A Russian startup that received $100,000 of funding from Microsoft made headlines recently as its emerging efforts to battle digital piracy found their way to the spotlight. Dubbed Pirate Pay, the company’s technology launches attacks on groups of computers hosting pirated content, theoretically making it impossible for them to share copyrighted material. While the company claims to have already successfully trialed its technology when it blocked nearly 45,000 attempts to download pirated copies of a Russian film, one expert believes Pirate Pay’s system may be illegal.“Reading the article it sound like they are spoofing traffic to confuse torrent clients and force disconnects,” former BitTorrent VP of engineering John Pettitt wrote in a note distributed in Dave Farber’s Interesting-People elist, Techdirt reports. ”It’s not at all clear if this will work against all versions of the protocol (particularly the udp based version). Leaving aside the technical issues it’s also unclear if such action is legal.”

Pettitt continued, ”It sounds like a targeted denial of service attack, a major corporation paying for such an attack leaves itself wide open to civil and criminal legal action particularly if they accidentally target the wrong torrent which given the history is highly likely.”

Pirate Pay’s trial was performed in cooperation with Russia-based Walt Disney Studios Sony Pictures Releasing, and it is unknown if the company is currently in talks with any major studios or related companies based in the United States.

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Russian startup Pirate Pay is taking aim at the growing popularity of illegal file-sharing as it looks to cooperate with music labels and movie studios to stem the distribution of copyrighted materials on the Internet. The company’s technology launches attacks on “BitTorrent swarms,” or groups of computers hosting pirated content, making it impossible for them to share copyrighted material, TorrentFreak reports. “After creating the prototype, we realized we could more generally prevent files from being downloaded, which meant that the program had great promise in combating the spread of pirated content,” Pirate Pay CEO Andrei Klimenko said recently in an interview. Pirate Pay recently received a $100,000 investment from the Microsoft Seed fund, and it claims to have blocked nearly 45,000 attempts to download pirated copies of Russian film “Vysotsky. Thanks to God, I am Alive” in a test campaign launched earlier this year for Russia-based Walt Disney Studios Sony Pictures Releasing.

[Via TorrentFreak]

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In an effort to bypass censorship as well as heat from authorities and copyright owners, The Pirate Bay on Sunday unveiled new plans to “experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air.” The GPS controlled drones will hover over international waters and host parts of the website. “Everyone knows WHAT TPB is. Now they’re going to have to think about WHERE TPB is,” The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak. “We’re already the most resilient and the most down to earth. That’s why we need to lift off, being this connected to the ground doesn’t feel appropriate to us anymore.” The Pirate Bay has been the subject of a number of raids and investigations stemming from numerous claims of copyright infringement. In order to stay afloat, the service seemingly must find new and innovative ways to reach the masses. ”We’re just starting so we haven’t figured everything out yet. But we can’t limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore,” the team stated on its blog. “These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we’re building, that’s more than enough.”

[Via TorrentFreak]

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Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other Internet service providers in the United States will soon launch new programs to police their networks in an effort to catch digital pirates and stop illegal file-sharing. Major ISPs announced last summer that they had agreed to take new measures in an effort to prevent subscribers from illegally downloading copyrighted material, but the specifics surrounding the imminent antipiracy measures were not made available. Now, RIAA chief executive Cary Sherman has said that ISPs are ready to begin their efforts to curtail illegal movie, music and software downloads on July 12th. Read on for more.

“Each ISP has to develop their infrastructure for automating the system,” Sherman said during a talk at the annual Association of American Publishers meeting, according to CNET. Measures will also be taken to establish databases “so they can keep track of repeat infringers, so they know that this is the first notice or the third notice. Every ISP has to do it differently depending on the architecture of its particular network. Some are nearing completion and others are a little further from completion.”

Customers found to be illegally downloading copyrighted material will first receive one or two notifications from their ISPs, essentially stating that they have been caught. If the illegal downloads continue, subscribers will receive a new notice requesting acknowledgement that the notice has been received. Subsequent offenses can then result in bandwidth throttling and even service suspension.

The news comes shortly after the closure of file-sharing giant Megaupload and increased pressure on other networks thought to be major hubs for the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials. Some studies show that these measures have had no impact on piracy, however, so organizations like the RIAA have been lobbying for ISPs to intervene and develop systems that will allow them to police their networks and directly address subscribers who illegally download copyrighted content.

Swedish registrar and Web host Binero on Wednesday confirmed earlier reports suggesting digital piracy hub The Pirate Bay is currently under investigation by authorities in Sweden. Members of The Pirate Bay team reported last week that they believe the site is currently the focus of a new investigation, and that Swedish police are planning to execute a raid in an effort to seize Pirate Bay servers. IDG’s ComputerSweden on Wednesday reported that the site’s Web host has confirmed that the group’s suspicions are at least partially true. ”We can confirm that an investigation is underway against the Pirate Bay. We received a letter with questions,” Binero representative Erik Arnberg said. ”We will not share any information about our customers until there is a court order, or when a prosecutor can refer to an applicable law. In this case, we have answered the questions with information that’s already available through Whois services.” Authorities in Sweden raided The Pirate Bay back in 2006 and the company’s founders were later sentenced to jail and forced to pay millions in fines after being found guilty of multiple piracy-related charges.

[Via TorrentFreak]

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The recent ordeal surrounding the now defeated SOPA and PIPA proposals followed by the shuttering of file-sharing giant Megaupload has put online piracy back in the spotlight. Despite studies showing Megaupload’s closure had no impact on online piracy whatsoever, copyright owners continue to pressure authorities in an effort to go after more services similar to Megaupload. The new wave of attention these file-sharing services are attracting is driving some illegal downloaders to seek out new means of sharing copyrighted materials, and decentralized torrent network Tribler emerged as one option. Another interesting solution created by a New York University professor takes things a step further, however, completely removing the Internet from the file-sharing equation and therefore putting pirates out of authorities’ reach.

NYU professor David Darts created the PirateBox more than a year ago and now, thanks to the availability of new cheaper components, users can build a box for as little as $50 according to TorrentFreak. Once assembled, the PirateBox essentially acts as its own file-sharing network, broadcasting wirelessly and allowing any users within range to upload and download files.

“Simply turn the PirateBox on to transform any space into a temporary communication and wireless file sharing network,” Darts wrote on his wiki page. “When users join the PirateBox wireless network and open a web browser, they are automatically redirected to the PirateBox welcome page. Users can then immediately begin chatting and/or uploading or downloading files.”

Darts has published a free DIY guide that allows anyone to gather the equipment needed and build a PirateBox quickly and easily, and all of the software used by the device is free and open source. ”The PirateBox consists of a wireless router and light-weight Linux server connected to a USB hard drive,” Darts notes. “The system can run on AC or DC power which allows it to be fully mobile. You can take it to the park, operate it a cafe, in a subway, at work, etc.”

The solution is designed with both privacy and security in mind. While PirateBox users must be in close quarters in order to access the device, it doesn’t require any logins nor does it log any user data. Users on the local network are kept completely anonymous and because there is no Internet connection, there is no way for authorities working with copyright owners to track the service.

Swedish authorities have reportedly secured warrants and are planning to raid The Pirate Bay. Unnamed Pirate Bay team members speaking with TorrentFreak claim to have learned that the raid is currently being planned by Swedish police, and they expect the operation to target Pirate Bay servers and the site’s new .se domain. Law enforcement officials in Sweden first raided The Pirate Bay in 2006, and the company’s founders were eventually sentenced to jail and forced to pay millions in fines. The service remained online, however, and it is still operational today. “The Swedish district attorney Fredrik Ingblad initiated a new investigation into The Pirate Bay back in 2010. Information has been leaked to us every now and then by multiple sources, almost on a regular basis. It’s an interesting read,” The Pirate Bay said on its blog. “We can certainly understand why WikiLeaks wished to be hosted in Sweden, since so much data leaks there. The reason that we get the leaks is usually that the whistleblowers do not agree with what is going on. Something that the governments should have in mind – even your own people do not agree.”

[Via TorrentFreak]

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Though box office revenues declined for the second consecutive year in 2011, a new study suggests that there is little if any correlation between United States box office revenues and illegal file-sharing facilitated by BitTorrent. Major Hollywood studios have spent tremendous resources over the years fighting digital piracy, but the recent study conducted by researchers from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College is the latest to suggest that illegal file-sharing services have less of an impact on movie sales than had previously been conveyed, at least where U.S. box office sales are concerned. While there is some evidence that suggests a link between BitTorrent and decreased international box office sales due to the delay between U.S. openings and international openings, no such connection could be made in the U.S. ”We do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy,” the researchers wrote. The team did not investigate the potential relationship between digital piracy and DVD sales or legal movie downloads.

[Via TorrentFreak]

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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.

On Wednesday, Sweden’s Supreme Court announced that it decided not to grant an appeal in the long-running Pirate Bay trial. After a nine-day trial in April 2009, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström were found guilty of assistance to copyright infringement and sentenced to one year each in prison and payment of roughly $7 million in damages. Each defendant appealed the verdict, and in November 2010 the sentences were shortened, but the fines were increased. The new sentence was again appealed, and now the Supreme Court has rejected those appeals. Sunde must serve eight months in prison, with Neij facing 10 and Lundström to face four months. Svartholm, who missed the hearing do to illness, will be forced to serve a one year prison sentence. One of the defendants, however, reached out to TorrentFreak and informed the website that he plans appeal the new sentence at the European Court of Justice.

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Piracy is still a huge problem according to the music industry and Hollywood, and it’s hard to dispute the notion that downloading a paid digital product without actually paying for it is theft. Now, as TorrentFreak releases its list of the 10 most pirated movies of 2011, we can see a possible correlation between illegal downloads and movie revenue continue to take shape. Read on for more.

Fast Five — the fifth film in Universal’s Fast & Furious franchise — was the most pirated movie this year according to TorrentFreak, having been downloaded 9.26 million times. The Hangover II followed with 8.84 million downloads, and Thor was the third most pirated film with 8.33 million illegal downloads. Source Code followed with 7.91 million downloads and I Am Number Four rounded out the top-5 with 7.67 million downloads.

At the same time, movie ticket sales and box office revenue declined for the second straight year in 2011 according to The Numbers. Moviegoers purchased 1.24 billion tickets in 2011 compared to 1.33 billion last year, and revenue from ticket sales sank to $9.9 billion this year from $10.46 billion 2010.

Perhaps even more telling are DVD sales figures in 2011 compared to 2010. While legal digital downloads certainly gained popularity in 2011 and likely had a more significant impact on DVD sales, the disparity between DVD revenue in 2010 compared to this year is much more pronounced than it has been in the past. Seven movies saw DVD sales that exceeded $100 million in 2010, lead by Avatar, which pulled in more than $183 million. In 2011, no DVD did $100 million in sales; Disney’s Tangled was the highest-grossing DVD of the year with just $96 million in sales.

A complete list of the top 10 most pirated movies of 2011 along with torrent download totals and worldwide gross revenue totals follows below.

Read [top 10 torrents] Read [ticket sales, revenue] Read [DVD sales]

It is a sad day for torrent lovers. A few days ago, an injunction was granted to several Hollywood movie studios that prohibited CB3ROB — thepiratebay.org’s hosting company — from connecting the site to the internet. Torrent Freak is reporting that CB3ROB director, Sven Olaf Kamphuis, has decided to “stop routing The Pirate Bay’s traffic until his lawyers have carefully read and reviewed the legal documents.” The report goes on to say the torrent site has, “already set the backup process in motion which will bring the site back online. The Pirate Bay’s servers are untouched and getting the site up and running only requires the routing (IP-tunnel) to go through another provider.” At time of publishing thepiratebay.org was down. 

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The net neutrality movement received a huge blow today when the US Court of Appeals sided with Comcast in its claim that the Federal Communications Commission lacks legal authority to demand ISPs shape internet traffic. Over the past few years, the FCC has grown increasingly concerned that ISPs would throttle connection speeds for things such as peer-to-peer file sharing and streaming media in order to dedicate more bandwidth to services it can better capitalize on. Comcast first challenged the FCC on net neutrality in 2008 when the FCC reprimanded Comcast for throttling the connections of clients who used a large amount of bandwidth through P2P networking.

As a rule of thumb, we at BGR are not in favor of government agencies (whether independent or not) imposing rules upon industries, although in this instance we’re actually finding ourselves disappointed if only for the fact we believe net neutrality must become a reality.

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Just because we might associate the company with loveable characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck doesn’t mean the characters who are running the show at Warner Bros. Entertain UK have similar personalities. After all, they’re the ones that came up with the brilliant idea of hiring a student intern, paying him or her £17,500 ($26,212 USD) over the course of a year and having them engage in a bit of digital espionage. The intern, who is to be “IT literate” and currently enrolled as a student pursuing a degree in computer science, will be charged with infiltrating torrent sites and creating bots which sniff out media which Warner Bros. and NBC Universal hold the copyrights to. Here’s a snippet from the job description:

During the 12 month internship, duties will include: monitoring local Internet forums and IRC for pirated WB and NBCU content and in order to gather information on pirate sites, pirate groups and other pirate activities; finding new and maintaining existing accounts on private sites; scanning for links to hosted pirated WB and NBCU content and using tools to issue takedown requests; maintaining and developing bots for Internet link scanning system (training provided); preparing sending of infringement notices and logging feedback; performing trap purchases of pirated product and logging results; inputting pirate hard goods data and other intelligence into the forensics database; selecting local keywords and submitting local filenames for monitoring and countermeasure campaigns and periodically producing research documents on piracy related technological developments. Various training will be provided.

Yikes.

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First, the short version: The Pirate Bay has been acquired by Global Gaming Factory X AB for $7.7 million. Now the even shorter version: WTF?! We don’t know where to start with this one. The ridiculously low acquisition price? The fact that this politically active, anti-establishment, controversial, torrent-loving site was acquired at all? A blog post on the site this morning states:

The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess [SIC] of the nets.

Fair enough. The deal is expected to be completed in August and whatever the case, expect The Pirate Bay to undergo some pretty big changes moving forward. If you’re a pirate, expect The Pirate Bay also to become infinitely less useful moving forward. Apparently those legal fees add up pretty fast.

[Via The Pirate Bay]

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