Silicon Valley veteran and former Formspring COO Ro Choy has been hired by BitTorrent Inc. as VP of Biz Dev and Marketing. One of his first tasks on the job: Dealing with rumors that the company is going to rebrand itself as Gyre Corp. Read More »
Tech
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 »
Neil Young put a lot of the media industry’s hysteria about file-sharing into perspective when he said in a recent interview that “piracy is the new radio — that’s how music gets around.” In fact, a certain amount of “piracy” can be good for business. Read More »
One of the key accusations against MegaUpload is that the site knowingly paid users who uploaded infringing content. MegaUpload did pioneer affiliate programs for cloud hosters, and others quickly copied the strategy, leading to a pirate cottage industry. But these days are now over. Read More »
Not only were the authorities able to shut down MegaUpload and arrest its founders without either SOPA or PIPA, but the facts of the case raise even more red flags about what the government would be able to do to similar services under those proposed laws. 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 »
KaZaA, Napster, LimeWire & Co. all have been sued out of existence in the U.S., but Spain’s Blubster and Piolet music swapping apps prevailed in court today. Pablo Soto, who developed both file sharing applications, can’t be held liable for copyright infringement, a local court found. Read More »
Megaupload sued Universal Music in federal court today, alleging that the music label is trying to censor a promotional video for the file hoster through bogus take-down notices. However, Universal said that some of the artists depicted in the video never consented to it. Read More »
How do you convince people that the future of music is all about access, and not ownership? LimeWire thought it had a solution to this problem with its never-launched Grapevine music subscription service. What did Grapevine have to offer? Take a look for yourself. Read More »
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