Today, popular BitTorrent index BTjunkie shut itself down to preempt legal action of the type experienced by the Pirate Bay, Megaupload and others. The seven-year-old site may not have been squashed directly by authorities, but it is nonetheless good news for the RIAA, MPPA and other opponents of online piracy.

Separately, the Swedish Supreme Court recently upheld the sentences of three Pirate Bay cofounders who were convicted of copyright infringement in 2009.

Battling Piracy in a Post SOPA-World

Apparently by pure coincidence, the Megaupload shutdown came one day after large-scale online protests against SOPA and PIPA, the proposed anti-piracy legislation. The timing of the crackdown raised a few eyebrows, as well as questions about why SOPA would have been necessary in the first place.

SOPA and PIPA may be shelved for the time being, but the war between the content industry and the parts of the Internet that they perceive to encourage copyright infringement is far from over. The next battle may be legislative, or it may rely on civil or criminal law. In some cases, the aftershocks of previous strikes will be enough to shake other perceived enemies from their positions, as happened in the cases of BTjunkie and FileSonic.

The counterstrikes in these battles have come in occasionally dramatic flavors such as the DDoS attacks from Anonymous that followed the Megaupload shutdown. More subtle - and far more powerful - is the mass migration of users from one service to another as authorities engage in what appears to be one giant game of Internet whack-a-mole.

There have been recent successes, but the very nature and structure of the Internet raises questions about the longterm effectiveness of this approach. As we saw with SOPA, any attempt to tinker with that structure will be met with fierce resistance.

Photo by Mike Baird.

Google is still not exactly adored by many media companies and rights holders, but they've gone to great lengths to appease those that have traditionally created and sold content to the masses. In late August, Eric Schmidt spoke to a gathering of UK television executives and laid out a list of accomplishments Google has made in the fight against online piracy.

Of course, none of these words are actually blocked from search results, but by removing them from Autocomplete, Google is implicitly discouraging people from searching for them and effectively decreasing the volume of searches performed for each one.

These changes are not by themselves momentous, but they're part of an ongoing evolution in Google's approach to digital piracy and media consumption. It's an issue through which the company has to tread carefully so as not to alienate its users, but at the same time Google is increasingly looking toward traditional content companies to help bolster some of its products.

Most recently, the company announced that they would be offering rentals of Disney movies on YouTube, as part of its ongoing effort to beef up its content offerings. This not only makes YouTube a more competitive service, but paves the way for Google TV to become a more desirable product in the eyes of consumers, who thus far have not flocked to use the platform.

Last week, Google publicly launched Google Music, leaving the cloud locker portion of the product free (up to 20,000 songs), but layering a robust MP3 store on top of it, complete with all kinds of competitive perks. It's that music storefront that gives Google its only hope of monetizing this new initiative, something that wouldn't have been possible without deals from three of the four major music labels.

These "old media" relationships are going to be increasingly critical to Google's success as it extends its business beyond search and goes up against other tech giants like Apple and Amazon.

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.

This is a first for the publishing industry, who are following in the footsteps of Hollywood. Most famously, tens of thousands of users who used BitTorrent to download the widely-acclaimed and award-winning film The Hurt Locker were sued by the film's producers. Many of those defendants settled out of court, as is common in cases like these.

Despite the popularity of legitimate e-book marketplaces like Amazon's Kindle Store and Apple's iBooks, digital book piracy has grown in recent years, with some best-sellers being illegally downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.

It remains to be seen how this case unfolds, or if other book publishers follow Wiley in the practice of suing BitTorrent users for copyright infringement.

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%.

This type of network traffic management is apparently much more common in Canada, where most major ISPs do it, sometimes blocking as much as 78% of the traffic, which is far more than Comcast was ever caught doing. In Britain, things are a bit more mixed. BT Group throttled about 27% of Bit Torrent traffic, while another big ISP, BSkyB, only blocked 3% of it.

ISPs in France and Sweden allow their customers to exchange files via Bit Torrent without limitations.

The compete data set, complete with interactive charts is available for your curious perusal here.

The Pirate Party, which was was originally founded in Sweden in 2006, is a political party whose platform is built around issues like reforming copyright and patent law, digital privacy and radical government transparency. The organization "promotes in particular an enhanced transparency of government by implementing open source governance and providing for APIs to allow for electronic inspection and monitoring of government operations by the citizen," according to its Wikipedia entry.

The party is no stranger to controversy. It is loosely linked to the Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent tracker whose operators were prosecuted for copyright infringement in 2009. It also donated server space to WikiLeaks as other ISPs have booted the organization from their servers.

Its Berlin upset marks the biggest electoral win yet for the party, which won two seats in the European Parliament in 2009. Their German victory is politically significant within the country because of the blow it delivers to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's governing coalition and because it secures federal funding for the party. While they're still a minority, the win gives them enough seats to have a say in the regional government.

What Does It Mean For the Web's Role in Politics?

Its meaning beyond the country's borders may be even more significant, even if the party's popularity fails to spread beyond a few European countries. If nothing else, it demonstrates the role that the Internet and issues related to the digital realm can play in electoral politics.

For example, much has been made of the growing impact the Web has had on U.S. politics, especially during the 2008 election, when Barack Obama's campaign used social media and Internet-based fundraising tools to mount an unexpected challenge to more established candidates. Yet, as the U.S. gears up for its next election cycle, its political system itself is largely unchanged, still dominated by the same two parties.

The apparent rise of the Pirate Party marks the first time that a political party has been successfully built on issues pertaining directly to the Internet and digital rights. Such matters are increasingly on the minds of voters everywhere, as people live more and more of their lives online. Even if upstart parties like this don't gain mainstream traction anywhere, they're bound to offer a few lessons to major party politicians, for whom the Web is now not only a crucial campaign tool but an important component of policy itself.

Not all viewers have the patience, it turns out. In the absence of a free, immediately-available streaming option, many of them are turning to piracy, according to an informal study performed by TorrentFreak.

While it's a pretty small sample of data, the results shouldn't come as a shock. For years, people have used peer-to-peer file-sharing networks to find and download music, television shows, movies and other content. As on-demand streaming services like Hulu and Netflix have risen to prominence, the drive for consumers to acquire content through less legal means has decreased. Meanwhile, a growing number of Americans have come to rely on the Internet to stream their favorite television shows, even if it means waiting until the morning after the show originally aired.

That consumer demand still exists, even if the networks have begun to decide to scale back their online offerings in the hopes of encouraging more people to view the original broadcasts and to make the most out of traditional, and frankly more lucrative, content distribution relationships.

If viewers want to see the most recent episode of Master Chef, they're going to see it. As more of them shift to watching TV online, they become conditioned to finding content there. If it's not readily available on legal streaming services, they'll find it elsewhere.

That could be through a file-sharing service like BitTorrent or simply by uploading episodes to YouTube, where grateful fellow fans thank one another for making the content available.

"There is no doubt that the Hulu delay is not in the best interests of TV-viewers, " writes TorrentFreak. "Although it might be a good business decision in the short term, one has to doubt whether driving people to 'pirated' content is a wise choice. To many viewers it is clearly a step backward."

For their part, networks are hoping to make the most out of traditional arrangements since the Web has not yet offered a clear-cut, lucrative way to monetize this type of content.

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.

The plot of The Tunnel, according to the film's website:

In 2007 the New South Wales government suddenly scrapped a plan to utilise the water in the disused underground train tunnels beneath Sydney's St James Train Station.

In 2008, chasing rumours of a government coverup and urban legends surrounding the sudden backflip, investigative journalist Natasha Warner led a crew of four into the underground labyrinth.

They went down into the tunnels looking for a story - until the story found them.

This is the film of their harrowing ordeal. With unprecedented access to the recently declassified tapes they shot in the claustrophobic subway tunnels, as well as a series of candid interviews with the survivors, we come face to face with the terrifying truth.

This never before seen footage takes us deep inside the tunnels bringing the darkness to life and capturing the raw fear that threatens to tear the crew apart, leaving each one of them fighting for their lives.

Eek.

You can download the official torrent or find the film in the BitTorrent's new App Studio.

But one good online citizen - an anonymous one at that - has taken the time to spider and archive the endangered content and provide the material in a BitTorrent file (available here).

The act also has a political side. "The purpose of this project is to expose the 'cost savings' of this proposed exercise as nothing more than a charade to appease the detractors to a strong BBC and to curry favour with the current government. BBC's current senior management has demonstrated a lack of leadership and a lack of courage in pushing back on these demands."

Political or not, the archivists of the Internet are thankful. Perhaps the accountants at the BBC should be too.

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.

Forbidden from Autocomplete Arbitrarily?

Part of the problem with this new implementation, as TorrentFreak noted when it broke the story, the list of banned terms is "seemingly arbitrary." No version of the word "torrent" will work for instant search - neither the software "uTorrent," nor "BitTorrent," the name of a protocol and a San Francisco-based company. But while the cyberlockers RapidShare and Megaupload are now forbidden, other sites like HotFile and MediaFire are not. Furthermore, you can still find the names of other popular torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay.

TorrentFreak cites a response from RapidShare, who say that "We knew about Google's plans for quite a few weeks now. We embrace that certain search suggestions will not put a wrong complexion on RapidShare anymore, but we are concerned that at the same time the legitimate interests of our users will also be affected."

The company adds that "RapidShare is one of the most popular websites worldwide. Every day hundreds of thousands of users rely on our services to pursue their perfectly legitimate interests. That is why Google has obviously gone too far with censoring the results of its suggest algorithm. A search engine's results should reflect the users' interests and not Google's or anybody else's."

For now, you can still search for torrent information. While your search queries won't autocomplete, the results aren't censored. Yet.

Image credits: TorrentFreak

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.

The company has released additional statistics about the usage of its clients: There are over 20 million daily active users, and the client is downloaded an average of 400,000 times per day. The software is available in 52 languages, and the clients check in from over 220 countries every day.

Although the P2P protocol has long been associated with digital piracy, BitTorrent made a number of agreements with content creators such as Pioneer One and the Yes Men in order to distribute their works.

The iControlbits app allows you to control your BitTorrent downloads remotely, with an interface far improved over the alternative - the mobile web version of Transmission.

The app costs $1.99, and Hlastec says he plans to add more features soon, including the ability to add new downloads to your queue.

But a new version of the app would have to pass Apple's scrutiny, and BitTorrent apps have historically faced rejection and removal from the iTunes store. An app with functionality similar to iControlbits made it into the store in October, but was booted just three days later. Like iControlbits, that app avoided the word "BitTorrent" in its name and description, something that only saved it for a short time.

Hopefully iControlbits will have better luck.

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.

Also among the top 10 search terms: porn and xxx. Windows 7 is the first software-related search term in the list, in 20th place. Despite music industry brouhaha about filesharing, music searches do not rank highly. Eminem is the first music mention, at number 47.

Here's the top 20, but you can find the full list of 100 here:

1. inception
2. iron man 2
3. 2010
4. xxx
5. french
6. avatar
7. dvdrip
8. despicable me
9. porn
10. clash of the titans
11. toy story 3
12. glee
13. salt
14. twilight eclipse
15. dexter
16. the sorcerer's apprentice
17. axxo
18. robin hood
19. prince of persia
20. windows 7

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.

A Distributed Alternative to the Domain Name System

Arguing that "we want the internet to be uncensored," Sunde has formed a group to work on the project, a DNS that would not utilize a centralized root but would instead take advantage of peer-to-peer technology. He writes, "By using existing technology for de-centralisation together with already having a crew with skilled programmers, communicators and network specialists, an alternative system is not far away. We're not going to re-invent the wheel, we're going to build on existing technology as much as possible."

The technology may exist to make a BitTorrent-based alternative possible, but such a system would face a massive uphill battle to provide a viable alternative - in terms of delivering speed and performance, but also in terms of gaining widespread adoption. And as Ars Technica notes, one of the biggest problems will be around the ownership of domain names. "The stakes are high," writes Iljitsch van Beijnum, "even a small fraction of the traffic of a popular site, or even just an interesting search term, can be worth a lot of money. It's hard to imagine that with such high stakes there wouldn't be any abuse of such an open system, or at the very least, widely diverging points of view of what's best."

Despite these obstacles, Sunde's proposal has been met enthusiastically in some circles, which considering the intersection of politics and web technologies over this past week, is hardly a surprise.

In justifying the increase in damages in this ruling, the appeals court said that it had "to a greater extent than the district court, accepted the plaintiff companies' evidence of its losses as a result of file-sharing."

A fourth defendant from the original conviction, Gottfrid Svartholm, was not included in today's verdict as he was absent at the court hearings due to medical circumstances. His case is still pending.

While awarding large damages in these sorts of cases has become common, sentencing people to prison is unusual. Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that ""They're giving us jail even though it's not the right thing for the 'crime.' It's just to scare people. That's what you did in the 1600s." He indicated that the group intends to appeal today's decision to the Swedish Supreme Court.

One of the entertainment industry lawyers, Monique Wadsted, is quoted in the New York Times as saying "My assessment is that in two years this type of piracy activity will be completely dead." However the court battles, including today's ruling, have yet to impact the ability of The Pirate Bay to stay online.

Derek Kepner, app developer, tweeted news to that effect earlier today, and the app is indeed unavailable at this time. "Just got a call from Apple," said Kepner. "They're taking IS Drive down. I'm seeing what I can do. I have a feeling I won't be able to change their mind."

On one hand, Apple's decision isn't a shock as the company has rejected other BitTorrent apps before, claiming they violate the developer guidelines.. And Kepner admitted in earlier interviews about the app that it was likely the absence of the phrase "BitTorrent" that helped secure the app's approval in the first place. The press coverage that the app received, however, probably prompted a second look by Apple.

But in an interview with Macworld, Kepner says he plans to appeal Apple's decision, noting that not all BitTorrent downloads are illegal. " "There are many legitimate uses for ImageShack Drive. I don't think it's fair to punish legitimate users for the actions of morons who think my app will help them pirate."