Over the past 10 days, Chinese downloaders have flooded - and in some cases, crashed - major P2P and torrent sites after rumors that the government would be effectively disabling all media downloads in the country.
The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) has closed hundreds of file-sharing sites since last week as part of an ongoing effort to fight piracy and porn. However, many users say these sources are one of few ways to access films, books, and music banned in China, whether the media is lewd or merely politically dissident. What will media-seeking Chinese citizens do when their links to the wider world are finally severed?
It's been a month since PayPal released its global payment APIs and the company is already primed to make some new announcements at today's Le Web Conference. ReadWriteWeb caught up with VP of Product Development Osama Bedier for an early look at the company's latest announcements.
Virgin Media, one of the UK's leading providers of television / broadband / mobile / phone services, has announced plans to use deep packet inspection technology to track illegal file-sharing activity among around 40 percent of its UK network. Users whose activities are being monitored will not be informed of this fact.
The tech comes from Detica, a company better known for working with government data and intelligence agencies than media files and P2P networks. Their CView product is designed to help put an end to illegal filesharing, and with ISPs showing interest, it's unlikely that Virgin's deal will be the last we hear about.
In the wake of a leak of an international trade agreement on online file-sharing and copyright violation, U.S. House representatives are introducing legislation to curtail the greatest of American freedoms: the illegal download.
Let's not kid ourselves, dear readers. P2P's best use cases all revolve around the liberation of data, software, music, movies, and other copyrighted and rather expensive content. You may direct your angry emails to Rep. Edolphus Towns (NY-Dem.), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The Pirate Bay is like a gigantic inch worm. If you cut it down, it's various pieces rise up and keep growing. As The Pirate Bay prepares to be passed on to Global Gaming X AB, the service is offering the ultimate legacy gift to users. It looks as if an anonymous user uploaded the entire site's archive in order to ensure that multiple backups exist in case torrents are removed post-purchase. Users who would like to download an archival copy of the site, can access it as a massive 21.3 gigabyte download for free.
A new study commissioned by the European Union has finally proven what many have suspected all along: internet users don't want to pay for content. Period. And nothing is going to change their minds. The report finds, in a surprising contradiction to what industry executives have been spouting for ages, consumers' behavior has nothing to do with the peer-to-peer technology (P2P) that has given rise to all-you-can-eat systems for free downloads of copyrighted content. In fact, many people claim that they wouldn't pay for online content even if all other free options were taken away. This finding has dramatic implications for the future of business, and not just in the entertainment industry, either. If people won't pay for content, how will companies survive?
According to their blog and a recent BusinessWire release, controversial Swedish bit torrent tracker the Pirate Bay, is being acquired by Global Gaming Factory X AB for roughly $7.8 million in cash and shares (or $60 million SEK).
On the blog, the group hopes to alleviate concerns by saying:
"If the new owners screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want it to. And - you can now not only share files, but shares, with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That's awesome and will take the heat off us."
FileTwt is a new service that enables file transfers using Twitter, from presentations and rich text documents to ebooks and music files.
At the moment, the UI is a bit clunky and the file sizes are capped at 20MB, but the service presents an exciting opportunity nevertheless. Once mobile capabilities are introduced, FileTwt would allow more freedom for the 9-to-5ers among us. And it already allows for mass sharing (either via public streams or multiple-recipient DMs) of files, which is awesome news for self-marketing musicians, who desperately need better online promotional tools.
Our good friends over at TechDirt discovered an interesting anomaly and enormous security hole in BayTSP's website today.
BayTSP, a Los Gatos, CA-based company, is best known for putting the cease-and-desist smackdown on peer-to-peer copyright violators. The site serves infringement information forms to offending parties on behalf of the copyright holders. Think of them as the online debt collectors of the BitTorrent universe, with all the information security risk that implies.
Today, a court in Sweden found four members of the Pirate Bay guilty of breaking Swedish copyright laws and sentenced them to a year in prison and a $3.6 million fine - a third of what the prosecution had asked for. The Pirate Bay and its lawyers will, of course, appeal the verdict, and the site will continue to function normally during the appeals procedures.
