Following high level talks with the IFPI and very public declarations on national TV, it recently became clear that Bulgarian authorities would start taking down torrent sites and other file-sharing services. This week the Ministry of Affairs has been busy targeting what it describes as a "criminal network" of file-hosting services which allegedly generated more than $3 million.
The U.S. Copyright Group (USCG) has been all over the news in recent months. The lawyer group sued thousands of BitTorrent users who allegedly file-shared motion pictures belonging to their clients, including the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker. However, it turns out that USCG are not copyright purists either, as they have blatantly copied the website of a competitor without permission.
After adding support for the iPhone last month, BitTorrent Inc. has now made the remote access 'Web' feature of its uTorrent Falcon client compatible with the iPad and Android devices. uTorrent users can now remotely control their downloads from wherever they are on their favorite mobile device.
For many years movies have been released onto the Internet, trickling down the so-called 'piracy pyramid' from elitist and private sites. Now a new breed of release groups are starting to make waves, bringing media directly to the masses. Today we take a closer look at this scene and speak to groups on the frontline to see what makes them tick.
Following in the footsteps of the UK, Finland is preparing a new piece of legislation that will make it mandatory for Internet providers to warn customers who download music and movies without consent from copyright holders. The proposal is meant to cut down piracy in Finland but both pro and anti-piracy outfits have their doubts abouts its potential effectiveness.
This week Wikileaks released more than 90,000 government documents related to the war in Afghanistan. When added to the perceived damage caused by its earlier leaking of the 'Collateral Murder' video, Wikileaks is now undoubtedly a serious target for U.S. authorities. After becoming The Pirate Bay's ISP, The Pirate Party now says that if needed, they will supply servers and hosting to Wikileaks.
uMap is a new App that allows uTorrent users to display all the peers they are connected to on Google Maps. While the App provides a good visualization of global BitTorrent swarms, it also demonstrates that anonymity is hard to find for the regular torrenter.
Online movie piracy has largely enjoyed a fairly predictable structure during the last decade. New releases have generally hit the Internet on high-security 'topsites' first and then trickled down to become widely available on peer-to-peer networks. TorrentFreak now takes a look at a new wave of release groups who operate with a fresh and BitTorrent-powered philosophy.
Earlier this year The Pirate Bay's co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij were banned from operating the site by a Swedish court. Today, The Pirate Bay's former spokesperson Peter Sunde was added to this list, and now faces a fine of nearly $70,000 if he does not comply with the decision.
Following threats in recent months that it would begin targeting those who obtain or deliver their content without permission, the Ultimate Fighting Championship has announced they are targeting two popular streaming hangouts. UFC have subpoenaed Justin.tv and Ustream.tv to force them to reveal the identity of a single user who uploaded two UFC events earlier this year.
Top 50 Recent Searches
These are the most popular searches of the last 24h. This is our full Search Cloud.