BitTorrent wants more artists to give away stuff to file sharers – which is why they just gave those artists an option to also sell stuff to file sharers. Read more at paidContent »
Could distributed computing hold the future for scaling out the internet and meeting our increasing demands for broadband? The CEO of BitTorrent argues it does have a place in next generation architectures. Read more »
Watch out, Ustream and Co: BitTorrent officially launched the open beta of its live streaming service at SXSW Tuesday morning. Read more »
Watch out, Yousendit: BitTorrent now offers person-to-person file sharing of files of up to 1 TB for free. The company’s new SoShare app specifically targets musicians, filmmakers and photographers. Read more »
France’s Supreme Court has set aside a critical piracy ruling won by Google in 2011, leaving the door open to the search giant being forced to censor some of its autocomplete listings to prevent copyright infringement and piracy. Read more »
Crowdsourcing, crowd-financing and… file sharing lawsuits? The science fiction comedy Iron Sky has gotten lots of help from its fans, and its filmmakers have in the past relied on BitTorrent to distribute their works. Now, a German distributor is threatening to sue file sharers. Read more »
BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen demonstrated his P2P live sreaming protocol at the SF MusicTech Summit on Monday, arguing that it would be much better suited to stream large sports events that existing CDN-based solutions. “My goal here is to kill off television,” he joked. Read more »
One of the world’s most popular BitTorrent search engines has closed down voluntarily, as the domino effect brought on by recent moves against Megaupload and the Pirate Bay starts to hit other filesharing sites. Read more »
Peter Sunde, one of the Pirate Bay founders convicted of aiding copyright infringement, has told GigaOM that the group could go to the European court, after Sweden’s top judges refused to hear their appeal against a guilty verdict handed down in 2009. Read more »
Surprise: The Internet hasn’t destroyed the entertainment industry. The business of making money with music, movies, video games and books has grown by 50 percent in the last decade, according to a new study. Check out some highlights of the study in this infographic. Read more »
MegaUpload, the file-sharing community, has had its physical offices raided by the FBI and its site shut down because the U.S. government says it has violated copyright. I asked a few companies that track web traffic to see how it affected the Internet. Read more »
BitTorrent’s new Share app offers users a way to privately share files of unlimited file size with others without paying for a cloud storage service. The company is currently using S3 to cache files, but wants to eventually move to its own P2P cloud service. Read more »
This week’s talk about usage-based billing has been a bit of a deja vu for BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker, who thinks the solution isn’t to charge or slow down customers. Instead, he believes smart technology can solve our problems and save the Internet in the process. Read more »
Two weeks ago, publisher John Wiley made headlines by suing 27 internet users who were allegedly swapping editions of the popular “For Dummi… Read more at paidContent »
A new twist today in the battle of media companies trying to stop their content from being distributed by illegal means online: the UK’s mai… Read more at paidContent »
BitTorrent Inc. is starting to stream a live DJ set out of its office every Friday afternoon to stress-test its new live streaming platform. BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen and his team have been developing the live streaming platform for close to three years. Read more »
µTorrent users will soon be able to transcode their downloads and sync them with mobile and connected devices, thanks to a new µTorrent Plus client now going into limited alpha testing. Want to check it out yourself? We have some invite codes inside. Read more »
BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen and his company are moving forward with its P2P live streaming project, expanding field trials and courting indie bands to stress test Cohen’s algorithms. However, it could still take months before BitTorrent Live is ready for prime time. Read more »
Broadband geeks don’t have to look to the stars any longer to guess how much of Europe’s bandwidth is generated by BitTorrent and how SIP is faring against Skype on the continent. Ipoque’s new Internet Observatory offers real-time traffic data for these and other trends. Read more »
Peer-to-peer networks in general and BitTorrent in particular are more expensive per bit for companies and business that provide networks rather than the larger ISPs according to a recent study that looks at file sharers usage patterns and ISPs peering agreements to understand costs. Read more »
This guest post was written by Alex Swartsel, who is a member of the MPAA’s communications team, and originated on the MPAA Blog. It was written in response to Janko Roettgers’ piece “Sorry, Hollywood: Piracy may make a comeback,” which we published Thursday. Read more »
Fox wants viewers of its TV shows to authenticate or subscribe to Hulu Plus in order to access full episodes of favorite shows online the day after they air on TV, but a significant number of viewers might simply just pirate them. Read more »
File sharers can download a spy thriller with a cast including Six Feet Under actor James Cromwell this Friday, thanks to a collaboration between the film makers and P2P distribution platform VODO. The site is asking for donations to bring the movie to theaters. Read more »
The midnight sun, harbors, beautiful fjords, and water, lots of water: That’s what millions Norwegians have been watching since the local broadcaster NRK started its 135 live stream of a fjord cruise last week. NRK is also using BitTorrent and live streaming for the show. Read more »
Martial arts movie fans that downloaded the action flick The Legend Is Born: IP Man earlier this month could get a letter from the movie’s U.S. distributor soon, asking them for a big lump of cash: FUNimation has sued 1427 alleged BitTorrent downloaders of the film. Read more »
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said this morning that one of the things he’s most proud of is beating BitTorrent, at least in the U.S. Now, he says, the challenge is to beat copyright infringement in places like Korea, where it runs rampant. Read more »
German content owners have been busy pursuing alleged infringers: Local ISPs have to hand out around 300,000 names and addresses of file sharers caught in the act every month, according to data from a German industry association. Will we see similar numbers in the U.S. soon? Read more »
Movies often show up on torrent sites as soon as they see the day of light. In the case of the new horror flick The Tunnel, this was done on purpose: The film makers are using BitTorrent as a way to raise money and awareness. Read more »
Suprnova.org used to be the Internet’s biggest torrent site, and it inspired countless others to start sites like The Pirate Bay and Mininova.org. We sat down with the site’s founder to talk about lessons learned from the past and his plans for Suprnova’s future. Read more »
BitTorrent’s new Project Chrysalis client now makes it possible to share files of unlimited size with your friends even when you’re not online. The company is caching files and using a revamped UI to make the facilitation of BitTorrent downloads much easier than before. Read more »
ISPs have staked out a singular public rationale: Data caps are necessary to limit the consumption of “bandwidth hogs” in order to protect the network experience for everyone else. But is this really accurate and what can the application providers do to help? Read more »
BitTorrent is known as a way to quickly download gigabytes of data, ranging from TV show episodes to Hollywood blockbusters. The technology doesn’t work quite as well over dial-up. Pakistan-based researchers have found a way to change this by tweaking some of BitTorrent’s core design principles. Read more »
Thought people upload torrents to sites like The Pirate Bay out of the goodness of their heart? Well, think again: A good portion of the content comes from people with clear financial interests at heart, and some make as much as $3700 per day with piracy. Read more »
Today on the Net: Google won’t suggest its users uTorrent anymore, pirates can still find plenty of Oscars fare online and Democrats want tougher net neutrality regulations. Read more »
BitTorrent is making a big push to get its filesharing client embedded on multiple platforms, partnering with Taiwan’s ITRI to develop standards for sharing streams between connected devices. It’s also finally productizing a new P2P-based live streaming technology founder Bram Cohen has been working on. Read more »
Today on the Net: The Daily Show and the Colbert Report may return to Hulu soon, CE makers are still trying to convince us oh 3-D in the home and uTorrent has 100MM monthly users. Read more »
You may think you’re downloading a movie or a TV show via BitTorrent — but you’re really taking part in a massive distributed denial of service attack against a major corporation. Sounds like Sci-Fi? Well, it’s possible today, thanks to a security vulnerability in BitTorrent’s protocol. Read more »
Bram Cohen has been working two years on a new P2P live streaming solution. He started from scratch instead of building upon and optimizing BitTorrent code. One of the reasons: The BitTorrent protocol is based on TCP, and that introduces too much of a delay. Read more »
How about this for day-and-date: The Dutch documentary California Dreaming will be available legally, for free, via BitTorrent today while it airs on TV. The movie is released by VODO.net and licensed under a Creative Commons license that even allows viewers and downloaders to remix it. Read more »
The Wikipedia’s Wikimedia foundation doesn’t want to be a slave to high video bandwidth costs. Instead, it is using BitTorrent-based P2P technology to distribute the growing amount of video on Wikipedia.org. Users can simply install a Firefox plug-in to help with the distribution of Wikipedia videos. Read more »
