geekosystem

At this point, is anyone actually surprised to hear that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been caught sharing copyrighted material via BitTorrent? Sure, they have that spiffy anti-piracy emblem, and are in general meant to enforce the law where piracy's concerned, but it certainly seems that pretty much everyone that says they want to stop piracy also has employees that pirate. So, yes, TorrentFreak has found evidence that IP addresses associated with the FBI were pirating, but what's more shocking is their taste in television. Homeland? Really?

In retaliation for the United States repeatedly blocking Antigua from hosting online gambling, the country now plans to launch a website that will sell music, movies, and software from U.S. content-makers without paying royalties to the content's U.S. copyright holders. It's not surprising that the Antinguan government denies that the site qualifies as "privacy," and it's even less surprising that the U.S. isn't happy about the site and will try to stop it.

Yesterday, we reported that employees of several major movie studios were caught pirating files on BitTorrent. It seems Hollywood isn't alone in its do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do pirating ways. TorrentFreak since revealed that the Big Three music labels, as well as government agencies, and even foreign parliaments were caught red-handed using BitTorrent. This is a little like being told not to smoke by someone while they themselves are lighting a cigarette.

The thought that motion picture studios, including members of the Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA, have been pirating content through the use of BitTorrent is one of those things that's long been suspected, and TorrentFreak reports that they now have proof. Specifically, they worked with BitTorrent monitors Scaneye to track down what IP addresses associated with the member studios of the MPAA have been illegally accessing, and the results were pretty much what you'd expect.

It's fairly well-known that TorrentFreak is an excellent source for anything related to BitTorrent, copyright, and general piracy news. Due to this fact, it's understandable that any legal firm dealing with these issues would be familiar with it. Those that follow the site should know that TorrentFreak looks down on copyright trolls that send out mass notices. Prenda Law apparently didn't get the memo, as they've included a direct link to a TorrentFreak article in their latest legal threats. Well, TorrentFreak's responded by redirecting the link to a page on how to defend against such claims.

Word on the street is that the Swedish police are preparing for a raid on The Pirate Bay, and the information comes from an interesting source: The Pirate Bay. This wouldn't be the first time The Pirate Bay has been raided. It happened back in 2006 and it was almost lights out for the site, which was saved by a prudent last minute backup. Now, according to TorrentFreak, The Pirate Bay has come across some evidence that the Swedish police are preparing for round 2, but a lot has changed since 2006.

Perhaps almost as shocking as the initial MegaUpload takedown is the wide-reaching effects it has had on the Internet landscape as a whole. It persuaded FileSonic and other cyberlockers to turn off file sharing of their own accord, and played a part in convincing The Pirate Bay to retreat to a .se domain. Now you can thank it for the closure of BTjunkie, which voluntarily shut down today, for fear of legal action to come.

Following the surprise takedown of MegaUpload, the countless thousands who had been using MegaUpload's cloudspace for perfectly legitimate purposes - -sending files across the globe, for instance -- have been wondering what's to become of their data. As it turns out, there's a good chance it's going to disappear. Forever.

The Missionary Church of Kopimism, or in layman's terms, the Church of File-Sharing, was founded in 2010 by Isak Gerson, a philosophy student with a love of file-sharing that, well, bordered on religious. Now, after years of petitioning the Swedish government for official status, he finally got it. The idea was that through official religion, file-sharers might be able to find protection from persecution for their beliefs, which obviously include illegal file-sharing. But it wasn't just a bid for some kind of technical protection, as Gerson seems to take this whole religion thing kind of seriously.

As you may know, TorrentFreak has been using the YouHaveDownloaded tool to delve into the torrenting history of all kinds of corporate entities. Some of the juiciest finds were instances of piracy at several large SOPA supporting organizations, but one of the biggest catches was the piracy of several seasons of Dexter, some Jay-Z albums, and other assorted goodies through IP addresses associated with the RIAA itself. The RIAA responded to the allegations of course, and as you can expect, they didn't admit to anything. Their explanation? "It wasn't me."

In this lull in the debate over SOPA, TorrentFreak has released their list of the top 1o pirated TV shows for 2011. HBO's Game of Thrones had a strong showing with 3.4 million downloads, a full 360,000 more than the estimated US viewership for the series. However, it was blood-splattered Dexter that took the top spot with 3,620,000 downloads -- a full 1.4 million more downloads than estimated viewers.

Not too long ago, a site claiming to know what you have downloaded via torrent showed up on the scene. The site, YouHaveDownloaded.com, aims to call attention to the fact that torrenting, as it stands right now, is not a very private activity. You can go there right now to see if they have anything on you. Of course, it was only a matter of time before the folks at TorrentFreak decided to use the service to see if the big, anti-piracy companies live up to their own standards. Spoilers: They don't.

According to an article over on TorrentFreak, a pirated release of Starcraft II, with a torrent size of 7.19 gigabytes of data, has been downloaded around 2.3 million times totaling 15.77 petabytes of transferred data. Even more interesting, the torrent was only released about three months ago.

More than one million people are expected to download the pilot episode of Pioneer One, the new indie sci-fi series by filmmakers Josh Bernhard and Bracey Smith which debuted on Bittorent-powered distribution platform VODO last Wednesday, with P2P file-sharing giants such as uTorrent, Limewire and The Pirate Bay also pledging their support. As of this post's publication, there are over 19,000 seeders for one torrent of the episode. It's an exciting vision of how entertainment content will be presented in the future: After all, why spend buckets of money trying to get your show on television when you can circulate it directly among the viewers? Who watches actual television nowadays, anyway?