Pirate Bay hopes for a full flotilla

Possibly not the Christmas Present the copyright industry was hoping for: The Pirate Bay has released its source code into the open so anyone who fancies running a mini Pirate Bay can do so.

It's a response to Swedish police - acting on behalf of the private companies which control copyrights - closing the site down last week and, therefore, something like the 795th time the music and film industry have learned the lesson that file sharing isn't something you can just send policemen and lawyers to fix.

Bing throws 'pirates' off its search engine

Bing has removed "several hundred thousand" search results from its index, believing them to be links to unlicenced content.

A cursory search for, say, "Torrent Monsters University" proves this has had little more effect than removing a few pine needles would diminish a forest.

Bing's user base is out visiting his grandson this weekend, and is unavailable for comment.

"This also available in licenced version" plan

There's something sweet about Comcast's plans to pop up a message when it sees someone downloading an unlicenced track:

As sources described the new system, a consumer illegally downloading a film or movie from a peer-to-peer system would be quickly pushed a pop-up message with links to purchase or rent the same content, whether the title in question exists on the VOD library of a participating distributor’s own broadband network or on a third-party seller like Amazon.

How effective is this likely to be? There's two reasons why people grab torrents - because the content isn't available through licenced platforms; or because it is, but they'd rather not pay.

In effect, this is like trying to do home security by sticky-taping the Argos catalogue laptop page to the top of your Macbook.

Sky Broadband casts itself as wheezy cat; Pirate Bay proxies as mice

Sky Broadband has started to block access to Pirate Bay proxy sites, in a bid to inspire the creation of other Pirate Bay proxy sites ("defeat unlicensed file sharing once and for all").

The Pirate Bay buries its tracker

The Pirate Bay has announced that its torrent tracker is down and never coming back.

Not, they rush to stress, because of the legal actions brought against them. No, it's because just as how Napster really outlived its usefulness as you no longer needed a server, the trackers themselves are now passe:

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well,” the Pirate Bay crew write on their blog.

In fact, the Pirate Bay are in talks with torrenting sites to encourage the eradication of torrents altogether:

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT+PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak.

The record labels have got what they wanted. But it's not quite what they were hoping for.

Music industry policy in action

Well done, the music industry. Your efforts to close down the Pirate Bay might have cost you a fortune in legal brain-hire, and might not have actually have done more than take the site down for spurts, but still: You made your point, right?

Sure, what you also did was lead to a increase in the number of Pirate Bay-alike sites doing the same job, but in a more distributed fashion. But you made your point. Like when you closed Napster down, and wound up with helping the drive to filesharing in the first place.

According to [McAfee security analyst Greg] Day, in the days prior to the shutdown, treasure-hunters used anonymising software to gain access and copy the indexes that Pirate Bay used to redirect users to other computers hosting torrents.

Once the indexed data was in the public domain, open-source code was available to anyone who wanted to help with redistribution of torrents. While the Pirate Bay was offline there were four times as many sites offering access to the torrents.

Well done, the music industry. Well done.

Kyrgyzstan torrent site taken offline

Torrent.kg, the Kyrgyzstan torrent site, has been closed by the country's Finance Police. Their servers have been seized while claims of copyright infringement are investigated.

The service was primarily used for porn and unlicensed software - in a country where even Windows XP costs more than the average monthly wage - but also was used for music sharing.

Amazon try to distance themselves from torrents

Coda FM, a torrent site, has been offering people the opportunity to buy albums after sampling tracks for free, by using Amazon links. It's worked, too - they've sold a not insubstantial number of albums. Now, though, Amazon are asking them to stop.

Which means that Amazon appear to be saying they really don't want to offer people the chance to legitimately purchase a product if they had previously had a grey version of it. Wouldn't it be more copyright friendly to offer sinners a way to repent?

Anyway, the site isn't going to stop linking:

“We give the user the option to easily buy an album that they liked after downloading and hearing it for free,” the Coda.fm founder told TorrentFreak. He thought it was a good idea, and it therefore came as a surprise when Amazon asked him to remove the links from the site. In addition, the world’s largest online retailer closed his associate account.

Even though he's not making any money from the links any more, he's keen for there to still be a legal purchase route. Presumably Amazon's fear is of seeming to give legitimacy to a peer-to-peer site?

The Pirate Google

The question raised as Judge Ilovemesomecopyrights threw The Pirate Bay team into prison (or, at least, a long, drawn-out, process of appeals) was why the IFPI was targeting one search engine while not having a pop at Google.

There are two answers: first, Google could theoretically buy the four major labels without breaking much of a sweat and where would the IFPI be then? But, secondly, and more seriously, Google could find it much easier to argue - under US law - that it's just offering a search, and if people use it to search for things they shouldn't, well, that might be regrettable but is hardly their fault.

As if to test this hypothesis comes The PIrate Google:

The intention of this site is to demonstrate the double standard that was exemplified in the recent Pirate Bay Trial. Sites such as Google offer much the same functionality as The Pirate Bay and other Bit Torrent sites but are not targeted by media conglomerates such as the IFPI as they have the political and legal clout to defend themselves unlike these small independent sites.

What the organisers of this site seem to have missed is that, effectively, they're doing what The Pirate Bay did and what Google doesn't - building a search that expressly looks for torrents. So, rather than suggesting the IFPI goes after Google rather than the little guy, aren't they just making themselves targets?

[via Everything Is Miscellaneous]

Smaller Swedish torrent trackers shut shop

Following the Pirate Bay judgement, a range of smaller Swedish based torrent sites have started to seal up their businesses and move on.

Music Ally is suggesting that this represents a sort-of victory for the music industry - but, seriously, did the IFPI and its associates really pour all that time and money into forcing MP3nerds off the internet?

The Pirate Bay remains afloat, and - apart from the less-than-valuable principle that Sweden might not be the best place to set up a torrent site - closing down a few hobbyists doesn't seem to be that wonderful an outcome.

Facebook repels pirates

Facebook has told Pirate Bay it doesn't want links to torrents popping up on the service:

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told TorrentFreak, “Facebook respects copyrights and our Terms of Service prohibits placement of ‘Share on Facebook’ links on sites that contain “any content that is infringing. Given the controversy surrounding The Pirate Bay and the pending lawsuit against them, we’ve reached out to The Pirate Bay and asked them to remove the ‘Share on Facebook’ links from their site. The Pirate Bay has not responded and so we have blocked their torrents from being shared on Facebook.”

Interesting. It's true that there is a pending lawsuit against Pirate Bay - although, given that it's pending, you might wonder if Facebook might not be better off waiting for the courts to decide on the lawsuit before springing into action.

It's also questionable if Facebook is wise to strike out these links from its end - because asking Pirate Bay not to share is fine; banning all links is fine. But once you start picking and choosing what links you're going to allow, Facebook shifts from being a platform to being an editor. Given that some torrents on Pirate Bay are completely legal, and some links to non-Pirate Bay webspaces are to unlicensed content, Facebook is now having to exercise a value judgement. And if a judgement is being made, sooner or later that judgement is going to have to be explained; especially why some torrent links have been allowed to remain active while others have been blocked, and why some services are targeted when others are not.

Oh, and also: Facebook has decided to not tell its users the truth about why iso links hosted on the Pirate Bay servers are being blocked:

According to the message you’ll see on Facebook it is because it “has been reported as abusive by Facebook users” but this is inaccurate.

At least be honest with your audience, Facebook. If you're sure you're doing the right thing, why hide behind a half truth?

Marillion to give away their new album

Marillion have decided that the market value of the digital version of their next album is one email address. They're going to be releasing Happiness Is The Road for free onto the torrents; first play of the official tracks will generate a pop-up box into which you stick your email address, which will then be collected by the band.

The thinking is that most people who like Marillion would rather pay for the finished CD and live in anonymity than to let the band know who they are. Or something.

NME surprised to find Joe Lean album online

With an air of bewildered surprise, NME.com reports that the cancelled Joe Lean And The Jing Jang Jong album has "found its way" onto file-sharing sites.

Commenters on our post about the cancellation had pointed out that it was in the wild before the record company had decided it wasn't good enough.

Bittorrent not keen on all sharing

Valleywag's story that Bittorrent was laying of twelve staff proved to be slightly flawed - there was a last-minute decision to save some of the employees. The original generated a huffy official statement, but also a surprising request from Bittorrent's PR person Lily Lin, who tried to persuade Valleywag to offer up the name of the original anonymous tipster who told them about the job losses.

"Any chance?" begged Lin, alongside the sort of threat that even Slartybartfast would have thought a bit weak - "I've heard rumblings of legal implications".

There's no money in torrents

Sometimes, there's room for schadenfreude for the music industry: BitTorrent Inc is having financial difficulties and is having to lay off twelve of its 55 staff. It's plan for profit - an online shop stuck on the torrent backend - turned out to have a fatal flaw, in that people who use bittorrent tend to not be used to paying for the service.

Too thick to leak

The default No Rock eyebrow position when we hear of bands in need of publicity whose tracks "leak" onto the internet is half-raised; now, our suspicion that the leak/moan about leak strategy is well in play has been confirmed - The Wall Street Journal reports that Torrentfreak has caught Buckcherry redhanded.

The "leak" of Too Drunk To Fuck outraged the band:

Buckcherry wrote in a July 3 MySpace posting that "we hate it when this s- happens, because we want our FANS to have any new songs first." In that post, the band provided a link that allows fans to download a copy of the song, and soon after posted a music video on its Web site. A July 22 news release from Atlantic quoted the band making the same complaint.

The trouble is, it turns out that the leak came from the band's manager, Josh Klemme.

But, of course, the record industry couldn't be using illegal filesharing as a marketing route, could it? Because that could create a hypocrisy-feedback-loop out of which we might never escape.

A snapshot of that new world

Big Champagne - who have been counting torrent downloaders since the days when people still used to ring up their mate who was good with computers to do it for them - have issued some interesting stats about Radiohead's In Rainbows, which PaidContent see as some sort of sign that we're all doomed:

Some 2.3 million people skanked Radiohead's latest album from BitTorrent sources during the two months it was legally available for free. A research paper from P2P monitor Big Champagne and the UK's MCPS-PRS royalty collection society said the "staggering" number "far exceeds what outsiders have reported as the estimated download total from the bands official website, regardless of whether those downloaders paid or not".

See? Even if you try to give people something nice, they'll still rob it! Doom! Darkness!

Maybe so many people are already downloading the rest of their albums from torrents, they simply couldn't be arsed to type inrainbows.com in their browser. The bottom line is that legal free was trumped by illegal free.

But is this really doom? Isn't this news quite cheery for the music industry? Scroll down the report a little:

In Rainbows torrent downloads peaked on the first day data was collected, October 27, at 400,000 - what Page and Garland call "a bloody big number". How big? More than double the top torrent through March and May (Panic At The Disco's Pretty Odd) got in a whole week (ie. 10 times Panic's daily average).

So, what we're talking about here is not large numbers of people habitually pinching albums. What we're talking about is a spike in free downloading of an album that was available for nothing.

So, while the MCPS scare about for sky-falling reasons...:

The report's "venue hypothesis" posits net users have simply become accutomed to using technologies like Gnutella, BitTorrent and trackers like Mininova. What's more, "an off-limits venue may be even more appealing" to the core youth market. So illegal is now entrenched, it's habitual and the business faces an uphill struggle to change that.

... isn't the evidence telling us that people do have the ability to download stuff from the torrents, but mostly aren't using that ability; and that they only did when they had reason to believe it was okay to do so. Because can anyone explain to me the actual, real "illegality" of downloading for free something from one place that one can legally download for free from another? I don't mean the letter-of-the-law difference, but the moral difference? And, even if you can, isn't it just possible that the nicety was lost on the great masses who heard Radiohead were making an album available for free (as was repeatedly, erroneously, reported at the time) and didn't see there was a problem in where they didn't pay for it?

Oink drops its bacon sandwich

In what the IFPI-RIAA is claiming as a major victory, and what others are saying "they've shut the what?", the operator of alleged file-sharing site OiNK has been arrested:

A Cleveland Police spokesman said: "This extremely lucrative and creative scheme consisted of a private file-sharing website being set up. Membership was by invitation only.

"The site allowed the uploading and downloading of pre-release music and media to thousands of members.

"Members paid 'donations' via debit or credit cards, ensuring their continued access to the site."

The arrests took place in Teesside, following a raid on the servers in the Netherlands. IFPI spokespeople claim the site was responsible for "the leaking" of 60 pre-release albums this year:

They were encouraged to distribute recordings in the torrent file format with other OiNK members, and have to keep posting such music to the site to maintain their membership.

"Once an album had been posted on the OiNK website, the users that download that music then passed the content to other websites, forums and blogs, where multiple copies were made.

"Within a few hours of a popular pre-release track being posted on the OiNK site, hundreds of copies can be found further down the illegal online supply chain."

Although, really, it doesn't offer any evidence that OiNK was the point where these albums entered the internet; it seems likely it was just a clearing house that attracted more savvy users who reshared releases found elsewhere.