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Here is a link to what theu are referring to: http://torrentfreak.com/uk-game-piracy-the-propaganda-the-evidence-and-the-damages-080821/

http://torrentfreak.com/youre-caught-downloading-dream-pinball-settle-now-or-go-broke/

This is old http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-the-one-third-of-all-internet-traffic-myth/
Got something more recent to back up that 99% claim?

It is encouraging to finally hear that last night, the RIAA and the member companies that were involved in the case finally paid the fees (they refused first), putting an end to this protracted legal wrangling. The amount paid was not, however, $107,834 but a figure of $107,951 â" a figure which takes into account interest accrued due to delay.
[snip]
So, with Thomas looking to head to a mistrial, making the $222,000 judgment null and void, the two largest decisions in the RIAA's 'war on downloading' have been against them. In both cases the RIAA admitted it was wrong, and ordered to pay the fees.

Or it could be like Duffy says, and it's people who can't afford (yet) to purchase games. What about the people who pirated Warcraft and now pay $15/month for World of Warcraft?

So... the fact I had it running in windows, fairly easily, yesterday morning (and then i wrote an article about it here) despite not exactly being a code monkey (to be honest, I find those that have the time for all that, should find a proper use for their time) and yet it works great.

Worked really well for Media Defender.

for a perspective on this matter

Just disregard the pirate views if you aren't into that. There's still something in there!

Digital video is all or nothing, meaning it will play or it will not play.

If you don't have enough bandwidth to watch digital video in real-time, you let it download first to a local buffer, then watch it.

Or had you forgotten that 50% of BitTorrent traffic is TV shows? Full-length, high-definition, 30+ Mbps movies over the internet are just as workable; it simply takes longer to buffer.

>> Is there a router out there that would allow me to reserve, say, 75-90kbps of bandwidth off the top for VOIP and never, ever allow any application to use that, regardless of whether there's a VOIP call going on at the moment or not?"

Why completely block out bandwidth even when you're not using the service that uses it? that seems kinda silly overkill to me. Packet prioritisation is much better.

I expect your actual problem is either:
1) Your bittorrent client doing all it can to make your bittorrent traffic not look like bitttorrent traffic so that your ISP won't throttle it, so your router can't prioritise it either.

2) Your ISP is recognising you have a bittorrent going on, and is flooding you with RST or SYN packets in order to limit your download speed, which is also having an effect on your voip call.
see http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-throttles-bittorrent-traffic-seeding-impossible/

the gameplay of both versions would be the same regardless of the DRM.

The good:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/
- non-language specific programming musings

http://blog.brokep.com/
- The Pirate Bay's brokep's blog

http://ikeahacker.blogspot.com/
- interesting furniture hacks

http://www.ladyada.net/rant
- hobby electronics news

http://www.wired.com/rss/commentary/securitymatters.xml
- Bruce Schneier's blog

http://www.thefirsthourblog.com/
- reviewing the first hour of games, handy for people like me who have a 10 minute attention span

http://torrentfreak.com/
- P2P / legal news

The ugly:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/default.stm
http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/
- destroy your faith in humanity, or at least the British

http://seenonslash.com/
- because sometimes -1 is funny

http://icanhascheezburger.com/
http://www.lolcats.com/rss.php
- still funny?

Comcast and Bittorrent? Deep Packet Inspection commencing by Time Warner and Comcast? And, Today on slashdot, Verizon preventing access to a chunk of usenet?

Either your trolling or live in a cave.

yes

From: Randy Saaf [mailto:randy@mediadefender.com]
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2007 5:06 PM
To: Benjamin, David
Cc: Ben Grodsky; Jay Mairs
Subject: FW: newsgroups

David:

There looks like there is a fair amount. Is this a play at ISP liability?

R

From: Ben Grodsky
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2007 1:04 PM
To: Randy Saaf; leaks
Cc: Jay Mairs
Subject: RE: newsgroups

yes. loads of it. and loads of other illegal type content that David might also be wondering about.

From: Randy Saaf
Sent: Mon 11-Jun-07 12:57
To: leaks
Cc: Jay Mairs
Subject: Fw: newsgroups

Without downloading, can anyone tell me if there is kiddie porn on news groups?

--- Original Message ---
From: Benjamin, David
To: Randy Saaf; Octavio Herrera
Sent: Mon Jun 11 12:42:39 2007
Subject: newsgroups

is there kiddie porn on newsgroups

It's high up on the agenda of Virgin, actually.

Comcast has been known to deliberately reset the connection of torrenters who upload more than they download, in effect temporarily interrupting all of their connections; The claims have been brought to the attention of the FCC. They specifically target the .torrent protocol; you can bypass the resets with encryption. Of course, encryption reduces the total number of downloaders available to connect with, and Comcast's objective is to slow the downloads, not stop them entirely, so it is often more efficient (as a downloader, anyway) to not encrypt.

In any case, what Comcast advertises is download and upload speeds -- they do not advertise a bandwidth cap. Here is some nice drivel from their website, http://www.comcast.com/Shop/Buyflow/Default.ashx

"Get on the fast track...fast! With Comcast High-Speed Internet, you'll enjoy the most amazing online experience. Powered by Comcast's advanced fiber-optic network, you'll love the thrill of blazing-fast speeds. Speeds way faster than DSL from the phone company! * And with Comcast's innovative PowerBoost® technology, activities like downloading videos, movies, music and games or uploading photos go even faster.

Plus, you'll enjoy over $300 of valuable features included with your subscription at no additional charge. Like the highly-acclaimed McAfee® Security Suite ($120 value) and the Comcast Toolbar, a comprehensive set of security tools to help protect your family when online. You'll also get the Universal Address Book powered by Plaxo®, Rhapsody Radio PLUS®, Photoshow Deluxe 4.0 and much more!

So just select the plan that suits your needs, add it to your cart, and start enjoying the best Internet experience available. Happy shopping!

Current Cable TV Customer Special 19.99 for 6 months: Stop crawling the web and start burning rubber with scorching speeds up to 4 times faster than 1.5 Mbps DSL, up to 7 times faster than 768 Kbps DSL, and up to 100 times faster than 56 Kbps dial-up! You'll get free tools like McAfee® security software to keep all your info and computer safe. And with Comcast.net, you'll get amazing free content and features like The Fan(TM), your one-stop source for the best online video.

Promotional Rate is $19.99/month for 6 month(s), ongoing price is $42.95/month"

Now, this page links directly to a "shopping cart." Nothing has been mentioned about a bandwidth cap. Way, way, WAYYYY at the bottom of the page, there is some fine print:

"Comcast High-Speed Internet: Equipment fees not included in monthly service charge. Prices do not include applicable taxes, installation or franchise fees. Pricing, content and features may change and may vary by area. Call your local Comcast office for restrictions and complete details about service, prices, and equipment in your area. Pricing and service offerings displayed on this site are for residential Comcast customers only. Commercial and business pricing and service offerings differ. Speed comparisons are dependent on Comcast High-Speed Internet service tier selected (6 Mbps, 8 Mbps or 16 Mbps) and are based on download speeds vs. standard 1.5 Mbps DSL service. Not all service tiers are available in all areas. Many factors affect speed. Actual speeds vary and are not guaranteed. Maximum upload speeds range between 384 Kbps and 2 Mbps depending on the service tier selected and can be even faster with PowerBoost®."

Emphasis mine. Now, that is the ONLY THING that might remotely imply a bandwidth cap that I've seen in this whole sales pitch -- they are basically telling me that, if there is a cap, I have to call them and ask about it. Now, I haven't gotten around to that part yet, but don't you already see how t

Let me ask you something - if everyone is guilty of something, how do government officials stay in the office? Either they can be found just as guilty of something, and then everyone's on the same footing - and Ayn Rand falls flat on her face. Or they are exempt from laws that affect the regular plebeians
...

(Article here, many others).

Yeah, because eeeeeverybody here agrees to cop killings over some dispute about copyright violations.

Don't believe me? Something very similar just occured in Australia: hundreds of police officers in South Australia were caught with pirated movies on their computers, but they will not be prosecuted because "the ability to effectively police the state will be severely diminished".

(Article here, many others).

email your MP. This forum is a result of previous outcry over proposed legislation. The bill was supposed to slide through parliament but MP's were scared by the backlash. Now they've arranged a fair & impartial (??? with the US ambassador offering the opening remarks, and the VP of the motion picture industry 'moderating' the first panel ???) symposium to garner support for the US-based and backed bill. U.S. copyright laws are so messed up that the president didn't even know he was breaking his own laws by listening to the Beatles on his MP3 player! http://torrentfreak.com/george-bush-vs-the-riaa/ These are essentially the same laws they are trying to bring to Canada!

The idea for this service apparently came when one of the piratebay's admin's friends was forced to take down his blog because he had posted some links to torrents.

You may very well not be allowed to post links to torrents on your own site, depending on your country's legislation (or the country the server is dwelling in). Baywords was started to remedy that situation. There's more info on TorrentFreak (this is actually TFA, but you apparently didn't read it, so here's another link). Note that TorrentFreak never ever post links to torrents on their site because they fear to be taken down. Quite ironic, isn't it? If they had started hosting their blog on Baywords, this might not have been the case.

By the way, not everyone can administer/afford/maintain their own server. In fact, I'm glad it's like this, because everyone and their dog renting a server and bandwidth for their own totally nonsensical blog would be a complete nightmare.

We actually did a preview piece on it a week or two earlier - http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-on-tv-080321/

regard
Ben Jones

Actually, the MPAA gives roughly equally to both parties, see for yourself:
OpenSecret MPAA campaign finance numbers

Actually there is a new project called Gemini Project, which tests if your torrents are beeing throttled.

There have been a number of posts that have mentioned using encryption to get around the problem of ISPs that throttle bittorrent traffic, but no one has posted a HOWTO for the less enlightened on how to actually enable encryption in a bittorrent client. For those interested, here you go: follow this link for details on how to enable encryption in Azureus, BitComet, and uTorent.

As has been mentioned, this may or may not improve the download speeds that you experience. But it's worth a try.

There are plans in the works for developing new protocols that are even better at bypassing existing throttling techniques.

There have been a number of posts that have mentioned using encryption to get around the problem of ISPs that throttle bittorrent traffic, but no one has posted a HOWTO for the less enlightened on how to actually enable encryption in a bittorrent client. For those interested, here you go: follow this link for details on how to enable encryption in Azureus, BitComet, and uTorent.

As has been mentioned, this may or may not improve the download speeds that you experience. But it's worth a try.

There are plans in the works for developing new protocols that are even better at bypassing existing throttling techniques.

while ping is a measure of latency, and not bandwidth low latency would tend to indicate a packet has a shorter route and less congestion than a high latency packet. It's a simple measurement being abused to help rate a peer, however the most important rating is the transfer speeds being achieved.

http://www.superjason.com/archive/2007/08/14/local-peer-discovery-best-new-utorrent-feature.aspx

It looks like utorrent already has a "local" feature also azureus

http://torrentfreak.com/speed-up-your-torrents-with-ono-070921/

What isps do is largely up to them, net neutrality is a nasty can of worms, we can do little about.

Word has filtered down that the authorities tracked down Deimos when he tried to move the site to Malaysia. A front was allegedly set up in Malaysia and Deimos fell in the trap. Word is the tracker was never up legitimately, only to track IPs for demographic information for analysis of the nature of the BitTorrent problem, and to disseminate IPs to the authorities in those countries interested in prosecution. This info came from a knowledgable source on the official #demonoid channel on irc.p2p-network.net. Stay safe, fellow P2Pers

Word has filtered down that the authorities tracked down Deimos when he tried to move the site to Malaysia. A front was allegedly set up in Malaysia and Deimos fell in the trap. Word is the tracker was never up legitimately, only to track IPs for demographic information for analysis of the nature of the BitTorrent problem, and to disseminate IPs to the authorities in those countries interested in prosecution. This info came from a knowledgable source on the official #demonoid channel on irc.p2p-network.net. Stay safe, fellow P2Pers

Word has filtered down that the authorities tracked down Deimos when he tried to move the site to Malaysia. A front was allegedly set up in Malaysia and Deimos fell in the trap. Word is the tracker was never up legitimately, only to track IPs for demographic information for analysis of the nature of the BitTorrent problem, and to disseminate IPs to the authorities in those countries interested in prosecution. This info came from a knowledgable source on the official #demonoid channel on irc.p2p-network.net. Stay safe, fellow P2Pers

Bittorrent is indeed efficent as it scales far better than http or ftp. A better example than that in the article would be the following article that was recently posted on torrentfreak.

http://torrentfreak.com/university-uses-utorrent-080306Dutch University Uses BitTorrent to Update Workstations

The worst case scenario is when every single users deems uploading to be too costly for their own good and therefore caps it to nothing. In that specific case, bittorrent basically have the same efficency as http or ftp, needing the same amount of dedicated servers and bandwidth. There would be a slight efficency loss due to protocol overhead, but that is minor when dealing with large files.

In most cases however, the upload bandwidth of a peer will be less expensive than that of a dedicated seeder for the simple fact that the peer is idle otherwise, while the dedicated seeder is working at full capacity.

Also, spreading out the distribution costs on the users lessens/removes the need to actually have to charge the users for that same distribution. Even if the users have to pay some/most of that money to the ISP instead, the simple fact is that removing the need for micro transactions is a huge benefit in itself.

"Hey, X can be used in illegal ways, therefore we should make it illegal!"

Let's see, that can apply to everything from raw sugar to automobiles. Quick, file legislation to make them all illegal!

Compromised Windows systems are being used to flood the internet with spam in violation of various state and federal laws. Outlaw Windows!

Why cant these congresscritters get it through their thick skulls that there are plenty of legitimate uses for P2P, even in a university environment. A university in Holland is using bittorrent to manage 6500 workstations and it's saving them time and money. The university I work at uses SystemImager on its high performance research cluster to manage the software on all the compute nodes. SystemImager supports the use of bittorrent as a transport mechanism. If these aren't legal, legitimate, and highly useful implementations of bittorrent then I don't know what is. These are just two working examples of P2P being used in university environments in responsible ways, but I'm sure those stuffed shirts in Washington could care less.

Lame huh...? I guess 70% of the internet is also lame. I think your retort is lame. I think you spent the rest of your lengthy post avoiding the point I was making because you know your retort is lame. Nothing runs on an iPhone without Apple's permission, and that permission can be revoked at any time... screwing you and your customers. THAT is lame.

I wonder: how many of those 8k concurrent connections are from people who paid the money but couldn't download their digital purchase from NIN.com because of how incapable the servers were of handling the demand? I for one bought the $10+$6.99S&H CD set, then spent the next 6 hours repeatedly trying and failing to download the Apple Lossless files for which I paid. Once those files appeared on The Pirate Bay, I jumped on that torrent and downloaded from there in a matter of minutes. I'm messing with the statistics by doing that, and I would argue that many other people did likewise.

Hmmm, let's see... Oh wow, email: < 2% of bandwidth. Bittorrent 33%. What were you saying about what really costs ISPs money? Do you really expect anyone to believe that 1% bandwidth is a deal breaker for ISPs?

When the subject is bittorrent, it's the ISPs' fault for not building out their infrastructure. Bittorrent accounts for roughly one third of internet traffic. ALL email accounts for less than 2%. In both cases, the one footing the bill for extra bandwidth is generally not the end user.

From the original TorrentFreak announcement:

A source close to this case has told TorrentFreak that Jonathan Nilson, the owner of the Shareaza.com domain has been contacted and he has confirmed that he has sold the domain to the scammers. It looks like the domain is lost forever[...]

While later stories are not clear on this, as Jonathan is still listed as the contact, he could initiate a transfer. So what we have is not so much a domain hijacking as a shady deal to alter the end point of the site.

TorrentFreak had a nice blog post summarizing various expert opinions expressed in the hearings.

"Like many lawyers in the anti-piracy arena, Tøndel tries to blur civil and criminal law to obtain leverage. The police are clear - their priority is investigating real crimes, such as murder and robbery and sadly for him, file-sharing does not fall into those categories. Tøndel must now make his claims against alleged pirates in a civil court.

Following this major setback, Tøndel wrote to the Department of Justice and demanded a meeting with them. Unfortunately for Tøndel, the response wasn't what he'd been hoping for -the Department of Justice completely refused him a meeting- leaving him to start suing IP addresses, which he's not allowed to do. Ouch."

Do people actually make imitation Grateful Dead live tapes? Some bar band (or Phish?!?) and claim it's the Dead? The mind boggles.

All of the points make sense but he doesn't address that, while he is describing value, it many cases it is valued much less measured in dollars (OK, Euros) than previous, say 20th century, media value.

Sure you'll pay for the immediate delivery, I do with iTunes, but I almost never buy the whole album/disk/collection

Personalization is fine in the future but where is the great employment engine in the here and now? While media is worth a lot less money, real estate, food and energy will only continue to rise. Can 21st century media provide anywhere near the level of employment that 20 century media did? That sure is a lot of adsense.

I understand what you're saying and agree with that I don't want to see them go down,

but making money advertisements on a website doesn't tie them to piracy. That's a very hard thing to tie together, regardless of your business. Also, hosting the tracker is a method to search out the files but is not a copy of them. Remember as well that copyright infringement is not theft, no matter how much the MAFIAA wants you to be brainwashed otherwise, and this is going to be a core issue in court. Especially since files can be shared without a hosted tracker, too. Trackers help, but are not required. A smart lawyer for piratebay will see plenty of ways and options to tear down the MAFIAA on this one. Don't forget this case will go on for years (RIAA/MPAA, not piratebay reasoning - remember RIAA/MPAA wants to drag it out for excess legal fees) and there are no preliminary injunctions against the bay in Sweden. That last part makes a huge difference as well.

Even with making filesharing illegal, note that they aren't suing for that . That should indicate to you just how little of a case they have.

There is some additional information and commentary on Torrent Freak here http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-team-charged-080131/ and on techwag here http://techwag.com/index.php/2008/01/31/the-pirate-bay-finally-finds-out-what-they-are-being-charged-with/ techwag actually broke out the numbers in relationship to number of torrents against the fine against the operators. Interesting additional reading.

From a torrent freak article http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-team-charged-080131/: "The prosecution claims the site generates annual ad revenue of more than $4 million." Shouldn't take long to get over it then...

The beautiful thing about the internet is that pointing and laughing leads to discussing and linking, which gets the issue out a lot quicker than knocking on doors would - what do you think we should do beyond that?

Actually, you may be right. Seems like The Pirate Bay has offered them a tracker. Check this:
http://torrentfreak.com/demonoid-welcome-in-sweden-080116/

Guess that would mean TPB has some abundant cash and bandwidth, huh.

Pictures are at http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-website-hacked-080120/

Who we are.
It appears that the article you requested has been temporarily removed.

Press releases and Statements
ThePirateBay.org - Get free music and movies!

Error
The page at http://riaa.com/ says:
RIAA sucks ... XSS ftw?

Please do note that Unless you live in Canada where citizens are shielded from P2P copyright lawsuits, because the pay an extra fee on their CD, DVD purchases to do so, then downloading some P2P files may put you at risk for a civil lawsuit in any other country. These lawsuits usually take the form of class-action suits, filed against groups of users who are logged as blatantly copying and distributing copyrighted materials. Recently, the MPAA and RIAA, along with the governments of England and Australia, took several thousand users to court, demanding that they pay thousands of dollars in copyright infringement penalties. " It is also illegal for DMCA to invade the privacy of Canadians, to harass, obstruct their downloads with fakes torrents. Attention the Federal Minister of Industries, Consumer affairs, Jim Prentice Jan 7, 2007 Reference: MediaDefender MediaDefender , a notorious anti piracy gang working for the MPAA, RIAA and several independent media production companies, who mow had launched even their very own video upload service called "miivi.com". The sole purpose also of the site was to trap people into uploading supposedly copyrighted material, and bust them for doing so. Now the overall the manner in which they did any of this clearly was illegal firstly too in Canada. It has been at least 3 months since the many news media has reported the false invasion of our home computers, invasion of our home privacy, sabatoage of our Internet bittorrent download usage by MediaDefender and so what good have you now personally done about any of in this time now too? About this big culprit who are seriously responsible for our costly related big interent band width waste usage and that you all should firstly should go after MediaDefender , or Overpeer, who now in the last year with their thousands of computers have generated phony torrents. Now did you have them MediaDefender liable for 'Disrupting Normal Services' by uploading fake torrents and rightfully prosecuted, for 'Disrupting Normal Internet Services' in Canada by their now uploading their fake torrents? Downloading torrents is not illegal in Canada for any Canadians now too but sabotaging our right to do so and their invasion of our personal privacy is. RSVPas to what good have you now personally done about any of in this time now too? http://torrentfreak.com/mediadefender-emails-leaked-070915/ PS In Canada Peer to peer P2P Internet usage has become very popular and is a main reasons many person have a high speed Internet.. but a high speed Internet does not necessary insure you get adequate speeds on your torrent downloads. Also insure that when you get an Internet Service Provider do first check their actual speeds delivered to you, should be at least 6 megs for a high speed system . see http://groups.msn.com/CanadaToday5/internetspeedtest.msnw or search engine - "Internet speed test", and insure that you have unlimited download capability preferably, and that they do not cap the downloads in anyway.. A simple tip to insure optimize download capabilities is to cap your bit torrent's program uploads capabilities to about 60 kbs, to avoid it from plugging up, and do restrict to about 8 torrents downloads too? Trial and error here will let you know what is best for you. How to improve your downloads using a bit torrent program http://bittorrent-list.blogspot.com/