Despite the apparent popularity of getting the latest Windows and Photoshop versions off of BitTorrent, a new pie chart based on download statistics from torrent tracker Mininova shows that people are downloading far more than just that. Out of all the .torrent downloads that happened in the past two year, caught by Mininova, roughly half of them were television shows. The rest of the downloads break into what users would expect: games, movies, software, and "other". For an intrepid analysis of what exactly all this means, please follow the source link. Otherwise, do enjoy the pie graph.

As the Pirate Bay administrators get closer and closer to their court appearance for conspiracy to break copyright law, one of them decides to speak out for his views. Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, otherwise known as Anakata, has plenty of choice words regarding piracy and The Pirate Bay. The full clip can be found at the source link in a handy YouTube video. Since most news outlets only post what the RIAA/MPAA and their equivalents tell them to, the views of a man who calls himself the brains of The Pirate Bay are quite refreshing. Anakata claims that The Pirate Bay is really "the battle against greedy corporate America." In his spot, he assures viewers that under Swedish law, the Pirate Bay administrators have committed no crime. Anakata also proclaims that his site is "the scourge of the film and music industries", and claims that the actions he facilitates through The Pirate Bay are "not stealing, morally or legally".

Piracy really needs no introduction. The RIAA is on it like a fat kid to cake, and a sizable chunk of internet users do it. Artists and record labels are caught in the middle of things, the victim in both cases. If pirates win, they make no money. If the RIAA wins, nobody will pay for their music. And so, in what is likely to be the only time this happens, an independent record label is hoisting a white flag. All music that German record label Dependent Records owns will be uploaded directly to The Pirate Bay. Dependent Records attracted mainly aggrotech, electro-industrial and futurepop artists. Dependent Records is doing this because they had to close shop recently, but still want the artists to see some exposure.

Update: The record label Dependent has informed us that this news posting is not true and that the owner Mr. Herwig has been an opponent of file sharing for a long time. Apparently the original news source Torrentfreak did not do their research properly.

Apparently, the RIAA doesn't feel like ISPs blocking piracy server-side is quite enough. The RIAA wants ISPS to begin implementing client-side filtering. This would work by forcing the end-user to install a program that monitors their every move, to ensure that nothing is illegal. It is very unlikely that such a move will actually come into play, because it is a massive violation of privacy and a huge breach of user rights. The RIAA feels that it would all be worth it, because it would let users that wouldn't otherwise know they're getting in a lot of trouble pirating stuff that they are, indeed, pirating.

Just because children in Sweden under the age of 15 cannot be charged for a crime of digital origin doesn't mean that said child should pirate. And so, to help promote a lack of piracy, Sweden filmed a nifty little spot that will hopefully make children feel like piracy is wrong. Basically, the story starts out with a classroom full of students admitting that they pirate media. Then, a couple girls try to laugh it off, saying things like "everybody does it, it's no big deal" and "people are just putting it on their iPods". Afterwards, a man informs the classroom of the proper laws, and the children all appear apologetic, and seem like they will never pirate again. Whether or not this will have any effect on piracy in Sweden will depend massively on how this clip is accepted in Swedish society, and how many people see it.

In just a few hours, the administrators of the infamous Pirate Bay could be convicted of several counts of aiding/facilitating copyright infringement. The country of Sweden, after spending over two years collecting evidence, finally made a case against the five Pirate Bay administrators. However, Pirate Bay aficionados will be proud to hear that, even if the administrators go to prison, the site itself is here to stay. "In case we lose the pending trial (yeah right) there will still not be any changes to the site. The Pirate Bay will keep operating just as always. We've been here for years and we will be here for many more."

The reason behind this is simple. The Pirate Bay servers are not located in Sweden. In fact, the Pirate Bay administrators themselves do not know where the servers are (and perhaps that's for the better). Wherever they are, you can rest assured that the site is on several servers across several countries, and none of them are going down for a long time.

Despite Microsoft initially blaming disappointing sales figures on software pirates, the company's Vice President of Windows Product Marketing, Michael Sievert, has now claimed that the piracy rate for Windows Vista is actually half that of XP. In an interview, he said:

While piracy rates are hard to measure precisely, we're seeing indications from internal metrics, like WGA validation failures, that the Windows Vista piracy rate is less than half that of Windows XP today.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft is putting this down to the fact that Vista is harder to counterfeit. However, some analysts are suggesting that it may be linked to the fact that even pirates expect a stable operating system, and perhaps they choose to use Windows XP over Vista for reasons such as that rather than because they lack the means to pirate it. Of course, another explanation could be that software pirates have actually found a way to counterfeit Windows without being detected, which would also account for the lower rate of WGA validation failures.

The Inquirer cites the MPAA as the "champion of nothing good nor right, on a crusade against it's customers for nearly as long as the RIAA." While the MPAA would ordinarily scoff at such allegations, they seem to be right in the middle of them this time. While they frequently are seen trying to get software pirates and copyright violators off the digital streets, they were recently caught violating copyrights. It all started when the MPAA released a toolkit for universities to use in a quest to find potential software pirates. This toolkit was compiled with a lot of open-source material. However, it would seem as though someone at the MPAA overlooked part of the GPL agreement.

While we all know that the RIAA uses questionable and filthy tactics to attempt to apprehend what they call "pirates", who are usually college students and old people, nobody has dared to interfere with their legal might. Fortunately, someone has taken a stand: Oregon State. When the RIAA sent Oregon State subpoenas to investigate the behavior of a few students, Oregon State sent them right back, went to court to see those subpoenas nullified, and accused the RIAA of spying on their students. The RIAA's legal team was quick to claim that Oregon State was "misguided" in their actions, and is preparing to file their own accusations that Oregon State is obstructing justice. The Oregon Assistant Attorney General responded as follows:

Those accusations are not warranted. The record in this case suggests that the larger issue may not be whether students are sharing copyrighted music, but whether (the industry's) investigative and litigation strategies are appropriate.

While the RIAA and CRIA (the respective American and Canadian anti-piracy firms) work hard to shut down piracy sites and sue every old man and college student with a pirated "all your base are belong to us" clip, France has a slightly different approach to getting pirates off the map. The SNEP (Syndicat National de l'Edition Phonographique) recently unveiled plans to cut off internet to anyone that ISPs decide are pirating. ISPs will give their customers "three strikes", and then their internet is cut off. The SNEP believes that this is a much easier and fair way to eliminate piracy, as opposed to the RIAA's infamous search-and-sue methods. French president Nicolas Sarkozy claims that this is a "decisive moment for the future of a civilized Internet." While this move received much fanfare from the various artists and media industries, politicians aren't so sure this is a good idea. Some politicians feel that this move is "very tough, potentially destructive of freedom, anti-economic and against digital history." The main incentive behind this maneuver is to counter the 40% drop in music sales noted since 2002.

According to the MPAA, "piracy is the unauthorized taking, copying or use of copyrighted materials without permission. It is no different from stealing another person's shoes or stereo, except sometimes it can be a lot more damaging." And so, when anti-piracy site Brein took information from TorrentFreak and refused to cite their sources, they did something that children have been taught not to do since their first essay requiring cited sources: Plagiarism. The MPAA also decided that what Brein did could also be seen as piracy. And so, one of TorrentFreak's counsels wrote an open letter to Brein, which aims to "educate the public about their lack of respect for the rights of people who don't pay them millions." If you would like to read the full letter, please click "Read full story" below.

While government agencies such as the RIAA and CRIA seek to shut down every pirate search engine in existence, they also seek to "educate" the public. If you listen to the RIAA, piracy is an amoral crime, and should be treated like any number of other heinous crimes. Internet Service Provider Comcast has even gone as far as to filter bandwidth, preventing pirate software from working correctly in the first place. However, independent artists, who don't get five cents every time someone buys their song off of iTunes, benefit immensely from what we have come to know as 'piracy'.

The film The Man From Earth by Jerome Bixby had next to no advertising budget, and so almost nobody knew about it. That is, until someone boldly ripped a DVD and made it available as a torrent on one or two "piracy" sites. Since then, the movie went from the 11,235th most popular movie to the 5th most popular movie on IMDb, at one point beating such high-budget movies as Bee Movie and Lions for Lambs. While the ratings for The Man From Earth have since dropped, the movie has still been seen by 23,000 people over the past 12 days. See "read full story" for the letter of thanks that torrent tracker RLSLOG.net got from the film's maker.

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall announced today that he plans on pressing charges against the infamous Pirate Bay, on charges of facilitating copyright infringement. The five Pirate Bay founders scoff at the idea, and do not think that Roswall will get the conviction he strives for. After all, the pirate bay only runs a search engine, and does not store any copyrighted material on their servers. The Swedish police already tried earlier this year to blow The Pirate Bay out of the water, but were unable to find any evidence that was usable in a court of law.

Even if Roswall is somehow able to get a conviction, The Pirate Bay founders are pleased to announce that they will simply pack up and move to another country, without any down-time.

In a stunning turnaround from the staunch anti-piracy position the CRIA has against Demonoid, the Canadian police announced that they are not going to hunt down every Demonoid user. They are also not going to target the average pirate. Instead of focusing on every college student and old lady who downloads a song or two off of a P2P network, the Canadian police are going after organized crime/piracy, as well as piracy that affects the health and safety of citizens. In an interview with Le Devoir, Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the Canadian police, discussed the new Canadian stance on piracy. He said that chasing down every single pirate is tedious, time consuming, and generally fruitless. A very simple statement of the new Canadian view of piracy:

Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted. It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it.

Torrent Freak discovered quite a few studies that show piracy as having a beneficial effect on the economy.

There seems to be a worldwide crackdown on piracy, as of late. Demonoid was once shut down by the Canadian Recording Industry Association, and then came back on the promise that Canadians could not access Demonoid. Unfortunately for anyone hoping for a fast and easy way to download that latest Linux distribution, the CRIA had a nasty surprise for the administrators of Demonoid. You can see the nasty surprise on the front page of the website.

The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.

This method of site shutdown, called "upstream takedown", was done in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The administrators of BitTorrent are always working on side projects, however a certain project may just change the future of file-sharing: a new BitTorrent protocol. In an effort to curb the massive amount of spammers and anti-piracy agents hijacking torrents, Pirate Bay founder Bram Cohen recently announced the closed-source creation of a new BitTorrent protocol, which is currently nicknamed ".p2p", after the file extension the protocol will likely have. The protocol will be backwards compatible with the current .torrent protocol, which should make transitioning to the new protocol very easy. Other torrent sites, such as Mininova, already are backing and announcing support for the new protocol, which should come out in early 2008.

Thanks to some new, more lenient legislature on copy protection, retailers around America can do more liberal things with digital content. The Walgreens convenience store and pharmacy is looking to beat rival CVS by being the first to offer DVD-burning kiosks. In one sense, it adds convenience. By burning your own movies legally, you save a buck or two. However, it also allows old movie makers to put their content on said kiosks. Since most old black-and-white films, independent films, and b-grade horror films are not nearly popular enough to deem mass-manufacturing feasible or profitable, this new method of distributing said movies would possibly curb piracy, give old movie-makers fresh profits and popularity, and get classic movies to the consumer. Walgreens hopes to have the first movie-burning kiosks operational next month.

When Folding@Home came out with a GPU client, folding scores soared, due to the massive power just waiting to be unlocked in a graphics card. However, as said in Spider-man, with great power comes great responsibility. Someone has reverse-engineered the power of graphics, and is trying to patent the use of this power to crack passwords at incredible rates.

The toughest passwords, including those used to log in to a Windows Vista computer, would normally take months of continuous computer processing time to crack using a computer's central processing unit (CPU). By harnessing a $150 GPU - less powerful than the nVidia 8800 card - Elcomsoft says they can cracked in just three to five days. Less complex passwords can be retrieved in minutes, rather than hours or days

Such technology could be used by crime investigators to log into terrorist networks, or pirates to get into RIAA servers.

Comcast, one of the largest providers of cable television and internet in America, decided recently that they were fed up with the huge amount of file sharing traffic on their network, which was beginning to affect the speed of other users connections. And so, they've snuck a little code into their cable internet services. Subscribers of Comcast can download all the BitTorrent/P2P content that they desire without a problem. However, when they in turn try to upload it to other BitTorrent/P2P users, Comcast forbids the file transfer from completing. Whether this is done via hardware or software is unclear. Regardless, this certainly puts a damper on file sharing. While this does stop potential pirates in their tracks, an independent film maker or artist hoping to share their content via BitTorrent will have to find a different service provider to share their content on.

One of the world's largest and well known torrent trackers recently found a new domain name: IFPI.com. IFPI stands for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. While this may seem like it has absolutely nothing to do with piracy, the IFPI is actually the parent organization of the more well-known RIAA and BPI (British Phonographic Industry). The IFPI used to sue piracy firms just as often, if not more often, as the RIAA. Now that the Pirate Bay acquired the address, they quickly took the liberty of re-assigning the initials. IFPI now stands for International Federation of Pirate Interests, according to Pirate Bay administrator Brokep. The old IFPI is not pleased with this maneuver. Fortunately for the International Federation of Pirate Interests group, efforts to regain the domain are going nowhere fast. At this point, it seems as though the Pirate Bay attained a hearty treasure.

Last week, Demonoid was down for quite some time, and everyone seemed to think it was due to the Canadian Recording Industry Association. Demonoid is back with a vengeance, and proudly proclaims they were not shut down, rather, they merely had a bit of server trouble. However, to avoid future issues with the CRIA (and possibly the American RIAA), they are prohibiting anyone from North America to access their tracker. ISOHunt.com and it's partners have followed suit, presumably for the same reasons.

Some lucky Norwegians got their hands on the NTSC version of Halo 3, which will be released in just two days in the United States (three days in Europe). One Norwegian in particular, who goes by the alias "Assclown" turned Halo 3 into a file you can get off of Bit-torrent. The hacked version, once burned onto a disk properly, would obviously need a modified Xbox 360 to play it. The Halo 3 torrent is 7.3GB broken down into 154 RAR files.

During a recent concert, Nine Inch Nails lead singer Trent Reznor decided to let his fans know exactly what he thought of CD prices.

STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin'. Because one way or another these mother****ers will get it through their head that they're ripping people off and that's not right.

Universal Media is not very pleased with Trent Reznor's comments. You can see the full version of the rant here.

Well, it looks like another pirate has been convicted and thrown in jail. However, Scott McCausland, ex-administrator of the Elite Torrents Bit Torrent tracker, has a rather peculiar sentence to serve. After pleading guilty to 'conspiracy to commit copyright infringement' and 'criminal copyright infringement', the court gave him five months in jail and five months house arrest. Under the condition that he follows his parole officer's orders, of course. Those orders were simple: McCausland must let the FBI watch his every online move. In order for that to happen, McCausland must dump Linux for Windows in order for that to happen. McCausland claims that this is cruel and unusual punishment, as it means he will have to buy expensive software while he is unemployed.

LimeWire is well known throughout the pirating world as one of the most common file sharing engine. Recenly, LimeWire has faced lawsuits from the RIAA, Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music. It seems as though LimeWire is making some attempt to go straight. The LimeWire Music Store will sell DRM-free 256Kbps MP3s from IRIS distribution and Nettwerk Productions. The LimeWire Store will have popular artists available, such as Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, and Paul Van Dyk. The LimeWire file sharing client will still be available, however, future versions will have links in them to the LimeWire Music Store.

There is no word on when the store will launch, how much money each song will cost, and whether or not other record labels will join LimeWire.