East Wing - Credit: thadman on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

In the landmark trial of TPB, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Carl Lundström will receive 1 year in jail and a fine of $905,000 each.

The court said that the four defendants worked as a team, were aware that copyrighted material was being shared using The Pirate Bay and that they made it easy and assisted the infringements. It categorized the infringements as ’severe’. The judge said that the users of The Pirate Bay committed the first offense by sharing files and the four assisted this

…

The judge also stated that the usage of BitTorrent at The Pirate Bay is illegal. Rest assured, other torrent sites hosted in Sweden will be keeping a close eye on developments.

Bummer man.  By this argument, is using the internet illegal too?

• TorrentFreak
• The Pirate Bay
• Ars Technica

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

”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

Stanford Engineering Everywhere - Credit see.stanford.edu (CC BY)

Stanford Engineering Everywhere has decided to use bittorrent to help distribute their courseware under CC BY-NC-SA.

The University not only gives away videos of lectures, but also syllabi, handouts, homework and exams. In addition to offering torrents, the courses are also available on YouTube, via iTunes and Vyew. With the project Stanford aims to spread knowledge on technology worldwide.

Thus far, the online courses have been a great success. Over 200,000 people from all over the world have visited the site already. Most foreign visitors come from Canada, according to a recent news release, followed by Brazil, China, Italy and the UK.

For now, only the 10 most popular computer science and electrical engineering courses are published online, but additional courses will be added later. All course materials are published under a Creative Commons license, which allows others to adapt, remix and share them as long as it is for noncommercial use, and if they link back to the university.

As P2P-blog points out, there is one downside to the torrents Stanford is offering. They do not use regular trackers, but only Vuze’s DHT tracker. This means that people who use BitTorrent clients that do not support DHT, such as Transmission, BitLord and BitTornado, are not able to download the files. Of course, uTorrent and Azureus users will have no problems.

Boo, non-commercial.  Oh well, at least this sets a bit of an example for other universities.

• TorrentFreak
• Creative Commons
• Stanford News Service
• Stanford Engineering Everywhere

The Pirate Bay - Credit: thepiratebay.com

The Pirate Bay has accumulated over 20 million peers.

The Pirate Bay has reached yet another milestone. Today, they track more than 20 million unique peers for the first time since the site was launched. It is estimated that the Pirate Bay tracks more than half of all BitTorrent users at any given point in time.

By November 2007, The Pirate Bay was tracking around 6 million peers, up from ‘just’ 3 million the year before. The growth has been amazing, and it doesn’t seem that it is going to slow down anytime soon.

One of the reasons it was possible for the site to handle this record number of peers are the constant improvements on the software and hardware side. New servers are added regularly, budget permitting, and UDP trackers were added to all the torrents on the site, which are less resource consuming than TCP trackers.

Has anybody heard about the law that may get passed in Sweden that would outlaw bitTorrent trackers?  Even if that passes, I don’t think anything can kill TPB at this point.

• TorrentFreak

aeu

Spore has become the most pirated game ever. Many are saying it’s because of the aggressive DRM.

Since September 2nd when Spore first appeared on BitTorrent, it has been downloaded a little over 500,000 times across various BitTorrent sites. This download rate exceeds that of any other pirated game in history, and in a week or two from now it will be the most pirated game ever on BitTorrent.

As a comparison, Crysis, one of the best-selling PC games of this year has only been downloaded 420,000 times since it was released in November 2007. The Sims 2 currently holds the record for the most pirate downloads. There are no accurate stats for this game, since it was released long before we started tracking downloads, but we estimate that approximately 1 million copies have been downloaded.

That’s hilarious.

• Torrent Freak

OiNK, a private BitTorrent tracker, was shut down last October. After many months, the investigation has come to an end. Alan Ellis, creator of OiNK, has been charged wtih “conspiracy to defraud.”

Today, after almost a year, the OiNK investigation came to an end. Earlier today we reported that OiNK administrator Alan Ellis was charged with “conspiracy to defraud”. Now, just hours later the alleged uploaders are charged with copyright infringement for uploading one CD.

This May, five men and one woman were arrested for sharing music on OiNK. The suspects were taken in for questioning, and required to provide DNA samples and fingerprints.

Two months later, two of the six alleged uploaders were released from further investigation, but (at least) two of the remaining four have been charged today. The alleged uploaders were charged with copyright infringement for uploading one CD.

11 months. One CD?

• TorrentFreak

isoHunt has counter sued the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) to legalize bittorrent sites.

The CRIA is known for taking on BitTorrent sites. In the past year they have threatened Demonoid and other BitTorrent sites, and taken legal action against QuebecTorrent. Now, they have set their sights on isoHunt, one of the largest BitTorrent sites on the Internet, but this might just backfire.

In May 2008, isoHunt received a Cease and Desist letter from the CRIA, in which they demanded that isoHunt founder Gary Fung should take the site offline. If Fung didn’t comply, the CRIA said it would pursue legal action, and demand $20,000 for each sound recording the site has infringed.

…

As an act of self-defense, isoHunt has decided to sue the CRIA instead, and today Fung will file a petition to ask the Court of British Columbia to confirm that isoHunt –and sister sites Torrentbox and Podtropolis– do not infringe copyright. “This is our preemptive strike with a narrowly defined petition for Declaratory Relief that we do not infringe, in anticipation they are going to file their own lawsuit that we do infringe (their copyright),” Fung said

“Our petition summarizes BitTorrent technology, its open nature and a whole ecosystem of websites and operators that has developed around it, that CRIA does not own copyright to all files distributed over BitTorrent or on isoHunt websites, and we seek legal validation that we can continue to innovate within this emerging BitTorrent ecosystem on the Internet.”

I have doubts that this will succeed. Good luck isoHunt.

• TorrentFreak

Comcast has sued the FCC and wants the p2p throttling ruling overturned.

As the legal process plays itself out, Comcast has pledged to abide by the order and continue its work to move towards a protocol-agnostic throttling system that could slow “heavy users” down to DSL levels for 20 minutes at a time (another piece of the bandwidth management puzzle, hard bandwidth caps, were also announced last month).

“Although we are seeking review and reversal of the Commission’s network management order in federal court, we intend to comply fully with the requirements established in that order, which essentially codify the voluntary commitments that we have already announced, and to continue to act in accord with the Commission’s Internet Policy Statement,” said David Cohen, Comcast’s executive vice president.

“Thus, we intend to make the required filings and disclosures, and we will follow through on our longstanding commitment to transition to protocol-agnostic network congestion management practices by the end of this year.”

With Comcast pledging to abide by the FCC’s decision, what’s the point of the lawsuit? The FCC’s finding and order are precedent setting, in that the Commission has rendered a decision on how far ISPs can go in managing their networks for the first time. That’s a precedent Comcast and its cable and telecom brethren would rather not have, as they would prefer to manage their networks in any manner they see fit without directives from the FCC covering what kinds of management techniques are over the line.

I agree with the analysis at the end there.  What do they want out of this other than the last word?

• Ars Technica

The FCC has ordered Comcast to stop throttling bittorrent.

Indeed, a recent study by the Max Planck Institute showed that the company had misinformed the FCC and their users. Comcast has always argued that BitTorrent upstream traffic was only blocked during periods of heavy network traffic, this turns out to be a lie, as the study showed that they blocked BitTorrent upstream traffic 24/7.

The FCC has announced that it will take appropriate action against Comcast, and the ISP will be ordered to stop interfering with BitTorrent traffic. Comcast has said before that it will invest in its network capacity and stop slowing down the traffic of their users, but these were all false promises.

And all the people say, “Hip, hip, hooray!”

• TorrentFreak
• Public Knowledge