UK Will Order More ISPs To Block The Pirate Bay

The BPI (British Recorded Music Industry), the voice of the British recorded music bizz, is reported to make desperate efforts of extending its Internet-blocking policy about The Pirate Bay onto other largest broadband providers, including TalkTalk, Virgin Media, Sky, O2, and Orange.

The British Recorded Music Industry outfit officially demanded BT to block access to the “rogue” website known as The Pirate Bay – the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker. This may invoke the MPA against BT case – a well-known and debatable lawsuit which managed to set a precedent in the fight against piracy thanks to the court’s decision to order BT to block access to Newzbin service.

As if it wasn’t enough, now the music industry, with the help of multiple industry trade outfits, wishes that BT would voluntarily restrict access to The Pirate Bay website without court injunction. Meanwhile, if the Internet service provider fails to comply with the requirement, it’s likely that the British Recorded Music Industry would seek justice in the court of law by obtaining the required injunction.

Taking into account the fact that the current censorship system should be extended onto other Internet service providers as well, the anti-piracy outfit has now extended its main objective, that of blacklisting The Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracker, to all of major broadband providers of the United Kingdom. The outfit issued a statement, saying that it is engaging in further dialogue with the Internet service provider BT on this issue. The organization also admitted that it has written to the UK’s other largest broadband providers – Virgin Media, O2, Orange, Sky, and TalkTalk – to ask them to block access to the BitTorrent tracker. Now the outfit is waiting for their responses.

Usenet Service Lost Legal Battle

Dutch anti-piracy outfit named BREIN represents multiple members of the entertainment industry. Recently it has won a two-year battle against the company News Service, whose main activity is reselling Usenet services to multiple providers.

Despite all its attempts and appeals to go on with their operations, the company was recently forced by court order to cease its activity and delete all violating material from their site. News Service has published a statement, saying that they didn’t see how it could comply with the court’s order. As a result, in the end of October the company began interlocutory proceedings, within which News Service asked the summary Judge to order pro-copyright outfit to cease the execution of the court decision. However, recently they’ve learned that the summary Judge has denied the claims of the company. Consequently, News Service is now forced to cease its activity with immediate effect. Nevertheless, the administration of the online service has announced that the portal will continue to appeal the court’s order. In the meantime, some industry observers believe that this struggle may be futile.

BREIN is an anti-piracy group having many years of experience behind it and is particularly good at hunting BitTorrent tracker websites, but it has never claimed a hunt on Usenet services before. This is considered the first major win of the anti-piracy outfit against a Usenet provider. In addition, this victory could easily set a precedent and encourage BREIN to close down other large newsgroups. For example, two of the most important newsgroups, Astraweb and Giganews, are already worried about being not that cautious in this area of activity. Indeed, BREIN’s focus may simply switch to them.

BitTorrent Contributed To Network Decongestion

Erik Klinker, BitTorrent’s Chief Executive Officer, attended the Broadband World Forum that took place in France. As a result, he came with a new solution for an old problem of network congestion because of P2P. A new open-source technology called Micro Transport Protocol or xTP has already been introduced into the company’s application in order to increase the performance of network by decongesting it.

Most of the information flying around the web is transmitted through TCP, which works by breaking it down and later reassembling at the other end of the network link. However, Klinker explained that this method is obsolete, because TCP defines congestion based on lost packets. He compared the network congestion to driving a car through a school zone and only slowing down after having struck the first pedestrian.

As opposed to TCP protocol, the xTP technology would detect the network congestion on the early stage and try to fix it, because it was designed in the philosophy of yielding to traffic. BitTorrent promised that xTP will no longer be the cause of the web congestion thanks to new mechanisms. Mr. Klinker noted that if the company could somehow address the problem of network congestion, it would end up addressing the network cost issue. He also came with a prediction, saying that the worldwide web is going to evolve and develop in the direction of a multimedia network. What is it for the users? A lot more big files at the very least, and you can consider many other advantages.

BitTorrent CEO announced that the company will develop this new direction. BitTorrent has already begun to facilitate transferring large amounts of information from digital devices and gadgets, and it will do much more in the nearest future. Klinker promised that the industry will soon see the company rolling out software that would help liberate media from the above mentioned devices in order to share it easier with family and friends.

Many will agree with Erik Klinker that content doesn’t present any value until it is shared and seen. That’s where it becomes hard for today’s networks in the first place. While the devices at the edge of the network are rapidly increasing in capability, the today’s networks stay the same and are governed by the same old mechanisms.

The Pirate Bay Sued By Finnish Record Labels

The largest BitTorrent tracker site in the world The Pirate Bay has been sued again. Now the plaintiffs are more than twenty record labels from Finland, desperately attempting to halt piracy in their country. The petition to block The Pirate Bay was sent by the country's Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center on behalf of the IFPI.

Finnish pro-copyright outfit, which claims its goal is to ensure favorable operational conditions for the recording industry in the country, represents 23 record labels that launched a lawsuit at the Helsinki District Court. Like other similar outfits, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in Finland required the court to order telecommunications company called Elisa to deny access to a popular Swedish site providing Internet users with access to copyrighted content like music, films, and other material. The representative of the IFPI claimed that a legitimate online market can’t develop in country if infringing services like The Pirate Bay are allowed to go on with their operations.

In response, the Internet service provider argued that it doesn't condone piracy in the Internet, and refused to block access to The Pirate Bay unless the court orders it to do so.

Founded 8 years ago, the BitTorrent tracker allows millions of people to share copyrighted content through BitTorrent technology, or P2P links offered on the website. Two years ago, the website founders were fined and sentenced to prison for copyright infringement, but The Pirate Bay is still operational. However, the members of the service are still being pursued.

For example, recently the Denmark judge ruled that the website member nicknamed Icenfire should pay over $35,000 in damages for movie upload. The movie in question was Anders Matthesen’s comedy of 2009, “Black balls”, which was released on Blu-ray in the country, but the United States and Canada never saw the movie in the stores. The fine included the cost of the violation itself ($28,000) and associated court costs ($7,500). The individual was singled out by a Danish pro-copyright group, which claimed he was the original uploader. The outfit had raided his home in Denmark back in February, right after the routine analysis revealed the unauthorized upload

Another UK BitTorrent Lawsuit Dropped

Two operators of FileSoup, the longest standing BitTorrent site, had their case dismissed by the Crown Prosecution Service. Actually, the prosecution only relied on the evidence by the anti-piracy outfit Federation Against Copyright Theft, also known as FACT, and due to this one-side view failed to build a case. The case became the second one, after the trial of OiNK, where British BitTorrent website admins have walked free.

FileSoup was launched 8 years ago, so it can be considered one of the original BitTorrent services. In fact, it outlived a huge number of trackers that sprung up around the time. Meanwhile, the service developed a reputation and a welcoming community in 8 years of existence. Everything has been going smooth, until 2 years ago, without any noticeable trouble, police and the Hollywood-backed outfit FACT suddenly decided to conduct a raid in the house of the site’s founder nicknamed “TheGeeker”. The first raid was followed by the second one on the property of fellow admin “Snookered”. Both of the site operators were arrested and taken in for questioning. Then, in a year, they were charged with conspiracy to violate copyright for their involvement with the online file-sharing service. Like many British cases, this one could only boast the evidence by the Hollywood-funded outfit FACT, and no other independent investigation.

This appeared to be the reason for the court to drop the case. The solicitors of the site operators, who previously managed to defend the owner of OiNK tracker, pushed the prosecutor to formulate the charges, which they failed to do. In fact, the prosecution couldn’t even understand technical side of the matter, wasn’t sure whether to prosecute BitTorrent tracker as a business or not, and didn’t know whether the rights owner had caused prejudice. As far as there wasn’t any additional investigation into the issue, no-one could answer these questions, which made the Crown Prosecution Service to dismiss the case entirely. The court ruling read that the offenses were rather a civil matter than criminal one, so no more public money should have been spent on the prosecution.

The site operators are relieved at the end of the trial, while FACT is quite frustrated by having spent thousands of dollars on this very case. Best for the British tax payers, the justice was served by dismissing the case.

Khan Academy Teamed Up With BitTorrent Inc.

Someone else chose to team up with BitTorrent Inc.: the Khan Academy has released its own video catalogue app, which will provide more than two thousand educational videos to the BitTorrent users.

When BitTorrent Inc. introduced the App Studio to the BitTorrent community, it immediately started looking for ways to cooperate with musicians and other content creators, offering them a new distribution instrument enabling the artists reach millions of Internet users throughout the globe.

Now BitTorrent Inc. has teamed up with the Khan Academy. Their collaboration resulted in a new video catalogue app release that will offer more than two thousand award-winning educational videos. Salman Khan, founder and executive director at the Khan Academy, believes that BitTorrent is one of the best platforms to help the Academy fulfill its mission of providing high-quality education to people wherever they are and whoever they are. The Academy also confirmed that BitTorrent Inc. provides video creators and publishers an excellent opportunity to promote. For example, this technology lets users to download heavy video files with good speeds, without requiring costly hosting or any infrastructure on their end, which is considered an important factor for non-profit organizations.

Thus far, the Academy made the following classes available for BitTorrent users:

1. Scale of the Galaxy

2. Evolution and Natural Selection: Introduction

3. Algebra: Solving Inequalities

4. Atom: Introduction

5. History of the French Revolution

Currently the Khan Academy app can be reached through both the BitTorrent mainline and uTorrent applications.

Chief strategist at BitTorrent, Shahi Ghanem, admitted that the company was honored to help the Khan Academy bring knowledge and education to anyone throughout the world. He called the project a perfect example of why the company launched its App Studio platform. The main goal of the platform introduction was to help content creators connect with the huge user base of BitTorrent Inc. This way, the company also enjoys the advantage of empowering the Academy to provide millions of Internet users with free access to world-class educational content. Since BitTorrent believes it’s a truly worthy cause, it is looking forward to further cooperation with the Khan Academy and inviting other socially-conscious content creators to employ this innovative content distribution model.

The Pirate Bay Launched Threatening Site

The world’s largest BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay is known for being a thorn in the side of the entertainment industry for a while. Nevertheless, it hinted that things still can take a turn for the worse. The matter is a new project launched by the TPB crew, titled “The Music Bay”, and promising that the music industry now has a great reason to be very, very afraid.

First of all, it was several years ago that The Pirate Bay registered a domain which hasn’t been very active thus far – themusicbay.org. Actually, when it was launched, there were plans to develop the most efficient music-sharing software ever. However, the plans were put aside because some other projects were more important.

Nevertheless, the domain didn’t fall into oblivion, as recently rumors started to circle that this domain name might be put to use after all. Although at the moment it is setup to serve ads for TPB site, as soon as this spring The Music Bay could be hosting a great surprise for the entertainment industry.

For example, the currently active subdomain fear.themusicbay.org is now containing a hint that something is “coming soon”. However, The Pirate Bay operators are reluctant to reveal any specific details about the site. At the same time, their intentions are quite obvious, considering their words related to the record labels. Precisely, they said that the industry can’t even imagine what is going to be rolled out in the near future. Although the industry has been complaining bitterly about piracy for years, now they have a real reason to be scared. The only thing The Pirate Bay crew released is that “it is going to be a special surprise for the IFPI’s birthday”. Perhaps, even a festival will be organized in Rome, where IFPI was born. IFPI, by the way, is the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, founded under Italian fascist government of Benito Mussolini in April of 1933.

No more details have been released by The Pirate Bay, so it will be not just a big surprise for the music industry, but for everyone, including us. As for now, all the rumors and comments can be interpreted in many ways – without any information on the oncoming project, it can only be treated now as a mere domain name, registered and used for the sole purpose of threatening the already paranoid record labels.

Largest BitTorrent Porn Websites Closed Down

A couple of the Internet’s largest porn BitTorrent sites have announced that they permanently shut down. Empornium and PureTNA, having over 2.5 million members between them, when closed will leave a significant number of porn fans empty handed.

It started a few days ago, when the sites’ members discovered that the largest BitTorrent adult trackers PureTNA and Empornium have been routing to 127.0.0.1. Of course, the members of both services have been worried, because those 2 giants connected by the same management boasted a huge number of users.

For example, PureTNA had more than 1,330,000 members, and its fellow Empornium had a close number. Recently PureTNA’s database was almost 67 thousand torrents servicing around 630 thousand peers. Meanwhile, Empornium listed over 82 thousand torrents and 660 thousand peers. That is a huge amount of porn, just how their members liked it.

However, the sites’ users face the sad reality now, with the management of both sites confirming that they went permanently offline. The demands for elaboration have been declined, but the management of both trackers said briefly: “Such is BitTorrent life.”

The event was quite unexpected by the community, because both BitTorrent trackers had continued to grow, in terms of both torrents and membership. The rumours are that because of the lack of investment in code development, PureTNA and Empornium have become vulnerable to virus attacks, which led to one or both of the trackers being hacked a few days ago. Instead of pumping money into the services to prevent the attacks happening again, trackers’ owners chose to wipe hard drives in order to protect user privacy. Or, at least, so the story goes.

Another rumour (and a sounder one) is that the services buckled under legal pressure. A few weeks ago many porn websites and studios have issued legal orders to the sites. Curiously enough, PureTNA is still listed by Google, while a search for Empornium brings up a complete blank, creating an impression that the site doesn’t exist.

Regardless of the reason, whether it is hackings, legal pressure, or both, the BitTorrent trackers will not come back, which certainly marks the end of an era for BitTorrent porn consumers. In the end the sites’ owners could simply lose interest in developing further.

BitTorrent Can Be Used for DDoS Attacks

A talk at the CCC (Chaos Communications Congress) made it clear that BitTorrent swarms can be easily exploited to take down large sites. In short words, vulnerability in the technology of “trackerless” torrents indeed makes it possible to trick downloaders of popular torrents into send a great number of requests to a chosen server, finally taking it down. Virtually, this makes BitTorrent quite an effective DDoS instrument.

Everyone knows that BitTorrent is in the list of the most effective tools for transferring huge digital files to many people simultaneously. As distinct from a central server, BitTorrent transfers tend to increase speed as more people share the same file. That is the reason why BitTorrent has evolved into the most popular file-sharing platform.

Imagine that millions of people are downloading files through BitTorrent daily. Meanwhile, in some instances over 100 thousand people are sharing the same file at the given moment. While such large swarms of peers are good for sharing, they can also be used for DDoS attacks, as the Chaos Communications Congress recently revealed.

CCC talk was titled “Lying To Neighbors”, and revealed that the DHT technology powering “trackerless torrents” can easily be abused, as BitTorrent downloaders are able to effectively DDoS a certain server. In fact, DHT’s function is to find peers with the same files without communicating with a central tracker, which ensures that your downloads will continue even when the central BitTorrent tracker goes offline. However, DHT can also be exploited to carry out a DDoS attack. In case there’re enough peers downloading the same file, this can effortlessly take down large sites. The sad side of all this is that the downloaders involved in the DDoS attack may be unaware of that.

Such DHT vulnerabilities aren’t new concepts for the developers. In fact, they have been discussed earlier, but still no agreement has yet been reached on them. Meanwhile, over the last months DDoS attacks became a common event, major part carried out under the flag of Operation Payback. However, those attacks required hundreds of users to actively participate simultaneously, while the BitTorrent DDoS is able to take down a server from a single computer.

It unclear whether BitTorrent developers are planning to act upon that DHT vulnerability to prevent that kind of abuse after it became known to everyone, or not.

More File-Sharers Will Face Prison Like TPB Founders

Henrik Rasmusson, a senior public prosecutor of Sweden, believes that in case of more file-sharing lawsuits are filed to the courts, and the cases prove to be indeed a very serious problem for the entire society (like was reasoned in the case with the Svea Court of Appeal), convicted file-sharers will more often face a jail sentence.

After Sweden’s Svea Court of Appeal having reaffirmed the previous convictions of 3 of The Pirate Bay’s co-founders for the facilitation of copyright violation, a senior public prosecutor for the country Henrik Rasmusson came to conclusion that illegal file-sharers should be convicted to jail sentences more often.

As you might remember, the appeal of the TPB’s co-owners resulted in their conviction, with the court meting out the length of jail terms for them in accordance with their level of involvement in operating the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay. For example, Fredrik Neij received a 10 month jail time, while Peter Sunde got only 8 months prison sentence, and Carl Lundström faced 4 months conviction. As for the 4th co-founder of The Pirate Bay, Gottrid Svartholm Warg, he didn’t participate in the trial because of illness. Nevertheless, his individual case will be heard later, and he will most likely face prison time like his fellows.

Rasmusson said to press that the court made a huge step in the issue of illegal file-sharing when reasoned that such activity had become a very serious society problem. Consequently, future sentences will undoubtedly be impacted by this precedent. His logic is clear: if there are more cases of illicit file-sharing, the Swedish courts can start reasoning in the same manner as the Svea Court of Appeal that it represents a serious problem for the entire society, which will more often cause convictions to a prison time.

Meanwhile, the co-founders of The Pirate Bay don’t feel bad for the conviction, as it was decided from the very beginning that the case will move up to the Swedish Supreme Court, where it is highly expected to wind up. However, the hearing will not be scheduled in the near future, and the file-sharers accused of copyright infringement might already feel the effect of the TPB’s case.

Michael Jackson’s New Album Leaked Online

New star’s album “Michael” has already appeared on BitTorrent trackers all over the world before its official release date, which is December, 14th.

This album of Michael Jackson followed the way of lots of other hotly anticipated albums that have leaked to the Internet and now can be found on any BitTorrent tracker website throughout the world. The leak of this particular album happened over a week prior to its official release date – December, 14th.

New album called “Michael” contains 10 Michael Jackson’s tracks recorded from 2001 to 2009. This leak means that all of them are currently available to anyone who is able to use BitTorrent client, and they are not the snippets that a label, Sony, has been offering piecemeal in order to spur interest, but the full-fledged songs.

Although this leak will most likely have no effect on sales (i.e. lead to any tangible decline), it can become the useful prove for those rights owners that are looking forward to persuading US Congress to pass the controversial COICA legislation (Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act). The latter is supposed to provide the Justice Department with an expedited process for tracing and closing down domains of websites involved in providing access to illegal downloads, as well as to online streaming or sale of copyrighted material and counterfeit products.

Actually, no artist has been spared having their album leak to BitTorrent websites. So, Michael Jackson is just following in the footsteps of many other artists, such as U2, Eminem, Kings of Leon and many, many more. The most interesting fact in all this is that some of the artists have shown quite curious responds to the cases of leak. For example, U2 the band made a decision to respond by offering free streaming of their own album “No Line On The Horizon” on MySpace network.

Although Sony never expressed its attitude to the leak, one can be sure that it isn’t that happy and is going to somehow respond to news. While many fans of Michael Jackson can already enjoy his works for free, this may have the opposite effect over time, especially if Sony decided to take a closer look at last Billboard’s list of “5 Easy Steps to Plug Online Music Leaks.”

uTorrent 2.2 Version Released

uTorrent has launched a stable 2.2 version, highly anticipated by the public for being the first to open up the BitTorrent’s App Studio to its vast community. Besides, the version introduced the optimized proxy privacy settings to 65 million users. Finally, to highlight the fact of its collaboration with many indie artists, the release of uTorrent 2.2 was tied up with a promotion of the film “Four Eyed Monsters”, which is available for open downloading.

All in all, BitTorrent has been very active when developing its uTorrent file-sharing application this year. Apart from this particular application, BitTorrent Inc. also pushed out 2 experimental clients called Falcon and Griffin to test some of new features built into them in public. The feature that drew most attention was uTorrent’s support for Apps.

Actually, BitTorrent Apps represents a web-based extensions framework, designed to add new functionality to the client without adding more weight to the core BitTorrent application. In fact, it’s the same as many other applications, extensions and addons that are embedded into Internet browsers and mobile phones. Apps are based on JavaScript and let the third party developers design software to be integrated seamlessly with the uTorrent. People will be able to add those apps to uTorrent with a single click, and to be shown through an embedded browser window.

Originally, the Apps feature was only available to a very limited group of the users that decided to download the experimental Griffin application. Later, in September 2010 the users of BitTorrent’s Mainline software joined their team, and finally today the studio is available to all the vast audience of uTorrent, totaling to 65 million.

Among those official applications that are included into the most recent version of uTorrent is VoDo’s one – a platform containing the free works of indie moviemakers. In order to celebrate the event of Apps being bundled with uTorrent, the platform released 2 of the new films – “Snowblind” and “Four Eyed Monsters”. Actually, the producers of these movies have got an opportunity to show their works to millions of people around the world without worrying about any distribution problems. In fact, the multimillion audience of BitTorrent surpasses that of many television networks, at the same time fostering a direct connection between moviemakers and consumers.

Download here

Pirate Bay Warned Facebook and Twitter Could Be Threatened Too

Defense claims that the public has seen similar examples regarding copyright issues over the years, recalling how the entertainment industry targeted any new technology – from radios and satellite dishes to VCRs and DVRs.

The world’s largest BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay has faced the last day of its appeal trial of the conviction for the facilitation of copyright violation with nothing new.

The attorney for one of the co-founders of the service, Frederik Neij, first highlighted that almost each case of unauthorized downloading where the tracker has been accused of facilitating, took place in a country with laws allowing legal file-sharing (Spain, for example).

Besides, he reiterated his contention that according to the Section 16 of the E-Commerce Act, the tracker is in fact protected as transmission service. If the court allows a guilty verdict to stand, this could endanger the whole worldwide web as we know it. The attorney says that a guilty verdict for his client would automatically imply a threat to the similar online search services, such as Twitter and Facebook, especially taking into consideration that the tracker never hosted any copyrighted content, and didn’t violate the laws itself, only its users did.

Another attorney, for the second co-founder Peter Sunde, later made an attempt to get to the core of technology, which is what all the trial has been about. He emphasized how the public has seen other examples over the years, with rights owners having targeted everything from radios to DVRs.

Whatever new technology appears, large companies always claim that it is really life-threatening. In the case of The Pirate Bay, the prosecutors are also after the technology. Then, the attorney argued that since the tracker never hosted copyrighted content, it can’t be held liable for infringement, but its users can, as they are the real people who committed the violation.

Finally, the attorneys pointed out that the only figures the judges have seen when estimating financial damages have been those the entertainment industry provided to the court, but not the ones of the independent outside experts.

The court is expected to hand out its verdict in the late November, but either way it’s just a boring waste of time. It actually doesn’t matter, what the outcome of the case will be – it will still make its way to the High Court.

Major BitTorrent Trackers Have Been Offline

It has been almost 2 weeks since two of the most popular online BitTorrent trackers, PublicBitTorrent and OpenBitTorrent, started going down. Considering the recent news of DDoS attacks at many BitTorrent tracker websites, the public feared that both this trackers became victims of such an assault. However, the cause is friendly fire now, though the largest trackers are really overloaded.

Both PublicBitTorrent and OpenBitTorrent are BitTorrent tracker sites of a non-commercial origin using Opentracker software. None of this services hosts or links to the .torrent files. Besides, the trackers are free to use by any BitTorrent user. The services are actually listed on the top of the most popular services, coordinating in common the downloads of twenty million users at any given time.

One of the services, OpenBitTorrent, though had a seemingly neutral setup, managed to get lots of legal troubles last year. The tracker faces legal issues from both movie and music industry that were fighting against what they understand an illicit service. Hollywood was the first to win the court case against the Internet service provider of the tracker. Then, after the tracker found a new one, IFPI traced it in Spain, thus forcing the service to move again.

With all this intensive history in mind, it wasn’t a surprise that many file-sharers were afraid of the worst when the tracker appeared to become unresponsive a few days ago. Nevertheless, this time the outages were not caused by legal issues. It turned out that the downtime is actually caused by a constantly increasing number of file-sharers. OpenBitTorrent’s servers are just overloaded and aren’t able to process all the requests. However, the operators ensured the users that the troubles will be dealt with in a few days.

At the same time when OpenBitTorrent faced the issue, another major BitTorrent tracker, PublicBitTorrent, also had to solve the problem of too many users in the network, with similar results. Over the last few days PublicBitTorrent has also been unresponsive for 50% of the time, because its servers were also overloaded. This proves only how vulnerable the BitTorrent tracker ecosystem can be. The tracker also ensured the users it’ll be all right in a few days.

Still, the good news is that most users can continue downloading, because torrents work fine relying on DHT and PEX.

Canadian Recording Industry Insulted the Independent Musicians

The representative of the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) recently visited Washington to discuss the country’s copyright legislation over there. However, his discussion ended up with independent artist being furious about his comments.

The comment that insulted the musicians who chose to distribute their works online for free related to the assumption that Canadian citizens are willing to support the country’s record industry and Ottawa was called to act. The CRIA’s representative thinks that this “modern digital century creates beggars of creators, sending them back to the 1800s.”

At the same time Canadian artists know that Canadian Recording Industry Association doesn’t even come close to protecting the interests of the country’s material creators. That’s why the major country’s record labels left the Association after the Liberals Bill C-60 came around. The CRIA described people ready to give away their works for free as beggars from the 1800s – that’s what seems to creep close to the defamatory line. On the contrary, the artists themselves think they are rather fueling their independent business model by making the content they created available in the Internet. In fact, no-one can argue that it’s up to performers to choose whether they use the common (outdated) business model or their own. The brightest example of such artists is Toby Emerson, who has been giving away his music for free by uploading it to MySpace and other free services, and he finally became one of the most famous Canadian musicians online. Only then he began selling his works – when he already had a huge fan base. Now he’s enjoying both his fans and profits from his works, which he doesn’t have to share with record labels.

That is just a guy who chose a different way of marketing and succeeded. Why should he be called a beggar? Because he differs from the others? But he’s not alone – thousands of musicians are doing the same. Because he does have control over his works, as distinct from the performers who sign contracts with record companies? Hardly.

Targeted artists, insulted with this announcement of CRIA, remind the Association that the industry’s failed business model is not their problem. The public isn’t going to tolerate any efforts to censor creators, so if they decide to share their own creations on BitTorrent, they have every right to do so without being offended by such words.