TorrentFreak Email Update

MPAA Lists Major Torrent, Usenet and Hosting Sites In Submission To U.S. Government

Posted: 07 Nov 2010 09:10 AM PST

In a response to a request from the Office of the US Trade Representative, the MPAA has submitted a list of "notorious markets" for pirated goods located outside the United States. Among them are some of the world's leading torrent sites including BTjunkie, Demonoid, isoHunt, KickAssTorrents and The Pirate Bay. Usenet service UseNext makes an appearance alongside file-hosters MegaUpload and RapidShare.

In a letter addressed to Kira Alvarez, Chief Negotiator and Deputy Assistant for Intellectual Property Enforcement at the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the MPAA has submitted a list of online and physical locations where unauthorized movie industry products can be obtained.

“The Motion Picture Association of America submits the following response to the request for written submissions issued October 1, 2010, by the Office of the US Trade Representative, inviting submissions from the public on notorious markets outside of the United States,” wrote Interim CEO and President of the MPAA, Bob Pisano.

Following a preamble describing the importance of the movie industry to the U.S. economy, Pisano stresses the influence MPAA member companies products wield internationally and the need to protect their business outside US borders.

“The industry distributes its films to over 150 countries and in 2007, 46 percent of MPAA's member companies' revenue came from overseas,” he wrote.

“MPAA has a strong interest in the health and sustainability of these international markets and appreciates USTR's interest in identifying notorious markets that threaten legitimate commerce, impair legitimate markets' viability and curb U.S. competitiveness and hurt our overall economic strength. It is critical that our trading partners protect and enforce intellectual property rights.”

It will come as no surprise to learn that Pisano’s list of “notorious markets” is headed by some of the world’s biggest torrent sites. Below, we list the sites being targeted and the description of each that the MPAA gave to the U.S. Government, errors (such as TPB having a tracker) intact.

BTjunkie.org – Sweden

This BitTorrent indexer with an Alexa ranking of 385 aggregates content "torrents", which are executable instructions that initiate the download process. Btjunkie offers nearly 100,000 active torrents that are identified as copyrighted movie or television files. Unique to btjunkie.org is its ability to make available both public and non-public infringing content. With most release groups posting new content to non-public torrent websites, this indexing capability is particularly challenging for rightsholders. The site is currently hosted by Sweden's NetworkSpiration.

Demonoid.com – Ukraine

Demonoid is a very active, semi-private BitTorrent tracker and website with servers located in the Ukraine. Individuals can view what is available but downloading the torrent metadata requires the user to log in. A review of the accessible content on the site lists nearly 100,000 copyrighted movies and television files. Demonoid's Alexa ranking is 516 which is extremely high for a semi-private environment

IsoHunt – Canada

This is the most popular BitTorrent site in the world after The Pirate Bay. IsoHunt boasts of having 12.51 million peers and 3,743,581 active torrents and has an Alexa rank of 227. A U.S. Court issued a permanent injunction against IsoHunt after finding that over 90% of the downloads made using IsoHunt's services related to infringing content and that the defendants were liable for inducing infringement. Yet, its Canadian operator continues to run the site with impunity. The site's operator has commenced an action in Canada seeking a declaration that its operations do not violate Canadian law. IsoHunt can be found at 208.71.112.30. Its corporate address is IsoHunt Web Technologies, Inc., 820 Broadway West, Vancouver, BC V8Q 4K1.

Kickasstorrents.com – Sweden

This BitTorrent portal has a commercial look and feel that could deceive users into thinking it is legitimate. It has been gaining popularity since 2009. The site is hosted by Sweden's Dedicated Network, Luxembourg's Root, and France's OVH. This infrastructure creates redundancy to defend against successful litigation, raids or other actions that may threaten the service. Its current Alexa ranking is 457 and it appears to offer access to 8.1 million torrent files.

Rutracker.org – Russia

This BitTorrent portal is the clone to Torrents.ru, which was taken down by the Russian criminal authorities. It is an indexing site that serves four million users and it has over one million active torrents. It has a global Alexa ranking of 297 and a shockingly high local ranking – 15. Torrent.ru had its domain name suspended by RU-Center, the nation’s largest registrar and web-host, but for now the site is back up at Rutracker.org and it remains to be seen whether the new domain will be taken down by the authorities. Its IP address is 195.82.146.114 and it is hosted by AvtomatizatsiyaBusiness Consulting.

ThePirateBay.org – Sweden/Netherlands

This BitTorrent portal has servers in both Sweden and the Netherlands. The Pirate Bay (TPB) comprises a BitTorrent tracker and websites which facilitate the exchange of vast amounts of infringing content. The Pirate Bay operators proudly claim that it is the biggest tracker of its kind in the world, with over one million users. Since its establishment in 2004, the website has grown exponentially and is now accessible in some 39 separate languages. It has facilitated the illegal exchange of untold millions of protected copyright works. Rightsholders, their trade associations and collecting societies have made countless complaints about the TPB's activities. The Pirate Bay contains significant and lucrative third-party advertising, much of it promoting the porn industry and US green cards. Advertising revenue is typically a function of number of unique site visits per day. With more than one million hits per day – the Pirate Bay takes in an estimated $60,000 per month from advertisers in addition to thousands of dollars collected from user "donations." In May 2006, the Swedish Police executed search warrants at 10 separate locations and seized 17 computer servers and made three arrests, closing down the site for a brief period. Although the site operators were ultimately convicted by a Stockholm court, the site has not been shut down. Only the Italian government has taken such action vis à vis Italy. This site has also sparked numerous civil proceedings.

Cyberlockers/File-hosters

From torrent sites, the MPAA then moves to their next biggest target – file-hoster/cyberlocker services.

“It is very common for links to illegal copies of movies and television shows stored on cyberlockers to be widely disseminated across the Internet via linking websites, forums, blogs or email,” says Pisano.

“Some cyberlockers offer both legitimate and infringing content. The cyberlockers listed below were identified because traffic to their sites is driven by the vast amounts of infringing premium content available to users.”

The MPAA goes on to list several hosting services including Megaupload.com, Megavideo.com, RapidShare.com, Webhards (Korea) and Ba-k.com (Mexico).

The linking site Kino.to, which appeared in our recent article, is also listed as problematic.

Not even the newsgroups escape scrutiny, with famous Usenet service UseNext making the list. The MPAA’s description can be seen below:

UseNext.de – Germany/Netherlands.

This Usenet service markets to mainstream P2P users much more heavily and directly than do traditional subscription Usenet services. UseNext claims that over 1.2 million videos are available and proclaims "There is nothing you won't find here." High-quality Blu-ray rips of MPAA members' content can be found on UseNext. UseNext has approximately 200,000 regular users. UseNext provides a free trial period to users and then subscription plans start at approximately $10 USD a month and go up based on the quantity of content users wish to download. It is estimated that UseNext clears around 100,000 EUR a month. UseNext is a German operation with indexing servers in the Netherlands. Its Alexa rank is 5,845 and its German rank is 2,811.

The rest of Pisano’s letter is dedicated to both online services selling counterfeit physical products and real-life physical locations around the world selling the same, including markets in such diverse locations such as Ukraine, Czech Republic, Canada, Indonesia, Ireland, India, various South American countries and China.

“MPAA supports USTR's efforts to identify foreign notorious markets. These markets are an immediate threat to legitimate commerce, impairing legitimate markets' viability and curbing U.S. competitiveness. We strongly support efforts by the US government to work with trading partners to protect and enforce intellectual property rights and, in so doing, protect U.S. jobs,” Pisano concludes.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

5 Torrent Files That Broke Mind Boggling Records

Posted: 07 Nov 2010 05:34 AM PST

BitTorrent was first released by Bram Cohen back in 2001, but it took two years before the new file-sharing protocol gained a notable audience. In the years that followed millions of torrent files were downloaded and shared billions of times. In this article we will discuss five memorable torrent files that each broke a unique record, from the largest in size to the oldest that's still alive today.

In the near half decade that TorrentFreak has been covering the latest BitTorrent news and developments, every now and then we also have time to discuss BitTorrent trivia. Today we’ll bring you a list of 5 single torrent files that each broke an impressive record, from the largest through to the oldest, and the one that transferred most data.

The Largest Torrent

When we refer to the largest torrent we mean the single .torrent file that downloads the most data, not the size of the .torrent file itself. There are several huge torrent files active at the moment, but the record goes to a torrent with a 746.70 GB collection of all 2010 World Cup soccer matches (~ 6GB per half). This torrent was released 4 months ago and is still active with a handful of downloaders (update, this one is even bigger).

Another sizeable torrent that was released just a few days ago is the archive of the late Geocities.com that was shut down by Yahoo last year. The 641.32 GB torrent has received a fair bit of attention from tech journalists and is well seeded at the moment.

Downloading these torrents nowadays is a lot easier and cheaper than a few years ago. In 2001 when BitTorrent first went public the cheapest hard drive cost $238.00, and that was for just 40 GB. At the time, downloading a file of this size would have required a $4522 investment. Even in 2005 you would still had to invest $500 to get this much storage cheaply (5×160 GB).

The first commercial 1TB hard drive, one that could store the entire 746.70 GB, wasn’t released until 2007. Times sure have changed a lot.

The Oldest Torrent

The torrent file that has been around for the longest time according to our knowledge is The Matrix ASCII. We already crowned this one the oldest torrent back in 2005, and as of today it is still active with a few downloaders and only one seeder.

The torrent file in question was created in December 2003 when sites like isoHunt, The Pirate Bay and Torrentz.com were only a few months old and when Facebook and YouTube didn’t yet exist. Thus far, this torrent has survived a mind boggling 2500 days.

The Matrix ASCII

matrix ascii

The Largest Swarm

We know that BitTorrent is used by millions of people, but which torrent was shared by the most people at once? According to our records this honor goes to the first episode of Heroes season 3, which appeared on BitTorrent September 23, 2008.

On the first day the torrent ‘Heroes.S03E01.HDTV.XviD-0TV’ had a swarm (seeders + leechers) of 144,663 peers, a record that hasn’t been broken since. Today, most than two years later the episode has been downloaded more than 7 million times and at the time of writing it is still active.

The Most Files

The next record is the one for the most files in a single torrent. This is a tricky one, because we know that there are torrents which link to millions of files, but none of these are indexed by regular torrent sites. With this many files, the size of the torrent alone can go over 10 MB and most torrent indexes have a restriction on the filesize of a torrent file.

The torrent with the most files that we’ve seen on public indexers is a copy of Magic Workstation that was uploaded 8 months ago. The download is only 4.01 GB in total but has 35,256 files in total.

The Most Data Transferred

The final record we will discuss is the torrent that has resulted in the transfer of the most data. This record goes to a release of Blizzard’s StarCraft 2 which came out three months ago. The most popular torrent file for this 7.19 GB game has been downloaded 2.3 million times, totalling a massive 15.77 Petabytes.

Interestingly, the legit copies of the game sold by Blizzard may have transferred even more data. All download copies of StarCraft 2 have been distributed through Blizzard's very own BitTorrent downloader. Unfortunately Blizzard’s tracker doesn’t provide any stats so we don’t know if the official beats the illegitimate counterpart traffic wise.

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Are there any torrents or records that we missed? Feel free to discuss these in the comments.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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