Technologizer » BitTorrent

Mininova’s Death of a Thousand Cuts

David Worthington — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:03:03 +0000

A Dutch court has ordered Mininova, a popular torrent search Web site, to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted content from its Web site within three months, or it will face hefty fines.

Dutch anti-piracy organization Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland (BREIN) filed a lawsuit against Mininova that resulted in the judge’s ruling.

Torrents are a terrific way to distribute large files, but the technology has been abused by copyright violators. While sites such as Mininova do not host pirated content, they do host torrent files that link to tracker servers that facilitate piracy. Tracker servers coordinate communication between peers that are distributing files.

Mininova took measures to remove torrents that link to copyrighted content from its site by deploying a content recognition system in May. That was not enough to appease the judge, who ruled that Mininova had to do more to prevent piracy – even though it was not directly responsible.

That may just be a sisyphean task. Mininova is a community Web site where its users upload torrents, and there are many thousands of torrents. I do not see how it will be able to keep every “bad” torrent off of its site without reviewing each submission manually.

With BREIN examining Mininova under a microscope, and a court imposed penalty of 100 Euro per infringing torrent, it is probably just a matter of time until the site dies a death of a thousand cuts. The fines are capped at 5 million euros, but that might be too much for Mininova to swallow.

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D’oh! Prosecution Stumbles Badly in Pirate Bay Trial

Ed Oswald — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:39:27 +0000

I think we all can agree that The Pirate Bay makes much of its living off of piracy. Well, if it wasn’t for the apparent ineptitude of Swedish prosecutors in the trial against the site, we might have that set in stone legally. Not so fast.

According to TorrentFreak, the prosecution’s weak evidence will lead to at least half of the charges against Pirate Bay being dropped. It has been ruled that the prosecution cannot use .torrent files as evidence of TPB’s wrongdoing, as there is no clear correlation between the site and the illicit files.

There is still charges of “assisting and making available” infringing files hanging over the site’s head, but any allegations of actually participating in the act will now need to be withdrawn.

Why is The Pirate Bay getting away with it? It seems that the prosecution built its case around the fact that BitTorrent’s “trackers” (a server that assists in connecting two peers to initiate and continue downloads) were reproducing the files, thus making them liable.

However, in building this evidence, they were not able to show that TPB’s trackers were actually being used. OOPS.

Wounded but still fighting, the record industry insisted the case was still not over, calling the dismissal of those charges a “technicality” and that prosecutors could now focus on the crux of the case, the fact that the site makes available illicitly copied files.

As for The Pirate Bay? Defiant as ever. “EPIC WINNING LOL” commented TPB admin brokep on Twitter this morning.

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Windows 7 Beta 1 Leaks Via BitTorrent

Ed Oswald — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:33:18 +0000

If you cannot wait for Windows 7 to make its public debut sometime next month, you can get on BitTorrent now and download it. The next generation operating system has appeared on the P2P service as an ISO file.

The build number is 7000, which is believed to be the one which will get the “Beta 1″ label. It is a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, according to sources. About 1,500 seeders are available for the file and it is approxmately 2.5GB in size.

Windows 7 Beta 1’s leak onto BitTorrent follows a similar incident where an Alpha of the OS that was debuted at PDC also ended up being available on the service.

Reviews seem to indicate that overall the beta seems quite stable, probably indicating that we will only see one public beta of this OS before it rolls into the Release Candidate stage.

All in all, it appears as if Microsot is ready to push 7 out the door as fast as they can…

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The T-List: iPhone Tethering, BitTorrent Blockage, Phones in Flight

Harry McCracken — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:48:18 +0000

Today’s big stories involve what you can and can’t do with PCs and phones. BitTorrent over Comcast? Okay. iPhone tethering? Not okay. Skype on a plane? On its way to not being okay. List starts after the jump…

Tether Brawl
Whenever anybody asks me if my iPhone 3G has any downsides, one of the first things I mention is that I can’t use it as a modem for my laptop. A solution seemed to be at hand yesterday when NullRiver’s $9.99 NetShare appeared in Apple’s App Store–suggesting that tethering had Apple and AT&T’s blessing as a legitimate iPhone application. But NetShare was quickly pulled from the store, leaving lots of people wondering how it got there in the first place. Assuming that it was Apple rather than NullRiver that yanked the software, it’s a good example of how the iPhone’s App Store-only distribution lets Cupertino render judgment on each and every iPhone program. Even if it’s not clear how NetShare got out there in the first place.

Read more at: PC World, ZDNet, Cult of Mac, TechCrunch

The FCC Sides With BitTorrent
Score one for Net neutrality advocates: The FCC has voted 3-2 that Comcast’s throttling of Internet bandwidth for folks who used the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing network was illegal. It’s the first time an ISP has been found to have violated Net Neutrality laws; Comcast had already ended the throttling back in March, but says that it’s considering its legal options. Me, I’m worried about this New York Times blog item’s statement that AT&T blocks Slingbox’s Slingplayer on its wireless network–you wanna look into that, FCC?

Read more at: CNET News.com, eWeek

The Sounds of Silence
The House of Representatives’ Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted to pass the Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace act–better known as HANG UP–on to the full House for consideration. The law would ban in-flight telephone calls; as airlines such as American and Virgin America begin to roll out airborne Wi-Fi, it’s clear that one way or another, policies on Skype need to be in place. When the feds get involved in telling people what they can and can’t do with electronics equipment, my instinct always to be skeptical. On the other hand, the spectre of sitting next to someone who chooses to spend a six-hour flight yammering about his or her personal life is utterly gut-wrenching.

Read more at: PC World, Engadget, Crave

A Brief History of “We Don’t Suck” Ads
Microsoft’s “Mojave Experiment” ads for Vista, which show it tricking Vista doubters into believing a ten-minute Vista demo involves a wonderful new version of Windows, continue to spur chatter online. I like Gizmodo’s look at past ads from Chrysler, Avis, and other companies whose first goal, lack that of the Mojave ads, was to try to convince consumers that the product in question wasn’t awful. (And I’m still looking for examples online from A&P’s “Price and Pride” campaign, which used a couple of singing fictional grocers to tell shoppers that A&P stores were no longer grimy and soul-crushing.)

Read more at: Gizmodo

A Little More Freedom for Olympic Reporters
The New York Times is reporting that Chinese officials have loosened the censorship tactics that were preventing foreign journalists at the Olympic Village from getting through to sites like that of Amnesty International or ones that discussed human rights in Tibet. The loosening isn’t all that loose: Reporters can get through to Amnesty Internatinal, but not to sites that mention the Falun Gong. The story says that nobody knows whether the changes are permanent or temporary. It’s heartening to see the International Olympic Committee press the Chinese government to live up to its original promise of uncensored access–but once again, I keep coming back to worrying more about the 1.3 billion people in the country who won’t get to go home to a free Internet when the Olympics are over.

Read more at: New York Times

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