Saturday, November 20, 2010

TorrentFreak Email Update

TorrentFreak Email Update

Pirate Parties Use Influence To Halt Anonymous’ Operation Payback

Posted: 20 Nov 2010 01:46 AM PST

In a letter to those coordinating Operation Payback, the series of DDoS attacks carried out against pro-copyright outfits since September, the UK and US Pirate Party are calling for an end to hostilities. They reason that the continuation of the operation plays into the hands of organizations that wish to "pervert" copyright law for personal gain and hampers the progress of those seeking copyright reform through legitimate means.

operation paybackLast week, the digital aggression that has become the signature move of the anti-copyright Operation Payback movement took what some will see as a more considered approach.

Stepping away from the massive show of force which had brought down countless websites, Operation Payback adopted a new strategy designed to regain the focus of attention.

The operation’s committee made a list of demands for governments worldwide with the ultimate aim of getting involved in political discussion. They argued that copyright laws need to change and called for an end to anti-piracy lawsuits and censorship.

"What we are now trying to do, is to straighten out ideals, and trying to make them both heard and accepted,” a spokesman for Operation Payback told TorrentFreak.

“Nobody would listen to us if we said piracy should be legal, but when we ask for copyright lifespan to be reduced to 'fair' lengths, that would sound a lot more reasonable.”

It didn’t go unnoticed that this switch to a more publicly acceptable path has more in common with the direction chosen by the the UK and US Pirate Party. Indeed, Operation Payback has certainly caught the eyes of the Pirates during their 2 month campaign and today, after a huge amount of hostility in recent weeks, Pirate parties have joined their voices in a plea for peace.

“We, the undersigned, call upon you to immediately cease the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks and to instead seek out a legal method to express your frustration and disquiet with the copyright industry, and their perversions of copyright law for personal gain,” write the Pirates today in a letter to the leaders of Operation Payback.

The letter goes on to express understanding of shared frustrations within the current debate but warns that Operation Payback, with its chosen path of aggression and hostility, runs the risk of playing into the hands of their enemy and hinder those who seek to promote copyright reform.

“By continuing Operation:Payback attacks, you will hamper those who promote copyright reform and curtailment of abuses of copyright, but who do so within the bounds of the law,” says the letter.

“Instead of being able to argue for legislative reform of copyright on its own merits, they will be accused of defending criminals and promoting lawlessness. It will be easier for legislators and the media to ignore the clear benefits of fair copyrights and free speech, in favour of clamouring for harsher legislation to ‘stop those pirates and hackers’.”

The letter from the Pirate concludes with a final plea.

“Please help those of us who care about your freedoms, your rights and your liberty, and choose a more moderate and legal way.”

The big question now is whether Operation Payback will respond positively. Despite its anarchic structure and the potential for action by dissenting splinter groups, the early signs are very good for a negotiated and lasting peace.

Anonymous’ spokesperson told TorrentFreak that they plan to adhere to the Pirate Party’s request and “cease activities immediately.” A full statement is expected to be released in the following hours and we will update this article as soon as it comes in.

The Letter

Article from: TorrentFreak.

LimeWire Pirate Edition Site Nuked By “Cheap and Dishonest” RIAA Action

Posted: 19 Nov 2010 11:52 AM PST

The RIAA has claimed in court papers that the official LimeWire company has breached last month's court injunction against it by somehow having something to do with LimeWire Pirate Edition. The RIAA says that the site, which linked to the rogue software, was created by a current or former LimeWire employee. This forced the company to move against the Pirate Edition website and have it shut down.

Earlier this month we reported that after being effectively outlawed by a court injunction, the LimeWire file-sharing client had been resurrected by a secret dev team. Based on the last functioning version of LimeWire (5.5.10), LimeWire Pirate Edition no longer relied on the official LimeWire servers and had all adware and spyware removed.

Today, CNET reports that the RIAA is claiming in court papers that due to the existence of LimeWire Pirate Edition, somehow the official LimeWire company is in breach of the injunction handed down by a federal judge.

“Defendants have demonstrated in no uncertain terms that they either will not or cannot do what the injunction commands,” CNET quotes the RIAA as saying.

But how could LimeWire be responsible for the actions of those behind LimeWire Pirate Edition? Simple. The RIAA is claiming that the site which carried links to the software was created by someone “either formerly or presently a Lime Wire employee.”

To this end, the RIAA has asked for LimeWire’s assistance to find out the identity of “Meta Pirate”, the individual fronting the LimeWire Pirate Edition operation. Following this pressure, LimeWire took action against the Pirate Edition’s website – and had it shut down.

Unsurprisingly, Meta Pirate is not happy and has told TorrentFreak that the RIAA is exploiting the release of LimeWire Pirate Edition to gain leverage in its case against Lime Wire.

“This is nothing more than cheap and dishonest opportunism,” he told us.

“The monkeys who created LimeWire Pirate Edition are not associated in any way with Lime Wire LLC. Because of the RIAA’s underhanded tactics, Lime Wire has used a court order from the U.S. Southern District Court of New York to shut down our website.”

Meta Pirate is well aware that it’s impossible to contest the court order while remaining anonymous so the site will stay down for now. Nevertheless, the software remains available from The Pirate Bay and other websites.

“LimeWire is and always has been open source software, licensed under the GNU GPL,” he concludes. “We created a derivative work from the published source code, as any user of LimeWire has the right to do. We encourage other curious monkeys to do the same.”

Article from: TorrentFreak.

New Torrent Client Features Hollywood’s Latest Blockbusters

Posted: 19 Nov 2010 05:43 AM PST

A new BitTorrent client called zButterfly saw the light this week. Based on the Vuze source code, the new client sets itself apart from the competition by offering a searchable catalog of movies in various qualities. The developers of zButterfly are convinced that the movie centric approach will be appreciated by users, but it's doubtful that Hollywood will be happy with this latest innovation.

The movie-oriented zButterfly BitTorrent client was released to the public a few days ago after being tested in a private beta for a few weeks. Published under a GNU general public license (GPL), the Open Source client is based on the well known Vuze code, but with some added features that make it stand out from the rest.

The main focus of the client is to make it easier for people to find the various movie releases on BitTorrent. On startup users see a home screen where the most popular movies are featured, and on the side they can navigate through the ‘catalog’ of films by genre, actors, directors, countries and the year the film was released.

In addition to a catalog browser there is also an advanced movie torrent search engine built into zButterfly. Here, users can filter their searches based on production years, genres and IMDb ratings. In total, there are over 8200 films for which at least one torrent is available, but Philip Lamb, Marketing Director of zButterfly, told TorrentFreak that the catalog will continue to expand.

zButterfly Home Screen

zbutterfly

When users see a film they like they can continue to the movie download page where a wealth of information is presented. Various release formats, the film’s cast, its IMDb rating, trailers and recommendations for similar films are all available. Most of this meta-data seems to originate from IMDb. The actual downloads are torrentless, and rely solely on magnet links.

Although there is little doubt that there will be a subset of BitTorrent users who will be interested in using such a client, it is also a certainty that the MPAA will not be backing this project. zButterfly’s Philip Lamb agrees with this assessment but believes that they don’t do anything wrong.

“Trouble with the movie industry should be expected,” Lamb told us. “But legally we are a search engine. We do not copy the content on our servers, we do not operate a torrent tracker, we are just a mirror of the BitTorrent network. A mirror which is decorated with a catalog of movies.”

“All movies in our catalog were found with our automatic search robots. Any copyright holder may submit a request for removal, but there is no guarantee that the movie will not be added to our database in the future,” Lamb said, adding that search engines such as Google can also be used to find torrent files. “Legally we are not much different from Google.”

Up to a certain degree Lamb may be right. But judging from the movie industry’s lawsuits against torrent sites in the past years, we’ve learned that ‘intent’ is more important than technicalities. The MPAA would probably argue that zButterfly is promoting copyright infringement by featuring several blockbuster movies on their home screen.

The new client can be downloaded on the official site and all the project’s source files are available on Sourceforge.

Article from: TorrentFreak.
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