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.

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.

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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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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Demonoid Shut Down By The CRIA

The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.

Demonoid Website


* Not again, this is a huge blow to us leechers.

OiNK.cd Servers Raided, Admin Arrested

The servers of OiNK.cd - one of the most popular private BitTorrent trackers - are raided and the admin, a 24-year-old man from Middlesbrough, is arrested.

The British and the Dutch police both contributed to the investigation that was initiated by the IFPI and the BPI, two well known anti-piracy organizations. The operation was supported by Interpol who coordinated the international cooperation.

According to early reports OiNk’s servers were confiscated in Amsterdam last week. This seems to be unlikely because the site was still fully functional 24 hours ago. The administrator of OiNK was arrested this morning by the Cleveland Police. The BBC reports that his employer and the home of his father were raided as well.

Jeremy Banks, Head of the IFPI’s Internet Anti-Piracy Unit, said in a response to the news: “OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music online. This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online.”

OiNK hosted hundreds and thousands of torrents with over a million peers which makes it more popular than most public trackers. The site was known to be one of the first places where leaked music albums appeared, so anti-piracy outfits such as MediaDefender were keeping a close eye on it.

In July the tracker already changed its name from OiNK.me.uk to OiNK.cd due to “legal” issues with their domain registrar. Unfortunately it now seems that the popular private BitTorrent tracker is in bigger trouble.

Demonoid Is Back Online!

After being down for a couple of days. Bittorent tracker site is up and running once again. Hooray! Their News post.....

===========================================================
Downtime

We received a letter from a lawyer representing the CRIA, they were threatening with legal action and we need to start blocking Canadian traffic because of this.

Thanks for your understanding, and sorry for any inconvenience.
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