BitTorrent’s Ultra Music bundle asks fans to sign up for a newsletter to unlock additional content.

The first bundle released by BitTorrent comes courtesy of Ultra Music. Fans of dance music producer Kaskade will get a free MP3 of one of his tracks, as well as a trailer for the release of Kaskade’s upcoming tour DVD as soon as they download the torrent. An additional 10 minute concert video and an exclusive booklet can be unlocked by signing up for a Kaskade newsletter.

However, this is only one iteration of the bundle. Artists can also elect to use torrent bundles to directly sell additional content to their fans. From BitTorrent’s blog post:

“We don’t need another digital radio station. We don’t need another walled garden or standalone content store. We need ways to place value exchanges within the content itself – allowing these exchanges to travel freely, without barriers or limitations; allowing these exchanges to multiply as content is shared. Our goal is to move the interaction to where it matters; making it a property of the file, versus the distribution framework; giving artists real data about, and real access to, their fans.”

This isn’t the first time BitTorrent is trying to sell content to file sharers. The company launched a digital download store dubbed the BitTorrent Entertainment Network in 2007. The store featured DRM-protected movies from major Hollywood studios — and was largely ignored by the file sharing masses. BitTorrent eventually shut down the BitTorrent Entertainment Network at the end of 2008.

The company went through a bit or a rough patch in the following years, but has since recovered, and put a bigger emphasis on working with independent artists in recent months. Asked whether the company wants to take a cut when people start to sell their music or movies through bundles, a spokesperson told me that there are “no immediate plans for this.”

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Novell — the company that dominated the network operating system market with NetWare before running into the Microsoft Windows NT/Windows Server buzzsaw and coming out with open enterprise server and identity and access management software — is releasing Filr. It’s the first Novell product that doesn’t build on existing products since Novell was acquired by the Attachmate Group.

Bob Flynn, Novell’s president and general manager, wants to reposition the company as lively and innovative but also reliable in its core strengths in networking and file management. Flynn sees the company’s software assets as strong but said the brand still suffers in the aftermath of the company’s rough patch. Whenever he hears from a company that doesn’t want to buy from Novell anymore, he asks why. It’s usually not the technology or the user experience that gets in the way. Rather, it’s the company itself. “Well, I haven’t heard from you guys in years, and you’re sitting right in the middle of my infrastructure, running mission-critical stuff for me. Where are you going? What do you expect me to do?” he said, representing the sentiments of an unhappy customer. That’s what Flynn is trying to change.

So here comes Filr, which will be generally available on Tuesday. On the front end, browser, desktop, iPad, iPhone and Android applications keep files arranged in neat areas: those available inside an enterprise’s network, those that people have shared with a user and those that are exclusive to the user. On the back end, the software runs as a virtual appliance, files can sync up, and deployments can be made to comply with security standards a customer has in place.

Novell Filr iPhone and iPad apps.

Companies that already pay Novell for maintenance of Open Enterprise Server software will get complimentary access to Filr. Others can get the product for $45 per user per year.

Bringing a safe solution to the bring-your-own-device party isn’t the most surprising move. Arguably it should have come sooner. Flynn said the idea was on the drawing board soon after the Attachmate Group closed on its acquisition of Novell in 2011, but executives wanted to focus on rolling out additions to existing products first. Now that Novell has introduced Filr, it, along with a dozen other companies, will try to become the Dropbox of the enterprise, and with an on-premise option it will compete with Microsoft SharePoint, FileReflex, mobilEcho and others.

Novell might not succeed at this — the company shuttered its Vibe Cloud collaboration offering a couple of years ago. Then again, maybe the company is different now. Flynn certainly seems up for leading the charge of a turnaround.

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Piracy is exploding, and NBC is barely keeping up fighting back: That’s the message of the story, which details the work of the studio’s anti-piracy unit at length. Here’s the thing about that notion: It runs counter to some of the common narrative we’ve seen with regards to piracy in recent years. Piracy was supposed to be on the decline, we’ve heard time and again, with Netflix and others offering legal alternatives that are simply more convenient.

And there’s been numbers to back this notion up: In 2010, 19.2 percent of all residential U.S. Internet traffic during peak times was caused by P2P file sharing, according to traffic management company Sandvine. In the second half of 2012, that number was down to 12 percent. Netflix traffic, on the other hand, exploded during the same time.

So what’s going on here? Is piracy getting worse, is Netflix winning or is it all just business as usual? The answer probably depends on who you ask, but here are a few points worth considering:

• BitTorrent is still growing, just more slowly. Or in the words of Sandvine: “In absolute traffic level, BitTorrent has risen in volume by over 40%, but the application continues to exhibit a steady downward trend in overall traffic share.” That means people are still downloading growing amount of movies and TV shows via BitTorrent, but Netflix and others are just growing faster.
• BitTorrent’s not the only game in town anymore. Pirates have been using one-click file hosters and streaming sites hosted in countries with more legal flexibility for some time now, and streaming sites, especially, are starting to play an increasing role for TV show piracy.
• The world isn’t flat. Sandvine’s numbers in particular have shown a significant slowdown of file sharing in the U.S., but abroad, things look very different. The existence of release windows has in many countries led to a whole generation of TV viewers who watch U.S. movies and TV shows online, something that was echoed by the WSJ piece:

“Rick Cotton, general counsel of NBCUniversal, who oversees the company’s antipiracy unit, said piracy is a particularly big problem overseas. For example, he said that revenue for its Spanish home-entertainment unit declined 62% between 2009 and 2011, mainly because of piracy, and NBC shut it down.”

• Takedowns don’t equal downloads. That’s an important point that was somehow lost in the Wall Street Journal’s story. The number of takedown notices sent out by NBC isn’t exactly the best indicator for actual piracy levels. Sure, one could argue that the growing supply of pirated sources also indicates a growing level of demand for pirated content. However, the fleeting nature of piracy makes it hard to actually quantify any of this, in part because P2P file sharing works without hosted copies of content. It doesn’t really matter whether ten or a thousand sites link to the same torrent, shared by the same number of people — except if you want to send takedowns to all of these sites.
• Curious timing, anyone? The WSJ story remarked that studios hardly ever talk about their own anti-piracy efforts, but went on to say that “NBCUniversal gave the Wall Street Journal a rare peek inside the cat-and-mouse game its security team plays with suspected pirates.” Of course, one should note that NBC’s corporate parent Comcast just implemented a six strikes copyright enforcement scheme on its own broadband service last week. In light of that step, the story reads a bit like a plea for sympathy: Look, we had to step up our game because takedowns alone weren’t working!

So what’s the takeaway from this? For one, piracy is obviously alive and well, and it’s still a huge headache for studios like NBC. But Sandvine’s numbers also show that piracy’s growth can be contained, especially in markets with compelling legal alternatives. However, expanding these efforts is hard work that takes time, money and the will to change up some of Hollywood’s rules. Expect many more stories about piracy whack-a-mole in the meantime.

Image courtesy of Flicker user Steenbergs.

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Dropbox announced the news on its blog Wednesday, noting that users who share their files within a Facebook group will be making those files available to all members, and changes made to the files will update for everyone else. Users can share files by choosing “Add File” on the group page, an option that will roll out slowly.

Facebook, which had more than 955 million active users in June, could likely generate a good deal of interest and new users for Dropbox. Dropbox experienced issues with hacking in August and this summer doubled the amount of storage space available to its premium users.

The move also puts Facebook closer to the enterprise world by providing solutions for people in businesses or schools that make Facebook Groups more useful, coming after the company made moves toward file-sharing among groups earlier this year.

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Case in point: Less than 15 percent of U.S.-based online video viewers use file sharing for their movies and TV show fix, according to Ericsson’s TV & Video Consumer Trend Report 2012 (PDF). Netflix on the other hand is used by around 55 percent. Hulu, websites of TV networks, iTunes and Amazon’s VOD offering are also more popular than piracy.

Compare that to Spain, where legal services are still in their infancy: Spanish online video users primarily access their shows and movies through “other means,” which likely stands for unlicensed streaming sites. File sharing is also hugely popular, and being used by more than 30 percent of all users. Licensed services on the other hand are far less popular, with none of them attracting more than 15 percent of all users.

So what should Hollywood do to fight piracy? One easy fix would be to license more content to Netflix and its competitors, and put up fewer restrictions on accessing this type of content.

However, in the U.S., the industry is actually moving into the opposite direction: Last fall, Fox began delaying access to its TV shows on Fox.com and Hulu.com for people who can’t authenticate themselves as subscribers of affiliated pay TV providers or Hulu Plus. It’s difficult to draw conclusions about the effect of these measures from Ericsson’s numbers, but it’s notable that both Hulu’s numbers and the use of TV networks’ websites went down when compared to 2011. Piracy and “other” means to access content on the other hand grew slightly.

It’s too early to tell whether the industry’s love affair with TV Everywhere is driving viewers back to piracy – but on a global level, the message seems clear: Instead of forcing countries to adopt ever stricter copyright laws, Hollywood would be well-advised to help services like Netflix and Hulu with their international expansion.

Photo courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) Flickr user Richard Masoner / Cyclelicious.

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A key part in his plea is the involvement of Jim Keyzer, the chief police investigator who went on to work for Warner Bros. while the case was still ongoing. Sunde explained how he came to the conclusion that Keyzer was interviewed by Warner Bros. around the same time that he was questioning the defendants. He also repeated bias accusations against the judge and two lay judges.

Sunde also argued that his conviction was based on false accusations, including the installation of a load balancer at the site’s ISP which supposedly was proof for his participation in the copyright infringement facilitated by The Pirate Bay. The load balancer wasn’t used for the Pirate Bay, Sunde maintained, but instead part of the ISP’s equipment.

One interesting tidbit about the clemency plea is the fate of The Video Bay, a Pirate Bay-sponsored streaming video site. The site was supposed to become an alternative to YouTube and made use of HTML5 video before many others tried their hands at the then-nascent standard, but eventually disappeared. Sunde mentioned in his plea that he was personally involved with The Video Bay, and that the site would be up and running today if it wasn’t for the raid against the site in 2006.

Sunde concluded on his blog that the plea would probably not get a positive answer. However, he hasn’t given up completely: Last month, Sunde and one of his co-defendants filed an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that their conviction was in violation of EU laws.

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The judge’s ruling is significant because it rejects a controversial shortcut that a growing number of publishers and pornographers are using to target copyright infringers. In the bigger picture, the case may provide a clue into the ongoing delay in a long-awaited “six-strikes” deal between copyright owners and U.S. internet service providers.

Comcast stops a “shakedown”

In the Comcast case, a Caribbean-based holding company sought the names of subscribers it accused of sharing an adult video. The firm, AF Holdings, had obtained subpoenas in different states that required Comcast to supply the names of hundreds of these “John Does” based on their internet addresses.

AF Holdings sued Comcast for contempt of court after the internet giant told it to get lost by refusing to hand over the subscribers’ names and email addresses. In a court filing, Comcast said the subpoenas in question should be quashed because AF Holdings was abusing the legal system:

The plaintiffs have no interest in actually litigating their claims against the Doe defendants, but simply seek to use the Court and its subpoena powers to obtain sufficient information to shake down the Doe defendants.

According to Comcast, AF Holdings’ real agenda was to obtain the defendants’ email addresses in order to threaten and embarrass them into paying a settlement.

The court agreed with Comcast but did not provide written reasons. In a one-page order dated last week, the court wrote: ”The four subpoenas are quashed. Civil case closed.”

How the John Doe racket works

Comcast deserves credit for standing up for its subscribers but, unfortunately, they represent just a fraction of the tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans who are the target of similar intimidation tactics.

As Comcast points out in its court filing, lawyers for AF Holdings have filed 118 cases against over 15,000 “John Does.” But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

If you search federal court records for names like “Boy Racer,” “Patrick Collins LLC,” “Malibu Media” and other pornography-related corporations, you will discover thousands of other cases that are all pursuing a business model similar to that of AF Holdings.

The business model works like this: the pornography company files a copyright complaint against “John Does 1-150″ (where the John Doe names are to be filled in later). The complaint says computers that belong to the John Does are using bit torrent technology to share files and asks the court for a subpoena that requires an ISP (like Comcast) to identify the computers. The company then gets a court order like this:

The subpoenas shall be limited to providing Plaintiff with the true name, address, telephone number, email address, and Media Access Control address of the Defendant to whom the ISP has assigned an IP address

The John Does are now real people and the pornographers’ lawyers can contact them and demand a settlement. In some cases, the lawyers treat the order as a green light to begin a campaign of terror and embarrassment. Ars Technica, for instance, reported earlier this year about a rogue West Virginia lawyer who used outrageous methods to sue more than 22,000 John Does across the country.

The John Doe pornography cases smack of blackmail (one can imagine the settlement offers — “Mr. Smith, you can pay a $5,000 copyright fine to make this gay porn incident go away forever”) but that is just the beginning of the problem. There is also the question of innocent people getting swept into these indiscriminate lawsuits and facing threats, default judgments and more.

Worst of all, the John Doe-style litigation is now poised to go mainstream as not just pornographers but regular companies embrace it too. Publisher Pearson and its subsidiary John Wiley, for instance, are now suing thousands of John Does too.

The copyright concerns, however, are legitimate. John Wiley claims that tens of thousands of its “For Dummies” books are being downloaded without permission and it is probably telling the truth. The pornography industry too has a right to complain about unauthorized distribution of its movies. Like it or not, the law of the land grants the same copyright protection to Shakespeare in Love and Muffy the Vampire Slayer.

Content owners are entitled to protect their creations. Unfortunately, whatever efficiency the “John Doe” suits provide is simply not justified by the rampant abuse and legal disorder they produce. Comcast made the right decision to blow the whistle.

John Doe and “Six Strikes”

Comcast’s bold decision to stand up for subscribers comes at the same time that a “six strikes” copyright enforcement scheme was supposed to go into effect in the United States. The scheme is the fruit of a landmark agreement between content owners and ISPs who have reportedly agreed to take on a greater role in policing file sharing. Under its terms, repeat file sharers are to face an escalating series of warnings and penalties.

The deal, widely reported in 2011, was supposed to go into effect this year but the start date keeps getting pushed back. Recent reports predicted a July date but now that seems to receding too. In response to an e-mail query, a spokesperson for the Recording Industry Association of America wrote:

The dates set forth in the MOU are not hard deadlines but were intended to keep us on track to have the [Copyright Alert System] up and running as quickly as possible. No ISP plans to launch until we are confident that each of the key components of the program is ready and able to be implemented in a manner consistent with all of the goals of the MOU. We expect our implementation to begin later this year.

This is only speculation but the failure of “six strikes” (the RIAA disagrees with the terms, saying there is no “out”) to materialize may be tied to the tidal waves of John Doe lawsuits that are being unleashed across the land. Comcast and other ISPs, which are supposed to send emails to their own subscribers under the deal, may be wary of becoming associated with the more controversial tactics of AF Holdings and others. As a result, “six strikes” may be on hold until content owners or the courts solve the John Doe mess.

Comcast declined to comment on either the lawsuit or “six strikes.”

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Last time we looked at Pipe, it was just going into beta. The app uses Adobe technology to set up direct peer-to-peer transfer connections from within the social network, and it has plans to branch out to other platforms too, including mobile. And, as of Tuesday, it’s available for you to use… as long as you have an invitation.

Luckily, GigaOM readers have their own block of 5,000 invitations waiting for them here.

To recap, here’s how it works: once you’ve installed the Facebook app, you can use it to send even large files to any of your friends who’re online and logged into the social network. Your friends don’t need to already be using Pipe — sending them something will prompt them to install the app themselves, and they don’t need an invitation code.

Here’s their promo video:

What’s that you say? Facebook’s already introduced its own file transfer service? Well, kind of. It’s only been rolled out to groups, it’s asynchronous (i.e. the files are stored on Facebook’s servers rather than being transferred in realtime between browsers) and it’s one-to-many, not one-to-one like Pipe. Basically, that’s a file sharing service (my, how times have changed).

But what if Facebook were to extend this sort of functionality to individual users?

“We’ll see first of all whether they do that,” Pipe CEO Simon Hossell told me. “Facebook right now is focused on being a platform and offering it to app developers. I would question the surmise that they’d do the same thing — we’re anticipating Facebook would be happy they have this app developed by a third party.”

Changes

Hossell said the beta process that was running since we last spoke had been very productive: “Classic things like bugfixing, understanding the effect of communication, and how people respond to messages and instructions.”

Some of the technical challenges that presented themselves required a bit of head-scratching. There were problems with tunnelling through network configurations, firewalls and the like, but Hossell said these had now been overcome.

“We also realised that if you weren’t behind one of these secure networks but one of your friends was, we had to solve it for everybody,” he added.

Although it’s a simple proposition, the version of Pipe that’s out now still could use a couple of extra features — such as the ability to send something to someone who’s not online at the time.

“We’ve had some requests to give some thought about how we might tackle being able to send a message to someone who’s offline – store-and-forward type of functionality,” Hossell said.

“That’s something in the pipeline.” Boom boom.

Get your invitation here

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These kinds of costly cease-and-desist campaings against file sharers aren’t uncommon in Germany; hundreds of thousands of Internet users have been targeted by music labels, porn studios and others with similar demands in recent years, netting rights holders millions. Unusual about this case is that Iron Sky is a crowdsourced and crowd-financed movie, produced by people who made names for themselves with Creative Commons-licensed content that could be freely downloaded and reshared.

Iron Sky is a science fiction comedy, depicting a world in which the Nazis fled to the moon at the end of World War 2. It’s director Timo Vuorensola and its visual effects producer Samuli Torssonen previously rose to fame when they released the Star Trek parody Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning in 2005. That movie was offered for free online and clocked three million downloads within three months. The filmmakers have also in the past  lambasted old media for their take on piracy. In a blog post from 2009, Vuorensola wrote: “Piracy in its current, most common form – the digital download – is not a crime.”

His current German distributor, Polyband, seems to disagree. The company has hired local law office Sasse & Partners, which has in the past sent out similar letters on behalf of German record companies, according to a local law blogger.

Iron Sky has been heavily relying on crowdsourcing for animation, modeling and other parts of the movie making process, and €1 million of the movie’s €7.5 million budget have been contributed by fans. However, the film makers are relying on traditional distributors to actually get the movie in the theaters, and that apparently has resulted in a number of problems.

Iron Sky’s British distributor initially intended to only show the movie in theaters for a single day and then immediately take it to DVD. This strategy was opposed by the film makers themselves, who wrote on their blog: “What they are doing is basically stabbing us in the back.” The duo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit threats in Germany, but one can imagine that they’re not too happy about threatening their fans with lawsuits either.

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Cloud-based storage — Dropbox, especially — has become the primary villain in the move toward BYOD (bring your own device) workplaces, but is also an area of strong growth for providers such as Box.net that can support business needs. With those concerns in mind, this acquisition makes a lot of sense for EMC, which is hosting its annual EMC World conference in Las Vegas this week..

Already, BYOD is wreaking havoc on unprepared companies, including companies like IBM that should know better. Employees want to use their personal iPhones, iPads and Android phones that  to work from anywhere, but employers worry that sensitive corporate documents stored in the cloud on services like Dropbox and SugarSync might find their way into the wrong hands.

Syncplicity seeks to resolve this issue with a service that gives security due consideration. Its business-class administration and  controls, and even its personal edition offers features such as SAS 70 Type II compliance and remote wiping of corporate data if a device is lost.

As for where Syncplicity fits into the EMC lineup, well, that’s a little more complicated. Its focus on syncing and sharing files certainly distinguishes it from EMC’s existing Mozy online backup service, but not from VMware’s Project Octopus, the corporate file-sharing service announced at last year’s VMworld conference and which is currently in beta. EMC is the majority shareholder in VMware.

Perhaps the difference has to do with customer segmentation. Project Octopus seems likely to target larger companies that want a full-on enterprise service, while Syncplicity — with its complementary personal edition and one-size-fits-all corporate features — could work well for smaller businesses.

Syncplicity launched in 2008 and had raised $2.35 million leading up to today’s acquisition, the details of which were not disclosed.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user Mastertasso.

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