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| After Epic Battle, Anti-Piracy Lawyers Finally Get Their Man Posted: 06 Aug 2010 01:21 PM PDT After an epic journey through the legal system, much of it shrouded in secrecy, an anti-piracy group has finally tracked down an individual it said uploaded a first-run movie. In the end the IP address evidence didn't identify the correct person, a confession did. But were there ulterior motives behind this witch hunt?
Shrouded in secrecy for most of its duration, a battle between the Simonsen anti-piracy law firm and ISP Altibox wove a tortuous route all the way to the Supreme Court. In the end the ISP was ordered to hand over the identity of the alleged pirate. Simonsen went to work straight away. Although they ended up in roughly the right place, according to Norwegian news reports the person responsible for the Internet account in question had no idea file-sharing was taking place on his or her connection. It turns out that the uploader was actually a 20 year-old living with his parents. When confronted by Simonsen he confessed to carrying out the ‘crime’, which was to upload the movie from his bedroom to the now-defunct Lysehubben Direct Connect hub. It is also claimed that the man was a central figure at the hub, possibly the operator. Aside from the court order not revealing the identity of the actual uploader but the bill payer, there is another issue. Time and again the emphasis is being put on people who are claimed to put material onto the Internet first and the Max Manus case is no different. However, as we detailed in our earlier article, this 20 year-old is almost certainly not the first releaser of the movie. The date he uploaded Max Manus to Lysehubben was 28th March 2009. However, a release group called KAMERA already uploaded the movie months earlier on 29th December 2008. Within hours the release was available on BitTorrent so thousands of others would have uploaded the movie before 28th March. The general implication has been that the 20 year-old is responsible for thousands of subsequent downloads which seems far from fair, or even true. So, one has to question if catching the ‘first-uploader’ of Max Manus was really the target in all of this. If it was, in that sense it has failed. It looks more likely that the real aim was the closure of the Lysehubben hub along with some scary media propaganda which shows that would-be pirates can be identified. "Without this decision copyright holders wouldn't have the opportunity to pursue copyright violations on the Internet,” said Simonsen lawyer Rune Ljøstad earlier. “Now we have that opportunity, so the question is when to use it.” There’s little doubt that the high profile chase through the legal system was helped hugely by the support of a big national-pride movie, its producer, and all the emotive issues that go with them. The question remains though – what punishment lies in wait for the 20 year-old after this fairly epic battle? Despite more than a year of work, no decision has been made. “It’s a bit early to say. We do not aim to storm into boys rooms and take thirteen year olds to trial,” said Max Manus producer John M. Jacobsen. “Our goal is to stop their activities.” Not a chance. There are currently 17 separately seeded torrents of the movie on The Pirate Bay alone. Article from: TorrentFreak. |
| uTorrent Wants Torrent Sites to Adopt Torrent Tweet Posted: 06 Aug 2010 07:33 AM PDT BitTorrent Inc. has released a new App for uTorrent that allows users to find out what others people are saying about a torrent they're downloading. Users can also join the discussion and use uTorrent to tweet about torrents. With the new App, BitTorrent Inc. hopes to streamline discussions about torrents on Twitter, and encourage torrent sites to adopt the new standard to make it a success. One of the latest additions to uTorrent's App directory is ‘Torrent Tweet’. Via the Torrent Tweet App, uTorrent users can follow relevant tweets thanks to a unique Twitter hash tag that is generated for each torrent. The hash tags are based on the torrent file’s infohash, so discussions about the same torrents can be easily aggregated. BitTorrent's VP of Product Management Simon Morris announced the App earlier today and hopes that it will centralize discussions about torrents that are currently scattered across hundreds of torrent sites. “In this case we are relying on the fact that torrents are indexed not by file name but by infohash, a digital fingerprint of a file. While you might find the same torrent on dozens of different torrent sites, and get pieces of the associated file from thousands of different peers, ultimately, you can be sure that you're going to get the torrent you want, not something that shares the same file name,” he says. Torrent Tweet“The infohash is a key foundation of BitTorrent – referring to content by digital fingerprint rather than just a file name is a powerful way of referring to something,” says Morris. “Its like referring to a person by referencing their fingerprints rather than just their name. There are many people in the world called ‘Simon Morris’, but my fingerprints are unique.” “We hope that torrent sites will adopt our convention of referring to torrents using a shortened hashtag prefixed with "#bt" and enhance comments systems that already exist on torrent sites so that discussions can be accessed and propagated there and everywhere that Twitter is available,” Morris adds. TorrentFreak spoke to the owner of KickassTorrents, who told us that he will shortly implement the torrent referral system as proposed by BitTorrent Inc. If the idea catches on, it’s only a matter of time before other torrent sites will follow. Although it’s certainly a good idea to have a central place where people can read what other people are saying about specific torrents, we’re not sure that Twitter is the ideal form of communication. In most cases, BitTorrent users would prefer a more anonymous platform. That aside, not every BitTorrent user has or wants a Twitter account. Although Torrent Tweet is an interesting addition to uTorrent’s App directory, a central place where all comments from hundreds of torrent sites are aggregated might be an even better idea. Perhaps that’s something for BitTorrent Inc. to think about? For those who want to give Torrent Tweet a spin, it is available in the App directory and can be installed in the latest Griffin release of uTorrent. Article from: TorrentFreak. |
The Norwegian movie Max Manus is the most expensive and successful Norwegian movie to date. While perhaps not an epic achievement from a global perspective, the legal battle to 
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