So DivX Corporation’s Stage6 has croaked. The service’s ‘goodbye, cruel word’ note says it was a victim of its own success, but that it proved ‘it’s possible to distribute true high definition video on the Internet’. What it really showed is how deliriously inefficient streaming video is, whether it’s high def or otherwise.

It cost at least $1m a month to run Stage6 with its 17.4 million unique users a month, whereas (at an informed guess) The Pirate Bay costs about $50,000 a month all-in for its 92.5 million. That’s $57,000 per million users for Stage6; $540 per million for The Pirate Bay (not including people using its tracker without visiting the site, which adds a lot of Mininova’s traffic as well, not to mention the other big indexes.) So at the very least, The Pirate Bay is a hundred and five times more efficient than Stage6 was.

But inefficiency is not the only reason the service is no more, while the vilified Pirate Bay, Mininova et al. are still with us. Stage6 was also a lot more illegal than a BitTorrent tracker — whether it pretended to be complying with the DMCA or not. Surprisingly under reported after the abrupt demise of the service was the 6th Feb US court ruling against DivX’s attempt to establish its protection under the DMCA’s safe harbour provisions ahead of a legal battle with Universal Music Group. My reading of the company’s consequent, speedy exit from the stage (and correct me if you think I’m wrong) is that Stage6 didn’t have the cash or confidence to test its luck any further. (How much this affects DivX as a whole remains to be seen. But only six days after the court decision, Jerome Vashisht Rota, the inventor of DivX and a major shareholder in DivX corporation, was openly dumping stock.) Read the rest of this entry »

Following pressure from the IFPI, a court has ruled that ISPs should be forced to block access to a file-sharing link site. The Haifa District Court in Israel has ordered that the country’s three largest ISPs should block access to HttpShare.com, a BitTorrent and http hyperlink-only website.

It hasn’t been so long ago that in order to shut down or block access to a file-sharing site, it would be necessary for the site to be breaking the law. BitTorrent sites located in countries where there is no such offense as ‘facilitation’ of copyright infringement operate legally, and this is why sites such as The Pirate Bay continue to thrive.

However, the lack of a legal basis to try to stop people from using such sites doesn’t hold back the likes of the IFPI. In February we reported how the IFPI successfully managed to convince a Danish court to block its users from accessing The Pirate Bay, despite the likelihood that this action breaches EU law. In the past, Turkey has blocked access to The Pirate Bay and Kuwait has recently blocked access to quite a few torrent sites in what appears to be a rising trend.

As attempts to actually close sites seems to be faltering, the IFPI is putting more effort into forcing ISPs to block access to them instead. The latest addition to this tactic comes from Israel, as the Haifa District Court - under pressure from twelve IFPI affiliated recording labels - has ordered the three biggest ISPs in Israel to block access to BitTorrent and http link site, HttpShare.com.

HttpShare does not carry any copyright material itself. Instead - and typically for this type of site - its users provide links to material stored elsewhere on popular file-hosting sites such as Rapidshare and MegaUpload, along with regular BitTorrent links. Read the rest of this entry »

Nine Inch Nails has just released the first volume of their new album “Ghosts” on BitTorrent sites as a free download. The band encourages its fans to share the album with friends, post it on websites and play it on podcasts

“Ghosts” is released under a non-commercial Creative Commons license and can be shared freely, something their fans weren’t allowed to do when the band was held back by a record label.

In the release notes the band writes: “Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.”

This sounds is music to our ears, in more ways than one. For now, only the first volume has been uploaded onto BitTorrent sites, but the entire collection is available for download on the official website for only $5 Read the rest of this entry »

BitTorrent is supposed to be hassle free, that’s why it’s so attractive right? Sadly, it is also used by by scammers to generate money, often through trickery and deception. Recently, a new ring of BitTorrent rip off sites has sprung up, this time related to movie codecs.

Spamming BitTorrent sites with fake movies is nothing new. We’ve reported before how people download movies only to find out that they require a special media player to play it, or others, which are bundled with malware to infect their PC when they install it.

Today, sadly, we have to report on a new ring of BitTorrent scam sites. This particular brand notifies people who try to play a video file they’ve just downloaded that they need to download a codec if they want to play the file. The site they are redirected to is of course a scam, most of them are filled with annoying ads.

Thousands of downloaders have already fallen for this scam, and new reports keep coming in. The downloaded files are simply huge uncompressed videos, named after a popular release. This is what the message looks like: “Warning: HD Codec not detected. Please get the correct codec from [insert site here].” Read the rest of this entry »