Due to server complications, CBC decided to team up with mininova and let them seed the torrent files for “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister”. It is great to see that mainstream broadcasters use BitTorrent to share their content online, and even better, that they use mininova’s content distribution platform to do so.

Last week we reported that CBC, Canada’s public television broadcaster, was about to release CNGPM on BitTorrent. Because of server issues, CBC has now turned to mininova, who now seed the torrent files for the show.

Tessa Sproule, head of CBC’s Digital Programming told TorrentFreak: “We had aimed to include a direct link to the torrent files on cbc.ca/nextprimeminister, but ran into a conflict with the CBC server which meant we needed to point to the file elsewhere, and that’s where Mininova came in. Since then, we’ve also submitted the CNGPM BitTorrent to Miro, Vuze, and a number of other torrent sites/services.”

Mininova’s content distribution platform, which currently has over 300 premium publishers, is ideal in this case because the BitTorrent site will also take care of the seeding, making sure the torrents never die. All CBC has to so is upload the file, and the torrent will automatically created and seeded for them. Read the rest of this entry »

The best way to deal with piracy is to go in hard - real hard. It doesn’t matter if you upset non-pirates or alienate your customers, it doesn’t matter if you make children cry. Pirates are evil and they need to be dealt with severely - this documentary shows how it’s best done, using intimidation and violence.

In the time it took you to read the introduction to this post, movie pirates have cost the MPAA $12.7m in lost revenue, several thousand people in the movie industry have lost their jobs, and civilization (as we know it) is under threat.

Faced with this nightmare scenario, drastic action is called for, as any delay could exacerbate the already horrendous losses listed above. It’s time to stop movie piracy in its tracks - right now - by letting loose the “Movie Screening Security Guards”, armed with the bluntest instruments known to man - and night vision goggles. Read the rest of this entry »

ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for years now, but only recently has this turned into a political issue. The BitTorrent client Azureus has now developed a plugin through which you can help distinguishing the good from the bad ISPs, data they will use to strengthen their argument in the ongoing Comcast debate.

Last November Azureus petitioned the FCC, resulting in a FCC hearing which was held a month ago. One of the issues raised there, was that there is little data available on the scope of BitTorrent throttling, a gap Azureus now plans to fill.

“We at Vuze (Azureus) decided there was something important you can do to help elevate the debate,” says Jay Monahan, General Counsel at Azureus. “We created a simple software “plug-in” that works with your Vuze (Azureus) application to gather information about potential interference with your Internet traffic.” Read the rest of this entry »

The sale of Bebo.com to AOL for $850 million last week sparked a fresh wave of opining about music piracy, with Billy Bragg and Michael Arrington both stepping into the ring. The problem is, they are both wrong.

In the blue corner we have musician Billy Bragg, who sees people like Bebo founder Michael Birch as another type of pirate, or profiteer, earning millions by leveraging other people’s intellectual property, and sharing none of it. He writes in The New York Times:

“The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.” Read the rest of this entry »