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Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Dutch anti-piracy group takes down illegal P2P site
Amsterdam, NL. (Top40 Charts/ IFPI)-This week Dutch anti-piracy foundation BREIN took down another illegal P2P site: dsb-tracker.org. This Dutch language Bittorrent site offered torrent links to popular films, music, games and software to 8,300 registered users. BREIN executes structural civil law enforcement against illegal P2P sites and over the past 15 months 131 sites that facilitated around 1.6 million users were taken down.
The site operator had been put on notice by BREIN but continued its illegal activities. BREIN then demanded the site's hosting provider, Leaseweb, take down dsb-tracker.org, a move which led to the operator taking it down himself. This operator was also owner of the illegal site dsb-scene.org which was also put on notice by BREIN.
Tim Kuik, managing director of BREIN, says: "Although this action concerns smaller sites we did consider requesting a name disclosure because the operator continued his activities after our notice."
Illegal P2P sites make structural and systematic use of the unauthorised availability of content files with music, film, games and software on the internet. BREIN demands that site operators to give themselves up and sign an undertaking to cease and desist from their illegal activities under forfeiture of a penalty. If the operators cannot be reached or fail to respond, BREIN requires the service provider to take the site down and disclose the name and address of the owner or operator. BREIN holds the owners and operators of P2P sites liable for the infringements that take place through their services.
Last year the Amsterdam District Court ruled in favour of BREIN's claim that an Internet Service Provider had to disclose the identity details of large uploaders that sourced an illegal P2P-site. ISP's are held to disclose identity details if the injured party has a justifiable interest to obtain them, the infringement is plausible and the identification of the responsible person is beyond reasonable doubt. In addition to its cease and desist undertaking under forfeiture of a penalty, BREIN also demands compensation for the damage caused by the illegal activities. That can run up from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of euros.
Viacom Files Landmark Copyright Case Against Google, YouTube
The case that will likely determine the future of the online video sharing industry at least, and the Internet media economy at most, has been filed. Viacom, one of the world's largest media rights holders, has sued Google in federal court in New York, seeking $1 billion in damages for an estimated 1.5 billion separate infringements of copyright.
Viacom's legal team released a four-paragraph statement this morning, which is best read in its entirety:
YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others' creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws. In fact, YouTube's strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden - and high cost - of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement.
This behavior stands in stark contrast to the actions of other significant distributors, who have recognized the fair value of entertainment content and have concluded agreements to make content legally available to their customers around the world.
There is no question that YouTube and Google are continuing to take the fruit of our efforts without permission and destroying enormous value in the process. This is value that rightfully belongs to the writers, directors and talent who create it and companies like Viacom that have invested to make possible this innovation and creativity.
After a great deal of unproductive negotiation, and remedial efforts by ourselves and other copyright holders, YouTube continues in its unlawful business model. Therefore, we must turn to the courts to prevent Google and YouTube from continuing to steal value from artists and to obtain compensation for the significant damage they have caused.
While YouTube and Viacom had reached some kind of tentative agreement last October, which originally was reported to be culminating in a kind of rights management system for copyright holders, that agreement appeared to be quickly unraveling last month.
In its statement, Viacom's grievances against YouTube, and the probable causes for their deal having fallen apart, are made stunningly clear. The first paragraph alleges that YouTube would not have played an active, participatory role in the rights management process, beyond providing rights holders with some of the tools for them to do the job themselves. YouTube videos are posted mainly by individuals, and a tremendous amount of that content is comprised of recorded video excerpts of others' copyrighted material.
While some have been willing to live with that fact under the premise that any kind of awareness of that material counts as promotion -- and free promotion at that -- Viacom, a company that's in the business of distributing such content over its own systems, perceives any distribution of its material outside of its own control as contrary to its own rights to use that material as it solely intends.
The second paragraph alludes to services that have "recognized the fair value of entertainment content," though it mentions no one by name. In recent months, Napster has completed its transition from a decentralized content replication service to a fair market brand. Last month, the company reached a preliminary deal with startup Joost, whose creators' last P2P effort is known as Skype.
And last November, Viacom's Paramount Pictures unit announced a partnership with BitTorrent, which just one year before had been the target of a full-on legal assault by rights holders who accused the system's creators of willfully devising BitTorrent to thwart the aims of copyright protection.
BitTorrent's Bram Cohen had long maintained he did not create his P2P multiplexing system will ill intent, though in the interest of maintaining his business and against his own earlier claims of non-feasibility, he agreed to implement a rights control system for BitTorrent. Since YouTube is not nearly as technologically complex, it will be difficult for Google to argue that a similarly agreeable rights management system isn't feasible.
Even if Viacom's case against Google ends in settlement -- which at this early stage appears impossible -- its outcome is likely to set both legal and technological precedent that other players in the digital space may find themselves forced to follow. More importantly, it could change the chemistry of video sharing services everywhere, even before the case reaches a conclusion.
How so? To protect themselves from a similar legal assault, competitive services may choose to adopt more restrictive uploading policies, and start policing their uploads more carefully. The task of policing every upload personally, to ensure that it doesn't include material that appears to belong to someone else by law, would be unfathomable for most companies. But a technological means to prevent somebody's second-hand copy of some sitcom recorded on tape from being replicated throughout the Web, is even more out of reach.
Inevitably, there will be smaller players in the video sharing business who will today be reconsidering whether their current business model -- if there is one -- is worth the risk.
But the impact goes further: To whom does "second-hand" video belong? Certainly, the grainy reproductions of stuff taped from broadcast TV, though digital in its delivery, shouldn't really count as "high resolution." The US Supreme Court has upheld individuals' rights to tape video and audio over the public airwaves, and has unofficially permitted those rights to pertain to cable and satellite services as well, so far as those tapes aren't redistributed to any broad extent.
Giving a copy of a tape of last week's Battlestar Galactica could legally be frowned upon, if there weren't millions of individuals already doing it. Sharing over the Internet would qualify as distribution en masse. But if you were to try to write a law to regulate it, where would you begin? Why would one million people making one copy each be legal, and one person making one million copies not be?
The legal quandary does not stop there. Up to now, P2P services have been able to defend themselves to a limited extent on the theory that they have no centralized repository of files, and thus no responsibility for the content that flows through them. If the new version of the Boucher Bill is passed, conceivably, P2P services would be protected by law from copyright infringement claims on the theory that they weren't expressly created for that purpose. The exception would be when services advertise themselves to their users for their infringement abilities, as was the situation in MGM v. Grokster.
If Viacom's goals with its YouTube lawsuit are reached, the only type of video sharing service of which you'd ever want to be the proprietor, is one that has no centralized repository of files - a P2P service, assuming Boucher passes. Otherwise, the only legal protection you might have as a proprietor against multi-billion dollar lawsuits from the content industry is one of two possibilities:
1) you implement a highly restrictive DRM scheme to protect content available for download, which is something extremely few users say they actually want or would accept, and which could go against the whole purpose of the video sharing business model; 2) you try to use the Boucher argument as a defense: that you didn't create your sharing system to explicitly thwart copyright. And that will be extremely hard to prove not just for psychological reasons, but for technical ones as well: You would not have created your sharing system in the first place; if it's like YouTube, it uses the Web, which pre-existed before you came along.
Ten Sites for Free and Legal Torrents
Bittorrent downloads are either illegal or DRM-infected, right? Wrong. There are plenty of websites out there that offer free and legal Torrent downloads to save bandwidth and make file sharers happy at the same time.
Granted, sites like The Pirate Bay are still the major source for Bittorrent traffic. But legitimate platforms offer enough video goodies to clog your tubes for days. Here are 10 great places to get started:
Legaltorrents.com distributed 90 terabytes of Creative Commons-licensed content in the last seven months alone. The site features lots of music downloads, but also has some good video content like the South African TV show Go Open and the Firefly-Documentary Done The Impossible. All the files are centrally seeded, so your downloads will always have a happy ending.
Public Domain Torrents features hundreds of Torrents from out-of-copyright films in numerous formats. Unfortunately there is no central seeding, so you better stick to the recently posted items.
Legit Torrents is a new site that aggregates freely available Torrents, including video, games and Linux distributions.
Bittorrent has taken a beating for its recently launched download store, but the site still offers lots of freely downloadable content as well. Unfortunately the free stuff gets buried under the rentals and sales, which are for some reason deemed more “relevant.”
SXSW.com features music and video downloads to promote the South by Southwest festival. This year’s film trailers aren’t up yet, but there’s 3 gigabytes of MP3 music to get an idea of what’s gonna go down in Austin this March.
Speaking of music: Etree is hosting live recordings of bootleg-friendly artists in the lossless FLAC audio format.
The soon-to-be-relaunched Azureus home base Zudeo offers a mix of music videos, user-generated content, professionally produced movies and short films. Worth a look because of its extensive list of fan films and HD content. All downloads are centrally seeded.
Torrentfreak is known for its up-to-date coverage of the BitTorrent scene, but the site also operates an own tracker and regularly features legal downloads like the official Bittorrent release of the movie The Corporation.
Revision3.com is technically not a Torrent site, but the online video network utilizes BitTorrent like few others. Every episode page features a multitude of Torrent links, and you can subscribe to each show with an RSS-Feed including proper Torrent enclosures.
Finally, no list of legal Torrent platforms would be complete without a Linux ISO site like Linuxtracker.com. Advocates of the free operating system have been using BitTorrent for a long time to spread the latest releases of their preferred distribution. Linuxtracker lists all major flavors of Linux, including video-specific releases like the open source DVR system KnoppMyth and the multimedia production platform 64 Studio.
Peer Play
Web downloads and P2P traffic consume 75% of the Internet. Much of that's still illegal.
Technology veteran Edward Kozel has a simple philosophy about a scourge of the Internet--the peer-to-peer networks that let millions of users illegally swap pirated movies, songs and software: If you can't beat 'em, make a buck off 'em.
"LimeWire, Edonkey, Ares, BitTorrent--we want to commercialize them all," Kozel says. "I hope we can get rich and make a lot of money." His company, Skyrider, makes money by loading ads onto these rogue networks, and he has signed up Lions Gate studio to pump legally authorized content through the systems, as well. Kozel, an 18-year veteran of Cisco Systems (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ), can choose from dozens of thriving peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, and they now churn out almost 40% of all Net traffic, says Ellacoya Networks, a firm in Merrimack, N.H. that sells hardware to track network usage.
P2P networks emerged suddenly and infamously a decade ago with the rise of the Napster (nasdaq: NAPS - news - people ) song-swapping service. The music industry managed to run it out of business by taking them to court. These days, however, P2P is going legit, winning fans for its sleek and powerful design and drawing programmers and hungry entrepreneurs eager to build businesses around the swapping services.
A legal music and movie site called ArtistDirect aims to reap profits by selling data on what movies and songs are swapped the most and in which regions--and by charging content producers to thwart pirate networks by clogging them up with bogus and flawed files. Elsewhere a Web TV service called MediaZone is using peer-to-peer technology to get Bollywood sitcoms, a nightly news show from Mongolia and prime-time fare aired in China to expats in the U.S.
BitTorrent, a superfast download service installed on 135 million computers, once was derided as a web of online thieves. Now its creators have launched a new Web video network for TV shows and movies zapped at a few bucks apiece--all of it entirely legal. And the founders of Kazaa, another infamous peer-swapper, have launched a legal outlet called Joost.
These nascent firms make up a sliver of the $2 billion digital entertainment market, but already they are allying with Hollywood partners who once cursed the underlying technology as parasitic.
P2P networks can move large files (like movies) faster than traditional server-based networks, because they harness the unused power of millions of PCs. Unlike traditional networks, in which PCs must communicate through central server computers, P2P networks let users communicate directly with one another. Just download a bit of software and you can swap files with anyone else who has done the same. The lack of any central computer server makes it all but impossible to wipe out illegal copies. Stomp out one bad guy and a hundred more take his place.
Skyrider's Kozel figures he is better off surfing the P2P wave than struggling against it. He started Skyrider, oddly enough, to create technology to disrupt the open-source P2P networks. His software uses sophisticated packet inspection and statistical modeling techniques to take snapshots of what moves across the continually changing network of PCs. When Skyrider figures out what content is going where, it can prevent downloads.
One problem: No one wanted to buy that service. "There are only a small number of customers for antipiracy, and they pay 80 cents of every dollar for lawyers, 20 cents for technology," says Kozel, who joined Cisco in 1989 as its first head of business development and rose to chief technology officer before quitting, exhausted, in 2001. He was a board member of a packet analysis company called Narus and, a year after two Narus engineers left to start Skyrider, he joined them as chief executive in 2005.
Finding few takers for the antipiracy software, Kozel crafted a new pitch: Skyrider's antipiracy technology also could be used to track what users are searching for, letting sponsors woo them with targeted advertising. Last June he re-launched, pitching Skyrider as a search advertising vehicle. "LimeWire has 20 million people a day looking for music and television shows, mostly men between 14 and 30 years old," he says. "Someone searches for 'Madonna,' you can sell them ringtones. You can tell what bands are popular in what parts of the country and plan where to tour."
Skyrider also has been paid to load studio content, like rap videos bracketed with ads, onto unauthorized networks. Skyrider just joins the network, same as anyone else, and starts offering up content--only its stuff comes with ads attached.
At ArtistDirect, in Santa Monica, Calif., the staff is exploring ways to make money off P2P. It is experimenting loading songs and music videos (the legal kind) onto the networks. At the same time, it earns money trying to disrupt the illegal file-sharing channels.
The firm in 2005 spent $42.5 million to acquire the main vehicle for this antiservice, MediaDefender. It is hired by movie studios such as Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ) Pictures and Universal and videogame publishers such as Activision (nasdaq: ATVI - news - people ) to spew garbage, like partial or corrupted files, onto P2P nets and wreck the user experience.
"We're protecting all the major record labels, Hollywood studios and Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people )," says Jon Diamond, who owns ArtistDirect, with revenue of $20 million or so last year.
BitTorrent started out in 2001 as snazzy software for vastly faster downloads, designed by Bram Cohen, a freelance programmer in Berkeley, Calif. In 2004 Cohen formed a company by the same name--to sell legal downloads of films and TV series from the libraries of MGM, Warner Bros., Paramount and Fox in an iTunes-like online store. BitTorrent will sell permanent downloads of TV shows like 24 and South Park for $2 and temporary copies of movies for $3 to $4.
"We've got 3,000 movies, a thousand games and a thousand music downloads--all legal. Illegal content will be shut out of this site," says President Ashwin Navin, a former Yahoo (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) executive who cofounded the company with Cohen in San Francisco. He predicts legit P2P systems like his will overwhelm rogue networks such as LimeWire and Edonkey.
Web entrepreneur Michelle Wu started tinkering with P2P as a means for distributing not just recorded video files but live broadcasts. Chinese-born Wu moved to the U.S. in 1990 to obtain a physics doctorate at Princeton. In 2004 she was hired by the South African media conglomerate Naspers to build ChinaPortal, an online video site catering to Chinese citizens living abroad.
Thousands of Chinese expats signed on for $10 monthly subscriptions. In 2005 Wu renamed the outfit MediaZone and expanded to an array of international sports and entertainment sites. She hired a dozen software engineers to build a P2P network mimicking China's popular illegal file-sharing services. MediaZone's network transmits a video feed in 30-second chunks to a group of a few dozen viewers, who relay the feed in parts to other fans.
Broadcasts include international sporting events such as the Mavericks big-wave surfing contest from Half Moon Bay, Calif., South African rugby games and Pakistani cricket matches. Wu purchases an event's broadcast rights for certain geographic markets and sells subscriptions for $5 to $25 per event. Last year fans paying as much as $25 watched 300,000 live streams of Wimbledon matches carried by MediaZone.
In February P2P got another dose of legitimacy when media giant Viacom (nyse: VIA - news - people ) signed a deal to distribute TV shows and movies over Joost, a P2P video network created by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus (nyse: JNS - news - people ) Friis, the founders of Kazaa (file sharing) and Skype (Voice over Internet). Viacom will use Joost to revive defunct cult favorites such as MTV's Beavis and Butthead and Comedy Central's absurdist sitcom Stella.
Though still in limited-access test mode, Joost boasts near-DVD picture quality, rare in Web video, and posts as little as a minute of advertising per hour of programming. Zennstrom and Friis hope to charge high enough rates to make up for the limited number of ads, because spots will be targeted to users by geography, demographics and cultural tastes.
Back at Skyrider in Mountain View, Calif., Kozel sees big opportunity and a sea change ahead. "Peer-to-peer will have the same effect on the Internet that the World Wide Web (otcbb: WWWB.OB - news - people ) did," he maintains. "It is going to strip away a lot of costs and add a lot of capabilities."
Monsoon Multimedia's Hava Platform - Television Anywhere
The VCR at it's core was a time-shifting device to watch your content when you wanted. Many generations on, we have TiVo, YouTube, and BitTorrent as ways of consuming media when we choose and wherever we want. Television is still the centerpiece of the media consumption lifestyle, though. Despite many attempts to dislodge it from it's perch in the living room, and various efforts to marry the connected personal computer with the television, we are not quite in media nirvana yet.
The Apple TV is a product to watch, given it's ability to place-shift a wee bit, within the environs of your home. The Slingbox was a good solution, in that it encoded your TV signal and streamed it anywhere to any PC. It can only stream content to a single PC, however, and pretty much monopolizes the attached device. Enter the Hava from Monsoon Media. This device encodes and streams television, including HD content to multiple PCs anywhere. What's even more cool, it's being marketed as an OEM device, that will enable it to be embedded in consumer electronics systems and be truly idiot-proof. Pricing is in the Apple TV range, at about $250 to $300, and includes wireless streaming to any PC. It doesn't seem to do the reverse feed, though, enabling you to watch downloaded video content on your television. One product I've had great success with for that kind of media consumption is the Hauppauge MediaMVP device at the low price of $99.
Monsoon Multimedia comes from great founding stock. The founders also established the very successful Dazzle, a pioneer in the MPEG encoding journey. The India-based president, Arvind Jha, was with Adobe India earlier, and the company is based in Noida and has R&D facilities in California and Russia. The team worked almost fifteen months in "garage" mode to develop their best-of-breed technology that allows consumers to watch their home TV from their offices, hotels, airports and from outside the country, wirelessly and on any internet-connected PC. The Monsoon Hava Platform features built-in wi-fi, is Windows Vista and HD-ready, and looks real slick, as one might expect from a consumer electronics-oriented device. It streams MPEG-2 video in the home network, and MPEG-4 across the Internet.
This company demolishes the shibboleth of Indian companies not being risk-takers or product-makers, although I could list at least ten other leading products that had an Indian origin, from Talisma to iFlex. In the borderless world, it seems fatuous to expect innovation to be confined to any location, for that matter. While labour might not have been globalized. one cannot deny that capital and information, the other sinews of the global information economy are effectively place-neutral.
NASSCOM, the Indian association of software and services companies, recognized this, by selecting Monsoon Multimedia as the winner of their IT Innovation India Award for 2006. This award identifies and recognizes efforts made by young and enterprising IT companies that have carved a niche using breakthrough technological products and fresh marketing strategies. They were conferred the award by Mr. Manmohan Singh, who said on the occasion,"Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Singh said, "Business as usual will not work anymore and innovation is the need of the hour."
No news on when the Hava will hit Indian stores.
Bram Disses Joost
Ready to rumble? BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen had some fighting words for competitor Joost during a keynote at the VON New Video Summit on Monday. He even pulled out the dreaded “old media” slur.
“Joost is kind of a quirky thing, it’s fundamentally based on the channels concept, which, like I’ve said, is kind of an old media way of doing things…Pieces of content can be organized any which way, and a channel is just one of many ways of organizing those.”
The inimitable Cohen also bragged about having ten times as much video content as iTunes, discussed BitTorrent’s interest in supporting video with ads, mentioned the company’s upcoming “play on demand” P2P streaming option, and complained about Windows DRM affecting playback.
Hollywood takes another stab at download dollars
Some of Hollywood's largest players -- including Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, MGM and 20th Century Fox -- announced this week that they are making yet another attempt to jump on the Internet bandwagon by providing some of their movies for download.
But does this latest effort have any better chance of success than its predecessors? To put it bluntly, the odds don't look great.
The studios have signed an agreement with a firm called BitTorrent Inc., whose software is one of the most popular ways of downloading movies and other copyrighted content illegally. According to some estimates, BitTorrent file swapping accounts for as much as 30 per cent of all Internet traffic.
One of the unique things about BitTorrent is that the software (using a protocol known as "peer-to-peer" networking, which doesn't require any central servers) is structured so that users download and upload pieces of the same file simultaneously. The more people share a file, the faster everyone's download becomes.
P2P technology is a very efficient way to distribute large files. Unfortunately for the movie studios, however (and for music labels, software companies and others), BitTorrent doesn't have any "digital rights management" built into it, so there is no way to keep track of which files are legal and which ones aren't.
As part of the deal with the studios, BitTorrent has created a version of its software with Microsoft's DRM technology built in. Movies -- which cost $3.99 (U.S.) to rent -- can't be burned to a DVD, can't be copied to another computer, and are only playable for a 24-hour period. They can only be played in Windows Media Player.
The BitTorrent deal is the latest attempt by the major studios to make their movies available online, but so far only one of those attempts has had any real success, namely, Apple Inc.'s iTunes.
Other efforts include CinemaNow and MovieLink, which have attracted small numbers of users, but nowhere near as many as traditional renters such as Blockbuster or Netflix (none of the movie download services are available in Canada).
Online retailer Amazon offers a movie download service called Unbox, and several studios (including Warner and Sony) have an alliance with a software company called Guba to offer movie downloads. Retailing giant Wal-Mart also recently started offering a movie download option when you buy a regular DVD movie.
Renting a movie from one of the existing services costs between $9.99 and $14.99, and every one except iTunes gives you rights to the movie for just 24 hours after you first start playing it (although you have 30 days to do that). CinemaNow allows you to burn it to DVD, but charges $14.99 for the right to do so. Many argue those prices are too high, particularly with so many restrictions placed on the downloads. In a New York Times story about the BitTorrent service, CEO Ashwin Nevin said the firm could have offered people the right to buy a movie, but prices demanded by the studios were higher than what BitTorrent wanted.
The new service faces some other hurdles as well, and one of those is technological. Because P2P file swapping is such a big component of Internet traffic, many Internet service providers put limits on applications such as BitTorrent. That kind of "bandwidth shaping" could slow down the new service and make it less efficient.
The bottom line is that the movie studios are trapped between an old business model and a new one. The existing structure, where films are released in specific patterns to specific forms of media -- first in theatres, then to DVD sales, then rental, then pay TV, and so on -- is designed to maximize revenue, since some films can cost $150-million or more to make.
But downloading -- both legal and illegal -- is eating into that business model. So the studios are still trying to maintain as much control as they can, by imposing DRM on downloads and restricting which movies are available when. And that makes sense if you assume that they need to make up for the lost revenue from theatre sales, DVD sales, pay TV and so on. But does it make long-term sense?
At the moment, people seem content to either download free movies illegally, rent them in the traditional way, or perhaps not even watch Hollywood movies at all. And that's not a pretty picture.
Goin' legit
BitTorrent Inc. launches sites to sell movies, TV programs for download
LOS ANGELES — BitTorrent Inc., makers of a technology often used to trade pirated copies of Hollywood movies, has launched a Web site that will sell downloads of films and TV shows licensed from the studios.
The BitTorrent Entertainment Network launched last week with films from Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Lionsgate, and episodes of TV shows such as "24" and "Punk'd."
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The service is squarely aimed at young men and boys who regularly use BitTorrent to trade pirated versions of the same films and who more often watch such files on their computer instead of on a big screen TV.
The San Francisco-based company is betting that at least one-third of the 135 million people who have downloaded the BitTorrent software will be willing to pay for legitimate high-quality content rather than take their chances with pirated fare.
"The vast majority of our audience just loves digital content," said Ashwin Navin, president and co-founder of BitTorrent. "Now we have to program for that audience and create a better experience for that content so the audience converts to the service that makes the studios money."
To help wean users to paying for content, BitTorrent is featuring content and pricing that appeals to its target demographic — males between the ages of 15 and 35.
TV episodes are $1.99 to download to own, which is typical for competitor sites such as Apple Inc.'s iTunes.
The new site will rent movies for a 24-hour viewing period for $3.99 for new titles and $2.99 for older films, but the site has decided not to sell films for now because the prices demanded by the studios were too high.
"We're really hammering the studios to say, ‘Go easy on this audience,'" Navin said. "We need to give them a price that feels like a good value relative to what they were getting for free."
The service also will offer Japanese anime and high-definition video, which is popular with its users. Individuals will be able to publish their works to the site, which will compete for attention beside studio content.
The BitTorrent technology, pioneered by Bram Cohen, assembles digital movies and other computer files from separate bits of data downloaded from other computer users across the Internet. Its decentralized nature makes downloading more efficient, meaning that a full-length movie should download in about half an hour, about twice as fast as some other sites.
Navin said TV episodes should download in about one-third that time.
BitTorrent's decentralized structure also frustrated the entertainment industry's efforts to find and identify movie pirates.
In 2005, after the studios won a key legal decision against another pirate software company, Grokster, Cohen agreed to remove links to pirated files and start talks to license legitimate content.
Studios also got more comfortable with the idea of distributing content over peer-to-peer networks after they adopted strong digital rights management safeguards created by Microsoft Corp.
BitTorrent's content is protected by Windows Media DRM and will only play back using Windows Media Player.
Studios striking deals with peer-to-peer networks is a good first step toward allowing users to more freely distribute films and TV shows on the Internet, but it may take another five years or more for Hollywood to become completely comfortable with that, one analyst said.
"Their biggest concern is that an anonymous person passes it to an anonymous person," said Les Ottolenghi, chairman and president of Intent Mediaworks Inc., a company that helps content owners protect their works on peer-to-peer networks.
Ottolenghi recently chaired a task force that looked at digital watermarking, a technology that helps content owners track the route of its files as they make their way around the Internet.
"Their greatest hope is that someone at home passes it on to someone at home, from one device to the next, and that becomes a value to the consumer," he said.
Online service becomes legal
A peer-to-peer service once used to pirate videos online has released a legal alternative for entertainment seekers.
The new service, called BitTorrent Entertainment Network, became available to the public at BitTorrent.com Feb. 26, said Lily Lin, director of communications at BitTorrent.
BitTorrent has become licensed partners with studios including 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures and television channels including VH1, Comedy Central and Warner Bros. Entertainment, Lin said, adding that the partnerships allow the service to legally distribute their content.
Downloadable movies are available for purchase or rent, Lin said. Rented content can be viewed for up to 24 hours within 30 days after payment, according to the terms of service.
Newly released movies available for rental are $3.99, while older titles are $2.99 to rent. Television shows and music videos are available for purchase at $1.99 per episode or video, according to a BitTorrent press release.
PC-based games range in price for purchase from between $10 and $30, Lin said. Most songs are available at no charge, she said.
Most downloads can be played using Windows Media Player 11 on PCs, Lin said. Free downloads can also be played on Mac and Linux operating systems, Lin said.
Lin said BitTorrent's main audience is 16- to 34-year-old men because they primarily use their computers to listen to music and watch videos. "For a lot of college-aged students, because dorm room size is so limited, most viewing [is done from their computers]," she said.
The BitTorrent Entertainment Network's compatibility is not restricted to any one device, allowing for users to upload downloads onto any device they may have, Lin said.
"We also have self-published content, so if you're an independent artist you have a channel to distribute your work and present your work alongside major studios," Lin said.
Carleen Maitland, assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), said students who usually download online content illegally are not likely to change their behavior with the introduction of BitTorrent's new service. But after they graduate and the threat of legal action "has a little more bite," students may wish to download legally, she said.
John Bagby, professor in the College of IST, said he is hopeful legal forms of peer-to-peer file sharing will continue to arise. "If a peer-to-peer service can be developed that has a legal business model, what we need is another form of a business model that will make this content available at reasonable prices that reasonable customers [would be interested in]," he said.
It may be difficult for users to adapt to the design of BitTorrent's service if it's radically different from other, more familiar services such as iTunes and Napster, and such a difference could "be the death of it," Maitland said.
"One thing that's not clear that needs to be understood is whether the behavior of music downloaders is the same as video downloaders," Maitland said. "There are always issues of who are the users and what are they trying to get out of it."
Clickster - freeware program lets you search and download MP3s ...
Clickster is an easy to use program which searches and downloads MP3 files from the Internet and NOT from P2P or file-sharing networks.
The real beauty of the program is that it provides a "comprehensive and credible alternative" to those who either can't connect to P2P or file-sharing networks, say at home, work, or especially school in light of the RIAA's most recent crackdown, or are afraid to use them out of concerns for being targeted by the RIAA or other copyright enforcement entities.
With Clickster any track can be previewed in the program as it has an integrated MP3 player that allows you to play and stream stream the songs without having to download them first. Downloading too, is a simple point and click process, with fairly quick download speeds.
There are over 25 million MP3 tracks already available on the Internet, hosted by a number of web servers just waiting to be downloaded.
At less than 1.8MB in size, Clickster is a small application, which can even be installed and run from a portable Flash-Drive, allowing users to use the program at work or school.
“Most users are struck, by just how easy this application is to use," says Clickster’s developer, Robert Palmer. “Often, mainly for security reasons, people do not feel confident about accessing P2P networks and very often find BitTorrent clients too confusing and geekish to use.”
I don't know about people finding BitTorrent clients "too confusing or geekish to use" but, the fact that you are grabbing the music from the internet instead of via P2P or file-sharing networks can make it a handy application to have if you are on an Internet connection where such networks are monitored. In light of the recent crackdown by the RIAA on users of such networks nationwide, this may just be the answer to many people's problems.
Additionally, having installed and used it on my PC for the purposes of this article, I can tell you that I have yet to encounter and adware, spyware, malware that one may think it is likely to contain. It does have a "Go Pro" option that solicits a donation of $15 in exchange for claims of "enhanced download speeds and more extensive search patterns" but, the regular version works just fine.
How Does It Work?
It's pretty simple. First type the the name of the artist you wish to search for in the query box, and then press "Find." I chose the artist U2 as as example.
It will then seek out the results and display them for you to browse, download, or play.
Here I selected "Where the Streets Have no Name" to play.
In another example I searched out the artist Beck as seen below.
To download a track simply select the GREEN DOWNLOAD ARROW as pictured here.
So as you can see, it's pretty darn easy. The best part,as I mentioned before, is that you are not only safe from the prying eyes of P2P and file-sharing copyright snoops, but you're also guaranteed to be able to use it from practically any location or connection. No port forwarding, throttling, or blocking headaches, the program will let you grab music anytime and at anyplace you choose.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Movie Torrents - Movie List - Page 338
Movie Torrents - Movie List - Page 337
Movie Torrents - Movie List - Page 336
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