Together with thousands of other blogs, TorrentFreak is participating in the Blog Action Day 2008. This year’s goal is to raise awareness and generate discussion on poverty, so that’s exactly what we’ll do.

Our plan? Encourage people to donate their pirate ’savings’ to projects that help to reduce poverty. Why? Because we believe in sharing.

The Rules:

The idea is to calculate how much you have ’saved’ in the past week by downloading copyrighted content. If you haven’t downloaded anything, just pretend you have, we’re trying to raise money here.

In the interests of grossly inflating the figures and therefore raising as much money for charity as possible, just like the MPAA and RIAA we’re going to assume that one pirated copy equals one lost sale. We decided not to include software, because things can get a little out of hand for those who downloaded Photoshop.

1 music track = $1
1 music album = $10
1 movie = $10
1 TV-show = $5
1 book = $10

Now, calculate your savings based on the example above (you are allowed to show off in the comments) and donate this amount to a project that aims to reduce poverty. You can pick your own charity of course, but we also have a pretty good suggestion.

Where to Donate?

We assume that most of our readers are familiar with the concept of P2P, so we would like you to consider the following. Let’s say you fire up your BitTorrent client because you want to download the latest album from your favorite artist. You use BitTorrent, which means that the more you share with others, the more you will receive back.

The only problem is that you will start with nothing, so initially, you don’t have anything to share at all. Luckily, the BitTorrent protocol has solved this problem, and when the swarm recognizes you as a new entrant, random peers will send you a few bits which you can then start to re-share with others. People might wonder what this has to do with poverty, so we’ll try to explain.

In ‘real life’, people sometimes also need to receive something before they can start building up their business, and generate a steady income. They are just like file-sharers – without the first bits, they can never fully participate in the downloading process. Kiva tries to solve this problem. With Kiva you can lend a few dollars to entrepreneurs in developing countries, who will use it to make a living for themselves.

These people will use your $10 to start their own businesses, so they can provide for themselves and their families – P2P in the real world. The good thing is, once they have a steady income they will repay their loans, give to get, just like BitTorrent.

Final Note

The MPAA, RIAA and other anti-piracy lobbyists want you to believe that thousands of people lose their jobs because of piracy, and that it’s a disaster for the global economy. We know better of course, and would argue the opposite. An illegally downloaded song is not a lost sale, in fact, it tends boost sales. We could even argue that, without piracy, hundreds of thousands of people would lose their jobs. For example, iPod sales would plunge and bandwidth usage would drop by 50%.

Piracy is embedded in our world economy and eliminating it would be devastating. It’s better to work on legal alternatives instead. So dust off your calculator and let’s donate!

Post from: TorrentFreak

We do not link to actual torrent files because linking to files that link to files that may be copyrighted is something that might get us in trouble.

The data is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

RSS feed for the weekly DVDrip chart.

Post from: TorrentFreak

The methods universities use to reduce piracy on their networks have been scrutinized in our ‘Tackling College Piracy’ series. Most of them have been found to be technologically ineffective, working only at the psychological level. The main problem with the “technological approach” is that it’s impossible to distinguish authorized from unauthorized network traffic. Nonetheless, these anti-piracy efforts are quite expensive.

First of all, the amount of time spent dealing with allegations of infringement are huge, according to the study by the Campus Community Project. IT personnel alone spend a mean time of 750 hours at public universities, while private university IT personnel spend around 620 hours a year on this. The shorter time for private institutions generally comes about because of their smaller size, and so smaller search size, and less frequent notifications.

Overall, the costs that come with them are larger than most would expect. It was concluded that between $350,000 and $500,000 is spent annually per institution – directly and indirectly – dealing with copyright infringement notices. The quality of US education has already been questioned (most recently by US presidential candidate Barack Obama in the 3rd Presidential Debate), especially in contrast to the high cost of it. In this light, the costs incurred dealing with copyright infringements are nonsensical.

The study reports that 25% of public universities use a form of technological filtering, such as Copysense, to try and reduce infringements. As noted before, such measures are fairly inaccurate and rarely work. Less common are educational methods, which may be linked with p2p access, as at Missouri S&T. However, most universities and colleges simply disconnect pirating students from the network, and make them promise to never do it again when they want to get back on. Financial penalties are also given, but this is not yet commonplace. We will deal with this in an upcoming piece.

Post from: TorrentFreak

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The dismantling of OiNK generated an enormous amount of coverage for the file-sharing community. The private BitTorrent website was one of the largest private websites online with over 180,000 members. Currently, the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) has claimed responsibility for the take down of the website and the administrator was arrested at his flat (as the BBC report clearly showed). While there is no shortage of information that is currently going around, it seems that incorrect information has been introduced into the mix. Slyck has taken the time to separate the myths from the facts in the hopes to provide some clarity into the event that gripped the private BitTorrent file-sharing community.

We begin our journey with actual correct information. On October 23, 2007, OiNK, a private BitTorrent website was taken down by British and Dutch police in a raid. The Dutch police confiscated the servers, while the British took the administrator into custody. The IFPI did issue a press release applauding the move.

Myth: The OiNK administrator downloaded music onto his website for distribution.

Fact: Users from all over the internet have posted material onto the website. To this date, no one has presented any evidence that the administrator for OiNK posted any of the content. Also, even if he did, the correct term would have been ‘uploaded’ to begin with.

Myth: the OiNK website is hosting copyrighted works.

Fact: OiNK is a BitTorrent website and the only thing stored in the servers is hash values to files stored on peer’s computers.

Myth: You paid money to access the content.

Fact: Users could only join OiNK via free “invites”. In fact, before OiNK was taken down, OiNK had a warning that said that if you paid money to get into the website, you would be found out and banned.

Myth: A donation fund has been set up to help the OiNK administrator fight this case in courts.

Fact: As is typical with just about every take-down, countless fake donation sites have been posted, but the money isn’t going to OiNK. No official donation system has been set up as of yet.

Myth: OiNK existed for the sole purpose of pre-released content.

Fact: There was pre-released content available through the trackers of OiNK, but this was not the purpose of the website.

Myth: There were no warning signs to suggest a take down of OiNK.

Fact: Slyck ran it’s own investigation through the publicly available emails which were leaked from Media Defender and found that those hired by the copyright holders were monitoring the website for some time. Whether it was solely through Media Defender or through another organization is not clear. However, it was known that at least one individual that was hired by parties who were interested in stemming file-sharing had access to, not only the website, but to IP addresses of those in the swarms.

While there are clearcut points which are clearcut true and clearcut false, there is always some points which is not certain. One of the more important points many file-sharers who were members of the site are asking, ‘what are my chances of getting caught?’ Figuring out the fallout for users of the website is extremely difficult at best. Though there is one event that has already happened that may present a clue for users – the take down of Elite Torrents.

When Elite Torrents was taken down, many similar questions were asked as they are today with the take down of OiNK. While the situation in some aspects are similar, the reasons may be different. When Elite Torrents was taken down, organizations like ICE made it perfectly clear what the specific reasons were for the take down of the website – the presence of Star Wars – Episode III being tracked by the website. The OiNK take down is different given that the only reasons were that pre-released music was released on the trackers. In the case of Elite Torrents, many feared that the raids provided a goldmine of information for copyright authorities – as is the same with OiNK’s raid. If, despite the clear differences, history repeats itself, an Administrator, and a handful of releaser’s would end up in legal trouble. To this day, despite the fears of hundreds of users facing legal woes, no one outside the releaser’s and the Administrator have reportedly faced legal trouble.

While the confusion could have easily ended, there is one posting made by an individual who opened a Blogspot account and started posting comments on the OiNK issues. The legitimacy of the postings have proved compelling, but there are a few important points to be made: Anyone can create a blog via Google’s Blogger with a few simple steps and anyone with enough knowledge can actually edit the postings to just about any custom template they choose. Having said that, the blog postings do contain sound advice such as being extremely skeptical about any legal funds. Ironically enough, probably the best advice was actually posted by this individual. “If you’re in doubt I’m who I say I am, then don’t believe me.” Paine advises, “I encourage you all to exercise extreme caution when people are floating around throwing names about left right and center saying these things.”

While a lot of information is being posted online, the fog of uncertainty, as usual, looms around this large event. However, as is the case with every other take down or crippling in file-sharing, something new will very likely take its place. This is one thing that is certain because it has happened with Napster (FastTrack, WinMX, Gnutella, eDonkey2000), FastTrack (Public BitTorrent), WinMX (The WinMX Pie Projects), SuprNova (MiniNova, Private Sites), ThePirateBay (ThePirateBay), etc. Will anyone know what specifically will actually replace OiNK? Not until it proves to be a replacement in the first place.