Although Pirate Bay downtime happens a handful of times each month, it rarely persists for more than a few hours. When it goes beyond that the steady flow of reader emails to TorrentFreak quickly transforms itself into a torrent.

At the time of writing The Pirate Bay has been inaccessible to most of the world for nearly 24 hours and our ‘inbox’ is suffering. But it appears to be the timing of the downtime that has caused more people than usual to panic.

The root lies in the recent court-ordered censorship of The Pirate Bay in the UK. The country’s leading ISPs are required to block the site so millions of people were already expecting to have trouble accessing the domain. What they didn’t anticipate was the failure of the many published workarounds to resupply access to the site.

For those to work the site itself has to be working properly and currently it is not. While TPB is used to being censored by courts and ISPs, it is a little less used to being blacked-out by other means. TorrentFreak is informed by a Pirate Bay insider that the site is currently being subjected to a DDoS attack rendering it unavailable in many parts of the world.

Now, while we’re informed that the problem might be mitigated during the next few hours, the timing of this attack against the site is either ironic, ‘interesting’ or at the very least coincidental, depending on your viewpoint.

Just last week, The Pirate Bay openly criticized elements of the ‘Anonymous’ collective for carrying out a DDoS attack on Virgin Media, the first UK ISP to block access to The Pirate Bay.

“We do NOT encourage these actions. We believe in the open and free internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us,” said TPB in response to the DDoS attack against Virgin.

“So don’t fight them using their ugly methods. DDOS and blocks are both forms of censorship.”

Right now, whoever is attacking The Pirate Bay has achieved what no copyright or governmental authority anywhere in the world has – an almost complete disruption of the site’s operations on a global basis with no court order required.

But despite the DDoS there are still ways for people to access the site. A handful of the proxies set up to circumvent the ISP blockades still appear to work and, when all else fails, the crazy methods still work too.

Source: Pirate Bay Under DDoS Attack From Unknown Enemy

Although Pirate Bay downtime happens a handful of times each month, it rarely persists for more than a few hours. When it goes beyond that the steady flow of reader emails to TorrentFreak quickly transforms itself into a torrent.

At the time of writing The Pirate Bay has been inaccessible to most of the world for nearly 24 hours and our ‘inbox’ is suffering. But it appears to be the timing of the downtime that has caused more people than usual to panic.

The root lies in the recent court-ordered censorship of The Pirate Bay in the UK. The country’s leading ISPs are required to block the site so millions of people were already expecting to have trouble accessing the domain. What they didn’t anticipate was the failure of the many published workarounds to resupply access to the site.

For those to work the site itself has to be working properly and currently it is not. While TPB is used to being censored by courts and ISPs, it is a little less used to being blacked-out by other means. TorrentFreak is informed by a Pirate Bay insider that the site is currently being subjected to a DDoS attack rendering it unavailable in many parts of the world.

Now, while we’re informed that the problem might be mitigated during the next few hours, the timing of this attack against the site is either ironic, ‘interesting’ or at the very least coincidental, depending on your viewpoint.

Just last week, The Pirate Bay openly criticized elements of the ‘Anonymous’ collective for carrying out a DDoS attack on Virgin Media, the first UK ISP to block access to The Pirate Bay.

“We do NOT encourage these actions. We believe in the open and free internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us,” said TPB in response to the DDoS attack against Virgin.

“So don’t fight them using their ugly methods. DDOS and blocks are both forms of censorship.”

Right now, whoever is attacking The Pirate Bay has achieved what no copyright or governmental authority anywhere in the world has – an almost complete disruption of the site’s operations on a global basis with no court order required.

But despite the DDoS there are still ways for people to access the site. A handful of the proxies set up to circumvent the ISP blockades still appear to work and, when all else fails, the crazy methods still work too.

Source: Pirate Bay Under DDoS Attack From Unknown Enemy

In recent years more than a quarter million people have been accused of sharing copyrighted works in the United States.

Copyright holders generally sue dozens, hundreds or sometimes even thousands of people at once, hoping to extract cash settlements from the alleged downloaders. The evidence they present to the court is usually an IP-address and a timestamp marking when the alleged infringement took place.

Early 2010, when these mass-lawsuits began, copyright holders targeted IP-addresses from all across the US in single lawsuits. This led some judges to dismiss cases because their courts have no jurisdiction over people who live elsewhere.

As a result, copyright holders switched to a new tactic. Before filing a suit they ran their database of infringing IP-addresses through so-called “geolocation” services so they could argue that the defendants most likely reside in the district where they were being sued.

This worked well for a while, but a new ruling by California District Court Judge Dean Pregerson puts an end to this new approach, killing 15 lawsuits in the process.

According to Pregerson, alleged BitTorrent pirates are protected by the First Amendment as they are “engaging in the exercise of speech, albeit to a limited extent.” Therefore, the copyright holder’s request to identify anonymous internet users has to meet certain criteria.

One of the requirements is that it’s absolutely clear that the accused are residents of the region where the court has jurisdiction, but according to Judge Pregerson it is not sufficient to use the results from a “geolocation” tool to prove it.

In a previous order the copyright holder – movie company Celestial Inc. – was asked to convince the court of the accuracy of these tools. In a reply Celestial referred to a website which contained some general claims as well as a quote from the company that collected the evidence, but it wasn’t enough.

“Based on Plaintiff’s own reliability claims, there may still be a 20 to 50 percent chance that this court lacks jurisdiction,” Judge Pregerson writes in his order.

The Judge adds that even if there is a slight chance that these tools are wrong, he simply can’t sign off on the subpoena request.

“Even if the most advanced geolocation tools were simply too unreliable to adequately establish jurisdiction, the court could not set aside constitutional concerns in favor of Plaintiff’s desire to subpoena the Doe Defendants’ identifying information.”

“Again, it is the First Amendment that requires courts to ensure complaints like this one would at least survive a motion to dismiss, before the court authorizes early discovery to identify anonymous internet users.”

The IP-address lookups and additional information provided by Celestial Inc. can’t guarantee that the defendants do indeed reside in California, and Judge Pregerson therefore dismissed the 15 mass-BitTorrent lawsuits the company filed at his court.

It also means the end of mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the Californian court, as no geolocation tool is 100% accurate.

While the ruling doesn’t mean the end of all mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US just yet, it appears that there’s a growing opposition from judges against these practices.

For example, two weeks ago we reported on a related ruling in which a Florida judge dismissed several cases because an IP-address doesn’t identify a person. In other words, even when a court has jurisdiction, the copyright holder can not prove that the account holder connected to the IP-address is the person who shared the copyrighted file.

If other judges adopt either of the rulings above, it means the end of mass-BitTorrent lawsuits as we know them.

Source: IP-Address Can’t Even Identify a State, BitTorrent Judge Rules

Our humanoid friend ASIMO had better start counting his blessings. If fate had dealt him another hand, he could have ended up as the behind-wearing UNI-CUB. Honda's latest personal mobility device appears to be a robotic stool with an omnidirectional wheel (dubbed the Honda Omni Traction Drive System, no less). You control speed and direction of the UBI-CUB by shifting your weight in the saddle, and the unit is designed to keep you at eye-level with non chair-riding pedestrians. Obviously this is no all-terrain vehicle, but it does claim to be able to handle gradients, has a top speed of six km/h and a range just under four miles. Which should be plenty for the National Museum of Engineering in Japan where these butt-supporting bots will be demonstrated in June.

Continue reading Honda's UNI-CUB mobility device is the butt of ASIMO's jokes

Honda's UNI-CUB mobility device is the butt of ASIMO's jokes originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 May 2012 16:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Despite the best efforts of Dutch lobby groups, and American entertainment cartels, the internet is a place where barriers don’t stay barriers for long.

Throw a roadblock out and a new route is recalculated. So it is with DNS. Add blocks in the ICANN systems, and people work their way around them.

The most common way until now has been a browser plugin, like MAFIAAFire, but alternate DNS systems are starting to become more popular. One of those, OpenNIC, is looking to capitalise on that with its new .pirate TLD (top level domain).

Registration takes just minutes, and then your new .pirate domain will be accessible by anyone using one of OpenNIC’s many DNS servers. That’s the big drawback at present.

However, the OpenNIC project is not just limited to .pirate (or dotPirate, as they’ve called it). They also have .geek, .oss (as in open source software) and .parody, among others.

The man behind the project is Travis McCrea, Deputy Leader of the Canadian Pirate Party.

“While the world gets smaller and more connected through advancements of the Internet and web technology, every day our ability to have a free flow of information becomes more and more threatened by countries who wish to censor and control the communication platform which brings us all together,” McCrea told TorrentFreak.

“This is something that we cannot let happen, and why the dotPirate Foundation, … is proud to announce the launch of the new Top Level Domain (TLD) .pirate on the OpenNIC root system.”

To prevent abuse, some of the more popular domains have already been reserved (including torrentfreak.pirate and thepiratebay.pirate). As an extra bonus, people using blockaid.me for their DNS will already be able to access .pirate domains – they added support for OpenNIC over the weekend.

For those using OpenDNS, the provider announced a new service for Windows users last week. DNSCrypt, previously only available for Mac OSX and Linux, is a technology that encrypts all DNS traffic between an Internet user and the OpenDNS service. It can be downloaded here.

Source: .Pirate Domains Now Available Through OpenNic

Despite the best efforts of Dutch lobby groups, and American entertainment cartels, the internet is a place where barriers don’t stay barriers for long.

Throw a roadblock out and a new route is recalculated. So it is with DNS. Add blocks in the ICANN systems, and people work their way around them.

The most common way until now has been a browser plugin, like MAFIAAFire, but alternate DNS systems are starting to become more popular. One of those, OpenNIC, is looking to capitalise on that with its new .pirate TLD (top level domain).

Registration takes just minutes, and then your new .pirate domain will be accessible by anyone using one of OpenNIC’s many DNS servers. That’s the big drawback at present.

However, the OpenNIC project is not just limited to .pirate (or dotPirate, as they’ve called it). They also have .geek, .oss (as in open source software) and .parody, among others.

The man behind the dotPirate project is Travis McCrea, Deputy Leader of the Canadian Pirate Party.

“While the world gets smaller and more connected through advancements of the Internet and web technology, every day our ability to have a free flow of information becomes more and more threatened by countries who wish to censor and control the communication platform which brings us all together,” McCrea told TorrentFreak.

“This is something that we cannot let happen, and why the dotPirate Foundation, … is proud to announce the launch of the new Top Level Domain (TLD) .pirate on the OpenNIC root system.”

To prevent abuse, some of the more popular domains have already been reserved (including torrentfreak.pirate and thepiratebay.pirate). As an extra bonus, people using blockaid.me for their DNS will already be able to access .pirate domains – they added support for OpenNIC over the weekend.

For those using OpenDNS, the provider announced a new service for Windows users last week. DNSCrypt, previously only available for Mac OSX and Linux, is a technology that encrypts all DNS traffic between an Internet user and the OpenDNS service. It can be downloaded here.

.Pirate domains can be registered for free at dotpirate.me.

Source: .Pirate Domains Now Available Through OpenNic

As people’s lives and the Internet became more and more entwined during the last decade, investment in multiple web-enabled devices rocketed.

From simple multiple PC locations to network-enabled storage devices and games consoles, effective home networking – wireless in particular – has gradually become a basic requirement.

In recent years, wireless routers – the now-commonplace devices enabling these networks – have become a conflict ground for lawyers working in file-sharing cases. When unauthorized (or at the least unidentified) people access them in order to engage in copyright infringement online, should their owners be held responsible?

In a landmark ruling yesterday which examined existing EU law, a District Court clarified the position in Finland following a near two-year long file-sharing case.

In 2010, anti-piracy group CIAPC obtained the identity of a local woman and sued her for copyright infringement. They claimed that she had used Direct Connect to infringe the rights of their entertainment industry members. Pay us 6,000 euros to make the case go away, they told her, or things will get much worse.

But instead of caving in the woman kicked back. The offense, which allegedly took place in a 12 minute time period on July 14th 2010, coincided with an event at the woman’s home attended by 100 people. Any one of them could have fired up a laptop, accessed the open WiFi, and been tracked by CIAPC.

“The applicants were unable to provide any evidence that the connection-owner herself had been involved in the file-sharing,” explains Ville Oksanen from Turre Legal, the law firm defending the woman.

“The court thus examined whether the mere act of providing a WiFi connection not
protected with a password can be deemed to constitute a copyright-infringing act.”

Oksanen notes that CIAPC had also requested an injunction to prevent the woman from infringing their clients’ copyrights in future. Had this have been granted the implications for anyone running open WiFi – domestically or in a commercial environment – could have been far-reaching. One instance of infringement could lead to an injunction, and the only way to be absolutely certain of avoiding a future breach would be to shut the system down completely.

In the event the court looked at the Finnish interpretations of several EU directives including Directive 2000/31/EC, Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC and the Copyright Enforcement Directive 2004/48/EC.

The District Court ruled that WiFi owners can not be held liable for the copyright infringing activities of third parties, an argument that still rages, for and against, in the United States.

While this ruling will be welcomed by Internet activists and network providers alike, it is still possible for CIAPC to take their case to appeal. However, should they choose to do so, Turre Legal say that taking the case to the European Court of Justice remains an option.

The ruling will be of concern to IFPI and Teosto, the Finnish Composers’ Copyright Society. They’re in the process of obtaining the identities of dozens of Pirate Bay users who allegedly shared the songs of Finland’s answer to Justin Bieber. If those alleged file-sharers are reading this story now, odds are that many of them will remember that their WiFi networks are wide open.

Source: Open WiFi Owner Not Liable For Illegal File-Sharing, Court Rules

Last month Counting Crows released their latest studio album titled Underwater Sunshine (Or What We Did On Our Summer Vacation).

Fans have been waiting since 2008 for the release and it’s selling well, but that won’t prevent the band from giving some tracks away for free.

Counting Crows decided to team up with BitTorrent Inc. and today they release a promotional bundle with the songs Untitled (Love Song), Like Teenage Gravity, Hospital, and Meet on the Ledge.

The download, which also includes high-resolution album artwork and liner notes from lead singer Adam Duritz, is available to BitTorrent’s 150 million users and will be bundled with all new downloads of the uTorrent client.

While this isn’t the first time artists have used BitTorrent’s promotion program to share their works for free, Counting Crows are perhaps the biggest name thus far. To find out why the band decided to embrace BitTorrent, TorrentFreak caught up with Adam Duritz.

“I’ve been a big proponent of giving songs away for a long time,” says Duritz, explaining why the band decided to share their music on BitTorrent.

While the singer doesn’t endorse people simply taking stuff, he realizes that BitTorrent can do a lot of good for musicians.

“I can dwell on the negatives, but I don’t want to miss out on the fact that there’s 150 million people who I can give songs to. You either treat it as just a money drain, like the record companies do. Or you can treat it as it actually is, which is a conduit, meaning it runs both ways.”

“You can either cry about it or make use of it. File-sharing is no different from the rest of the Internet, it is a tool that connects the entire world. It is the cure for Babel,” Duritz adds.

According to the singer the Internet is a “huge benefit” to music. Counting Crows realized this early on and started posting about their music on a message forum in 1995.

In the years that followed the music industry changed dramatically. But while the record labels have been complaining bitterly, according to the band’s frontman musicians are actually better off.

“Record business was never all that great for bands. It was always a 99 percent failure rate of bands. Even if you did do well record labels took 80 percent of your revenue and locked up your rights. And they are completely incompetent,” Duritz told TorrentFreak.

BitTorrent, the Internet and technological advances have democratized music and made it more accessible than ever before. Promotion is not centralized through the labels, but now works through bloggers, social networks and music services.

“On the Internet dependent bands can survive. Perhaps they don’t become megastars, but at least they can survive and thrive. And there’s a lot of great music out there right now.”

People make their own radio stations now according to Duritz, and BitTorrent plays a vital role there.

“If you got 150 million people on BitTorrent, then that’s the new radio station. That’s a better radio station in fact, because people have the choice to play it as much as they want and stop when they get sick of it.”

“I can’t believe everybody’s not doing it,” Duritz says, adding that it’s much better than bribing radio stations or record stores.

“It’s a no brainer to me and now that we’re an independent band we don’t have to listen to a bunch of idiots who tell us what we should or shouldn’t do. We can have smart people or we can trust ourselves.”

The Counting Crows frontman is no stranger to BitTorrent either. He knows sites like crows-town.com that are devoted to sharing his concerts, and he supports them.

“I gave birth to these websites basically because we’ve been encouraging people to tape concerts from the very beginning. We’re a good live band, so they’re going to want to listen to it. It would be great if we could sell concert recordings, but we don’t have to monetize everything,” Duritz told us.

“I have a whole wall of bootlegs in my house, not of us, but of other bands. So it would be a little hypocritical if I started getting angry at everybody else now. I think it’s a great thing and don’t know why bands have ever fought people recording shows because it’s a great advertisement for your product.”

So in part these torrent sites act as a promotional tool. And that’s exactly the reason why Counting Crows is partnering with BitTorrent.

“Giving songs away will draw people to the record, it will also draw people to the tour that’s coming up. Those are pretty big things. The fact that you can give something to that many people is not a small thing,” Duritz says.

“As an artist it’s what you’ve been wanting to do all along, which is to get your music to people.”

That said, Duritz thinks people will continue to buy music. However, they want sincere artists who charge a reasonable price, and not a band that’s backed by a record label people don’t trust.

“I believe in the future of the music business, just not the record labels,” he concludes.

For those who are interested, the Counting Crows bundle can be downloaded here.

Source: BitTorrent is the New Radio, Says Counting Crows Frontman

On February 1st, Sweden’s Supreme Court announced its decision not to grant leave to appeal in the long-running criminal case against the founders of The Pirate Bay.

This meant that the previously determined jail sentences and fines handed out to Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström would stand.

With Lundström’s and Svartholm’s fates settled and Sunde’s recent plea for clemency filed, only one person’s direction was left unclear – that of Fredrik Neij.

Through a statement penned by his lawyer Jonas Nilsson, today we learn that Neij intends to take his case to the European Court.

“According to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees citizens of Sweden the freedom to receive and impart information, we believe that Frederick Neij’s right to freedom of expression has been denied him,” says Nilsson.

“According to our complaint to the European Court, The Pirate Bay’s services – to transfer non-proprietary information among users through an automated process on the Internet – is protected under that article of the Convention.”

Nilsson says that The Pirate Bay never transferred or transmitted copyright information – that was the responsibility of the site’s users. The Pirate Bay’s function, he says, was “to allow the free dissemination of information via non-copyrighted torrent files.”

The lawyer also notes that since the torrent file information itself wasn’t illegal, the function should be covered by Article 10. He adds that he will also ask for further scrutiny as to whether it was indeed correct to hold Fredrik Neij responsible for what other people did when they used The Pirate Bay.

“In our opinion, it is like being held guilty in court because someone delivered a letter with illegal content. Another, and perhaps even more relevant analogy, would be if the founders of a buying and selling site were found guilty after someone sold a stolen bicycle after it was advertised on the site,” Nilsson explains.

Nilsson believes that it’s quite rightly not easy to get cases heard before Sweden’s Supreme Court, but by hearing certain pivotal cases valuable guidance can be gained for future rulings. Because a definitive ruling would provide much-need clarity in similar cases involving liability, the Supreme Court should have heard The Pirate Bay case, Nilsson says.

“In light of the Supreme Court decision [not to hear the case], we now see no alternative but to pursue this case through to the European Court. That clear legislation or legal precedent is missing in an area that affects us all – the Internet – represents a problem for the rule of law, today and tomorrow,” Nilsson concludes.

Source: Pirate Bay Founder Takes Case To European Court

This week there are four newcomers in our chart.

21 Jump Street is the most downloaded movie this week.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent