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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BitTorrent Live can stream straight from your webcam.

Broadcasters can either start streaming with their webcam, or use an app like Flash Media Encoder to stream their program. Users will have to download the BitTorrent Live plugin to tune into any of the streams on the platform. The BitTorrent Live website can be used to find channels to watch, and broadcasters can interact with viewers through chat rooms on their channels.

BitTorrent hasn’t said yet how it wants to monetize Live, but there may be less pressure to do so than for other live streaming services: Live uses P2P for video broadcasting, so there is little to no overhead to facilitate streaming.

BitTorrent Live is the brainchild of BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen, who has been working on the underlying P2P protocol for a number of years. BitTorrent started to test the service with a limited number of live events back in 2011, and gradually invited more broadcasters to join. Check out this interview I did interview with Cohen about live streaming all the way back in 2010 below:

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SoShare keeps copies of files available for up to 30 days, unless a user opts to take them down beforehand. Users need to install a plugin to upload or download files, but it’s not necessary to register in order to access shared files.

BitTorrent launched a first alpha version of SoShare a year ago under the name Share. While testing Share, it discovered that photographers, videographers and musicians were most in need for this kind of service. “No one is designing media delivery for the media industry. We saw an opportunity to build a reliable solution for this user group,” said Catherine Meek, Director of Product Management at BitTorrent, adding:

“There are 3.34 million Americans employed in creative industries. They work in large file formats – photo, audio, film. And their work is dependent on being able to send and deliver these large file formats to collaborators and clients. Right now, doing so is costly and difficult.”

Speaking of costs: SoShare is absolutely free during its public beta test, but a BitTorrent spokesperson told me that the company may be looking at different options to monetize the service down the line.

SoShare is one of a number of new products developed by BitTorrent as parts of its BitTorrent Labs effort. Just last month, BitTorrent announced a new file syncing app that competes with traditional syncing services like Dropbox and Sugarsync.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Carlos Maya.

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The new regulations were passed in June, when the offence became a criminal rather than civil one, but only take effect from now.

In many countries around the world, approaching piracy has been balancing out in to a mix of graduated-response action (education, bandwidth throttling, sometimes disconnection), website takedowns and better legal content services. But Japan’s move is significantly more draconian.

Sony Music Unlimited was the first major streaming service to launch in the country this July – years after others in countries elsewhere.

BBC News: “The Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) had pushed for the move, suggesting that illegal media downloads outnumbered legal ones by about a factor of 10.

“The figure is based on a 2010 study which suggested that people in the country downloaded about 4.36 billion illegally pirated music and video files and 440 million purchased ones that year.”

Half-year internet music sales in Japan were 133 percent higher than a year earlier, according to RIAJ, while mobile music sales rose 63 percent and internet music subscriptions were 102 percent higher.

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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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A chart from the report “The six business models for copyright infringement.” Click to expand.

A new Google study entitled “The six business models for copyright infringement,” just released with the UK’s PRS (Performing Right Society) for Music, finds that live TV is the fastest-growing segment of copyright infringement. (To see the others, click on the image at right.) Global pageviews of live TV sites were up 61 percent for the year ending May 2012.

Live TV sites link to illegal streams of network and paid TV. The study looked at 51 live TV sites — it doesn’t mention any of them by name, but a couple of popular ones are Sidereel.com and TVDuck.com, which feature a mixture of legal and illegal content — and found that a third of them are based in the United States.

Two-thirds of the sites are funded by advertisers, and “compared to the other segments Live TV Gateway has very high levels of direct access and referrals from social networks.” Live TV sites are more likely than the other business models to have mobile sites and social network presence “in the form of a social networking ‘action’ icon, for example Facebook ‘like’ buttons, Twitter ‘tweet’ button or similar.”

P2P sites still get the most visitors

Researchers looked at 29 P2P sites; again, while they are not mentioned by name, the largest gets 2.1 million unique UK visitors per month (compared to 1.1 million unique UK visitors at the most popular live TV site). The UK-based study didn’t track monthly U.S. visitors by site, but did look at global page views across categories, using data provided by Google.

P2P sites are the most dependent on advertising of any of the business models looked at: 86 percent of them are funded by advertising.

Overall, “both Live TV Gateway and P2P Community sites, the two largest  and fastest growing segments, tended to link to content on other sites or services rather than host the content,” the researchers found.

To fight piracy, “follow the money”

Theo Bertram, Google’s UK policy manager, said in a statement:

Our research shows there are many different business models for online infringement which can be tackled if we work together. The evidence suggests that one of the most effective ways to do this is to follow the money, targeting the advertisers who choose to make money from these sites and working with payment providers to ensure they know where their services are being used.

The research was conducted by BAE Systems Detica, and you can view the full report here.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Mehmet Dilsiz

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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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Choy started his career at eBay, and then went on to work for RockYou, where he oversaw a growth in revenue from $300,000 to $35M per year as the company’s chief revenue officer. He went on to found his own social Q&A start-up, which was later acquired by Formspring.

Asked about similarities between his previous jobs and BitTorrent, Choy pointed to one key asset: community. BitTorrent has 150 million active monthly users of its file sharing clients, and the company is now adding to this with additional products. It launched a personal file sharing solution simply called “Share” in January, and has been working for some time on P2P-powered live video streaming – something with the potential to “kill of television,” as BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen joked earlier this year. Choy seemed equally enthusiastic about live video during our conversation: “We are talking about democratizing live streaming,” he said.

One of the first tasks Choy has to deal with on his new job is to figure out how to brand the company’s new and existing products. TorrentFreak reported on rumors this weekend that BitTorrent may consider rebranding itself as Gyre Corp., a name that has surfaced both within the company’s software products and elsewhere. Gyre Inc. is registered to BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker, and the company has registered trademarks that describe products identical to those offered by BitTorrent, according to TorrentFreak.

It looks like the company has been mulling over how to address branding issues for some months, but BitTorrent’s iconic name isn’t likely to go away any time soon. “We are absolutely committed to the BitTorrent brand,” said Choy.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Thos003.

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The service is called tt.One and assigns a real phone number either temporarily or permanently to almost anything, whether it’s a social network ID, IM account, mobile app or even an online dating service profile. That phone number can then be used to make voice calls and send text and multimedia messages into and outside or the app or service.

Tyntec has been working with Web-based peer-to-peer messaging company Pinger in Europe to extend its voice and text messaging services beyond its app, allowing members to send SMS messages to any mobile phone. But on Wednesday, Tyntec announced plans to expand to the U.S. and Canada (Pinger’s U.S. SMS service is powered by a competitor). CEO Michael Kowalzik said there is a huge opportunity in North America given the sheer volume of new over-the-top communications services emerging here each year.

How it works

Tyntec’s technology sounds like a lot like Google Voice and SkypeIn, and the principles are the same. The difference is that Google and Skype have built their own vast infrastructures, something that most Web companies have neither the money or inclination to do.

Instead, Tyntec is working directly with the mobile carriers, building a parallel network of SMS centers and servers within their networks. That allows Tyntec to replicate every aspect of a mobile phone – SMS, voice, subscriber authentication, and, of course, an actual phone number – and virtualize it in an IP environment.

“In the end, we’re operating a whole separate core network within the operator,” said Kowalzik said. “Over-the-top players want to get into the legacy mobile world, and we can give them that access.”

Not all operators are willing to play ball

Why would operators allow such access when over-the-top players are the ones cannibalizing their voice and SMS revenues? The short answer is they get paid. Tyntec functions essentially like an MVNO, buying SMS transactions, voice minutes and phone numbers from its operator partners at wholesale rates. In the case of most over-the-top traffic, they see no revenue at all, except what they collect in data subscriptions. By offering up access to their networks, they share in wealth rather than just stand idly by, Kowalzik said.

But there’s a Catch-22: The ubiquity of their services is really the only thing protecting the operators from losing their SMS and voice revenue entirely. If every app or Web service could reach outside of its confines and touch 6 billion mobile devices, there would be little reason for consumers to use carriers’ voice and SMS services at all. That’s why Tyntec’s partners have been smaller operators like Germany’s E-Plus that are looking for a way to differentiate themselves from their larger competitors, Kowalzik said – they have a lot less to lose.

Kowalzik wouldn’t reveal Tyntec’s North American carrier partners, but it’s probably a safe bet they aren’t AT&T and Verizon. In Canada, Rogers has actually tried to head off the over-the-top onslaught by launching its own softphone service called One Number. It will be interesting to see if more Web companies begin to use Tyntec and other virtual number services like those offered by Bandwidth.com to take the battle even further to the operators.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user @boetter

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The app is set to go into beta on Monday after an official unveiling at the London Web Summit.

Yes, it’s already possible to transfer files on Facebook as message attachments, but that method doesn’t work for large slabs of data and, frankly, most people don’t realise it’s there. Pipe uses some rather clever wrangling of Adobe technology to let users of the social network send each other files of up to 1GB in size, using not much more than drag-and-drop.

The people behind Pipe have big plans for their tool, but those ambitions are contingent on Facebook being a successful first platform.

“We’re starting on Facebook because it gives us viral reach,” CEO Simon Hossell told me. When the user wants to send a file to a friend, the friend gets a Facebook chat message with a link to the app and an explainer video; they install the app to get the file… and so it spreads.

A native iOS version of Pipe is waiting in the wings, currently in alpha stage, and the plan is to port that over to Android soon after.

What is it for? Hossell recoils at the mention of the word “file-sharing” for two reasons. He reckons the term has negative connotations of copyright infringement, an exercise which people are unlikely to carry out when it’s attached to their personal Facebook profiles. But file-sharing also implies one-to-many transmission, and Pipe is purely one-to-one, peer-to-peer.

None of the data sent in the file transfer goes through Facebook’s servers, or Pipe’s servers for that matter. The app uses Adobe’s Real Time Media Protocol Flow (RTMFP) communication protocol, which was designed to let Flash or AIR apps talk to each other, to load the file into the recipient’s cache – the emptier the cache, the bigger the file that can be transferred.

RTMFP isn’t technically supposed to be used for file transfer, according to Adobe’s own documentation, but that’s what Pipe’s using it for anyway.

Pipe’s Berlin-based team team has a fair amount of pedigree. Hossell was for many years European sales director for Gracenote, the service that catalogues ripped files for iTunes and others.

And product chief Marco Rydmann and operating head Philip Eggersglüss were the guys behind Songbeat, an online music search-and-download business that achieved some success before attracting the fatal attention of Warner. That piece of tech ended up in the music player of Simfy, the German Spotify rival.

Although Facebook is apparently just the staging point for Pipe’s dreams, it’s worth noting that at the end of February, the social network itself bought a San Francisco-based startup called Caffeinated Mind, which dealt in — you guessed it — in-browser file transfer.

“We’ll be developing internal tools to improve the inner workings of the company and product, applying our technical and product expertise to their rapidly growing service,” the Caffeinated Mind team said at the time, leaving it less than clear as to whether the acquisition was a talent or tech grab.

So Pipe had better move fast and be ready to jump to other platforms if and when Facebook makes its own large-file-transfer play.

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