Copyright holders thought they had scored a major victory last month when one of the biggest file-sharing networks in the world was shuttered. Megaupload had been responsible for an estimated 30% to 40% of all file-sharing traffic worldwide, but a recent study suggests that the network’s closure did absolutely nothing to slow piracy related to file-sharing. To compound matters, another network that has flown under the radar for some time has now been dragged into the spotlight, and it may pose one of the biggest threats yet to copyright owners and their content. Read on for more.

“Tribler” is a peer-to-peer file-sharing client that is completely decentralized. “The only way to take it down is to take the Internet down,” the software’s creator says.

The Tribler BitTorrent client has been in development for more than five years and according to the researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who built it, it has experienced 100% uptime since it first launched.

Unlike standard BitTorrent clients that rely on torrent sites to find and download content, Tribler is based on true peer-to-peer technology that requires no intermediate servers. Instead, the client installed on users’ computers communicates directly with other PCs on which Tribler is running.

“Our key scientific quest is facilitating unbounded information sharing,” Tribler creator Dr. Pouwelse told TorrentFreak in a recent interview. “We simply don’t like unreliable servers. With Tribler we have achieved zero-seconds downtime over the past six years, all because we don’t rely on shaky foundations such as DNS, web servers or search portals.”

Though it took an extensive investigation and coordinated efforts across multiple continents to take down Megaupload and its founder Kim Dotcom, the task was simple compared to stopping the threat posed by decentralized clients like Tribler. Joe Morganelli, founder of copyright consulting firm Morganelli Group, thinks true peer-to-peer clients like Tribler will change the way BitTorrent is used, making it infinitely more difficult for authorities and copyright owners to combat piracy.

“With no central location it will make going after individuals so much more important,” Morganelli told BGR in an interview, though he acknowledges that this approach has not been terribly effective in the past. ”The crusade against a normal individual has had very little effect since there are millions of people,” Morganelli continued. “With the central location, it makes for an easy lawsuit.”

Tribler is free to download and use, and its code is completely open source.

Federal prosecutors in Virginia have shut down notorious file-sharing site Megaupload.com and charged the service’s founders with violating piracy laws. The Associated Press broke the story on Thursday, reporting that the indictment accuses Megaupload.com’s owner with costing copyright holders including record labels and movie studios more than $500 million in lost revenue. Seven people tied to Megaupload.com have been charged and four are already in custody, including the site’s founder Kim Dotcom. Dotcom earned $42 million from the the site in 2010 according to the indictment. Megaupload.com allowed users to upload and share content without any measures in place to ensure files being hosted on the site’s servers were not protected by copyright. The company claims that it responded to copyright complaints as they were received. According to court documents made available on Thursday, Megaupload.com was at one point the 13th most trafficked website in the world.

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Apple has been testing a new wireless sharing feature that could allow users to quickly and easily transfer files from various iOS devices, PatentlyApple has discovered. The technology will no doubt compete with HP’s webOS “Touch-to-share” feature, which lets the Palm Pre3 and the TouchPad share files with one another. Though there is no indication as to when Apple might implement the tech, Apple’s patents outline a technology that appears to one-up HP’s offering. The patent describes the sharing experience as including both visual and audio aspects. As PatentlyApple points out, imagine an iPad “sucking” the files from your iPhone with a vacuum noise, and seeing the files leave the iPhone and appear on the iPad in an animated fashion. Or, as the image above shows, a user might be able to “pour” the files from an iPhone onto an iPad. The transfer process may also include “physical, intuitive gestures.” The patent application number 20110163944 was filed in the first quarter of 2010 and the inventors listed are Brett Bilbrey, Nicholas King and Todd Benjamin.

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Motorola announced Wednesday that it has acquired Zecter. While Zecter is perhaps best known for its original ZumoDrive service — a cloud-based file storage and sync product that emerged in a cluster of similar services following the success of Dropbox — Motorola appears to be far more interested in the service’s ability to store and stream media files on demand. Motorola will look to integrate Zecter’s technology with its MOTOBLUR product, a service and UI layer that sits above Android on several Motorola phones. “Consumers want seamless access to their content and media from wherever they are, while content providers want to ensure that content remains protected and secure,” said Motorola Mobility’s VP of software and services, Christy Wyatt. “We believe that Zecter enables that seamless experience with the necessary security measures, and we are delighted to be able to work with this team.” Hit the break for the full press release from Motorola.

Motorola Mobility Acquires Zecter

Acquisition to Enhance Motorola Mobility with Personal Cloud Server and Synch Technologies

LIBERTYVILLE, Ill., Dec. 22, 2010 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Motorola Mobility, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT), today announced that it has acquired Zecter, Inc., a leading start-up with synchronization and streaming technologies for on-demand digital media consumption.  Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Zecter’s solutions connect users to their content seamlessly and instantaneously, giving them simple, on-the-go access to music, video, photos and documents from their smartphones, tablets, PCs and web-portals.  Zecter currently has two products commercially available: ZumoDrive, for cloud-based content sync, access and sharing; and ZumoCast, for personal media streaming to any device.  Both products use innovative virtual file system technologies to make any personal content instantly available even if it is not stored locally.

Zecter will further enhance Motorola Mobility’s mobile content experience and MOTOBLUR service offering by enabling consumers to enjoy their digital content across their mobile devices, wherever they are.  Motorola Mobility will integrate Zecter’s wireless syncing, desktop integration, video transcoding and thin-file retrieval technologies across its device and MOTOBLUR offerings to provide consumers with real-time access to their content.

“Consumers want seamless access to their content and media from wherever they are, while content providers want to ensure that content remains protected and secure,”  said Christy Wyatt, corporate vice president of software and services, Motorola Mobility. “We believe that Zecter enables that seamless experience with the necessary security measures, and we are delighted to be able to work with this team.”

Wyatt added, “Zecter’s robust team brings multi-platform expertise along with compelling solutions for continuous digital media access across multiple platforms.  Zecter is an exciting addition to our MOTOBLUR service platform and we welcome their highly skilled personnel to the Motorola Mobility team.”

As part of the transition, the distribution of Zecter’s ZumoCast software will be suspended while enhancements are made. Existing ZumoCast users may continue to enjoy the service without interruption. Motorola Mobility will provide regular updates for ZumoCast users as well as exciting future plans for this service. The ZumoDrive solution will be unaffected.

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A new report Thursday suggests that legendary piracy pioneer LimeWire may soon call it quits. LimeWire was hardly the first network of its kind, but along with services like Kazaa, LimeWire played a major role in bringing file-sharing to the masses. This past October, LimeWire was forced to shutter its file-sharing service following a court order. Now, the company’s recent attempts to jump from seedy to sanctioned appear to be for naught. According to an alleged email to vendors obtained by All Things Digital, LimeWire will soon cease its attempts to run a legitimate online music store. The site also stopped accepting payments for its current offering according to a note on its homepage. LimeWire has supposedly been working on a new legal music service for the better part of 2010, but those plans are nixed as well. From the look of things, LimeWire will be no more as of January 1st, 2011. Hit the break for a copy of the company’s email to its partners.

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It truly is the end of an era. AllThingsD is reporting that P2P file sharing service Limewire will shutdown “searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality” as the result of a court ruling last year that favored the recording industry. A Limewire spokesperson had this to say:

While this is not our ideal path, we hope to work with the music industry in moving forward.  We look forward to embracing necessary changes and collaborating with the entire music industry in the future.

If you have a drink in your hand, pour a little out for your homeboy Limewire… and go find yourself a good BitTorrent client.

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If you didn’t already think the people behind the RIAA and MPAA were insane, we’re positive that your opinion on them will change as soon as your read what the two associations have proposed in a recent letter to the Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement. Here are but some of the changes the two have asked for:

• The installation of spyware on computers which would seek out and automatically delete illegally obtained media
• Censorship of the internet which would block the transfer of illegal files
• Giving border guards the authority to search one’s tech gear for illegal files
• The lobbying of foreign governments to follow suit
• Having the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security actively and swiftly enforcing copyright laws

Scary as hell, right?

[Via Boing Boing]

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In an uncharacteristically rational move, on the surface at least, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has decided that it will stop suing individuals caught downloading pirated music and will instead focus solely on asking the pirates ISP to either serve warning or kill their internet connections. This tactic is by no means new and is in fact standard practice in many countries across the world where, you guessed it, it makes little to no difference in levels of music piracy. But hey, at least the RIAA has finally realized that its spending $100,000 to sue a struggling single-mom diner waitress for $25,000 after catching her downloading a few pirated CDs is plain stupid, especially when there isn’t a hope in the world that it’ll ever collect a penny from her.

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When Kevin Bermeister of Kazaa fame and Michael Speck, former head of Music Industry’s anti-piracy arm join together to form a new company called Brilliant Digital Entertainment, you know the outcome will not be good. The brainchild of this duo is an application called Copyrouter that will use deep packet inspection to detect illicit files shared on the Internet.The application has been promoted as “the tool” that will eradicate child pornography but its true intent is much more nefarious. If it can sniff out child porn which is great, but it can also sniff out pirated media like movies, music, and games. The application is brilliant in its execution. Any customer attempting to access a file deemed “illegal” by the application will be redirected to a legal version which they can purchase. The legal version of the file is provided by the ISP who will bill the customer and receive a cut of the proceeds. Nothing like dangling the carrot of easy revenue in front of the ISPs to give them incentive to run the application on their network. As expected, “there is keen interest from ISPs, law-enforcement agencies and film and music publishers in the United States and Europe.” One problem, though… Copyrouter is unable to handle BitTorrent traffic! Seriously. The same swarming technology that makes BitTorrent so efficient also makes it impossible for the Copyrouter application to examine and identify BitTorrent files as “illegal”. Let’s hope our revenue motivated and politically pressured ISPs, don’t foist this upon us anytime soon.

[Via DSL Reports]

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Arizona resident Jeffrey Howell learned some a hard lessons this past week. If you are being sued for copyright infringement, get a lawyer and if you are served with a lawsuit that tells you not to tamper with your hard drive, don’t go ahead and format it anyway. In an unfortunate turn of events last week, the second high profile RIAA copyright infringement case came to a screeching halt as it was revealed that the defendant Howell had tampered with the evidence. Howell uninstalled Kazaa, deleted its logs, and formatted his hard drive after receiving the lawsuit; thereby making any evidence irretrievable. The RIAA argued and the judge agreed that “The deliberate destruction… by itself, compels the conclusion that such evidence supported Plaintiffs’ case.” The case was found in favor of the RIAA and a final judgment was announced today. Howell must now cough up a mere $350 in court costs and whopping $40,500 in statutory damages. This case was notable as the RIAA was handed a big setback last April when a judge ruled that simply making a file available on a P2P network did not constitute copyright infringement. A crushing blow to the legal basis of the RIAA’s infringement cases. Too bad it had to end so badly.

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While the popularity of torrents has shown no signs of dwindling any time soon, the MPAA-fueled case against EliteTorrents just saw its first conviction. Back in 2005, Homeland Security agents served search warrants in various locations around the country as part of “Operation D-Elite” that resulted in 10 arrests. What a fantastic use of the country’s counterterrorism resources. Now more than three years later Clintwood Virginia resident Dale Dove has been convicted of felony copyright infringement and conspiracy, and has become the first man to be convicted as a result of the case. According to prosecutors of the case, Dove was the ringleader in the group of pirated content suppliers that was EliteTorrents. Dove apparently maintained a server of his own and played a part in recruiting others to supply content and servers. While Dove represents the first conviction in this case, he will not be the first to serve time as a result. In 2006, EliteTorrents server administrator Scott McCausland pleaded guilty to two copyright-related charges tied to the distribution of Star Wars: Episode III and served five months in jail plus an addition five months of house arrest (during which has wasn’t allowed to use Linux). Dove’s sentencing will take place in September; good luck buddy.

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