Beaker is a project from Dat, a "grant-funded, open-source, decentralized data sharing tool." It's a browser that lets you easily create websites using Markdown, or fork any existing website to make it suit your needs, and then share those sites peer-to-peer, without the need for servers in the middle. Read the rest
The Swedish Court of Appeal is confiscating two domains of the popular torrent directory Pirate Bay. The prosecution did not go after The Pirate Bay directly. Instead, it targeted filed a complaint against Punkt SE (IIS), the organization that manages the .SE domain.
From Torrent Freak:
Read the restThe case was heard in April 2015 and a month later the Stockholm District Court ruled that The Pirate Bay should forfeit both ThePirateBay.se and PirateBay.se.
But despite ordering the domain seizures the case against IIS was essentially rejected, with the District Court dismissing the prosecution’s case and awarding the registry close to $40,000 in costs. As a result the prosecution took the case to appeal.
This morning, however, the Svea Court of Appeal handed down its decision which upholds the decision of the Stockholm District Court.
“In common with the District Court ruling the Court of Appeal finds that there is a basis for confiscation since the domain names assisted crimes under the Copyright Act,” the Svea Court of Appeal said in a statement.
Tommy Funderburk used to be a copyright troll whose company, Payartists, sent legal threats to people accused of copyright infringement, though they didn't represent any actual artists (the closest they came was in representing Frank Zappa's widow). Read the rest
The Motion Picture Association of America today announced that it had effectively shut down the popular Popcorn Time “fork” and movie-sharing torrent destination YTS after court orders in Canada and New Zealand. Read the rest
Rightscorp is the publicly traded extortion racket that tries to force/bribe ISPs into disconnecting their customers from the Internet unless those customers pay "settlements" for unproven allegations of copyright infringement. Read the rest
Chances are that the one you've been using all along is still the best. Read the rest
Bittorrent Sync is a Dropbox-like service through which the bittorrent protocol is used to synchronize all your devices. I recently used it to receive a large file from a friend in Los Angeles, and I was amazed and delighted by the speed an ease with which it came down. Bittorrent is calling for alpha testers to help it refine the product for its official launch.
Correction: An earlier version of this story got it wrong. I misremembered how the Bittorrent Sync product worked and erroneously believed that it used a cloud of bittorrent users to cooperatively share synch duties for one another.
It's exciting to see a more decentralized, redundant approach to cloud computing. Of all the resources we use with our computers, bandwidth is the scarcest and most fraught (since it's controlled by evil phone companies and mined by lawless spies). Storage, meanwhile, is fantastically abundant -- hard drives get so much cheaper so much faster that it's sometimes mindboggling. Many of us have storage to spare, and swapping that for cloud-based storage for backup, sharing and collaboration makes good sense.
The Bittorrent Sync architecture is reminiscent of the Freenet Project, a classic censorship-resistant file-sharing technology. I'm really looking forward to seeing what they come up with. Read the rest
Now that evidence has surfaced suggesting that Guardaley, a disgraced firm of German copyright trolls, is secretly behind the legal actions of notorious US trolls like Malibu Media, the US plaintiffs are running scared, asking judges to dismiss their cases before they can be dragged into a discovery process that might confirm the link.
Guardaley is seriously toxic in the USA, and any suggestion that they were pulling the strings of US plaintiffs would likely be enough to get any case booted -- and possibly result in sanctions for the lawyers representing the trolls.
The defendants in a case over downloading the B-movie Elf-Man has presented evidence that not only links Guardaley to the suit, but also suggests that Guardaley was one of the seeders of the Elf-Man bittorrent file. In other words, they were sharing the file while acting as representatives for the copyright holders, making the downloads they're suing over authorized, and not infringing. Read the rest
Jamie from Vodo writes, "We've launched Otherworlds, our first indie sci-fi bundle! This pay-what-you-want, crossmedia collection includes the graphic novel collecting Cory's own 'Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now', Jim Munroe's micro-budget sci-fi satire 'Ghosts With Shit Jobs', Robert Venditti's New York Times Bestselling graphic novel 'The Surrogates', and Amber Benson/Adam Busch's alien office farce, 'Drones'. Check out the whole bundle and choose your own price 5% of earnings go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation!" Read the rest
In Florida, District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro has dismissed a suit brought by notorious porno-copyright trolls Malibu Media on the grounds that an IP address does not affirmatively identify a person, and so they cannot sue someone solely on the basis of implicating an IP address in an infringement. This is a potentially important precedent, as it effectively neutralizes the business-model of copyright trolls, who use IP addresses as the basis for court orders to ISPs to turn over their customers' addresses, which are then inundated with threatening letters. The porno copyright trolls have a distinctly evil wrinkle on this, too: they threaten their victims with lawsuits that will forever associate the victims' names with embarrassing pornographic video-titles, often with gay themes. Read the rest
In a surprisingly sane ruling Washington District Judge Robert Lasnik found that an IP address is not sufficient evidence of the identity of a copyright infringer. The case involved the B-movie Elf-Man, whose production company have gained notoriety through trollish attacks on people alleged to have downloaded the movie over bittorrent. Read the rest
Emmanuel Goldstein from 2600 Magazine sez, "A few weeks ago, 2600 made its entire archive of radio shows available for free on the web in high fidelity. The response to this has been so great that the bandwidth charges have now gone through the roof. So in order to offset this, 2600 is appealing to the file-sharing community to use BitTorrent technology to distribute these files instead of traditional downloading from a single website. This is being done in the spirit of showing the world how file-sharing makes content more accessible, cheaper to manage, and quicker to download - concepts that fly in the face of the mainstream media's interpretation. Defining torrents as nothing more than a tool for piracy is a great way to make people afraid of it. Once its true uses and power become more widely known, the world can benefit in so many ways. Getting these radio shows out to the world will be a small accomplishment, but an inspirational one." Read the rest
Senior executives from Netflix have explained their method for choosing which programs to license for the service: they buy the rights to the most-pirated shows in each territory, because that's where the demand is. Read the rest
The latest release from Chuck D and Public Enemy is the Public Enemy BitTorrent Bundle, where you trade your email address for access to a torrent of "Get Up Stand Up," featuring Brother Ali, as well as "the song's music video, outtakes, and 37 multitracks." Public Enemy wants you to remix the track and upload and share your own mixes, too, and will reward the best remixes with a variety of prizes ranging from an official PE release and studio equipment to an editorial feature on BitTorrent and some PE swag.
Yo! Bum rush the torrent, with a boost from Public Enemy
(via Engadget) Read the rest
Travis sez, "The Pirate Party of Canada has uncovered that IP addresses from within the RCMP and Industry Canada are used to download copyrighted material. The point here isn't that they are downloading, it's that because all we have are IP addresses we don't know who is actually doing the downloading." Read the rest
Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin reviews the new BitTorrent BitTorrent Sync, a peer-to-peer-based Dropbox replacement that's now in public alpha testing. BTSync uses the BitTorrent protocol to keep the files on several computers synchronized, and the actual file-transfers are robustly encrypted so that no one -- not BitTorrent Inc, not your ISP, and not a hacker -- can sniff them as they traverse the Internet and invade your privacy. There's no central server for the police to seize or for hackers or backhoes to knock offline, either. Brodkin's review is comprehensive and makes this sound like a hell of a product.
"Since Sync is based on P2P and doesn’t require a pit-stop in the cloud, you can transfer files at the maximum speed supported by your network," BitTorrent said. "BitTorrent Sync is specifically designed to handle large files, so you can sync original, high quality, uncompressed files."
In the pre-alpha testing that began in January, 20,000 users synced more than 200TB of data. BitTorrent Sync clients can be downloaded now for Windows, Macs, Linux desktops, and Linux-based network-attached storage devices. Mobile support will come later.
Setting the client up is easy. No account is required, but a randomly generated (or user-chosen) 21-byte key is needed to sync folders across computers. After installing the application and choosing a folder to sync you'll be given a string of random letters and numbers that should be typed into a second computer to sync the folder...
BitTorrent Sync creates private, peer-to-peer Dropbox, no cloud required Read the rest
