The data presented here are based on a sample of over a million PCs (Windows only), and were gathered by PC Pitstop.

A few months we already reported that uTorrent overtook Azureus’ position as the most installed BitTorrent application, and this trend continues. LimeWire’s popularity on the other hand is declining worldwide. Nonetheless, it is still by far the most installed filesharing application.

LimeWire going down, uTorrent on the rise

From December 2006 to December 2007 LimeWire lost approximately 25% of its user base. By the end of 2007, 17% of all PCs in the United States had LimeWire installed, compared to 23.3% last year. Similar drops occurred in Europe, Latin America, and the rest of the world. The most loyal LimeWire users come from Australia, where the install rate is 27%, only a slight decrease compared to the 30.4% in 2006.

The uTorrent user base on the other hand is rapidly growing. uTorrent installs more than doubled in nearly every part of the world in the last 12 months. The BitTorrent client is most popular in Europe (11.6%), as can be seen from the graph below. Read the rest of this entry »

The artist, Nadia Plesner, started a campaign to raise awareness of genocide in Darfur, and raise money for the victims. All the profits she makes from selling the t-shirts and posters go directly to the “Divest for Darfur” organization to help the victims.

Nadia told TorrentFreak: “I started this campaign because of the distorted way the media prioritizes between big and small world news. How can Paris Hilton make more front covers than the genocide in Darfur? So, I “pimped” a victim, to see if it worked. And it did!”

Her campaign indeed generated a lot of attention, but not for the right reasons. For her “Simple Living” campaign, Nadia decided to dress-up a Darfur victim with a Louis Vuitton-inspired bag, and a Paris Hilton-style accessory dog. Louis Vuitton, however, was not amused by Nadia’s creative expression, and filed a lawsuit where they are claiming over $20,000 a day, if she continues with the project.

Nadia received her first letter from the Paris based retailer on February 22th. Vuitton kindly urged her to quit raising money for the good cause, arguing that it infringes their intellectual property rights. Nadia was surprised by the letter, and decided to send a reply in which she explained that she didn’t use the exact pattern of a Louis Vuitton bag, and that the drawing simply refers to designer bags in general.

“Sometimes recognizable objects are needed to express deeper meanings, and in their new form they become more than the objects themselves – they become art,” Nadia writes in her reply. “I therefore stand by my freedom of expression - artistic and/or otherwise - and will continue my Simple Living campaign in order to raise money for the victims of Darfur.” Read the rest of this entry »

When we announced that YouTorrent was launching, we did not expected the site to grow in popularity as quickly as it did. Only a month after its launch the site was pulling in 2.5 million visitors and climbing - quickly. In fact, YouTorrent became so popular that the site made it into the top 25 most visited BitTorrent sites only 2 months after its launch.

Unsurprisingly, other webmasters soon cloned the YouTorrent concept, and within a few weeks PizzaTorrent and NowTorrents saw the light, and even more clones followed. One of these clones is special though, as the code it offers is open source and available for free. The open source YouTorrent clone is named YouTorrent3 and has the same look and feel as the site it’s based on.

“In less than 1 minute you can have your own YouTorrent clone,” YouTorrent3 developer Aleksander told TorrentFreak. He explained that he decided to code it because he noticed that there was a growing interest for open source and easy to use YouTorrent clones.

It is extremely simple indeed, all you need to do is upload the files to your webserver and you’re good to go. It works fine, but the code can still be improved on, as Aleksander notes: “Don’t forget that work is coded in 1 hour, so don’t wonder why some code is strange or looks lame.” Read the rest of this entry »

When a conflict of interest rears its head, it can cast a long shadow over someone’s objectivity, or in the case of legal proceedings, jeopardize a whole case. Yesterday we reported that a key player in The Pirate Bay case - a policeman - has been working at Warner Bros, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Shocking, yes. But what if there were two similar events, on subsequent days?

Today it has been revealed by Computerworld that the expert witness - the ONLY expert witness - in the Danish Pirate Bay blocking case, was previously employed by the IFPI, a fact revealed through his LinkedIn social networking page.

Kristian Løkkegaard is now working for DtecNet Software, an anti-piracy company. DtecNet Software originally stems from Antipiratgruppen (Danish Anti-Piracy outfit) and Johan Schlüter Law Firm, where several of the partners are co-owners of the internationally successful firm.

Kristian Løkkegaard had also been employed for two years at Johan Schlüter Law Firm, which has the IFPI as a client, something which many find shocking, like Morten Agervig Helles who represented Tele2, the ISP ordered to block The Pirate Bay in Denmark. “I couldn’t in my wildest dreams believe that they would use a witness that had previously been employed by them” he said.

The court in Frederiksberg probably had no knowledge of that fact when it ordered Tele2 to block The Pirate Bay in February this year, however that doesn’t change the fact that Løkkegaard had a conflict of interests. Right now, the court doesn’t wish to comment on this situation. Read the rest of this entry »