As the trial of ‘The Pirate Bay Four’ comes ever closer, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, aka ‘Anakata’, speaks out on TV news. Dubbed by the report as the brains behind The Pirate Bay, Gottfrid is said to run a site that is ‘the scourge of the film and music industries’. “It’s not stealing, morally or legally” he said.

Now that the Pirate Bay trial is drawing ever closer, more and more mainstream news outlets are starting to report on the upcoming case, mostly with heavy anti-piracy bias.

Born in 1984 and co-owner of the Swedish ISP ‘PRQ’, the report says that Gottfrid, aka Anakata, has been interested in computers since he was just 6 years old and although he wasn’t with the ‘in crowd’ when he was growing up, many in cyberspace view him as a hero. As a fellow C64 veteran back in the day, I guess we have a slightly different perception of where the ‘in crowd’ actually was

Now accused of conspiracy to break copyright law, Anakata has decided to speak out about “the battle against greedy corporate America.” He points out that under Swedish law, they have committed no crime as they do not directly transfer any copyright material themselves. The news report refers to many people across Stockholm “illegally downloading music and films”, actions which of course are down to those individuals, not The Pirate Bay. It is precisely this situation which leaves ‘The Four’ to genuinely believe they are operating within the law in Sweden. Read the rest of this entry »

The top 10 most downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent, “American Gangster” tops the chart this week.

We do not link to actual torrent files because linking to files that link to files that may be copyrighted is something that might get us in trouble.

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

As of February 11, 2008…

Dependent Records, an independent record label from Germany recently decided to shut its doors and upload all its albums onto The Pirate Bay. Interestingly, a year ago the the CEO of the label mentioned piracy as one of the main reasons why they decided to quit.

Nonetheless, a few days ago (edit: someone who pretends to be) Dependent records’ CEO Stefan Herwig decided to upload all the albums from his label -which mainly features aggrotech, electro-industrial and futurepop artists- onto The Pirate Bay.

In the description on the torrent download page Herwig writes: “I closed down my record label Dependent Records for good. But since I want my music to be heard by the people out there, everything I have ever published is now available on The Pirate Bay,” stressing that it’s a legal torrent, approved by the label.

Over the past few months, more and more artists have decided to make their music available for free on BitTorrent sites. However, this move from Dependent Records seems to be a bit odd, especially when you read why the label decided to close its doors. Perhaps the Stefan who posted the albums onto The Pirate Bay isn’t the real one? Read the rest of this entry »

The popular BitTorrent site Mininova just released a set of new features, including music torrent streaming. The new music streaming feature uses a Java applet developed by BitLet, which is easy to use and compatible with all Java-enabled browsers.

With the new music streaming feature users can listen to individual music tracks, streamed from .torrent files. It is integrated in the featured torrents section, which lists all the distributors that take part in Mininova’s content distribution platform. An example of a streamable torrent is this track.

If you want to stream music torrents that are not listed in the featured section, you’ll need to use the Bitlet website. The service currently supports mp3 and ogg/vorbis files.

BitTorrent streaming is not restricted to music files, and indeed, Erik, one of the founders of Mininova told TorrentFreak that they are currently looking into the possibility of video streaming via BitTorrent as well. He said that Mininova will start a private BETA test of the BitTorrent video streaming integration in a few weeks. Read the rest of this entry »