The Pirate Bay has canceled its plan to launch an OiNK replacement. BOiNK was supposed to revive the hundreds of thousands of music albums that were lost during the raid, but The Pirate Bay will leave that up to more specialized private BitTorrent trackers.
The plan behind BOiNK was to re-upload all the lost OiNK torrents to a public tracker called BOiNK. However, it turns out that the music loving pirates didn’t need The Pirate Bay to help them out because several new sites sprung up to replace it mere days after OiNK went down.
Pirate Bay admin Brokep, who listed some of these alternatives on his blog a few weeks ago, noticed this as well and decided that BOiNK wasn’t needed anymore. “There are so many people opening up new music trackers right now so there’s no need for us to go and do that as well.”
He adds: “It’s simply better for us not to interfere with the music lovers that want their special ratio trackers for only scene releases and so forth. That’s not our specialty! Each to do what they’re best at and what they love the most.”
Brokep is right, it looks like former OiNK members, and releasing talent, already moved to other music trackers. Some moved to new trackers such as what.cd and waffles.fm, but existing trackers like STmusic also got a huge number of new members, as seen in the graph below:
For those who are interested in supporting OiNK admin Alan Ellis, there is an official legal defense fund set up that will be used to cover the legal costs.
The Hydra lives on…
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Continuing an aggressive campaign to defend his copyrights, pop star Prince is preparing to file lawsuits within the next few days in three countries–including the United States–against The Pirate Bay.
One of the world’s best-known BitTorrent indexing sites, The Pirate Bay has defiantly linked to pirated copies of films, TV shows, music videos, and other content while often boasting that it ignores Hollywood’s requests to remove them. The Pirate Bay does not host any unauthorized content, but the service is internationally famous for being a highly effective file-sharing tool.
Prince will file similar suits against The Pirate Bay in the U.S., France, a country with laws favorable to copyright owners, and Sweden, where The Pirate Bay is based. In addition, Prince is preparing to take civil action against companies that advertise on The Pirate Bay, many of which are headquartered in Israel, according to John Giacobbi, Web Sheriff’s president.
Prince has hired Giacobbi and Web Sheriff, a service that protects copyright materials from Internet piracy, to coordinate the legal challenges against The Pirate Bay and others who the singer believes has violated his copyright.
Giacobbi said Web Sheriff is also helping to launch an investigation into The Pirate Bay’s off-shore connections to determine whether the company is compliant with Swedish and international income and corporation tax laws.
The Pirate Bay has already weathered several attempts by the governments of Sweden and the United States to shut down the site. Yet, this is likely the largest civil challenge the Web site has ever faced.
At the core of Prince’s lawsuits are his claims that the three founders of The Pirate Bay are profiting from the work of artists without compensating them. The Pirate Bay earns $70,000 a month in advertising revenue, Giacobbi alleged. The site’s founders have previously denied that the operation makes money.
None of the three founders of The Pirate Bay could be reached for comment.
Prince, who Giacobbi said has the backing of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, the group that represents the recording industry worldwide, is only adding to The Pirate Bay’s legal troubles. The site founders also face criminal charges, according to a story published Thursday on the blog TorrentFreak.
A prosecutor in Sweden announced that he plans to press charges against five people involved with The Pirate Bay before January 31, 2008, the blog reported. The five are being accused of infringing on intellectual property.
The copyright battle that Prince has waged the past two months has not been without its costs. He was widely criticized this week when three unauthorized fan sites accused him of trying to violate their free speech rights when his handlers demanded that they remove several photos of him.
It was widely reported this week that Prince had begun suing fans. His representatives denied this.
“Prince is not suing his fans, is not looking to penalize fans and nor is he looking to inhibiting freedom of speech in any way,” said AEG, Prince’s promoter.
Prince began making headlines in September after lashing out against sites he believed were violating his intellectual-property rights.
In September, the singer said he planned to take legal action against The Pirate Bay, YouTube, and eBay. As of Friday, Prince’s lawsuits appeared to be solely targeted at The Pirate Bay.
By suing The Pirate Bay in three different countries, Prince is hoping to put financial pressure on the service, Giacobbi said. Copyright laws in the United States and France would also make it nearly impossible for a site like The Pirate Bay to triumph, he claimed.
“There is no way that they will have any defense because it’s blatant piracy,” Giacobbi said. “They’ll either have to come out and fight or just try and ignore it. In that case, we’re going to win a default judgment against them. This could be a ticking time bomb for them. They can’t outrun this. We are very confident.”
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Comcast has been “caught” blocking BitTorrent traffic in some areas, according to tests performed by the Associated Press. The news organization claims to have confirmed that Comcast is blocking—or at least seriously slowing down—BitTorrent transfers, regardless of whether the content is legal or not. If true, Comcast’s actions have serious implications for sharing information online, and by proxy, Net Neutrality.
The AP was tipped off to the possible P2P blockage by a reader who had noticed serious slowdowns on his Comcast connection. The organization then proceeded to perform a number of tests—three, to be exact—on two computers in cities on both the east and west coasts. AP chose to download a copy of the King James Bible through BitTorrent (because it is an uncopyrighted work) and went to work. In two out of its three tests, the downloads were blocked altogether, while in the remaining test, the download started after a 10-minute delay.
AP believes that the reason for the block and delay was due to reset packets being sent back from what claimed to be other torrent users—including the AP’s second computer. “However, the traffic analyzer software running on each computer showed that neither computer actually sent the packets,” wrote the AP, indicating that the packets were sent by a mysterious middle party. Further, the AP says that when it performed traffic analysis on another computer torrenting files over Time Warner Cable, over half of the reset packets came from the addresses of Comcast subscribers. This is curious, since Comcast’s 12.4 million subscribers only make up about 20 percent of US broadband subscribers.
Comcast spokesperson Charlie Douglas told the AP that the company doesn’t block access to BitTorrent, but did not elaborate on his definition of “access” (.torrent files can be downloaded just fine, for example). However, Douglas also said that Comcast does use something to keep the network running smoothly. “We have a responsibility to manage our network to ensure all our customers have the best broadband experience possible,” he said. “This means we use the latest technologies to manage our network to provide a quality experience for all Comcast subscribers.”
We’re not entirely sure that the AP’s tests are as conclusive as it seems to believe—after all, two tests in three cities does not constitute an exhaustive data set. We do, however, think that the AP—and others who have noticed the issue—are onto something. Everyone has been trying to figure out what, exactly, Comcast is doing to throttle P2P traffic in certain markets, and Comcast sending reset packets on behalf of Comcast subscribers is a probable cause. But doing so is also misleading, and could even be construed as an attack on other torrent users who are not using Comcast. There are other, more direct methods to go about filtering BitTorrent content, such as deep packet inspection. However, it has been argued that overprovisioning a neutral network is still cheaper than investing money on technology to fight such traffic.
Comcast’s actions also have implications for net neutrality. But that’s no secret, as Comcast has been among the plethora of ISPs that regularly oppose net neutrality legislation. The ISPs like to argue that, by allowing all Internet traffic to pass through the pipes equally, they could lose money because of overall network slowdowns. But customers pay for broadband service for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is so that they can get full, high-speed access to the content of their choice.
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