At our sister site TorrentFreak we do a weekly roundup of the most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, but there is of course more content on BitTorrent that is shared by many. Here’s an overview of the 10 most downloaded books on BitTorrent this year.
A movie described as a “mega-hit disaster film” was leaked to the Internet this weekend. It was downloaded 100,000 times and the distributors have angrily called in the police to investigate.
From very early on in its life-cycle, Sony’s PSP has been subjected to hacks that enable it to play pirate games. With the introduction of a new model, Sony hopes to stop the pirates. Some hope.
Nintendo has hired Warner Bros’ ex-anti-piracy boss to go after UK retailers that are still selling the R4 backup-enabling device.
Last week we reported that Entropia Universe would start using BitTorrent for distribution. Now ‘Aion’ – another MMORPG – is getting in a BitTorrent state of mind with its open beta client.
Audiences were shocked last Sunday when horror/torture porn movie ‘Antichrist’ screened at the Cannes film festival. Most audiences will have to wait until until October 23rd to watch the scenes of genital mutilation. Not so BitTorrent users.
Torrage, the world’s first torrent hosting service has opened up its source code to the public. Now everyone can easily start a torrent hosting service to offer the BitTorrent community a little more redundancy.
Known online as ‘brokep’, ex-Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde will be the key speaker at the iWeek Internet conference next week.
Back in July we reported that in apparent desperation at high music piracy rates in Nigeria, music industry groups arranged a hunger strike to draw attention to their cause. One musician has now collapsed.
As of today the antivirus program Avast has started blocking The Pirate Bay. When users try to access the site they are warned that the site is ‘malicious’ and denied access. The site came back online earlier today after being shut down by Swedish authorities.
There is no doubt that p2p file sharing is hitting the mainstream. Even young children are expected to know about it, if evidence from Webkinz is anything to go by.
Transmission, the popular cross-platform BitTorrent client, is now available in a new version offering improvements and bug-fixes.
Ever since the three Pirate Bay founders were found guilty, the poor record labels have been waiting to collect their share of the damages. They asked the Swedish Enforcement Authority, to claim anything of value from the Pirate Bay defendants and in particular their share of sale of the site.
Earlier today The Pirate Bay was taken offline by Swedish authorities. As a result many BitTorrent fans were forced to get their BitTorrent fix on other sites and through other trackers, resulting in huge traffic spikes for these alternatives.
Last week it was reported that Singpore is among the latest additions to the list of countries considering 3 Strikes-style sanctions for illicit file-sharers. Now the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore has ruled that out.
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) – a trade group representing Microsoft, Apple and several other software companies – has launched a new video campaign titled: ‘To Catch a Pirate’ in which it celebrates police brutality with a reference to pedophiles.
The iPhone continues its huge popularity and the amount of software from the App Store continues to grow, but what if the apps you install were spying on you? According to a report, this is exactly what is happening.
Last week isoHunt updated its indexing code and performed a thorough re-crawl of the indexed sites, resulting in an increase from 1.65 million to 3.49 million torrents. This week the team tackled another problem, namely, how to find the right torrent more effectively.
After we reported on TorrentFreak that an anonymous user had managed to create a backup of The Pirate Bay, yesterday we revealed that the owner of BTArena had put the entire thing online. But the precious torrent comments were missing……
The tiny Gulf nation of Bahrain is one of the latest countries set to crack down on online piracy following pressure from ‘international companies’.
The first episode of season 4 of the hit series Dexter leaked on BitTorrent a month before its official TV premiere. As always, the question is if this the work of hardcore pirates, or just some cheap promotion by the TV studio?
Following pressure from the music industry, Ireland’s largest Internet provider Eircom announced that it would start blocking customers access to The Pirate Bay in September. Censorship or a good way to prevent copyright infringement?
As the international music industry puts increasing efforts into its “disconnection for piracy” policy, Singapore becomes the latest country to consider a 3 strikes regime for illicit file-sharers.
UPC Ireland, the ISP that operates under the brand name Chorus NTL, announced today that it will not cave in to pressure from the music industry. The company refuses to block users access to The Pirate Bay. Instead, UPC said that it would rather go to court. “UPC has informed the rights holders that there [...]
In Norway, a coalition of 21 movie and music industry companies started a lawsuit against Telenor, the country’s largest Internet provider. Today the Court announced that it will hear the case on October 12. If the copyright holders win, the Pirate Bay has to be blocked within several days.
The Pirate Party of Finland have just informed FreakBits that today they have been added to the official party registry. They will focus on protecting civil rights and expanding freedom of information.
Japanese police have arrested a man for uploading a ‘cammed’ movie to the Internet. According to an anti-piracy group, this is the first time anyone has been arrested for uploading a movie recorded in a Japanese cinema.
Employees of the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) received a security alert today, warning them about the threats that BitTorrent and other P2P applications pose to them and the USAP. Aside from eating up precious bandwidth, these applications are bound to install viruses and keystroke loggers.
Cheggit.net, one of the more prominent adult BitTorrent sites on the Internet, suddenly disappeared today. But users of the site won’t be left empty-handed for long, as the site should start returning in the next few hours.
Peter Sunde, the former Pirate Bay spokesman and alleged co-founder, is working on his autobiography that will reveal some of his deepest secrets. In the book he will elaborate on some of the mistakes he made, and share details of ‘crazy’ encounters that he had with some prominent record label suits.
The Helsinki Court of Appeal has upheld the earlier decision of a regional court when it found a man guilty of file-sharing. The punishment stands at 3,000 euros for sharing more than 150 albums.
Following up on a complaint from a local anti-piracy outfit, the Portuguese Ministry of Culture decided to order a shutdown and blockade of 28 sites that supposedly link to copyright infringing material.
According to research carried out by The University of Nottingham, the UK’s music recording studios are in crisis with closures and redundancies. Of course the industry would love to blame piracy but really advancing technology is the problem.
Earlier this week the latest Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” was released to developers. As expected, it didn’t take long before this alleged Gold Master of Apple’s latest operating system would surface on the usual BitTorrent sites.
Torrent-Outpost, a medium sized private BitTorrent tracker has mysteriously disappeared a few days ago. Initially the site seemed to be struggling with technical issues, but since yesterday the domain redirects to a parked page hosted by Sedo.
Ever since Joel Tenenbaum picked up a huge fine of $675,000 for sharing music on the Internet, torrents have been appearing which taunt the RIAA. Now The Pirate Bay are promoting one such torrent on their homepage.
A group of up to 50 US and Japan-based adult movie studios have filed a mass copyright complaint against around 10,000 South Koreans accused of being heavy uploaders of porn.
EZTV just released ezRSS, a new site that makes it easier to find the latest episodes of your favorite TV-shows. ezRSS has extended search options and support ‘search based rss feeds’. These allow anyone to make a personalized TV-torrent feed, all your favorite TV-torrents in one feed.
Have you ever had your favorite torrent site blocked by filtering software installed at school, at work or at the airport’s network? If so, you might want to bookmark Yauba because it may come in handy in the future.
Many file-sharing applications have a ‘shared folder’ – a folder on your PC whose contents can be shared with anyone else on the same network. However, either through naivety or accident, some people share more than they intended.
After its success in the European Parliamentary elections, The Swedish Pirate Party will run in both the general and local elections next year, according to an announcement made today by party leader Rick Falkvinge.
isoHunt has been one of the leading BitTorrent search engines since 2004. Despite the fact the site’s founder Gary Fung is involved in legal battles with the MPAA as well as the CRIA, the site keeps on expanding and adding more torrents to its index.
There’s an old saying, that things don’t go away if you ignore them. Someone might want to remind the German Young Liberals about that. The Young Liberals, the third biggest youth party in Germany advised its members to ignore the Pirate Party and not give them any air time.
RealNetworks has been banned from selling its DVD copying software in the United States. After a case lasting a year, a San Francisco court has ruled that RealNetworks violated copyright laws with its software and is now on the tough end of an injunction, banning it from further sales.
The Swedish Pirate Party has won a seat at the European Parliament two months ago, and they are now preparing for the Swedish general election that will be held on September 19, 2010. A new campaign video is receiving rave reviews on Youtube.
Over the last 24 hours The Pirate Bay has been up and down – well to be honest, mostly down. As usual we’ve had quite a few emails from fans concerned that their favorite torrent site is in trouble, particularly since the site has been locking horns with Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN recently.
A new site has launched which allows movie producers to upload their movies for distribution to customers. Called The Content Bay (no prizes for guessing the inspiration behind that) the site allows movie creators to set not only their own selling price for their products but also which territories their movie can be sold in, [...]
In June Global Gaming Factory (GGF) announced that it would acquire The Pirate Bay and turn it into a legal file-sharing site. According to the Swedish company everything is still on schedule, including the required funding. What will happen to the site once GGF is the official owner is still unclear. However, GGF has scheduled [...]
The Call of Duty series has enjoyed huge success and masses of sales in recent years. It certainly hasn’t been damaged too much by piracy – Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare was 2007′s biggest selling game, shifting 2 million units in its first month and 9 million by April 2008 and 10 million to [...]
Speech Debelle is a 26 year old rapper from south London. Her debut album ‘Speech Therapy’ was last week included on the shortlist for this year’s Mercury Prize, an annual award for the best album out of the United Kingdom and Ireland. Now, speaking with The Guardian, Debelle (real name Corynne Elliot) shares her thoughts [...]
Mininova, one of the world’s most visited BitTorrent sites, broke another download record this week with the download counter displaying more than 9 billion downloads. Traffic wise Mininova is the largest BitTorrent index on the Internet with millions of visitors a day. In common with fellow torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt, [...]
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