Friday, January 7, 2011

TorrentFreak Email Update

TorrentFreak Email Update

Pirate Party Slams Anti-Piracy Outfit for Filing ‘Illegal’ Complaints

Posted: 07 Jan 2011 04:18 AM PST

ACAPOR is without doubt the most active anti-piracy outfit in Portugal. Last year the movie industry representatives made the news when they filed a complaint against The Pirate Bay with the General Inspection of Cultural Activities, a department of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture.

The group asked for The Pirate Bay to be censored in Portugal through an Internet filter, but instead their actions led to the uncensoring of their internal communications. As part of Anonymous’ Operation Payback, ACAPOR was shamed when their website was hacked, revealing hundreds of personal email messages in the process.

Despite this setback ACAPOR is continuing their quest undeterred. Two weeks ago the group announced that it would overload the judicial system with complaints against file-sharers in an attempt to raise awareness of the devastating effect they claim piracy has on their industry. And so it happened.

This week the group personally delivered several boxes of complaints to the Attorney General’s Office, wearing T-shirts with the slogan “Piracy is Illegal.” The movie industry group claims to have gathered 970 IP-addresses of ‘illegal’ file-sharers and is demanding action from the authorities.

In addition, 30 complaints were ‘filed’ containing the IP-addresses that republished the emails that leaked after the Operation Payback hack.

ACAPOR delivering the complaints

acapor

“We are doing anything we can to alert the government for the very serious situation in the entertainment industry,” ACAPOR commented on their actions, adding that “1000 complaints a month should be enough to embarrass the judiciary system.”

However, as with their previous revolt against The Pirate Bay, it may be that ACAPOR are the ones that will be embarrassed. Shortly after the group delivered the boxes to the Attorney General’s Office, Portugal’s Pirate Party came out with a statement claiming that ACAPOR’s actions are illegal.

The Pirate Party says that ACAPOR is not authorized by the National Data Protection Authority to collect IP-addresses as evidence, and has decided to file several individual complaints. In addition the Pirates have filed a criminal complaint for gaining improper access to the Attorney General’s Office.

The Pirate Party argues that ACAPOR’s actions violated the privacy of 1000 ordinary Portuguese citizens and hopes that the responsible authorities will take the necessary actions to prevent this from happening again in the future. ACAPOR was quick to deny the allegations and its President believes that no laws were broken.

Time will tell who’s right.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

BitTorrent Inc. To Launch All-In-One BitTorrent Ecosystem

Posted: 06 Jan 2011 10:18 AM PST

bittorrent new logoBitTorrent Inc. just announced that it will soon release a brand new BitTorrent client that integrates search, downloads and playback on multiple devices. With the new project BitTorrent Inc. is following in the footsteps of its main competitor Vuze and their already established all-in-one application.

The new application is part of project Chrysalis and a new ecosystem of BitTorrent certified products. Through the application users can search for files that are shared on BitTorrent, download these files, and play them directly on their computers, TV or mobiles devices. Everything is bundled into one system and downloaders don’t have to worry about conversion, codecs or file-formats.

"Today's generation of consumer electronics devices are more powerful than ever before, but they still lack cohesiveness and ease of use for content playback," BitTorrent’s chief strategist Shahi Ghanem said. "Consumers shouldn't need to differentiate between codecs, file formats, bit rates, and other technology jargon. Content playback should just work – regardless of content type or source."

The new application is expected to go live towards the end of the first quarter of 2011 and will replace the mainline BitTorrent client. uTorrent, the flagship of BitTorrent Inc and the source of the current mainline client, keeps its minimal footprint and will continue to be developed separately.

The Chrysalis project is an effort to keep more users on board than is currently the case. BitTorrent Inc. revealed earlier this week that uTorrent and the mainline client are downloaded 400,000 times a day, but a relatively small percentage of these new downloads result in recurring users due to the perceived complexity of the applications.

Project Chrysalis

chrysalis

In addition to launching the all-in-one client, BitTorrent Inc. will start partnerships with makers of consumer electronics such as TVs, tablets and mobile phones to display a “BitTorrent Certified” logo. For this task the company signed up with Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) who previously helped DivX with their certification program.

"Partnering with BitTorrent to create the standards for a new generation of BitTorrent Certified chips, designs and devices fits perfectly with ITRI's mission of accelerating the development of industry-enabling strategies and will certainly drive growth for Taiwan's domestic technology industry," ITRI’s Vice President Cheng-Wen Wu said.

TorrentFreak was assured that all the new software and standards will be fully compatible with the .torrent format as we know it now. For existing users little will change, but with the new system BitTorrent hopes to further expand the user base of its software while making it easier for existing users to play downloaded files on different devices.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

RapidShare’s Measures Against Piracy Are Sufficient, Court Rules

Posted: 06 Jan 2011 05:26 AM PST

rapidshareLike most file-hosting services, RapidShare hosts a wide range of movies, music and software files that are distributed without the consent of the rightsholders. This situation has caused the company to be dragged to court on multiple occasions, but the file-hoster has often come out the winner.

In May last year a US court already ruled that RapidShare is not guilty of copyright infringement, and in the same month a German court ruled that company could not be held liable for acts of copyright infringement committed by its users.

Today, RapidShare booked another major win against a copyright holder. In the appeal of their case against game distributor Atari, the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf acknowledged that RapidShare already takes sufficient measures against copyright infringement.

Atari had asked for additional tools to prevent their game "Alone in the Dark" from being downloaded from RapidShare. One of the suggestions they made was a filtering mechanism that would search RapidShare’s database for keywords and delete files that would match.

The Court sided with RapidShare’s stance that such a measure would be unreasonable, since it would create a risk of also deleting legal files that match the same keywords. Other measures such as manual verification of ‘suspect’ files and the removal of links on third party search engines were also deemed to be impossible, unreasonable or pointless.

RapidShare's lawyer and spokesman Daniel Raimer is pleased with the Court's decision and said: "The ruling demonstrates once again that RapidShare is operating a fully legal range and has taken measures against the misuse of its service which go beyond the level that is legally required. We are confident that copyright holders will gradually come to accept this conclusion."

The successes of RapidShare in Germany and abroad set a favorable precedent for other cyberlocker sites and file-sharing platforms, including BitTorrent sites. Together with RapidShare’s lobbying efforts in Washington the verdicts add to the legitimacy of such online file-sharing services.

Article from: TorrentFreak.
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