The new TV-season started last week with the debut of several new series, including the animated sitcom Bob’s Burgers on Fox. As with all TV-shows, the first episode of Bob’s Burgers also ended up on BitTorrent, where one downloader stands out above the rest.

In a torrent discussion at Demonoid.me, the largest semi private BitTorrent community, a commenter with the nickname XIIIth claims to have a special relationship with the show. Unlike the regular downloaders, he is actually involved in the production of Bob’s Burgers, or so he claims.

“Nice to hear that people liked the show, I’m an animator on it so it’s nice to hear something positive from all the negative I’ve been hearing about! I’m going to keep seeding to support my show,” XIIIth wrote a few hours after the torrent was published on Demonoid.

Of course, anyone can claim to be an animator of the show, but as we will point out later in this article this one turns out to be legit. This is where it gets interesting.

Other commenters on Demonoid seem to be genuinely surprised and honored that one of the animators approves of their actions, since makers of such big productions are generally negative towards ‘unauthorized’ downloads. In a follow up comment XIIIth adds some more insider insights to the ‘sharing’ crowd.

“There are 13 eps for the show coming out, they’ve been well received by the everyone at the studio so far so we’re hoping everything will turn out and it’ll gain more of an audience as it goes,” he says.

“If you go to 21:24 I’m one of the animators listed,” he adds. “I’m not going to say which just cause I want to keep my interbutts anonymity. But yeah, enjoy guys, this show was hell to put together considering the deadlines we had to work with. Hell I’m still working on it right now!”

With that last comment XIIIth did give away more than he might have wanted to do. It is of course great that someone from the production team of a popular show approves of torrenting, and we welcome such an open stance. But, at the same time we got very curious about the identity of the torrenting animator, if only to verify the legitimacy of his claims.

Since it’s hard to hide something on the internet nowadays, it only took a few Google searches to find out that the nickname and the birthday of the commenter are linked to an animator featured first in the credits above. So, the story seems to check out and we applaud XIIIth for making Bob’s Burgers available – in more ways than one.

Article from: TorrentFreak, Covering Torrent Sites and News since 2005.

For the last few days the huge BitTorrent porn trackers Empornium and PureTNA have been dark, with both sites routing to 127.0.0.1. Understandably, users of the sites have been pretty concerned since these pair of giants, which are connected by the same management, have massive memberships and are long-standing mainstays of the community.

To give an idea of size, PureTNA had in excess of 1,329,500 members, Empornium a similar number. At last count PureTNA’s database sat at nearly 67,000 torrents servicing around 630,000 peers. Empornium listed more than 82,000 torrents and 660,000 peers. That’s a hell of a lot of filth and depravity, just how their members liked it.

But for their users, speaking of the sites in the permanent past tense is the sad reality today. The management of both Empornium and PureTNA have confirmed to TorrentFreak that they are “offline permanently”. Requests for elaboration were declined, but a comment obtained from Breeze, the manager of both sites, said simply: “Such is bittorrent life.”

So considering that both sites had continued to grow, both in terms of torrents and membership, why suddenly close down?

The main unconfirmed rumor to have gained traction is that due to a lack of investment in code development, both sites have been vulnerable to malicious attacks. This resulted in one or both of the sites being hacked in recent days. Rather than pump money into the sites to prevent this happening again, their hard drives were wiped by the sites’ owners to protect user privacy, or so the story goes.

The other rumor, which is circulating on the fringes of the adult entertainment industry, is that the sites buckled under legal pressure, or at least the threat of it. As can be seen from a list retrievable via Google cache which was updated only last week, dozens of porn sites and studios have issued some kind of legal “do not upload” orders to the sites.

While there may be some triumphant gloating from elements of the porn industry, these lists could merely be an indication that both sites were trying to stay within the law by abiding by the desires of copyright holders who preferred for their material not to be shared on the sites. In any event, with the demise of both sites, that point is moot.

Interestingly, although PureTNA is still listed by Google, a similar search for Empornium draws a a complete blank. As far as the world’s leading search engine is concerned, Empornium doesn’t exist. In the future, those looking for nostalgia will have to settle for the Empornium song from Futuristic Sex Robotz which lives on with YouTube.

Whatever the reason – hackings, legal pressure, a combination of the two or just plain old lack of interest in continuing – the sites are not coming back so for BitTorrent porn consumers this certainly marks the end of an era.

Whether Cheggit can cope with the Empornium/PureTNA refugees will remain to be seen. Their servers, in common with the actors in the videos they index, are likely to be puffing and panting for some time.

Article from: TorrentFreak, Covering Torrent Sites and News since 2005.

If during 2009 and 2010 the world’s leading cyberlocker companies were feeling the heat, the signs are that 2011 will be a few degrees hotter still. While business is booming, competition is fierce, and more and more companies are looking to get involved in this rapidly expanding but sometimes controversial market.

As reported earlier this week, in traffic terms the number of one-click hosting sites that are now larger than the mighty Pirate Bay – and above them in the Internet’s top 100 sites – has grown to five.

While Hotfile, 4Shared, Mediafire are all significant players on the world stage, market leaders RapidShare and MegaUpload are the companies at the sharp end of accusatory finger-pointing by Hollywood and the music industry.

Now, following on the heels of RapidShare’s fightback, here comes MegaUpload countering what it describes as “grotesquely overblown allegations” of mass copyright infringement.

“We provide connectivity between end users and storage capacity in the cloud, but no content – just like e.g. ADSL providers and hard drive vendors,” the company said in a statement emailed to TorrentFreak. “As a matter of fact, most public Internet services, including backbone carriers, could not exist if the law did not protect them from liability for abuse committed by their users, as long as they fulfill specific requirements, such as the timely processing of abuse notices.”

MegaUpload is a “dual-use tool” comparable to an email account or a USB stick, the company says, and as such can be put to both non-infringing and infringing uses. In dealing with illicit content, MegaUpload says that violations of its terms and conditions are not tolerated and the company abides by the DMCA and quickly processes takedown requests.

Like competitor RapidShare, MegaUpload says that it too goes one step further to accommodate those seeking to remove infringing content from its servers.

“We also cooperate closely with rightsholders and their copyright enforcement agents and provide them with direct realtime takedown access, bypassing the DMCA process entirely. Because we strictly conform to all legal requirements, nobody has ever sued us over copyright infringement, and cases brought forward against our competitors have a long history of being unsuccessful,” the company notes.

MegaUpload also provides some very impressive stats. The company says that not only does it have more than 100 million registered users and in excess of 45 million unique visitors every day, but that employees at more than 70% of the world’s Fortune 500 companies are account holders. It adds that given these numbers, it is unfortunate that the actions of a small group of “black sheep” (aka copyright infringers) can overshadow those of the millions of customers who use their site legitimately every day.

“We have become the de-facto standard for sending files that are too big to email. We are the most popular hard disk in the cloud. We host more backups than any other company. If Mega is a rogue operator as we have been unfairly labelled by the MPAA and RIAA, then what about Google? What about Yahoo? And every single ISP?”

Yesterday, after reading a report by brand protection company MarkMonitor which labelled them as a “leading digital piracy site”, RapidShare threatened to sue for defamation. Google-owned YouTube, apparently due to their takedown policies (which don’t appear to be any more comprehensive), were not included on the list. Today, MegaUpload questioned why it too should be labelled a “rogue site” when Google “probably hosts the world’s largest index of pirated content.”

MegaUpload concludes with a statement that the vast majority of its traffic is legitimate and that their company is here to stay. It also holds out an olive branch.

“If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue. We have some good ideas. Please get in touch.”

Article from: TorrentFreak, Covering Torrent Sites and News since 2005.

In the last year RapidShare has taken extreme measures to ensure that they are operating legitimately. The company is actively working with copyright holders to meet their needs and has employed various take down tools comparable to those found at YouTube.

In legal action the cyberlocker site has been active and successful, winning cases in both the US and Germany where courts ruled that RapidShare runs a perfectly legal business. Despite these efforts both the RIAA and MPAA have marked RapidShare as one of the largest piracy havens, and this stance was reaffirmed yesterday by a paper published by brand protection company MarkMonitor.

In this study, which was picked up by dozens of mainstream news outlets, it is concluded that the Swiss cyberlocker is the largest ‘digital piracy site’ with a massive 13 billion pageviews. Although RapidShare is indeed a big player in the cyberlocker market, being labeled as a piracy site has hugely offended the site’s owners, who might go as far as taking legal action in response to statements they view as defamatory.

“This defamation of RapidShare as a digital piracy site is absurd and we reserve the right to take legal action against MarkMonitor. RapidShare is a legitimate company that offers its customers fast, simple and secure storage and management of large amounts of data via our servers,” the company announced today.

One of the main problems according to RapidShare, is the use of pageviews as an indication of the scope of the ‘piracy’ that occurs on a site. The company claims that the majority of its consumers use the site for legitimate reasons, which means that they should be discounted. Also, if pageviews were an indication then YouTube should really be branded the biggest digital piracy site on the Internet, with hundreds of millions of copyrighted videos published without the owners’ permission.

However, YouTube was intentionally left out of the study, incorrectly according to RapidShare.

“In an interview with mediapost.com MarkMonitor’s vice president of communications Te Smith said that she did not consider websites like YouTube piracy sites as they ‘have procedures in place where brandowners can take down the material.’ RapidShare offers the exact same take down features to copyright owners as YouTube does. Now, where is the difference?”

TorrentFreak asked MarkMonitor’s Te Smith to clarify why they chose to exclude YouTube but include RapidShare, despite both companies being committed to working with copyright holders. Although she could not answer our question directly, Smith did say that her company stands behind their research which is claimed to be independent.

For RapidShare the MarkMonitor report is another affirmation that they have a long way to go before they can shake off the piracy stigma, which they are committed to do. The company continues to seek dialogue with copyright holders and has most recently employed lobbyists in Washington to look after its interests.

“The study confirmed our resolution to actively raise awareness about what RapidShare is and what RapidShare does. Therefore, we have mandated a Washington-based lobbying firm some weeks ago. We are optimistic that this decision will eventually pay off,” RapidShare concludes.

Article from: TorrentFreak, Covering Torrent Sites and News since 2005.

As it comes under increasing pressure from the United States, not for the first time China has announced that it is getting tough on copyright infringement. With a campaign set to run until at least May 2011, China says it can make significant headway with the problem. The US reasonably thinks it will take rather longer than that.

But with trade talks looming between the two countries next week, China has been keen to announce significant progress. In the last few weeks China says that 650,000 law enforcement personnel have carried out 4,000 arrests while investigating 2,000 cases of serious infringement with a financial value of around $350 million.

With the authorities promising harsher punishments, China has been getting tough with the physical side of piracy with the recent destruction of huge numbers of counterfeit DVDs and other products. A show of force on Monday saw the authorities conducting public book burnings in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanxi, Jiangsu, Guangdong and Sichuan, with a promise of more in the lead up to World Intellectual Property Day in April.

But increasingly it is the digital domain where piracy is running most rampant and up until now China’s actions have largely appeared limited to the physical world. That, apparently, is changing.

Just before the holidays there was an investigation by the authorities into 500 music download sites. The Ministry of Culture said that 237 of those sites (list) were suspected of illegal activities, citing a lack of licensing, failure to register and/or distribution of copyright infringing material.

On Monday the authorities issued a list of music – much of it from Universal, RCA, Warner, EMI and Sony – to be removed from sites by February 28th. The list features music from artists such as Eminem, Christina Alguilera, Kylie Minogue and KT Tunstall but isn’t particularly long. Indeed, many single DMCA takedown requests sent to Google by IFPI are substantially longer. That the government mentions “illegal music products” and “piracy” separately in respect of these products is sure to raise questions of censorship.

But music isn’t the only media being targeted or becoming the subject of self-imposed censorship online. According to a report this morning, China’s three leading YouTube-like video sites – Youku, Tudou, and Ku6 – have been deleting US TV shows and movies from their servers en masse.

Although Ku6 claims it has been deleting infringing content since 2009, the latest move comes as less of a surprise following the announcement last year that it had reached content deals with Hollywood studios Sony Pictures and Warner Brothers. This deal made Ku6 the first local site to acquire legitimate copyright content from major Hollywood studios and with 10% of the market in China, Ku6 has impressive potential.

Then last week, competitor Youku announced that it too had done a deal with Warner to stream the blockbuster Inception for the modest price of $0.75 per view, a move which resulted in company shares increasing by 6.6%.

No surprise then that hot on the heels of a fine for copyright infringement last November and their chase for legitimacy and access to more premium content, Youku has just implemented a YouTube-like filtering solution for infringing content.

However, removing huge amounts of pirate content and replacing it with increasingly expensive licensed fare is taking its toll on Youku. While the price of its content goes from zero to through-the-roof, the fees advertisers are paying the company remain static. Couple this with competition from sites still offering infringing, more attractive and zero-cost content, Youku have a serious problem if they can’t convince users to pay for premium content at prices that make sense.

“This is the worst kind of diseconomy of scale,” writes Business Insider. “The bigger Youku gets, the bigger its losses.”

When Barack Obama and Chinese leader Hu Jintao meet in the United States next week, the progress against music and video piracy will certainly add to the positive mood set by the earlier agreement for the Chinese to crackdown on software piracy. The road to legitimacy, however, will be a complex one for China’s markets but one that the US will be keen to see succeed.

Just don’t mention the J-20 or, in the content vacuum that’s likely to exist before all shows and movies become available legitimately, BitTorrent.

Article from: TorrentFreak, Covering Torrent Sites and News since 2005.