As it turns out, though, the law has a loophole: streaming services and file-storage sites like Rapidshare. While BitTorrent’s share of the piracy dropped from 17.1% to 14.6% between September and December 2009, total piracy rose by 3%. Shut down or outlaw one service and its users flee to another — where have I seen this before? Oh, right, Napster, Kazaa, Suprnova… zZzzZzz…

Instead of outlawing pirates, why not take a leaf out of the Netherlands’ lawmaking books and make stuff easy to obtain? Piracy exists because there is demand. We don’t pillage food trucks on the way to supermarkets because there is no need. Why, after more than 15 years of broadband Internet connections, do we still have to pirate things? It’s almost as if government agencies and assorted associations want us to continue breaking the law.

“As you show no sign of relenting from your nefarious, terrorist-funding ways, you leave us no choice but to remove your, your son’s, and your son’s son’s access TO THE INTERNETS!!”

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According to an upcoming press release, “LimeWire Pro users will see the ‘Protected by AVG’ assurance whenever a downloaded file is safely scanned and cleaned.” It’s great to see a developer taking a proactive approach. Plenty of P2P users don’t understand the risks associated with what they’re downloading, so I appreciate LimeWire doing something to mitigate that risk.

The added protection will, however, only be available on LimeWire’s pro version. It’s a logical move since they likely need to cover licensing fees, but it also means that users of the free version (just about every desktop I service for a customer) will need to take care of things themselves (of course, plenty of free antivirus programs like Avast 5 provide protection for peer-to-peer connections like those used by LimeWire).

Jason Herskowitz, VP Product Management for LimeWire, states “LimeWire is committed to providing peer-to-peer’s best user experience and we are vigilant about user security.” He continues, “We are always looking for ways to improve, and with AVG’s seamless integration into LimeWire, we will be providing users with peer-to-peer’s most secure technology.”
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TorrentFreak has compiled the staggering download numbers to reveal the top 10 most-pirated shows of 2009, and you may be surprised just how many times your favorite shows were torrented.

Heroes came in at number 1 with almost 6.6 million downloads, which is well ahead of the show’s estimated viewership of 5.9 million. Lost was second, also with over 6 million, and the top 10 was rounded out by other dramas, including Prison Break, Dexter, and 24. Check out TorrentFreak’s full list for more stats.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about these download totals is that they’re (mostly) not coming from Americans who don’t want to pay for cable. In fact, most of the downloads were coming from people in other countries where the episodes aired much later than they did in the US.

As TorrentFreak posits, there’s an enormous untapped market for on-demand TV with no delay. Maybe the networks should just go for it, considering how many millions of potential customers are downloading shows via BitTorrent the night they air.

‘Ooh, cool, tons of free stuff!’ – no, I mean, really thought about it.

In almost every Western nation software and music piracy is theft. In the eyes of the law it’s wrong. There’s simply nothing more to it: it’s intellectual property that you’re stealing from the property’s owner. As mere users, just single faces in a crowd of millions, we’re relatively safe. It’s like stealing an apple from a busy market stall: it’s not particularly hard, it’s not very damaging — and at the end of the day, it’s hard to catch a single thief in a crowd of millions.

Organized crime, on the other hand, is serious business. You can think of BitTorrent sites and trackers as organized crime units. In some cases they control the flow of goods from the source all the way to the end user, and sometimes they’re just masters of distribution — either way, it’s these organized units that get most of the heat from governments and groups like the RIAA and MPAA. Conventional wisdom has it that it’s greater ‘value for money’ to shut down the big boys rather than go after run-of-the-mill pirates like you and I (hypothetically speaking, of course). In most Western countries it’s very easy to shut down pirate groups — it’s just a matter of asking the ISP nicely.

Enter bulletproof servers. Pirate havens. Speakeasies of the 21st century — whatever you want to call them, they represent a way for pirate groups to operate safely and outside the law. Sweden, thanks to The Pirate Bay, is the most popular example of a ‘copyright safe haven’. Until the recent ruling against TPB, Sweden was considered very soft on copyright infringement — and the moment the judge’s gavel came down, I can assure you a lot of other illegal groups moved their servers out of the country.

Now that Sweden has fallen into line with international community and ‘gone straight’, guess where The Pirate Bay’s servers are now located? In CyberBunker, an old nuclear bunker-cum-datacenter located 120 miles from Amsterdam in the Netherlands. How about Demonoid? They started in Serbia, but now they’re in the Ukraine. These guys can just keep on hopping around until they get bored and shut up shop. It makes you wonder a little about conventional national borders, eh?

Unsurprisingly, China is also a very popular destination for bulletproof servers. You have to assume that eventually every nation in the world will capitulate and kowtow on the contentious issue of intellectual property, but I don’t think it will happen any time soon.

If the television, film and music industries would just make it easy for us — the whole world! not just select countries! — to get our hands on reasonably-priced, high-quality media… well, I think we all know what would happen. Piracy would dry up in an instant.

Let’s say you’re at work, and you don’t want to download several gigs of music to your work computer. It’d be nice to find the torrents you want and have the downloads start on your home machine, right? Here’s how to do it with Dropbox: a lot of BitTorrent clients can watch a folder for new .torrent files and start downloads automatically. If your point your app to a folder on your Dropbox account, you can add a .torrent file to it from any computer, and the download will start automatically.

[via Lifehacker]
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Transmission, the popular open-source BitTorrent client, just got an important update that includes a few of the features topping users’ most-requested list. Magnet link support is included, and so is support for trackerless torrents. Those are the big changes, but the list of other improvements and new features is longer than your arm. Check out the release notes for Transmission 1.8 for a full rundown of the 100+ changes.

For Torrent junkies, Magnet links are an increasing popular alternative to downloading .torrent files from a central server. Instead, you get the torrent from a peer, which works even when a tracker is down or the .torrent file is unavailable for download. Magnet support is an important enough feature that leaving it out would likely cause power users to switch to another app for their P2P needs.

Transmission 1.8 also includes some fixes just for Mac users. Quick Look works again in Snow Leopard, and revealing files in the Finder is easier now. You can also optionally add an “incomplete” folder, if you don’t want partially-finished files clogging up Downloads.

[via TUAW]

The breakdown of file types reveals an interesting trend: people aren’t torrenting music, which is available cheaply, reliably and DRM-free from sources including Amazon and iTunes. They’re torrenting stuff like TV shows and DVDs, which are almost never made available DRM-free by legal sources. Funnily enough, most of the non-infringing content the study found was … porn. Take the study with a grain of salt, though: it only included about 1,000 torrents, drawn from Mainline DHT.

[via Ars Technica]

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While many uTorrent users haven’t been shy about updating to beta or RC builds, the general public seems to prefer the reassurance of the RTM stamp. If you count yourself among that group, you’ll be glad to know that you can now download the new stable release from the uTorrent website or a number of mirrors (like Filehippo).

Yes, the installer still offers the Ask.com toolbar — so make sure you pay attention to the screens as you click through the install if you don’t want the toolbar installed.

One thing a lot of users forget about uTorrent is that it’s skinnable — so why not download a new theme for your new 2.0 install while you’re at it?
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And now, Universal Music Group is suing Grooveshark. This is also not the first lawsuit they’re facing, so they probably know the drill by now (they’ve reached a settlement with EMI).

Incidentally, do you think this has anything to do with Universal’s new Vevo service, inspired by Hulu? I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. I would tell you what Vevo is like, but I can’t because it is “not currently available in my country”. Go Universal, I love you guys.

[Thanks, Mark!]

Just over a year ago, Frostclick and Frostwire joined forces to find high-quality content producers who were down with the P2P sharing concept. A million downloads later, the project is a smashing success – and Frostclick is celebrating by giving away free music!

You can download the celebratory 1,000,000 downloads and counting compilation album via torrent [direct torrent link]. The download also includes a virtual booklet with two high-resolution pages devoted to each artist.

Projects like this are a great way to discover new music – and I’ll be adding it to our massive list of places to download free MP3s.

[via TorrentFreak]