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As of May 27, 2008…

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Most Popular DVDrips on BitTorrent (wk21)

Mininova is currently the most visited BitTorrent site, and with approximately 3.5 million visitors a day, the site has gathered a spot among the 50 most popular websites on the Internet.

When we reported about the 3 billionth download back in November, Erik from Mininova told TorrentFreak: “We hope to reach the 4 billion mark in 4 or 5 months from now”. He didn’t have to wait that long, as it only took 78 days before they got there. The TV-show category remains the most popular, approximately half of all downloads from Mininova are torrents relating to TV-episodes.

The popularity of Mininova became apparent a few weeks ago when the site was offline for nearly a day because of hardware issues. The millions of visitors had to go elsewhere to feed their BitTorrent habit, and as a result, other sites like Torrentz.com and SumoTorrent saw a huge traffic increase, and almost went down under the strain.

The Mininova team will continue to optimize the site in order to handle the continuous traffic increase. On top of this, they are also adding new services and features such as a content distribution platform for independent publishers, a music streaming feature, and more recently, video streaming.

From the looks of it, Mininova’s growth will not be halted anytime soon, unless there is outside intervention. Last week, the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN announced that it will take legal action against the site, not to take it down, but to force it to filter copyrighted content. Erik from Mininova said in a response they “will proceed to court with full confidence,” and they will continue to serve torrents.

Mininova downloads since 2005.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Mininova, 5 Billion Downloads and Counting

When pressure from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the United States government caused the Kremlin to take down AllofṂ in mid 2007, the RIAA must’ve been jumping for joy.

Before the shutdown, AllOfMP3 had around 6 million users who were able to download songs and albums for a tiny fraction of the price of authorized alternatives such as iTunes. The RIAA said it could not live with this situation.

In December 2006, the RIAA filed a complaint against the site, stating that AllofMP3 sold millions of tracks to the public yet gave no money back to their artists.

According to a report, on May 20th 2008 the RIAA filed papers in federal court, Manhattan, dropping its copyright infringement lawsuit against AllofMP3.

“The site is now defunct and out of business, the result of a successful anti-piracy initiative,” Jonathan Lamy, an RIAA spokesman told Bloomberg.

Notably, Lamy did not mention a fully operational site set up by the same people as AllofMP3, called MѣSparks. Different name, same tunes, no lawsuit.

AllofMP3 was blocked by a Swedish ISP back in 2006 when it got caught up in the anti-AllofMP3 hysteria but later retracted its stance.

In August 2007, AllofMP3 was acquitted in Russia of all charges that had been put forward by IFPI and on October 24th 2007, a district court in Moscow confirmed the innocent verdict.

“They [RIAA] never correctly commenced the proceeding in the first place,” said John Crossman, who represented the site’s owner, MediaServices LLC.

“Maybe it was a rare triumph of good sense.”

In the meantime, dozens of similar sites operate in Russia, delivering super-cheap music to the masses in much the same way as AllofṂ did.

Victory for the RIAA? Not quite.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

RIAA Declares Victory Over AllofMP3, Drops Lawsuit

Unnar first arranged a meeting with Snæbjörn Steingrímsson, the executive of SMÁÍS, about a month ago. He told Snæbjörn that he could provide details about the owners and administrators of the BitTorrent tracker, and said he was willing to testify against them.

The sole purpose of the covert-operation was of course to gather information from SMÁÍS on the ongoing investigation on TVB (Icelanders only) and Torrent.is, two Icelandic BitTorrent trackers. “Me and an administrator at TVB were pondering one morning about what Smáis actually got on us, and I had this idea to contact Snæbjörn and set up a meeting,” Unnar explained.

To gain the confidence of Snæbjörn and the other investigators, 15 in total, Unnar led them to believe that the TVB staff was threatening him. “I was called in for another meeting and I told him that I had been assaulted because somebody knew I was going to witness against TVB, I made my friend give me some bruises.” Undy told TorrentFreak.

The investigators fell for it, and believed that they finally had an insider on their side, so they started to share confidential information. The cover story had worked, and this Friday Unnar was called in for a meeting where they showed 1000 pages of evidence against TVB. In addition they told Unnar that they were plotting a criminal case against the tracker, not a civil case as the one against Istorrent.

“I was shown screenshots of admin profiles on TVB, which showed information only available to administrators. I asked how they got this information and if somebody else was snitching, but they replied ‘you can do everything on the internet’,” Unnar said. The most likely scenario is that SMÁÍS used an exploit or some other hack, to gain access to the tracker.

At that point they still thought Unnar was going to testify against the people behind TVB, so they showed him all the info they had gathered on the tracker, and which users they would go after, if it would come to that. “They gave me the usernames of two persons who where responsible for 90% of the Icelandic material on TVB,” Unnar said. “After the meeting I gave this information to those users, so they could take evasive action.”

“The most interesting part about this is that I said at the beginning of the meeting: “No offense, I can help you convict some administrators, but the website isn’t going down just for that,” to which Snæbjörn replied “It doesn’t matter if we win or lose, we will still bankrupt you.” This shows that they are simply using their money to force the trackers to go offline.

All in all Unnar thinks that he has gathered enough information to have a significant advantage in court. This Friday he publicly shared his covert-ops experiences with other users at TVB, but up until now, he hasn’t heard anything from SMÁÍS.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

BitTorrent Tracker Insider Infiltrates Anti-Piracy Lobby