bittorrent sites

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) has just published its written submission to the Office of the U.S.

Trade Representative listing countries that it believes should be identified in the annual Special 301, the report that details the “adequacy and effectiveness of U.S. trading partners’ protection of intellectual property rights.”

Leading up to today’s hearing in Washington, there has been a lot of talk about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Aside from making streaming of copyrighted content a felony, the pending bill aims to make it easier to put sites that facilitate copyright infringement out of business.

Last week the MPAA submitted a list of rogue sites to the U.S.

Government. The movie industry group claimed that these sites facilitate massive copyright infringement, and would therefore like to see them shut down with help from upcoming legislation such as the E-Parasites bill.

The Internet is the largest copying machine ever invented, and if we take a look at the massive amounts of traffic file-sharing sites get, millions of people are using it to its full extent.

4shared, the largest English language file-sharing site, is serving 2.5 billion pageviews alone every month, and this number is increasing rapidly.

One of the main motivations for people to download and stream TV-shows from unauthorized sources is availability.

If fans can’t get a show through legal channels they turn to pirated alternatives.

This is one of the reasons why Hulu drastically decreased TV-show piracy in the U.S.

Viewers are happy with the legal streaming option it offers them, but not all studios see that as a success.

When we first discovered Jamendo more than 5 years ago the site was hosting 500 albums, mostly from French artists.

Fast forward to today and Jamendo features work from 38,000 artists from all around the world, who together have published 315,000 tracks across 50,000 albums spanning a wide range of genres.

Impressive statistics that easily beat some established record labels.

Italy is taking its crusade against BitTorrent sites to an unprecedented level. The authorities have moved against the general purpose proxy site proxyitalia.com because it could be used by Italians to access BTjunkie and The Pirate Bay.

Following this logic they will also have to censor thousands of other proxy sites and ban all VPN services, or shut down the Internet entirely.

Historically the RIAA’s litigation campaigns have focused mainly on individual file-sharers and P2P-software and services such as LimeWire.

For many years Gnutella was one of largest P2P networks on the Internet, but after the shutdown of its flagship LimeWire client, it started to collapse quickly.

Last month the private BitTorrent tracker XNT.nu was raided, a site which had risen from the ashes of other sites shut down by the authorities in 2009.

The raid and arrests in this new case have now claimed another casualty in the form of Piratetorrents.nu.