Founded in 2003, the initial goal of the Pirate Bay founders was to build the first Scandinavian BitTorrent community. However, with an increasing interest from users in other parts of the world, they decided to expand their horizon and made the site available in multiple languages a year after it was launched.

From then on The Pirate Bay quickly became the largest BitTorrent tracker on the entire Internet, responsible for the communication between millions of BitTorrent users at any given time of the day. Up until today they have continued to do so in a rather unorganized fashion, but that is all about to change.

This Monday the relatively unknown Global Gaming Factory (GGF) announced that it will acquire The Pirate Bay for $7.8 million. Provided that the shareholders agree and that GGF manages to raise the necessary funding to complete the sale, The Pirate Bay will be in new hands. Undoubtedly, this announcement resulted in a tidal wave of media coverage.

It’s been nearly a week since the sale to GGF was announced so TorrentFreak took the opportunity to catch up with departing Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde to look back at the last few turbulent days and to find out what the future holds for him.

TF: Were you surprised by the negative responses to the sale?

Peter: Not really surprised, but overwhelmed anyhow. The pressure of this thing has been enormous, and not a lot of people think it’s fair for us to take a break from things. I can appreciate that a lot of people put their support and hopes in us and we’re really happy that we’ve made an impact that allows people to do that. At the same time, we’re only human and can’t keep up with everything. The Pirate Bay needs to change or it will die by itself.

TF: Hundreds of media outlets have covered the news, but it is not entirely clear what is actually being sold to GGF. Can you enlighten us?

Peter: GGF is buying the domain names for thepiratebay (under all the tlds they exist). They also get a copy of the code and the database. The database includes no logs (there’s never been any logs) and there’s no personal details stored anywhere.

TF: GGF’s future plans for the site are still very vague, but they announced that “illegal downloading” will he halted once they own the site. What’s your opinion on this?

Peter: Well, that depends on how you look at it. GGF aren’t stupid, they know that if they only allowed pre-scanned content the site is worthless. Illegal downloading? Well, torrents aren’t illegal, it could potentially lead to copyright being broken though. But don’t underestimate them. They have had a hard time in the media, which they’re not used to being in. It’s all new for them - all of a sudden BBC, CNN, all local media in Sweden and so on just hammer them with questions. It’s probably hard to answer in the beginning. But they’re not as stupid as they’ve been portrayed.

TF: How do you think The Pirate Bay will look like a year from now?

Peter: No idea really. A guess would be an updated logo, new skin for the site, some changes in features but still the same basic concept.

TF: Will you or any of the other Pirate Bay co-founders be involved in the Pirate Bay site once it’s sold?

Peter: As it looks right now, no.

TF: Will the old Pirate Bay team still be working on (new) BitTorrent related projects?

Peter: We’re working hard on other things right now, especially with The Video Bay and some of our personal projects.

TF: The money generated by the sale will go to an unnamed foundation. Can you tell us a little bit about the foundation that receives the money? Are they working on any interesting projects?

Peter: The foundation is interested in more political means than technical. Having money will make it work quite hard, but there’s nothing to present yet. A lot of projects are in the pipe-line though.

TF: What does the BitTorrent community need the most to continue being the mainstream P2P protocol?

Peter: More trackers, less centralized systems and more people standing up for the community.

—–

For the founders of the site the sale is certainly the end of an era and they deserve credit for all the work they’ve done thus far. We will watch closely to what happens with The Pirate Bay in the future but BitTorrent is here to stay with or without it.

Post from: TorrentFreak

In his article ‘Playing Whack-A-Mole With Data: The Pirate Bay Lives On‘, Jamie King cut through much of the doom and gloom of the last week and took a refreshingly optimistic view of how the sale of The Old Pirate Bay might not necessarily be the death-touch many people in the BitTorrent community think it is.

Jamie mused: “What if someone was to simply scrape and copy all The Pirate Bay’s torrents over to a new tracker and Mininova and all the other indexes currently using the TPB tracker were to change their listings to point to that? OpenBitTorrent.com for example, an independent open tracker which started recently.”

So today we ask this question - was Jamie’s article incredibly prophetic? Or did it provide the spark, the catalyst, the inspiration needed to bring the BitTorrent community out of its premature misery this week, instead prompting it into positive action rather than self-destruction?

Whatever the truth, whatever the route, today the BitTorrent community has reason for cautious optimism - or possibly a full-scale celebration.

Try this for yourself, don’t take my word for it. First of all find a torrent on The Pirate Bay - I chose Montt Mardie’s “We Are All The Pirate Bay” for symbolic demo purposes here. Now paste the URL of the torrent into the editor on TorrentEditor.com and click ‘edit it’. TorrentEditor will return the seeds and peers - in this case 182 seeds and no peers.

For the next step, remove the Pirate Bay’s trackers from the torrent and replace them with the announce URL for OpenBitTorrent’s tracker, which is http://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce and click ‘update’ at the bottom of the page. Result: 182 seeds, no peers.

I haven’t got time to check all 1,720,650 torrents on Pirate Bay right now but after trying a few, I reached the same result each time. Also, the scrape file of the OpenBitTorrent tracker is exactly the same size of that of The Pirate Bay tracker.

GGF would like you to think that they will control The New Pirate Bay but I believe that accolade is for the community to bestow. So is OBT (c’mon, what’s a tracker without an acronym these days?) the New TPB?

It is if you say it is.

Post from: TorrentFreak

Is it constitutional to fine someone $1.9 Million for sharing 24 songs? Is it copyright infringement to merely place songs in a shared folder? That and many more questions might be answered in the Jammie Thomas case where she recently said that she would be appealing.

The Jammie Thomas case has been going on since 2007. Back then, she was originally fined $222,000 for sharing 24 songs. It looked like it would be all over back then, but that was when a new twist in the case happened – Judge Davis threw out the case citing a manifest error in law by instructing the jury that merely making songs available via a shared point is copyright infringement. The RIAA appealed the decision to throw out the case, but the judge denied that appeal – paving the way for the re-trial. Unfortunately, right before the re-trial, it started to look like it would be very possible that she wouldn’t get legal counsel, but she did get new legal council before the case would continue.

Things started to look like it would go her way, but in June, she lost the re-trial and was fined $1.92 million. Serious questions were raised by many over whether or not that fine is unconstitutional as there seems to be a huge discrepancy between the fine itself and actual damage it caused. It is true that one can go to iTunes and pay $24 for the same number of songs. Many argue that the fine is grossly excessive. Not only this, but Richard Marx, an artist whose music appeared in the lawsuit, said that Jammie Thomas “got a raw deal”.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has said that they are willing to settle the case, but there’s new details that have emerged that says that the Jammie Thomas case will continue it’s long, now close to 3 year saga. CNet is reporting that Jammie Thomas is appealing the ruling of the re-trial. There’s citation of what many legal experts have figured about the case, that the appeal is based on the argument that the fine is excessive and unconstitutional.

“She’s not interested in settling,” attorney Joe Sibley said in a brief phone interview with CNet. “She wants to take the issue up on appeal on the constitutionality of the damages. That’s one of the main arguments–that the damages are disproportionate to any actual harm.”

The RIAA seems to be trying to dump any and every bit of blame onto Thomas though.

“The defendant can, of course, exercise her legal rights,” said Jonathan Lamy, an RIAA spokesman. “But what’s increasingly clear, now more than ever, is that she is the one responsible for needlessly prolonging this case and refusing to accept any responsibility for the illegal activity that two juries decisively found her liable for. From day one, we’ve been fair and reasonable in exercising our rights and attempting to resolve this case.”

Further in the report, there was comments by Thomas’ lawyers that the RIAA did contact her to settle the case, but wouldn’t offer any dollar values. During the trial where she was originally fine $222,000, apparently the RIAA offered to settle the case for $25,000.

It’s unclear on what other grounds Thomas is appealing the case, but one thing is certain, the case will be continuing and addressing the constitutionality of the latest fine. It will be interesting to see where this goes from here.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

Pandora is forcing $29.95 payments from indie bands. Founder Tim Westergren responded to the controversy and others are sharing their opinions in a poll. Pirate Bay was sold to Global Gaming Factory and is launching The Video Bay The Michael Jackson Effect: an unprecedented spike in sales, concert promoter AEG discusses the cancellation and a commentary “The Music Industry, Michael Jackson & The Zombieconomy“ Sony invested in digital distributor IODA The Hype Machine blog outed artists for chart manipulation Music analytics firm Band Metrics expanded its private beta ReverbNation Survey: How is the Economic Downturn Affecting Artists? Join Hypebot’s online networking party Can what’s cool and uncool be rated? Essay: The Bullet That Works Best Hasn’t Changed. It’s Just Changed Hands

A 55 year old man from Vannes, France, is counting the cost after a police search on his property turned up his pirate media collection.

Back in 2006 the police, who were conducting a search linked to an unrelated fraud case, stumbled across the man’s sizable pirate media collection which included 12,591 MP3 files, 426 movies, 16 full TV-series and dozens of items of pirated software.

During the April hearing the retired IT expert said in his defense that it took him a whole year to accumulate the collection by using eMule on the eD2k network, but it was intended for private, not commercial use. He also told the court that he believed he had been acting within the law.

Unfortunately for the man, the legal system wasn’t sympathetic. A court in Vannes has just handed him a 2 month suspended jail sentence coupled with 33,000 euro (apprx $46,200) in damages.

Lawyers for 19 plaintiffs including the National Federation of Film Distributors, Sony, Paramount, Sacem and SCPP demanded between 1 and 2 euros compensation for each illicit MP3 and between 7 and 12.50 euros for each movie. It is believed that SCPP will collect the largest share of around 17,000 euros.

In a statement the man’s lawyer said: “There is stuff like this on all kids’ computers right now,” while pointing out that many of the files had been downloaded by the defendant’s children.

In January 2007, a court in Nantes also sentenced a file-sharer to two months suspended prison sentence for being caught in possession of 400 downloaded movies.

Post from: TorrentFreak

[Posted by David Card]

follow me at davidcard

This year’s patriotic plug. Since I haven’t read anything appropriate recently, it’s an oldie but goodie. Even if Abe was no Virginian.

Happy Fourth. Throw another burger on the grill for me.

In 2008 LimeWire was the most installed P2P application with an impressive market-share of 37%, compared to 14% for runner-up uTorrent. Although Limewire is primarily a Gnutella-based client it also supports BitTorrent downloads.

Although we can safely say that most LimeWire users don’t use the application just for its BitTorrent support, LimeWire could not ignore the popularity of BitTorrent and had no other option than to implement the most used file-sharing protocol back in 2006.

Up until today, LimeWire’s BitTorrent functionality has been rather limited, especially compared to the full-featured BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent, Transmission and Vuze. However, this is all about to change according to the LimeWire team.

LimeWire’s lead developer Sam Berlin told TorrentFreak that they’ve done a complete overhaul of their BitTorrent implementation. The newest release is already available in Beta and now uses Arvid Norberg’s Libtorrent under the hood, which is a significant improvement.

With the implementation of Libtorrent - which is also used by BitTorrent clients such as Deluge, Halite and Miro - Limewire now supports Mainline DHT, UDP tracking, IPv6, HTTP seeding, local peer discovery and uTorrent’s peer exchange

With Libtorrent LimeWire definitely made a step in the right direction that will benefit those who use the application to occasionally download torrents. True to LimeWire’s “ease of use” standards there are very few BitTorrent options to configure, meaning that most new features are simply enabled and can’t be turned off.

Sam Berlin told TorrentFreak that the LimeWire team has no idea how many of their users use the application to download torrents. In a BitTorrent client survey we conducted of 137,797 peers across various swarms only 43 of them were using LimeWire. They must be delighted at the news.

Post from: TorrentFreak