Noting that both Google and Bing have released their year-end "top search" lists, TorrentFreak has released its "BitTorrent Zeitgeist 2010," its list of this year's most searched for words and phrases on a top BitTorrent index, KickassTorrents.
It's not a complete picture of all torrents, of course, but KickassTorrents is one of the top 10 torrent sites in terms of visitors, and the searches are probably fairly indicative of what people are searching for on BitTorrent.
It appears as though a recent court decision forcing LimeWire to halt its P2P services is having a ripple effect to other parts of the company, as All Things Digital reports the site is closing its online music store at the end of the year and is abandoning its plans for a legal music download service.
The news wasn't good for LimeWire back in October when a U.S. District Court judge issued an injunction, forcing the P2P filesharing site to close down both the website and its client. And arguably, things went from bad to worse when a figure named MetaPirate took advantage of the open-source code for the client and recreated a Pirate Edition of LimeWire, causing both the RIAA as well as LimeWire to scramble to track him down. Those meddling kids.
With the news of Pirate Bay convictions upheld in Sweden, website seizures in the U.S., and now threats to "do something" about Wikileaks, it's no surprise that there are now calls for an alternative DNS, one outside the reach of governments and of ICANN.
The DNS, or Domain Name System, is one of the foundational elements of the Internet, responsible for translating the numbers in IP addresses to the more human-friendly names. And ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is a nonprofit organization tasked with managing both the IPv4 and IPv6 Internet Protocol address spaces, maintaining the registries of IP identifiers, and managing top-level domain names.
The verdict against three people assoiated with the BitTorrent tracking site Pirate Bay was upheld by the Swedish Appeal Court today. Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström were found guilty of "contributory copyright infringment" in April, but the group appealed the sentence - which included one year in prison and a sizable fine. Today's ruling upheld that conviction, decreasing the length of the prison sentence, but increasing the damages that the trio will have to pay to more than $6.5 million.
Less than a week since LimeWire was ordered to shut down its operations, almost all other major file-sharing applications are reporting a massive increase in downloads, arguably from those displaced LimeWire users.
A New York district judge last Tuesday issued a cease-and-desist order, demanding that LimeWire immediately close its doors. And while LimeWire has said it has plans to institute a redesigned service, based on legal and licensed music subscriptions, it seems like many of the site's users may have gone elsewhere for their torrents, rather than waiting for a revised version of what was once the most popular file-sharing app.
"Some of you may have heard a few popcorn farts re: our sites being threatened by hackers," wrote KISS bassist Gene Simmons on his website yesterday, responding to a DDoS attack that took down GeneSimmons.com earlier this week.
The attack was part of Operation Payback, a campaign that over the past few weeks has been targeting organizations who legislate and litigate in support of copyright laws. Loosely organized by Anonymous, a group of Internet "vigilantes" has launched a series of denial-of-service attacks against the likes of the MPAA, the RIAA, the UK Intellectual Property Office, as well as against the KISS bassman.
Here's an idea for you: instead of slowly amassing followers, like on Twitter, or carefully culling your friends list over time on Facebook, making sure everyone is in their appropriate list and category, collect and dispose of friends like you ask for the time or a spare cigarette on a busy city street.
That's what Lokast, the self-described "disposable" social network lets you do - carry your throw-away lifestyle over into the digital world.
In November, we told you about a move in the UK to monitor P2P sharing and permanently ban users who infringed on copyright from using the Internet.
In our reporting on P2P issues, it's rare these days to get wind of some good news; today, we've learned that this plan to ban would not, in fact, apply to most file-sharing fiends. After one ISP stood up to the government's proposals by circulating a petition, the government responded favorably, saying, "We are not requiring ISPs to monitor for unlawful file-sharing. Nor are we proposing that ISPs look at what users download in order to combat piracy... We will not terminate the accounts of infringers."
Students at UCLA don't have to rely on torrent sites to get their fix of online TV anymore - or at least that's the message the school wants to send. UCLA just announced a partnership with Clicker, a programming guide for online TV content. Thanks to this partnership, students at UCLA will soon be able to use a co-branded version of Clicker that will give them convenient access to student-generated content, university-generated content and regular online TV content and music videos from services like Hulu.
Last week, we told you about peer-to-peer and torrent file-sharing sites were being systematically shut down all over China. Not too long before that, we let you know about file-sharing being monitored by a major ISP in the UK.
Now, Israeli ISPs are throttling P2P network access, too, as confirmed in a report just released by an Israeli cyberlaw attorney and a partner news site. Whether you consider file-sharing an affront to content creators and copyright-holders everywhere or whether you see P2P networks as a permissible and valid way for users to exchange data, this trend is gaining considerable momentum around the world. Where will P2P restrictions pop up next?
