BitLite is a brand new online multimedia storage service that comes with a twist: full BitTorrent support. Users are able to upload .torrent files locally or even from a remote torrent URL. And since the service works entirely on the server-side, download speeds are incredibly quick. Once completed, multimedia files (video, music & images) [...]

Over the past years Google has been battling in court with Viacom over the question of whether YouTube is protected against copyright infringement claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton granted Google’s motion for summary judgment, ruling that Google is protected by the DMCA’s safe harbor provision. Effectively, this means that YouTube doesn’t have to remove any clips unless they are asked to do so by copyright holders.

“If a service provider knows of specific instances of infringement, the provider must promptly remove the infringing material. If not, the burden is on the owner to identify the infringement. General knowledge that infringement is ‘ubiquitous’ does not impose a duty on the service provider to monitor or search its service for infringements,” Judge Stanton wrote.

In a response, Google claimed the judgment to be a victory for all the people who ‘share’ on the Internet. “This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate and share experiences with each other,” the company wrote on its blog.

This judgment is obviously a huge win for YouTube and other video hosting services, but it also sets an important precedent for BitTorrent sites. Google’s YouTube shows striking similarities to torrent sites as it allows users to submit content. The only difference is that YouTube actually hosts the uploaded files, whereas torrent sites only link to content indirectly through .torrent files.

The Pirate Bay aside, nearly all torrent sites work closely together with copyright holders to ensure that their rights are respected. Like YouTube, IsoHunt and others have strict notice and takedown policies and swiftly remove .torrent files pointing to infringing material when they are notified by copyright holders.

Despite the similarities, BitTorrent sites haven’t been very successful in court thus far. Using the same arguments as Google did in its case against Viacom, Mininova and isoHunt have both argued in court that they were protected by a DMCA(-like) safe harbor, but both eventually lost their case.

The good news is that both isoHunt and Mininova have still options to appeal, and with yesterday’s landmark victory in hand their chances of winning may have increased.

If anything, BitTorrent sites should be seen as less infringing than video hosting sites because they only link to copyright infringing content indirectly through .torrent files. If Judge Stanton’s decision is translated to BitTorrent sites, it means that under safe harbor protection sites like isoHunt and Mininova would operate legally and wouldn’t have to use filtering mechanisms to prevent users from uploading ‘infringing’ torrents.

Viacom, meanwhile, isn’t done with Google and Youtube just yet. “We believe that this ruling by the lower court is fundamentally flawed and contrary to the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the intent of Congress, and the views of the Supreme Court,” the company said in a statement.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

This weekend, the International “Nordic Youth Film Festival” takes place in Tromsø, Norway. As is the case every year, the festival’s organizers have invited young filmmakers from all over the world to show their work, but not all were allowed to come. Despite an invite, the Palestinian director of Ticket to Azrael was prevented from flying to Norway by the authorities.

“It’s not a secret that the blockade in the Middle East prevents vital resources like water, food and medicines going to the needy people in Palestine. But it is perhaps not as general known that normal people who are traveling out of the area are denied a visa,” the festival organizers write in a blog post commenting on the issue. Luckily, with BitTorrent the filmmaker can still follow the festival.

The Norwegian film festival has close ties to the people of Gaza. The festival’s organizers have previously invited its young filmmakers and after the 2008/2009 siege they continued to collaborate on film workshops over the Internet. This year, due to the political situation, they’re going to take it up a notch by offering a BitTorrent-powered live stream to people all over the world, including Gaza.

The BitTorrent stream that the festival will use is facilitated by The Far North Living Lab which has experience with the technology. Last year the lab kicked off with a spectacular experiment in which they used BitTorrent to stream a 2K resolution film onto the big screen, and a few months later they hosted the first BitTorrent-powered live streamed concert.

The Far North Living Lab start their live stream from the festival tonight during the opening. In order to get the stream to Gaza and other parts of the Internet they’ve set up a BitTorrent-powered live stream (approx 1.1mbit h264, full PAL resolution) that will be transmitting from Norway’s oldest still-used cinema. Similar to the previous projects, the lab’s researchers are using the P2P-Next codebase.

“This is an important opportunity to reach our goal for an international awareness of Youth Cinema,” festival director Hermann Greuel told TorrentFreak.

An important aspect is that through the stream young filmmakers in Gaza can follow the festival. “The current stream will not be possible on a central place or event in Gaza due to special permissions from the Gaza government, but the stream is available in Gaza,” he added.

It’s good to see that there are filmmakers and enthusiasts who put BitTorrent to creative use, rather than simply accusing the technology of facilitating copyright infringement.

Readers who want to check out the stream can do so from 6 PM CET.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

BitTorrent is undoubtedly the fastest way to send large files to many people on the Internet. When publishing data on how the public’s money is spent, BitTorrent is a particularly good choice since it also saves a lot of bandwidth costs and thus hard cash.

Today, the UK Treasury decided to publish several data sets detailing how the tax money of UK citizens was spent in the last two years. Thanks to the Internet it is easier for the Government to be transparent about such issues, and thanks to BitTorrent the public can help with distributing the files.

“For too long the previous Government acted as if the public had no right to know where their hard earned taxes were spent. Today we have lifted that veil of secrecy by releasing detailed spending figures dating back to 2008,” Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury commented.

Although the four torrent files that have been posted don’t link to huge files (between 32 and 78 MB uncompressed), it is good to see that the Government isn’t shying away from using BitTorrent. If anything, this move will boost BitTorrent’s image. This is much needed since all the press about lawsuits have made BitTorrent synonymous with piracy for the majority of the mainstream public.

The torrent files have been posted today on data.gov.uk and the public is welcome to share them on The Pirate Bay or other high profile torrent sites. As a tracker, Amazon’s S3 service has been added, which most likely means that there will be always some high speed seeds available for the files.

By using BitTorrent to share information with the public, the UK government is in good company. NASA too uses BitTorrent for their ‘Visible Earth’ project, a massive library of high resolution images of the earth. In addition, several Universities use BitTorrent powered systems to update their computers.

Perhaps it’s time for Hollywood to look into BitTorrent as well, it sure sounds like a great technology to share films on the Internet.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

In a perfect BitTorrent world, public torrent index sites wouldn’t be forced to shut down, censor content or block IP ranges. Popular torrent indexers TPB, MN & IH have become obsolescent to BitTorrent so as long as others continue to exist. The short (but sweet) history of BitTorrent is evidently repeating itself – indexers will [...]

Less known is the fact that the people who are adding content – the initial seeders – can also be exposed quite easily. With this info copyright holders could potentially track down the big uploaders that are responsible for providing the content which goes on to be distributed among millions of people, and take action against them.

TorrentFreak spoke with Arnaud Legout, one of the researchers who examined how easy it is to spy on BitTorrent users. “Our goal is to make the privacy issues associated with BitTorrent usage public,” he said. “BitTorrent is truly one of the most beautiful, elegant, and efficient protocols ever designed. However, it has never been designed with privacy in mind.”

Legout and his colleagues found that spying on BitTorrent users is relatively easy and cheap. “We showed that anybody can monitor tens of millions of BitTorrent users in real time from a single machine and with a xDSL connection,” he told us.

The researchers also found that pinpointing the IP-addesses that make files available (initial seeds) is relatively easy to do. “We were able to identify 70% of the initial seeds for all the contents uploaded to The Pirate Bay in one month,” Legout told us, adding that they could have achieved a much higher percentage if they further refined their techniques.

The researchers were able to find the initial uploaders by quickly jumping on new torrents that were added on The Pirate Bay. This allowed them to grab the IP-addresses of the ‘content providers’.

Another interesting detail that the research revealed is that the majority of all the uploaded content originates from a small group of users. The Pirate Bay has millions of users, but only 100 IP-addresses are responsible for seeding 30% of the material uploaded to The Pirate Bay. The top 1000 IP-addresses are the ‘content providers’ of 60% of the torrents.

Taken together, this means that anti-piracy outfits could quite easily track down the biggest providers of copyrighted material, instead of just going after regular sharers.

Although most of these top providers do not use their home connection but high bandwidth seedboxes instead, shutting these down through legal action might hinder the distribution of copyrighted material.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

BitTorrent’s leading role can be partly attributed to its technical superiority, but there are other, perhaps even more defining factors that have propelled BitTorrent’s popularity. One could argue that Google has been one of the greatest contributers to its success.

Unlike competing filesharing applications, BitTorrent has a dominant presence in search engine results. A site like isoHunt for example, has 13,500,000 million indexed pages on Google and The Pirate Bay has 3,760,000. All public torrent sites combined, there are probably over a billion torrent pages indexed by Google alone.

It is needless to say that this overwhelming web presence has created a huge advantage for BitTorrent compared to P2P applications such as Limewire, that mostly rely on searches within the application. Over the years, millions of people have been introduced to BitTorrent through search engines like Google.

We’re now at a point where torrent sites top the search results for nearly search phrases related to downloading movies and music. For example, a Google search for “Shutter Island download” returns 6 torrent sites in the top 10 results and no legal authorized download options. The same is true for nearly all similar searches.

While Google and other search engines have helped BitTorrent popularity to a great extent, this could not have been possible without the people who developed the torrent indexes in the first place. That is where another key aspect of BitTorrent’s popularity, which also ties into the web-based nature, plays an essential role. Money.

BitTorrent sites can generate some serious revenue, enough to sustain the site and make a decent living. In general, ad rates per impression are very low, but thanks to the huge amounts of traffic it quickly adds up. This money aspect has made it possible for sites to thrive, and has also lured many gold diggers into starting a torrent site over the years.

Initially, most torrent sites were operated by students or hobbyists with a passion for filesharing and coding. Most of the larger sites today started out that way, but in the years that followed they were joined by groups of people that are mainly interested in the cash, not so much in offering a good service to their users.

Despite this darker side, the possibility to monetize torrent sites has been essential to the success and the survival of BitTorrent. Without a return on investment, nobody would spend tens of thousands of dollars each month to keep a large site or tracker online.

All in all it is fair to say that BitTorrent is as popular as it is right now simply because it’s web-based and findable through search engines. Although we don’t have any numbers to back it up, it would not be an outrageous claim to say that most of the people who use BitTorrent today were introduced to it through a Google search.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

The nifty BitTorrent swarm visualization uses processing.js to represent how a BitTorrent swarm works. In particular it may help novices get a grasp on how BitTorrent functions and why it’s capable of sending a gigabyte of data to millions of people in only a few minutes.

As most tech-savvy users know, BitTorrent starts with chopping a file into small pieces. The person who starts sharing the file sends those small pieces to available peers in the swarm. The BitTorrent protocol makes sure that the seed sends pieces to everyone, so they can immediately exchange these pieces with each other.

What follows is a sharing fest of bits and bytes. Your BitTorrent client tries to find the rarest piece that’s available among the peers in the swarm to avoid getting stuck at 99% and sharing relies on fair trading principles (tit-for-tat).

In general BitTorrent transfers go faster if the number of seeders in the entire swarm is higher. This means that a torrent with 20 seeders and 50 leechers should result in a better download speed compared to a torrent with 50 seeders and 250 leechers.

The BitTorrent simulation is a simplified visualizations of this process. It works in all up-to-date browsers except Internet Explorer. Seeds can be added to the swarm with the “s” key and peers with the “p” key. The “r” key allows you to delete seeds or peers from the swarm at random.

In 2006 we wrote about an earlier version of this “BitTorrent simulator,” but because the original is no longer online and since many more people use BitTorrent nowadays, the update is appreciated.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The dev team at utorrent.com have announced the release of a final 2.0 version of uTorrent today, marking this the first stable (non-beta, non-RC) release since development on uTorrent v2.0 began back in August. The world’s most popular BitTorrent client has undergone quite a few significant changes; including auto-uTP & UDP tracker support, an enhanced [...]

Last November The Pirate Bay shut down its own trackers, arguing that they have been made redundant by DHT and PEX. At the same time, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering Magnet links instead.

These are all interesting developments, but to really decentralize BitTorrent one has to take it up a notch. The way most torrent sites are setup makes them vulnerable to legal action from copyright holders, so the real solution might be to move away from web-based torrent indexes.

A rather primitive way to do this is to share torrents over another file-sharing network, and this is exactly what the Gnutella/BitTorrent client Frostwire has now made possible. Without any public announcement and stuffed away in the changelog of FrostWire’s upcoming release we find the following lines:

- New Feature: Gnutella Torrent Search. FrostWire now can search for .torrent metadata files in the Gnutella network.
- Upgraded feature: Optionally FrostWire will copy all .torrent meta files to a shared torrent folder.

Technically speaking these are just minor adjustments to the file-sharing application, but the implications could trigger a revolution in how torrents are shared in the future.

When FrostWire users start downloading a torrent with FrostWire, the client will keep and share the .torrent file on Gnutella. The idea is that as time goes by and more users download more torrents, even if torrent websites are shutdown, all the torrents will live on the P2P network forever.

To make it easier to find torrents on Gnutella, FrostWire also added a specialized “Torrent Search Mode”. As more users install this and later versions – and keep downloading more torrents – the richer these search results will be.

Now FrostWire only needs to offer support for trackerless torrents and they will have completely decentralized the BitTorrent operation with just a few simple adjustments.

Although we believe that FrostWire’s approach is interesting, it will also introduce one major problem. It is relatively easy to make a P2P-powered torrent index, but keeping it clean and malware-free will prove to be very difficult.

Most people might not even be aware of it, but one of the benefits of most torrent sites is that they remove thousands of torrents linking to spam and fake files every day. This will be much harder to do in a P2P-based environment, but not entirely impossible.

Over the last five years the Tribler BitTorrent client has been working on a decentralized torrent index that would make BitTorrent sites obsolete. Unlike simply sharing the torrent files among users, the upcoming release of the Tribler client has built in several spam control and moderation options that allow users to keep the network clean. In addition, newly created torrents can be shared with peers, instead of uploading it to a central server.

We don’t know if FrostWire has plans to implement similar moderation options, but they are absolutely required for a fully decentralized BitTorrent environment.

It will be interesting to see if the idea of a P2P powered and searchable BitTorrent index takes off. For now there are still plenty of good and reliable torrent sites out there, but with continued pressure from the entertainment industry they are not to be taken for granted.

Disclaimer: FrostWire is a TorrentFreak sponsor.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.