TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Failed Pirate Bay Buyout Blamed for Global Gaming Factory Going Bust, Again
- A Snapshot of the Public BitTorrent Landscape
- Apple Accused of Selling Pirate Books On App Store
| Failed Pirate Bay Buyout Blamed for Global Gaming Factory Going Bust, Again Posted: 15 Dec 2010 04:37 AM PST After more than a year of flirting with torrent sites, including the now infamous attempts to buy The Pirate Bay, the perilous financial position of Hans Pandeya's Global Gaming Factory X has reached a peak. Two creditors, who are together owed more than $220,000, have demanded that the courts immediately put the company into bankruptcy. GGF's overall debts are thought to be at least double that. Sweden’s Global Gaming Factory X has managed to hit the headlines every few months since the 2009 announcement it would buy The Pirate Bay and turn it into a miracle site. The deal, which promised it would be all things to all men, never came to pass. Sadly for GGF, none of the headlines in the last year have turned out to be good ones for the company. It has been followed by almost constant controversy. Now, for the second time in just over a year, GGF faces bankruptcy. In common with last year’s close escape when a former employee requested court action against the company for unpaid debts, history is repeating itself. A pair of companies, Kennicott AB and Hercora Trading Technology, say they are collectively owed 1.5 million kronor ($220,000). The amounts, 906,200 kronor and 567,600 kronor respectively, were loaned to GGF in August 2008 but the companies are yet to be repaid. In an application to the district court the companies demand that GGF “is immediately placed in bankruptcy.” According to a report, owner Hans Pandeya already has liabilities of more than 400,000 kronor ($58,800) registered with the bailiff and today Global Gaming Factory has recorded liabilities of 450,000 kronor ($66,200). The company has filed no financial reports for 2009. In filings, Pandeya places much of the blame for the current position on the failure to acquire The Pirate Bay last year. In 2009, GGF was kicked off Swedish stock market Aktietorget following several serious violations which solicited comments that the company had a casual approach to disclosure requirements which misled the market. But despite all the setbacks and serious lack of finances, Hans Pandeya continues to pursue his dream of owning a torrent site. In August this year he approached Demonoid with a buyout offer, which was rejected. Then in September, Winnipeg-based law firm Thompson Dorfman Sweatman LLP put in offers to acquire several of the largest BitTorrent sites on behalf of an unnamed client. All roads pointed back to Pandeya. These offers were also rejected. TorrentFreak has learned that just two weeks ago Pandeya made an offer to one of the most prominent torrent sites. No prizes for guessing what the response was. Article from: TorrentFreak. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| A Snapshot of the Public BitTorrent Landscape Posted: 14 Dec 2010 01:32 PM PST In a few months BitTorrent will celebrate its tenth anniversary, and in these years it has become the preferred technology to share files online. Today we document a piece of BitTorrent history with one of the most elaborate overviews of the files currently available on public trackers. When we first started reporting on BitTorrent late 2005, the BitTorrent landscape was totally different from what it is today. There were just a few hundred thousands files being shared, compared to the millions of files that are out there today. To document the ongoing evolution of BitTorrent and the files people share, today we present a snapshot of the BitTorrent landscape at the end of 2010. We believe that this is the most elaborate and detailed classification of the files currently available on BitTorrent. The data is gathered with help from BitSnoop and comes from thousands of BitTorrent trackers. It includes (nearly) all torrents that can be downloaded from public torrent sites today, including those that were not active at the time our snapshot was taken. We start off with an overview of the number of torrents and the associated file-sizes, separated into five broad categories. Later, we will take a close look at some of the sub categories such as TV, movies, books and different types of gaming platforms.
Below are the same categories again, but now with the number of peers who have downloaded the complete file and continue to share it (seeders), and the peers who are currently downloading the files (leechers).
The data above shows us that the number of public torrents exceeds at least 10 million and that close to 30 million peers were sharing a torrent at the time this snapshot was taken. We also find that video content is by far the most popular category on BitTorrent. The ‘video’ category contains more than half of all torrents available, and two thirds of all active BitTorrent users are downloading or sharing video content. In terms of available files, ‘games’ is the smallest category with just 340,416 torrents, but in terms of active BitTorrent users ‘software’ is at the bottom with 4 percent. In total, all available files on BitTorrent add up to a massive 12,037.9 TB. Let’s drill down a bit more, and take a look at the different subcategories. It has to be noted that not all torrents are categorized into a subcategory, and these files will be ignored below. Movies vs. TVMovies are by far the largest ‘video’ subcategory with 2,012,432 torrents, followed by TV which lists 1,011,607 torrent files. In terms of downloaders this difference is even more pronounced. Movies have 7,173,330 seeders and 2,851,119 leechers, while TV has 2,626,238 seeders and 1,230,625 leechers. The other video subcategories such as anime, adult and music videos are far behind. Gaming platformsPC games are shared the most on BitTorrent, with a total of 113,624 available torrent files. PSP games are in second place with 31,742 torrents, followed by Wii (25,770), Playstation (24,240), XBox (24,108), NDS (18,714), Mobile (2,495) and Mac games (1,936). BooksOne of the categories that has been growing quickly in the last year is ‘books’. We currently count 399,267 available ebook torrents (including magazines), with 662,228 seeders and 172,811 leechers. Ebooks are followed by audio books, with 81,841 torrent files and comics with 15,774 available torrents. It will be interesting to see how these trends develop over time. We will update this overview in a few months to see what trends are emerging and to find out more about what’s happening in other subcategories. Article from: TorrentFreak. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Apple Accused of Selling Pirate Books On App Store Posted: 14 Dec 2010 06:06 AM PST Pirated Chinese translations of books written by best-selling Japanese writers are being sold online by Apple. In a statement sent to the company today by a consortium of Japanese book publishers, the App Store operator is accused of not doing enough to ensure that it does not distribute copyright infringing material online.
According to Asahi.com, Apple has been offering unauthorized copies of books by prominent Japanese authors Haruki Marakami and Keigo Higashino. Other Illicit books also available from Apple include works by 1994 Nobel Literature Prize winner, Kenzaburo Oe. The architects of the pirate copies are believed to have scanned printed Chinese translations of the works (which include Haruki Murakami's "1Q84“) and converted them into eBooks.
The illicit version of “1Q84″ was found to be identical to a Chinese translation published in Taiwan during 2009. “Some of the works have been deleted in response to requests from authors and publishers but a majority of them continue to be illegally distributed,” the statement from the publishers said. The consortium added that they want to work with Apple to find more effective ways of keeping pirated books off the App Store, calling for the company to “act responsibly.” They also reject Apple’s claims that it isn’t able to check for copyrighted material during its App approval process. In response, Apple said that determining who holds the copyright to submitted works would be a difficult and time-consuming addition to its App approval process. It added, however, that it takes copyright infringement issues seriously and will respond to the consortium’s allegations in due course. Article from: TorrentFreak. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Today, a consortium of publishers which includes 
The unauthorized copies of the books were accepted into the App Store by Apple and are thought to have been on sale since July this year.| You are subscribed to email updates from TorrentFreak To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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