Peter Sunde - Credit: on paulohenrique Flickr (CC BY)

Brokep (Peter Sunde) has resigned from the TPB to work on other projects.

But of course, being involved with the running of The Pirate Bay means there is little time for anything else and this is the main reason cited by Peter behind his decision to quit – he wants time to do other things.

“I want to build something new and I want to focus my energy in a different direction. I have projects waiting to be finished, a book is waiting to be finalized and many more books are waiting to be read,” he said.

Touching briefly on the challenges facing the site’s operators, Peter – who is known to millions of Internet users as brokep – said that they had “been raised to another level” adding that it’s “time for biological dispersal.”

To work on other projects or to spend time in prison?

• TorrentFreak

net neutrality... to the power of you - Credit: markrabo on Flickr (CC BY)

Once again Network Neutrality has been brought back to the table in Congress, this is already the third time. But since we now have  a new President and a new FCC chairman it seems more likely that there will be a different outcome this time.

The war over network neutrality has been fought in the last two Congresses, and last week’s introduction of the “Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009” (PDF) means that legislators will duke it out a third time. Should the bill pass, Internet service providers will not be able to “block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade” access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device.

I’m not really sure how I feel about this. I definitely support net neutrality and I think it’s extremely important but maybe a better approach to insure net neutrality is to increase ISP competition.

• ars technica
• Slashdot

stephen_conroy by Dr Ron on Flickr (CC-BY-SA)

Yesterday, Australian Minister for Communications Stephen Conroy unveiled a report that vowed to crack down on illegal filesharing:

“The Government recognises a public policy interest in the resolution of this issue,” the report said. “A number of submissions received during the consultation phase for the development of this paper argued that a role for Government exists in addressing the apparent popularity of peer-to-peer file sharing of music and movies, without the necessary permissions of the relevant copyright owners”.

The report goes on to outline submissions made to the department by various stakeholders.

“One solution proposed by copyright owners is a “three strikes” or “graduated response” proposal under which copyright owners would work together with ISPs to identify the ISP’s customers who are suspected of unauthorised file sharing and the ISP would then send a notice on behalf of the copyright owner to that customer advising of this allegation”.

Why does Conroy hate the Internet so much? First he tries to filter it, now this. One has to wonder if it beat him up and took his lunch money when he was a kid…

• iTnews.com.au article

Watterlogged Pirate - Credit: Aak Ook on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

The Pirate Bay has announced that it will close its tracker and remove its torrents prior to being acquired.

Perhaps even more significant for the BitTorrent community is the thus far unreported decision to close down the BitTorrent tracker. Up until today Pirate Bay’s public tracker connected more than half of all BitTorrent users but this is about to change.

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde has informed TorrentFreak that the site will soon decentralize and stop running a BitTorrent tracker of its own. Instead they will encourage their users to use a yet to be launched third party tracker for their torrents.

To decentralize TPB even further, the torrents that will be listed on the site wont be hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers anymore. In the near future the site will use a new torrent hosting service that will store the torrents for them. This new hosting service will be open to other torrent sites as well and can be accessed through an API.

In the end The Pirate Bay is making these changes to ensure that the BitTorrent ecosystem stays intact no matter what happens, Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak. By decentralizing the different aspects they hope that BitTorrent users will be less reliant on the uptime of The Pirate Bay’s servers alone. The burden will now be spread among several independently operated services.

For now it remains a mystery what GGF CEO Hans Pandeya meant with “We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.” That’s worrying to say the least.

In addition, GGF also acquired Peerialism who apparently have developed a new P2P distribution technology which will be used on The Pirate Bay. How this related to the new tracker and external torrent hosting remains unknown.

Half of me thinks this is a late April Fool’s joke.

• TorrentFreak

"To the grieving minister of Culture...." Source: http://www.laquadrature.net/. License: CC-BY-SA.

Ars Technica reports that HADOPI, the infamous French “3-strikes law” passed in May after an initial defeat, has been overturned by the Constitutional Council.

“Moreover, whereas under section nine of the Declaration of 1789, every man is presumed innocent until has has been proven guilty, it follows that in principle the legislature does not establish a presumption of guilt in criminal matters,” wrote the Council. This basic principle applies “to any sanction in the nature of punishment, even if the legislature has left the decision to an authority that is nonjudicial in nature.”

The court also made a strong statement about freedom of speech: “Freedom of expression and communication is so valuable that its exercise is a prerequisite for democracy and one of the guarantees of respect for other rights and freedoms and attacks on the exercise of this freedom must be necessary, appropriate and proportionate to the aim pursued.”

Good to see that this guilty-until-proven-innocent law did not muster the tests of the Council.

• Ars Technica
• Digg

TorrentFreak reports that Nine Inch Nails has launched their own BitTorrent tracker to handle the bandwidth of their official lossless tracks.

[W]hen they released the album ‘Ghosts‘ for free last year their server couldn’t handle the high traffic numbers and downloads, so the linked to the torrents they had uploaded to The Pirate Bay instead. Thanks to The Pirate Bay, many fans didn’t have to wait till the server recovered, and the torrent quickly became one of the most downloaded files on the tracker.

With the release of their tour promo NIN/JA today, NIN decided to prevent similar server troubles, and the band now offers .torrent downloads for the higher quality (and size) downloads. The tracker used for the torrents is hosted by the band itself on the tracker.nin.com subdomain. The tracker is already being used by thousands of fans just hours after it went up.

I wonder what license the promos are under.

• TorrentFreak
• Digg

Ars Technica reports that the French “3 strikes law” has been drafted and is now up for debate in the French Parliament. According to the article, the law is the toughest if its kind to date.

“Création et Internet” requires home Internet users to install certain approved security software and to secure their networks. The old “I had an open WiFi network and someone across the hall probably logged on and downloaded all those episodes of The Office” won’t work; while that may be what happened, the law tries to avoid such controversies by simply making each Internet subscriber responsible for what happens on their connection.

One obvious retort is that people will simply slip down the boulevard to the café for a cup of overpriced espresso, a waiter with bad case of ennui, and an afternoon of torrenting. But the Law will not be mocked so easily. When French Minister of Culture Christine Albanel answered some parliamentary questions about public WiFi networks, she said that the solution was simple: such hotspots would offer only a “white list” of approved websites.

This sort of “plug every hole in the dike, the consequences be damned!” strategy shows just how far the government is willing to go in order to protect the copyright industries; not even rank censorship is a bridge too far. And the logic of this approach suggests that the current practice of scanning BitTorrent swarms for IP addresses will have to give way to deep packet inspection of Web content as users shift to streaming media, direct download links, and darknets.

Mandatory router security? Government-mandated censorship of public Wi-Fi hotspots? Deep packet inspection? Evidentially the “guilty until proven innocent” trend is crossing international borders.  Not only is this a waste of government time and taxpayer money, but this will have serious consequences for ordinary, law-abiding French citizens. We know full well that there will be mistakes made, and the lack of legal remedy would leave the victims in this defenseless.

• Ars Technica
• Digg

”The internet is a series of tubes.” Source: Eirik Solheim on NKRbeta. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Norway.

The Norwegian Broadcasting Company is setting their own BitTorrent tracker to host their television shows, as direct downloads proved to be too bandwidth intensive.

After some very successful tests through 2008 the Norwegian state broadcaster has decided to set up their own BitTorrent tracker and start offering content through this form of distribution on a more regular basis.

The tracker is based on the same OpenTracker software that the Pirate Bay has been using for the last couple of years. But it will only be used to distribute content from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK).

NRK is license funded and aims to reach their audience with the best possible quality. Tests with traditional download methods have proven difficult because of the large files and extreme load on the servers.

The first show we’re putting on our new tracker is a very popular television series about people living in remote places in Norway. It features fascinating people and spectacular scenery. We have provided all the Norwegian subtitle files and if people want to fansub any of the episodes we’re more than happy to let you do that. Please let us know in the comments and we’ll link to your translations.

It’s great to see a television network not only embrace the Internet and BitTorrent instead of fighting it, but openly allow for fansubs as well. Many translations have already been made according to the Web page. Hopefully more networks will follow.

PS: This is a giant backlog of stories that did not get posted while I was away. As such they are not in chronological order with the rest of the site and are quite old.

• NRKbeta
• Slashdot

The UK Intellectual Property Office has drafted proposals for dealing with “persistent” copyright infringers, particularly filesharers, as part of a discussion of the scope of a proposed UK Digital Rights Agency. The guidelines involve ISPs restricting the access of repeat infringers:

The new discussion piece, while not going into much detail, has proposed two potential example solutions to the problem. UK ISPs could employ protocol blocking or bandwidth restrictions, in relation to persistent infringers. In other words, P2P services could be blocked or users might find their service speeds seriously restricted[...]

One particularly interesting aspect of the new proposals is that it would not be limited to tackling unlawful peer to peer activity. Instead the DRA would be geared towards finding effective ways of reducing the overall levels of online copyright infringement over time, allowing for changing behaviours and technologies (i.e. it might tackle Newsgroups, FTP and other services where illegal usage takes place on a users account).

[...]

Typically all of these proposals rest on ISPs being able to reach some kind of agreement with the creative industry. Should that fail then the “less attractive” option would be for tougher measures to be introduced through legislation. “This would be necessary if there were little prospect of an effective rights agency,” says the paper.

So, essentially, the UK IPO wants to impose a kind of “three strikes lite” on their citizens. Never mind, of course, that a filesharer may want to download (or seed) a new version of Linux or talk with friends over Ekiga or something. She’s a *gasp* filthy filesharer! She’s not fit to interact with others online!

Imposing social rules through legislation rarely works out well.

• ISPreview article
• Link to paper (PDF, 448 kB)

Torrentfreak reports that Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, infamous for his crusade against Napster in 2000, has downloaded his band’s own album illegally.

“I sat there myself and downloaded ‘Death Magnetic’ from the Internet just to try it,” he said. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is how it works.’ I figured if there is anybody that has a right to download ‘Death Magnetic’ for free, it’s me.”

Ulrich went on to say that he and half a dozen friends were enjoying a bottle of wine at his house and used a file-sharing client (the name of which eluded him) to download the album.

“We found it – this was like two or three days after it leaked. I was like, ‘You know what? I’ve gotta try this.’ So we sat there and thirty minutes later I had ‘Death Magnetic’ in my computer. It was kind of bizarre.”

I’m hoping that this means that he will see things in an entirely different light from now on. Earlier in the article he was quoted as not being near as upset as his label when the album leaked, and I remember reading earlier about possible plans to try a Radiohead-style release in the future, so hopefully we can see some change of heart soon. Still, I’m surprised that he had never tried the technology until now.

• Torrentfreak
• Slashdot