This week, close to two million people have downloaded the Olympics opening ceremony, which makes it the most pirated TV-show of the week - again. The International Olympic Committee is not too happy about it, and they are urging the Swedish government to take on The Pirate Bay.

Last week we reported that the Opening Ceremony had been downloaded by more than a million people, and this figure has doubled over the past 7 days. However, there is less demand for the other Olympic events, as most of these get less than 20,000 downloads.

Compared to 2004, the availability of Olympic events on BitTorrent has grown significantly, both in quantity and quality. Interestingly, the demand for Olympic torrents is the greatest in China, as 65% of the people who downloaded the Openings Ceremony come from the host country.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is not pleased seeing their shows on BitTorrent sites though. Yesterday they even sent a letter (read it here) to the Swedish Minister of Justice, urging her to take on The Pirate Bay. From the letter, it looks like they have been reading last week’s article. “Our technical advisor Informs us that as many as 1 million copies of the Opening Ceremony have been illegally downloaded worldwide, with the most significant activity taking place through Pirate Bay,” they write.

The IOC claims to have contacted The Pirate Bay with a takedown request, but turned to the Minister when they got no response. The Pirate Bay denies this, and Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde writes: “The phone hasn’t rung. And I guess their e-mail probably got caught in the Chinese firewall, since TPB is blocked there.”

From the letter, it seems that the IOC is predicting that the Closing Ceremony will hit BitTorrent immediately after the fireworks. “We are also gravely concerned about the upcoming Closing Ceremony on August 24, as it is entirely predictable that illegal copies of that event will be immediately made available through the Pirate Bay.” They are right of course, and we’re afraid that the Swedish government can’t do much about it either. Read the rest of this entry »

In an official letter to the Swedish Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has asked for “assistance” from the Swedish government with preventing video clips from the Olympics in Beijing to be shared on The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay, however, does not plan to take anything down, and renamed their tracker to The Beijing Bay.

The IOC is getting used to censoring the Internet, and has asked the Swedish government to help remove Olympic torrents from The Pirate Bay - which they claimed have been downloaded more than 1 million times. IOC also wants the government to assist in preventing (!) clips from the Olympics closing ceremonies to be shared.

Apparently the IOC has been reading the article we wrote last week, which showed that millions of people are downloading the Olympic opening ceremony on BitTorrent. In the meantime, several other Olympic clips have been posted. Although these are not as popular as the opening ceremony, the gymnastics finals and other events get close to 50.000 downloads.

The press secretary of the Minister of Justice has stated that it is primarily clips from the Opening ceremonies that the IOC wants to stop. The Committee also questions the legal situation and wants to be informed on whether they can take measures themselves to prohibit videos of the Olympics to be shared.

It’s interesting that the IOC chose to contact the Swedish government, instead of The Pirate Bay. They probably realize that sending a takedown notice wouldn’t be that effective. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak: “I think it’s good that IOC understands that they will get nowhere with sending a legal threat to us. It shows they’re smart and without manners.” Read the rest of this entry »

The team behind the Shareaza client have recently had a tough time, having been the victim of a music industry conspiracy to steal their brand name and destroy goodwill. Undeterred they are fighting back and today proudly announce the development of a brand new filesharing client with BitTorrent support - Project Panthera.

Since its release, the open source Shareaza has been downloaded an impressive 43,000,000 times from Sourceforge alone, making it one of the most successful filesharing clients. However, through no fault of the development team, its recent history is complicated and at times sinister.

After turning two other filesharing applications, Bearshare and iMesh, into pay services, a company called Discordia Ltd turned their attention to Shareaza. The company, which seems to be related to the recording industry hijacked the Shareaza domain and moved to seize the valuable Shareaza trademark as their own. Discordia even had the nerve to set their lawyers on the open source team. A summary of the entire scandalous story so far can be obtained here.

Back in May the Shareaza team announced “We’re fighting back!” and today we bring good news in the battle to neutralize the nefarious intentions of Discordia - the release of a brand new client. We interview Wout and Alex of Shareaza about their new baby: Project Panthera.

TF: The Shareaza client has enjoyed considerable success over the years. What inspired you to taper off the effort on the old software and embark on this huge effort of creating a whole new client?

Wout: Due to recent events beyond our scope of expertise, we were required to rethink our strategy surrounding Shareaza. Because we can count on the support of a massive userbase, we decided to create a new client, with some of the features requested most for Shareaza, but which we were never able to introduce. Read the rest of this entry »

A man allegedly seen ‘camming’ the latest Batman movie has been arrested by police. Following guidelines, theater employees called the police after suspicions were aroused. According to the MPAA, many other movies have been recorded at this theater.

It was always going to be a big, big movie and it certainly didn’t disappoint, going to set a one-day box office record of $66.4 million on opening day, according to Warner’s head of distribution, Dan Fellman. No one, not even pirates are allowed to ruin this party.

Hindering piracy of the movie was always high on the list for Warner and it handed out night vision goggles in Australia in an attempt to thwart ‘cammers’ - people who record movies in theaters. In Australia ‘cammers’ are asked to leave if they are caught by theater staff, in the United States things are a little different.

According to reports, on Friday morning Eastglen 16 Theater employees grew suspicious that a man was recording, or ‘camming’ the “Dark Knight” movie. Following movie industry guidelines they called police at around 9:40pm, who arrived shortly after.

Lee’s Summit police confirmed that they found evidence that the 40-year-old man from Grandview, Mo. had recorded the movie so they arrested him. A few hours later the police went to the man’s house and conducted a search where they say they found pirate movies on DVD.

According to the MPAA, several other movies have been recorded at the Eastglen 16 theater, but at this stage it is not known if the man is affiliated with any particular group or was acting alone. Police have not released the name of the suspect.

Inevitably, and despite the best efforts of Warner, Rlslog reports that a copy of the movie has been leaked onto the Internet by a release group called “TradingStandards” who apparently ’stole’ it from a P2P group called ‘DEViSE’ who actually ’stole’ it from 2Bros - quite confusing. But anyway, by most accounts the quality is pretty poor and not worth bothering with at all, so Warner will be happy.

Considering the popularity of the movie, maybe this time it just has to be the big screen.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Police Arrest Man Camming ‘The Dark Knight’