It’s not long until this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, with hundreds of tracks from participating bands available to download as MP3s from the official website. An easier way to get hold of them, though, is BitTorrent – where they have been packaged up (seemingly with the festival’s blessing) by Ben Stolt
Tag: Torrent
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Pirates not so hot for Hope For Haiti Now charity album
Last week, we reported on the RIAA’s blog post about online pirates making the Hope For Haiti Now charity album available on BitTorrent – it said they were “undermining of humanitarian fundraising efforts via online theft”. How much were they undermining it though?
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Report claims GGF wanted to buy Mininova as well as The Pirate Bay
Remember the heady days of summer 2009, when every day seemed to bring a new comical mishap in Swedish firm Global Gaming Factory X’s attempt to buy The Pirate Bay? Happy days. But TorrentFreak has uncovered a previously-unknown aspect of the deal – it seems GGF wanted to buy another big European torrent site too: Mininova.
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Top Russian torrent site shut down by police
Torrents.ru is no more, having been shut down by the police for copyright infringement. As ever in these situations, the owners have simply registered a new domain name and ported everything across – although they are facing legal action which could put a stop to that too.
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BitTorrent gets decentralised
There’ve been some worrying developments in BitTorrent technology recently for the music industry, such as the launch of services to let people anonymise their torrenting activities, or the wave of more user-friendly web-based torrent download sites. Here’s another trend: decentralisation.
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Contrasting fortunes for isoHunt and uTorrent
The festive season brought good and bad news for some of the world’s biggest BitTorrent firms. isoHunt was slapped down by the judge in its legal battle with Hollywood movie studios, with a ruling that its founder Gary Fung had failed to rebut the studios’ key arguments in the case, and that he had a history of statements showing that he encourages copyright infringement.
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Demonoid torrent tracker returns in time for Christmas
Popular torrent tracker site Demonoid was taken offline by technical problems in September, but anti-piracy campaigners should put away the champagne: it’s just returned, apparently with minimal data loss. “Welcome back, we missed you!” said the admins in an announcement.
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Another BitTorrent tracker bites the dust
The latest BitTorrent tracker to shut down in Europe is SceneTorrents, a well-established site that’s apparently been going for more than four years. A terse message to users of the invite-only site said merely that it was closing, and “thanks for being with us”.
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Mininova goes legit following court ruling
Mininova, one of the biggest torrent tracker sites, has announced that it is deleting all copyright-infringing torrents. Instead, the only content that can be downloaded from the site is stuff that has been uploaded to it by authorised uploaders.
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Norwegian band forbidden from posting own music on Pirate Bay
Something of a hoo-ha has kicked off in Norway after collecting society TONO told local band Krakesolv that they are contractually forbidden from posting their music on BitTorrent, under the […]
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Files24 blends BitTorrent with IMDb
Not all new piracy sites are malware-toting scams. Some should worry the creative industries more, as they’re becoming more sophisticated.
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TaffyBox shut down for leeching resources
Well, that was quick. Having written about new web-based torrent service TaffyBox earlier this week, it’s already been shut down.