µTorrent 3.0 Beta Released

Finally, the long-awaited beta build of µTorrent 3.0 is released. The client comes packed with lots of new features and updates, among which there are ratings, speed streaming, and even portability options, which means that the client would create the best user experience ever.

BitTorrent Inc. recently announced the release of the 3.0 beta version of the client, and its new updates will please a lot of users who were waiting long for secure remote access, ratings, sharing content by drops, quicker streaming, simplified interface and even a portable mode working off a removable drive (USB).

One of the new features – torrent ratings – will allow you to rate and comment on downloads right from the client, which enhances community sense within µTorrent. Another one, called “drop files to send” will let µTorrent users to share files with the others with the drag&drop of the mouse, even if the recipients are not BitTorrent users. It works by creating a link with a personalized message through which the other party can download the files even if they don’t have µTorrent installed.

More features of the beta build of µTorrent 3 include the streaming enhancements. Now the client will enable users to watch the pieces of downloaded video files much faster due to some progressive sequential download methods. Many would love this feature as it could help the users decide if they want to finish downloading films like the highly discussed “Hobo with a Shotgun” at all.

Besides, µTorrent now acquires a new portable mode which will enable people run the client directly from a removable drive like USB. In other words, since now you are able to carry the client on you so that you could use it to download files wherever you like.

Finally, the client has the new simplified interface. BitTorrent Inc. team announced that they have been developing the new version of µTorrent focusing on convenience and better streamlined user experience. Indeed, that’s exactly what they managed to deliver. Now the user can at any moment minimize parts of the client interface for a simplified view. This is supposed to not just help the newcomers to focus their attention on the most important features of µTorrent, but also let the others to cut out distractions and focus solely on searching for, getting and playing files.

µTorrent 3.0 beta is already available online. Click here.

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.

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.

New US Bill WIll Force ISPs Close Down Piracy Sites

The new proposed Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) may provide the Department of Justice with an accelerated process for blocking websites hosting unauthorized copyrighted content. It would include the ability to block the import into the country of products offered by online websites devoted to infringing activities.

Recently Senators announced they want to introduce a bill able to solve the growing problem of online piracy and counterfeiting. A group of Senators believe the proposed Bill would give the Department of Justice the instrument it needs for finding and closing down online sites dedicated to providing access to illegal downloads or sale of counterfeit goods and copyrighted material. The latter part is a cause for concern for many, as it refers to the very heart of non-commercial copyright violation in the Internet. In fact, unauthorized peer-to-peer and streaming online services are not like the websites that traffic in physical counterfeit goods, and therefore are not making any profit. The controversial issue of the commercial and non-commercial infringement is again discussed in connection with a new Bill, which ignores this distinction.

The tool the new Bill would give the Department of Justice in order to address the abovementioned trouble is quite heavy handed. Although the Department has always been able to block any domestic infringing sites, it would now be able to prosecute foreign sites as well, in its attempt to prevent the import into the country of goods sold by infringing websites in case it harms US copyright owners.

The new Act, if enforced, would provide courts with the power to force ISPs to block access to any sites hosting unauthorized material by American citizens. For rights owners like the RIAA and MPAA it would be pennies from heaven, and the RIAA has already expressed its happiness with the suggestion.

But the problem is that the sponsors of the proposal still believe that commercial and non-commercial violation is the same, while they definitely aren’t: one can see a big difference between sharing material to enjoy it for free and unfairly profiting from the stolen copyrighted works. Individual file-sharers never profit from file-sharing, so they two can’t be linked together. If the Bill is enforced, the chances are that the US will get a filtering system resembling one of China, which is not even funny.

RIAA Calling For Forcing ISPs To Fight P2P

President of the Recording Industry Association of America Cary Sherman said recently they were looking forward to the law formalizing the “voluntary” cooperation between rights owners and service providers to tackle unauthorized file-sharing. Moreover, they want such cooperation to extend to advertisers, payment processors, and search engines.

Another day, another announcement from the RIAA, keeping telling and doing the things more disturbing than ever before. For example, recently the RIAA President Cary Sherman told the public at a Technology Policy Institute forum held in Aspen, Colorado that the DMCA is completely failing rights owners. He insists that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act needs to be revised and include another provision allowing Internet service providers and others to filter the web of copyrighted content.

Cary Sherman said that day that the DMCA was not working for content people. All the infringements can’t be monitored on the Internet, because it’s just not possible. The music industry isn’t able to search all the locations containing infringing material, like cyberlockers, as it appears new every second.

That is the exact reality of the new digital world, but the RIAA would prefer to make another attempt to break the Internet to satisfy its own economic demands rather than to give it a try and figure out how to adapt to the new reality. Everyone understands there’s no way to completely stop the unauthorized transfer of copyrighted content short of information packet inspection.

The RIAA President highlights that they are looking for a “voluntary” cooperation with broadband providers, and even advertisers, search engines, and payment processors. They believe such co-operation would help stop unauthorized file-sharing. The only thing, he believes, they lack now is the law that would encourage this kind of cooperation, though not mandate it.

In fact, the story of the RIAA’s partnership with ISPs is not a long one, if any. Two years ago the outfit claimed to switch from its strategy of fighting individual file-sharers to cooperation with service providers to filter copyrighted content and disconnect repeat infringers (in other words, implement voluntary “three-strikes” regime. So far no ISPs have chosen to cooperate with the RIAA, and you can guess why. So why can’t the RIAA?

U2 Band Manager Accused ISPs Of Profiting From Piracy

Paul McGuiness, U2 band manager, believes that illegal file-sharing constitutes a part of a commercial agenda of large telecoms and technology industries, earning high money at the expense of right owners.

Paul McGuiness, a longtime band manager for U2, argues that Internet service providers are to be blamed for the damage unauthorized file-sharing has done to the record industry. In addition he claims that ISPs have been profiting over the years at the record industry’s expense.

McGuiness says that despite the fact that service providers introduce themselves as neutral bystanders, they have contributed much to the depreciation of music and all the consequences it caused to the music industry. What ISPs did wrong is that they failed to aggressively sanction unauthorized file-sharing users.

U2 band manager highlights that faster connection speeds, for which service providers normally increase subscription fees, are actually only developed for illegally downloading customers. He refuses to believe that users may want more bandwidth to speed up their e-mails, but increasing the speed of downloading illegal content sounds as a good reason.

He also says that free material is a part of commercial agenda of large technology firms and broadband providers that need more content to create demand for services they provide. To prove this Paul McGuiness points at the figures of the past decade. Profits derived from the Internet access (both fixed line and mobile) quadruplicated within the last 5 years, while record industry revenues fell twice.

His argument sound reasonable for a number of reasons. First of all, considering that the memory storage capacity of portable players like iPod is huge, expecting people to fill it with legally acquired music isn’t reasonable at all, as it may cost up to $16,000. Is McGuiness ready to spend that much money for filling the music player? Guess not. So that’s why people download the content illegally or share music with family and friends. Although the manufacturers, for example Apple, are aware of the situation, they keep increasing the memory storage capacity to charge users more.

Also the ISPs advertise faster connection speeds to charge users more as well, though most people need only surf the Internet and check email.

So he’s probably right when considering that companies won’t stop using illegal file-sharing to profit. Still, they only have to do that because of inability of rights owners to adapt to a new business model.

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If you're a huge asian movie lover who loves to download thru internet be sure to register while its open for registration. I've been waiting for this moment. I already got my account. Happy Downloading & Be a Seeder not a Leecher.


FYI:

A seeder is someone who contributes to a torrent. Basically if you use a torrent client it is set to seed what you download for a set period after you have downloaded. This is completely configurable by the user.

A leecher is someone who downloads files and does not contribute to a seed or does not share any files that they have.


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