is uploading a completed version of a file to whoever wants it. "Leecher" usually refers to a person downloading a torrent and isn't yet seeding. How it works Imagine you want to acquire a 700 MB movie file. To download it from a single source could take quite a while, but BitTorrent is smart enough to seek out multiple people who have the same movie file and download it in chunks from several sources at once. This means you get the file much more quickly that you normally would, and it's what makes BitTorrent such a popular means of piracy. This brings us to the next part... Legality The same way that you can legally own a gun for recreational target practice and hunting, you could also use it to rob a bank. BitTorrent is a perfectly legitimate technology, it's simply a matter of what you use it for that makes it legal or illegal. That tech-savvy friend who's downloading movies weeks before they come out on DVD? He's probably breaking the law. Your friend who's using BitTorrent to download a new indie movie with the director's blessing? He's got the right idea. Where to find torrents With some clever Googling, you can find almost anything you want, but we're going to encourage you to download legal torrents that can be found on a number of services, such as ClearBits . Check out this excellent collection of legal torrent services on GigaOM . Rounding it up BitTorrent is awesome. So many different types of media fly under the radar and never find their audience, but BitTorrent is a way of decreasing the distance between producers and consumers.

Okay cheers for that.

Are they still avalible

Any one have the privatehd invite yet

DI.FM, also known as Digitally Imported, offers the most comprehensive selection of electronic music channels available online today. Available in ad-supported and premium flavors, the service has hundreds of thousands of users but until recently also had a piracy problem. TF spoke to founder and CEO Ari Shohat who surprised us with a pragmatic and refreshing approach to the situation. Anyone with a keen interest in electronic music styles will probably be aware of DI.FM, aka Digitally Imported. The service, which offers close to 100 channels of curated content, is a goldmine of classics and upcoming tracks covering every conceivable genre. From Chiptunes to Deep House, from Bassline to Drum and Bass, DI has something for everyone. It’s available for free, ad-supported, or premium if people want zero adverts and high-quality streaming. Of course, premium models tend to attract pirates and DI’s experience is no different. For several years, a Russia-based service known as DiForFree has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been offering DI.FM for free. All of DI’s channels were mirrored by the service, pumping out 320K audio via a web interface and an Android app. It’s unclear how many people used the pirate product but it’s safe to say that those who used it, loved it. Back in May, however, DiForFree began to break down. At first, it was unclear why channels were disappearing from the service but a policy change at DI itself provided an explanation. DI previously offered free premium trials via its site, a feature that was leveraged by DiForFree to obtain access to DI’s high-quality channels. With a switch to free trials only being offered via DI’s iOS and Android apps, DiForFree lost its source for accounts. On May 21, the pirate service announced that it may not be able to continue but was looking for solutions. The real DI.FM After a period of literal radio silence, in recent weeks DiForFree began to come back to life. It seemed that they’d solved the trial problem and last week, most if not all channels were working again. Then, during the past few days, everything shut down in a more dramatic way than before. “You probably already noticed that nothing works. So, we were amused here on all fronts,” DiForFree told its users. “Since May 25, we have been working on a paid subscription, but now they have an account that is automatically blocked when a certain number of connections are exceeded.” Adding insult to injury, DiForFree reported that DI had discovered the IP address of the server it had been using to extract content. After that was blocked, nothing worked. “Most likely this is the end. If we do not come up with anything, then the service will be closed, the code will be published on GitHub or somewhere else, and the domain will be sold and forgotten,” DiForFree said this week. With things looking pretty final, TF spoke with DI founder and CEO Ari Shohat to find out more about the service and the issues raised by rogue services tapping its content. “I started DI.FM (then called Digitally Imported) back in 1999. I was in college, and all I wanted to do was to share good music with others,” Shohat informs TF. “It started with one channel, and evolved into what is now over 90 channels. We also plan on launching a Playlists section as well in the near future, further providing more varieties and combinations of great electronic music.” So has a war been raging behind the scenes between DI and DiForFree? According to Shohat, not really. “We haven’t been waging any war. We’ve just finally been getting around to plugging a few inefficiencies of which we were always aware,” he explains. “All the methods that [DiForFree] (and others) have used in the past, we were aware of them from day one. They and some others started with abusing our free trial system, scripting things to start automatic seven-day trials, among other things. It’s just that to dedicate our limited resources on working around this would bring in diminishing returns, if any at all.” Shohat says that while winning a battle here and there is possible, losing the war is a likely scenario since there are always people intent on getting something for free. So, instead of spending disproportionate resources on dealing with pirates, the company chose to do what it does best – service its legitimate customers. “We were focusing on our needs and other development items for actual real users who were happy to use our service as it was, rather than go on a wild chase wasting time. I wish the music industry back in the day took this approach as well, to let pirates do what they do without making a big stink and just work to make different services better and more available for all, to compete with piracy,” he says. “Recently we found a bit more time, and finally did some of the changes we planned all along which we knew would limit this activity. As everyone knows, this is a constant ‘tug of war’.” Shohat told us that he’s not pro-piracy and from a business perspective he doesn’t want people short-cutting his premium offer. That being said, he did hint at a grudging admiration for the persistence of pirates and assumes there are some really talented people behind operations like DiForFree. On the piracy front overall, Shohat acknowledges that it’s not going away anytime soon but believes that a reluctance to innovate years ago fanned the flames under a problem that persists today. “My outlook on these things is definitely through the prism of what happened in the Napster era. The record industry, it seemed to me, did everything it could to prolong its days of selling CDs rather than evolve digital. And so this meant going to war with ‘pirates’,” he notes. “But I saw that so many of the people who pirated only did so because there were no legal alternatives – you could have your wallet open and there was no legal and/or good service which could serve your needs. Not only that, it seemed like until Apple they did everything they could to limit innovation and wouldn’t even work on making it happen. And even then they reluctantly went along with Apple. That is what pissed me off most of all.” Shohat says that in respect of digital services, the landscape today is very different from the one back then. Digital revenues are on the rise but the turnaround could’ve happened so much sooner if the record industry had reacted earlier. “In my opinion, this could have happened a decade earlier would they just focus on innovation and giving the users what they wanted rather than fighting piracy, which in the end turned out to be not that big a deal once good legal options existed. “One way to look at piracy is like the canary in the coalmine, if you have a big piracy problem then something is wrong with what you are doing – either your process sucks, you have leaky buckets, or your service sucks and people go elsewhere to get what they want or how they want it. “It’s a bit like those who short stocks when they feel a company is going to have bad times – it should be a signal to do something different, not to point fingers and blame them for creating a problem,” he concludes. DI.FM is available here for free but at just a few bucks a month, its premium offer is well worth the money. Android and iOS users can also get a month free trial.

Unlike most other countries in Europe, offering free wifi in Germany has been fraught with difficulty since local laws have failed to protect operators when users carry out infringements. Now, however, Germany's top court has upheld 2017 legislation which grants WiFi operators immunity from acts carried out by their users. In many jurisdictions it’s common for those who commit wrongs online to be responsible for their own actions. In Germany, things haven’t been so straightforward. Due to a legal concept known as ‘Störerhaftung’ (‘interferer liability’), a third party who played no deliberate part in someone else’s actions can be held responsible for them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this legal quirk has made itself known in a number of file-sharing cases where customers have used someone else’s WiFi to commit infringements. While this was convenient enough for copyright holders (there was always someone to blame), it meant that few people wanted to operate open WiFi. This stood in stark contrast to the situation in many other EU countries where open WiFi networks are both ubiquitous and good for trade. In 2016, the German government promised to do something about the problem by ensuring places like cafes and hotels would exempt from costs for court proceedings when people use their infrastructure for things such as infringement. In 2017, regulation was put in place to help facilitate greater access to open WiFi but the environment remained chilled. Despite assurances operators wouldn’t be prosecuted under German law, many believed that EU law might still hold them liable. Last week, however, an important step was taken when Germany’s supreme court upheld the 2017 amendments to the Telemedia Act. The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) decided that the legislation is indeed compatible with EU regulations. The case relates to an incident back in 2013 when a man challenged a company attempting to fine him for sharing a game online. DW reports that the IT worker had been running several open WiFi networks and Tor servers, one of which was used to download and share the game Dead Island. In common with many copyright-troll style cases, game owner Deep Silver, a subsidiary of Koch Media, demanded that the man pay 1,000 euros to make a supposed lawsuit go away. Acknowledging there should be a means for incidents of copyright infringement to be dealt with, the BGH found that WiFi providers can be told to prevent access to file-sharing services and even block entire websites, something which helps copyright holders prevent sharing of their works. In 2016, in a case involving Pirate Party member Tobias McFadden, the European Court of Justice previously ruled that WiFi providers cannot be held liable for third-party infringements providing local courts or authorities can order WiFi providers to take measures to stop repeat incidents of infringement. “[T]he directive does not preclude the copyright holder from seeking before a national authority or court to have such a service provider ordered to end, or prevent, any infringement of copyright committed by its customers,” the Court found. The case ruled upon last week is now likely to head off to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for a final decision.

Electronic Arts has asked GitHub to remove a fan-created remake of the classic SimCity 2000 release. While the original game is a quarter-century old, the publisher points out that the assets are not free to use, adding that a copy of the game can still be purchased legally. SimCity 2000 is without a doubt one of the most iconic games in history, one that paved the way for hundreds of other ‘building’ titles. The game was first released in 1993 for Apple computers, but it later made its way to the PC and several gaming console platforms as well. After more than a quarter-century, SimCity 2000 still receives plenty of interest from nostalgic gamers who like to relive their early gaming experiences. This is likely one of the reasons why developer Nicholas Ochoa decided to code a remake using the Electron framework. The game, titled OpenSC2K, was released on GitHub earlier this year and received quite a bit of attention on sites such as Reddit and Hacker News. While it is billed as an “open source” version, the remake did include original artwork, belonging to Electronic Arts. These images and sounds are definitely not free to use, something the developer is fully aware of now. A few days ago Electronic Arts sent a DMCA takedown notice to GitHub asking the platform to remove the infringing repository from its site. “Assets from the game SimCity 2000 are being infringed upon,” EA writes. The company points out that the game can be purchased legally through Origin where it’s still being sold for a few dollars. While OpenSC2K is far from a full remake, Electronic Arts makes it clear that the SimCity 2000 assets are not for public use. “The current audiovisual output of the repository creates content that infringes on Electronic Arts copyright. As long as that continues to happen, no other changes other than removal is sufficient to address the infringement,” the company writes. Soon after this DMCA notice was submitted, OpenSC2K was indeed taken offline, replaced with GitHub’s standard DMCA notification. The takedown effort didn’t come as a complete surprise to the developer. When he announced the project earlier this year, several people pointed out the potential copyright issues. This is also the reason why the developer came up with an asset conversion tool early on. That would make it possible to replace the original artwork with open source content, however, due to some code changes and other priorities, this hasn’t happened yet. TorrentFreak spoke to OpenSC2K’s developer who is currently trying to get a non-infringing version of the repository restored. He also mentioned that not just EA’s assets, but all his code was pulled offline without any type of prior notification. “I was never contacted by EA or GitHub prior to the takedown – I received notification after the fact from GitHub. Nobody from EA has reached out since and I’m still waiting for GitHub to review my request,” Ochoa tells us. “My plan right now once the repo is restored is the remove the copyrighted content and provide instructions on how to extract the assets directly from the original game files.” The developer understands that EA has the rights to the graphics and DAT files he used. And he has no intention to use these files going forward. However, he would have preferred it if the game publisher came to him directly, instead of taking down all his work. “I just wish they’d have reached out first, I would’ve gladly removed the content quickly and without issue,” Ochoa tells us. What remains, for now, are a few screenshots and YouTube videos of the remake in action.

Following its acquisition of BitTorrent Inc., the TRON foundation says it is considering changes to BitTorrent that have the potential to improve the ecosystem. TRON founder Justin Sun says that his company is mulling the introduction of financial rewards for those who seed, something which he hopes will lead to faster download speeds and greater content retention. Late May, TorrentFreak learned that Justin Sun, the entrepreneur behind the popular cryptocurrency TRON, was about to acquire BitTorrent Inc, the company behind the uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline torrent clients. BitTorrent Inc. acknowledged that negotiations were underway but few official details became available until last week when both BitTorrent Inc. and the TRON Foundation confirmed the acquisition had taken place. “We are excited to announce that TRON has officially closed its acquisition of BitTorrent,” BitTorrent Inc. announced. “With this acquisition, BitTorrent will continue to provide high quality services for over 100M users around the world. We believe that joining the TRON network will further enhance BitTorrent and accelerate our mission of creating an Internet of options, not rules.” The joining of the TRON network and in excess of 100 million BitTorrent users is an intriguing proposition but precisely how the pair will mesh and provide value to each other is yet to be revealed. Following a new announcement from Sun, however, we have an early sign that the bandwidth of at least some BitTorrent users could eventually become monetized. Under the current arrangement, BitTorrent users in public torrent swarms are left to make their own decisions about what content they obtain, where from, and for how long they choose to share that content (seed) once they have it on their own machines. It’s a personal choice that has few motivations beyond basic altruism. This system has worked exceptionally well for more than 15 years but it now appears that Sun has plans to introduce financial incentives into the equation, a move that he believes will improve the quality of the BitTorrent sharing experience. “Currently, we are exploring the possibility of using the TRON protocol to improve the BitTorrent protocol, in order to make BitTorrent protocol faster and lengthen the lifespan of BitTorrent swarms. I hope the integration of TRON and BitTorrent will allow both parties to work better as one in the future,” Sun says. “By integrating the TRON network into Bittorrent, we aim to improve on the currently existing altruism. At this point, there are no incentives for peers who have completed downloading to continue to seed. We intend to extend rewards to peers who seed torrents, infusing more resources into the torrent ecosystem.” The common sense conclusion is that Sun envisions a system in which BitTorrent users can earn TRON (TRX) by sharing content with other BitTorrent users. This appears to be based on the theory that people will share more and for longer when they’re being rewarded financially for doing so. If people are able to be incentivized in this manner, the knock-on effect should be a greater number of seeders overall and a corresponding increase in upload bandwidth availability. In theory, at least, this should not only translate to faster downloads but also greater content retention. “The TRON network will serve as the underlying protocol of the Secret Project. Hundreds of millions of BT users across the globe will become a part of the TRON ecosystem,” Sun notes. “BT will be the largest application on the TRON network, which will allow TRON [to] surpass Ethereum on daily transactions and become the most influential public blockchain in the world.” While it’s clear that Sun envisions BitTorrent users having the ability to get paid for seeding, it’s unclear who will be picking up that bill. The most obvious conclusion is that the people who utilize that extra bandwidth (downloaders) will have to pay to access it, but that part of the puzzle is currently up in the air. The other interesting possibility is that given BitTorrent users’ ability to get paid for seeding (and presumably downloaders being charged for downloading) there is the opportunity for a legitimate content market operating with a twist on traditional buy/sell lines. Sun hints at that within his announcement. “The integration of BitTorrent and TRON will offer new possibilities to global payment and settlement of online content. The creators of this content could reach hundreds of millions of global users through this decentralized network without any intermediaries,” he writes. There can be little doubt that the monetization of the BitTorrent ecosystem has the potential to startle those who have become accustomed to an entirely altruistic system. However, Sun is offering a number of assurances, including that his “Secret Project” will not associate itself with any mining projects, meaning that torrent clients themselves won’t become slaves to the system. “Various industries will be significantly affected by these changes. Secret Project will not associate itself with any mining projects, nor will it have any negative impact on BT user experience,” Sun adds. “For BT users, Secret Project is only going to strengthen the current BT protocol and make it stronger and more competent.” While it’s early days, these words should be of some comfort to those who fear that the entire system could eventually become monetized to the detriment of free users who’ve supported the system for many years. That would be a nightmare scenario for millions of users and would almost guarantee an exodus. However, acting as a behavior regulator is the ability of BitTorrent users to adopt whichever torrent client they like if uTorrent or BitTorrent Mainline prove too restrictive or unpalatable. Given that keeping user numbers up is probably one of the main priorities, people shouldn’t expect anything too drastic in the short term. Finally, it’s worth pointing out that the idea of paid seeding isn’t new. Back in 2015, we reported on JoyStream, a torrent client that aimed to improve BitTorrent by facilitating Bitcoin payments in exchange for upload bandwidth – or content, whichever way one prefers to look at it.

Online piracy is a complicated phenomenon that's constantly evolving. While it's hard to draw strong conclusions across the board, new research published by the University of Amsterdam reveals interesting trends, including effects on legal consumption. The study is a follow-up to an earlier report which made the news last year because the EU Commission held it back. Over the past decade there have been dozens of detailed reports researching the prevalence and effects of piracy. With a wide array of results, it’s hard to draw uniform conclusions but as the research adds up, stable patterns start to emerge. The Global Online Piracy Study, published by the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law (IViR) today, is an important contribution to this field. The research is the result of extensive consumer surveys among 35,000 respondents, including over 7,000 minors, in 13 countries. Combined with similar data collected in 2014, it shows how online piracy habits are changing. One of the main conclusions is that the number of online pirates is decreasing in most of Europe. This decline is visible in France, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Sweden. Of all surveyed countries, only Germany saw a slight increase in the number of pirates. In the surveyed countries across Europe, the piracy rate among Internet users is the highest in Spain, but this is topped by Brazil, Thailand, and Indonesia in the full sample. Number of Internet users accessing content illegally TorrentFreak spoke to Dr. Joost Poort, one of the authors of the report, who notes that pirates and legal users are largely the same people. In fact, roughly 95% of all pirates also consume content legally, and they typically spend twice as much as their non-pirating counterparts. This doesn’t mean that pirates are rich, of course. In fact, the research shows that a higher per capita income is linked to a lower number of pirates per legal users. In other words, ‘poorer’ countries have relatively more pirates. Lower income = more pirates When people are asked about the reason why they pirate, the cost factor is also frequently mentioned. Pirating is free which is convenient for those who have little to spend. But does that mean that it also leads to a decrease in sales? Is piracy hurting revenues? According to the research, there’s an overall negative effect of piracy on media sales. However, this doesn’t apply to minors. The latter makes sense, as that group has relatively little to spend anyway. “This study confirms earlier studies in finding statistical evidence that illegal consumption of music, books, and games displaces legal consumption,” the report reads. “However, the displacement coefficients are surrounded with substantial uncertainty. Separating these results between minors and adults suggests that displacement occurs for adults and not for minors.” What’s also worth highlighting is that piracy doesn’t affect all media and entertainment types the same. It even benefits some revenue streams. For example, the data suggest that every ten music albums pirated leads to three extra concert or festival visits. However, at the same time, it leads to a significant drop in physical album sales and digital downloads, while music streaming remains unaffected. For video content, including movies, online piracy doesn’t appear to affect sales of physical copies or digital downloads. Here, however, cinema visits and online streams are severely impacted. “For live concerts and music festivals, a positive sampling effect is found. For audio-visual content, no such sampling seems to occur for the cinema, which suffers from statistically significant displacement, as do digital streams.” To give an illustration, the data suggest that ten downloaded movies would in general lead to four missed cinema visits. While the research provides evidence for the negative effects of piracy, the authors don’t see any evidence that stricter copyright laws or enforcement against individuals are a good solution. Instead, legal content providers should focus on making their work readily available for a good price. “In terms of policy, obviously hunting down the industry’s largest customers is not the best of ideas. Rather, push for better availability, affordability, and findability of legal content. Affordability of large platforms in lower-income countries is certainly an issue,” Poort tells us. “If you must do something in terms of enforcement, website blocking seems to be a much better strategy than going after consumers. There is some solid looking evidence for effectiveness in the UK.” Finally, it is worth noting that this is a follow-up to a controversial EU-funded study. That report made headlines last year because the European Commission held it back. The latest version is funded by Google which had no such restrictions. “This builds on the EU study that caught some traction because the commission was very reluctant to publish it. This time, Google financed it and respected our academic interests and independence so much better than the Commission did…,” Poort says