Joining their counterparts in the film industry, large book publishing houses are the latest to take aim at users of the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol. John Wiley and Sons, the publisher of the popular "For Dummies" how-to book series, is suing 27 Bit Torrent users for downloading PDF files of the books, thereby infringing on Wiley's copyrights.
How extensive is the alleged book piracy? Demonoid.me users are said to have swapped copies of Photoshop CS5 All-In-One For Dummies more than 74,000 times, according to the lawsuit.
After Comcast was caught throttling Bit Torrent traffic on its networks in 2007, the company caught quite a lot of heat and voluntarily stopped doing so. The practice, which was then ruled by the FCC to be illegal, struck at the heart of the ongoing and contentious issue of net neutrality.
True to its word, Comcast has indeed backed off from throttling Bit Torrent traffic, as new data from Measurement Lab demonstrates. Three years ago, the company interfered with about half of all Bit Torrent traffic on its networks. Today, that number is down to 3%.
Every time a botnet is taken down, another is waiting in the wings to take its place. Each successive iteration of malware infected networked computers is more sophisticated than the last. Security research company Kaspersky believes it has found one that is almost indestructible.
The TDL-4 botnet is 4.5 million PCs strong. It has some unique features that make it difficult to remove such as a powerful rootlet exploitation and the ability to disable other malware that is installed on a computer. Those features make it difficult to detect and remove the malware, but that is not what makes the botnet indestructible. The way TDL-4 communicates with its command-and-control center and other infected computers is what makes it unique.
Although some people would like to blame P2P traffic for Internet piracy, that's not a completely accurate assessment. Case in point, the release today of the Australian horror film The Tunnel. The movie is being released simultaneously on TV, DVD, and yes BitTorrent - the first film to have this sort of global distribution on release day. The movie was recently screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and will be on the big screen in Sydney in June.
Although as we reported yesterday, Netflix now surpasses P2P Internet traffic - in North America at least - but this doesn't mean that this isn't a popular avenue by which many people access movie entertainment. Rather than fighting BitTorrent, the makers of The Tunnel are embracing it.
If you head over to the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay today, you'll notice an important name change. The website has temporarily rebranded itself as "Research Bay" and is asking users to participate in a brief survey about the values of the file-sharing community.
The research is being undertaken by the Cybernorms group at Sweden's Lund University. The sociologists are interested in how the Internet shapes norms - both social and legal - and this study looks more closely on how those norms play out vis-a-vis file-sharing. "With your help," reads the survey's introduction, "we hope to create a knowledge base that will influence new laws and law enforcement related to the Internet."
It's an argument that the music industry likes to make: go after P2P file-sharing sites, sue them, shut them down, and as a result we'll have less music piracy. But is that really the case?
According to a study released today by the market research company NPD Group, a market research group, it is. The company contends that since a federal judge ordered that the peer-to-peer site Limewire shut its doors in the fall of last year, that the peer-to-peer filesharing of music - both the number of files downloaded and the number of users of the P2P sites - has declined.
Searching for file-sharing information via Google is going to take a little bit more effort now, thanks to new steps taken by the search engine to remove all sorts of references to torrents from its instant search and autocomplete features.
In December, Google said it was taking steps towards "making copyright work better online." Among other things, it promised that "terms that are closely associated with piracy" would no longer appear in autocompletes.
As we noted last week when the music industry released an annual report detailing its continued decline in revenue, "piracy" seems to be the go-to scapegoat, the reason that the music industry is struggling. And one of the sites that the industry often points to (and in its recent report, lauded governments for trying to quash) as a major culprit of piracy is The Pirate Bay.
So rumors that The Pirate Bay is launching a music project may strike fear - or at least disconcertment - in the hearts of industry execs. It's apt, perhaps, that a new project - fear.themusicbay.org - is supposedly in the works.
The social micropayment startup Flattr has rolled out a change to its service today. As we first reported last month, users of the site can now donate specific amounts of money to Flattr users.
Flattr lets users "Like" websites and content, but that action is backed with real money. Before this new donation feature was added, the money in your Flattr account was split evenly each month among all the sites you've "flattred." And while you can still use the service that way, you'll also be able to donate a specific amount - a minimum of €2, up to €50. "We think this will take the system to a whole other level beyond just tips," says Flattr's Eileen Burbidge.
The company BitTorrent announced a significant milestone today: 100 million monthly active users of its software, BitTorrent Mainline and µTorrent.
These clients use the BitTorrent protocol, a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol that's used to distribute large amounts of data. Rather than downloading a file from a single source, BitTorrent allows users to join a "swarm" of hosts that can upload and download files in pieces.
