Microsoft's pirated software police have been going after companies abroad for years, but getting those far-away folks into US courtrooms isn't easy. What is easy, however, is suing the folks in your own back yard -- which is why Microsoft is lobbying to get laws passed in several states that'll put US businesses on the hook for the pirating ways of their foreign suppliers. For example, if a manufacturer uses pirated software in the "manufacture, distribution, marketing, or sales" of products sold in Washington, Microsoft could sue the vendor of those products and get an injunction to stop the goods from being sold. So Washington widget retailers would be liable for the piracy of their foreign widget manufacturers, even if the illicit act was merely creating the sales invoice on a counterfeit copy of Word.

The Washington state Senate and House have already approved different versions of the bill, and the legislature is in the process of merging the two together for final approval. Louisiana passed a similar law last year, and analogous bills have been proposed in Oregon and several other states as well. Numerous companies -- including Dell, IBM, Intel, and HP -- oppose the laws, as they see them giving Microsoft the power to not only drag them into court, but also futz with their supply chains. (There's bound to be some counterfeit software being used in Shenzhen, right?) As Microsoft's latest anti-piracy scheme unfolds, there should be plenty more legislative action to come. Evidently the crew in Redmond doesn't see piracy as a problem to be fixed by lowering prices.

Microsoft asks state lawmakers to make domestic companies pay for foreign firms' software piracy originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Mar 2011 09:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This week there are three newcomers in the top 10. Green Zone is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent 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 DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Week ending June 13, 2010

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	Green Zone	7.2 / trailer
2	(1)	She’s Out of My League	6.7 / trailer
3	(…)	Hot Tub Time Machine (R5)	7.2 / trailer
4	(…)	The A-Team(TS)	7.5 / trailer
5	(6)	Remember Me	6.5 / trailer
6	(5)	The Book of Eli	7.0 / trailer
7	(2)	Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time(TS)	6.9 / trailer
8	(3)	The Wolfman	6.2 / trailer
9	(4)	Kick-Ass (R5)	8.3 / trailer
10	(9)	Robin Hood (TS)	7.1 / trailer

The BitTorrent landscape has changed dramatically in the past 12 months. The two largest BitTorrent trackers today didn’t exist a year ago, and the top tracker of last year has shut down. The upside is that all these changes went by relatively unnoticed to the millions of downloaders.

Despite claims that millions of BitTorrent downloads would cease to work if a major BitTorrent tracker closed down, most downloaders today don’t even notice when a tracker stops working. Thanks to technologies such as DHT and PEX central trackers have become a luxury good to some degree.

Indeed, larger torrents with thousands of peers will work just fine without a central tracker. But the majority of torrents out there only have a handful of peers and for these files a central tracker is still an essential part of the downloading process.

It’s therefore good to know that several new players took the place of The Pirate Bay’s tracker when it shut down last year. Below we show a list of the five largest public BitTorrent trackers based on the number of torrents and peers (downloaders+uploaders) they track.

5 Largest BitTorrent Trackers, June 2009

#	Tracker	Torrents	Peers	Software
torrentfreak.com
1	PublicBitTorrent	2,484,145	21,694,091	Opentracker
2	OpenBitTorrent	2,388,738	21,186,589	Opentracker
3	Denis.Stalker	1,614,356	10,527,993	Opentracker
4	1337x.org	302,799	4,889,991	XBT
5	Torrent.to	326,467	3,205,170	Opentracker

The first thing that stands out in the top five above is that the first three spots are taken by standalone trackers that do not have a torrent index or search engine attached to them. These three trackers are responsible for the coordination of millions of public downloads on BitTorrent but do not provide any torrents on their sites like The Pirate Bay used to do.

PublicBitTorrent and OpenBitTorrent, number one and two in the list, are both relatively new trackers that emerged after The Pirate Bay announced that it would sell the site last year. This sale eventually failed to go through, but The Pirate Bay did close its tracker so both trackers became a very welcome addition to the BitTorrent ecosystem.

Another observation is that there is a lot of weight on the shoulders of the top three trackers. Although there are close to 50,000 known BitTorrent trackers, only a fraction of these are active, and of these only a few dozen track more than 1,000 torrent files. Without the five trackers in the list above most of the smaller public torrents could quickly become unavailable.

Although trackers in the top five are all public ones, there are a few private ones that should be in this list if it was only based on the number of torrents tracked. The music tracker What.cd, for example, currently tracks more than 800,000 torrents alone. A dazzling number that puts the site in fourth place based on the number of torrents, not peers.

For BitTorrent’s long tail content reliable public trackers are still invaluable. The good news is that the ecosystem is better off than a year ago when The Pirate Bay was carrying this burden alone, but it’s far from bulletproof yet.

Source TorrentFreak.com

This week there are five newcomers in the top 10. She’s Out of My League is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent 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 DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Week ending June 6, 2010

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	She’s Out of My League	6.7 / trailer
2	(…)	Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time(TS)	6.9 / trailer
3	(1)	The Wolfman	6.2 / trailer
4	(3)	Kick-Ass (R5)	8.3 / trailer
5	(2)	The Book of Eli	7.0 / trailer
6	(…)	Remember Me	6.5 / trailer
7	(5)	Alice In Wonderland	6.8 / trailer
8	(…)	Date Night (R5)	6.9 / trailer
9	(6)	Robin Hood (TS)	7.1 / trailer
10	(…)	I Love You Phillip Morris	7.0 / trailer

This week there are five newcomers in the top 10. Kick-Ass is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week. Iron Man 1 and 2 are both listed in the top 10, which is quite unique.

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 DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Week ending May 09, 2010

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	Kick-Ass (R5)	8.4 / trailer
2	(…)	Iron Man 2 (TS)	7.6 / trailer
3	(1)	Clash Of The Titans (TS)	6.2 / trailer
4	(2)	Shutter Island (R5)	8.1 / trailer
5	(…)	The Losers (DVDscr)	6.8 / trailer
6	(6)	How to Train Your Dragon (TS)	8.3 / trailer
7	(…)	Ip Man 2	8.1 / trailer
8	(7)	Alice In Wonderland (TS)	7.0 / trailer
9	(8)	Dear John	5.6 / trailer
10	(…)	Iron Man	8.0 / trailer

This week there are two newcomers in the top 10. Clash Of The Titans is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week, again.

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 DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Week ending May 02, 2010

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(1)	Clash Of The Titans (TS)	6.2 / trailer
2	(3)	Shutter Island (R5)	8.1 / trailer
3	(8)	Avatar (Blu-ray)	8.5 / trailer
4	(…)	True Legend	6.1 / trailer
5	(…)	Valentines Day	5.7 / trailer
6	(3)	How to Train Your Dragon (TS)	8.3 / trailer
7	(5)	Alice In Wonderland (TS)	7.0 / trailer
8	(4)	Dear John	5.6 / trailer
9	(6)	The Bounty Hunter (R5)	5.0 / trailer
10	(10)	The Crazies (R5)	7.1 / trailer

This week there are three newcomers in the top 10 including Avatar which returned after the release of the DVD rip. The Bounty Hunter is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent 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 DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Week ending April 11, 2010

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	The Bounty Hunter (R5)	5.0 / trailer
2	(1)	Shutter Island (R5)	8.1 / trailer
3	(…)	Cop Out (R6)	6.1 / trailer
4	(3)	How to Train Your Dragon (TS)	8.3 / trailer
5	(2)	Alice In Wonderland (TS)	7.0 / trailer
6	(4)	Sherlock Holmes (DVDscr)	7.7 / trailer
7	(…)	Avatar	8.5 / trailer
8	(6)	From Paris With Love (R5)	6.6 / trailer
9	(9)	Ninja Assassin	6.6 / trailer
10	(5)	New Moon	4.6 / trailer

ICCP Foundation claims to be an international company operating out of Switzerland. They say they are “committed to promoting the cultural and economic benefits of copyright” while assisting their partners to fight “copyright theft around the world”.

In fact what they really do is operate a scam to extort money from BitTorrent users.

Right at this moment we are unsure of the exact route of infection, but somehow malware (probably in either fake file or attached virus form) is displaying a “copyright violation alert” on the victim’s screen, locking it, and redirecting users to the ICPP site where they are told they have been caught infringing copyright.

There they are warned their offenses could result in 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine and are given the option to take the (fake) case to court. They are also offered a chance to make the whole thing go away for the payment of a ‘fine’ of around $400. Victims are also prompted to give their name, address and full credit card details – it is unclear how this information is further abused but it doesn’t look good.

If they select the court option, they are scared with this screen:

So that that this evil software (believed to be located at C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\IQManager\iqmanager.exe) more accurately targets BitTorrent users rather than just random users, it appears to scan the user’s hard drive for .torrent files and displays these as ‘evidence’ of an earlier infringement.

In order to boost their credibility, icpp-online.com claim to be affiliated with influential partners – the RIAA, MPAA, and The Copyright Alliance. Of course, this is a complete fabrication.

This whole approach seems very similar to that employed by so-called ‘rogue software‘ or ’scareware’ which attempt to frighten users into parting with cash for often useless software. And it seems the links to malware don’t stop there.

A WHOIS on the ICPP-Online domain reveals some contact data which shows up elsewhere in connection to other questionable activities.

Details on this new threat are scarce at the moment, so if any readers can discover more about this malware or the operation behind it, please collate the information and send it over to tips@torrentfreak.com.

This week there are four newcomers in the top 10. From Paris With Love is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent.

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 DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Week ending February 28, 2010

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	From Paris With Love (R5)	6.6 / trailer
2	(…)	Ninja Assassin	6.6 / trailer
3	(1)	Legion (R5)	5.3 / trailer
4	(…)	The Boondock Saints II	7.1 / trailer
5	(4)	Sherlock Holmes (DVDscr)	7.7 / trailer
6	(2)	Edge of Darkness (R5)	7.1 / trailer
7	(9)	Daybreakers (DVDscr)	7.0 / trailer
8	(3)	Old Dogs	5.0 / trailer
9	(…)	The Fourth Kind	6.2 / trailer
10	(5)	Avatar (DVDscr)	8.6 / trailer

This week there are four newcomers in the top 10. Legion is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent and Sherlock Holmes dropped out of the top three.

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 DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Week ending February 21, 2010

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	Legion (R5)	5.3 / trailer
2	(…)	Edge of Darkness (R5)	7.1 / trailer
3	(…)	Old Dogs	5.0 / trailer
4	(1)	Sherlock Holmes (DVDscr)	7.7 / trailer
5	(3)	Avatar (DVDscr)	8.6 / trailer
6	(6)	Couples Retreat	5.5/ trailer
7	(9)	The Hurt Locker	8.0 / trailer
8	(…)	Tooth Fairy (R5)	4.0 / trailer
9	(2)	Daybreakers (DVDscr)	7.0 / trailer
10	(4)	Agora	7.4/ trailer