There's a brand new study being pushed at the moment which suggests that there's no evidence that Torrent piracy affects US Box Office returns. In addition the only discernible link found in this paper published by the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College was in potential sales cut down by users downloading films in the time between their US and international release. What these two points suggest is that if BitTorrent were the only way people were able to download movies, it would essentially be solely on the shoulders of the film industry to change their ways to stopper up piracy, not any type of government-made law.
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‘bittorrent’ Stories
Piracy study suggests US Box Office completely unaffected by Torrents
Torrent site btjunkie shuts down
The anti-piracy crusade has claimed another victim, with BitTorrent indexing site btjunkie voluntarily shutting down this weekend. Apparently the fifth most popular torrent site online in 2011, btjunkie had opened its doors to download indexing in 2005. "We've been fighting for years for your right to communicate" the team behind the site said in a statement on Sunday, "but it's time to move on."
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Pirate Bay changes from torrent file hosting to magnetic links
If you are the pirating sort that likes to download torrent files from Pirate Bay, some changes are coming. Apparently, Pirate Bay is making some moves to reduce the bandwidth needed for the site and allow fans of the site to access the website offline. Traditionally the site has hosted the torrent feeds for download.
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BitTorrent Share to compete against DropBox in the game of cloud storage
With cloud computing on the rise, BitTorrent Inc., has created its own service to compete with DropBox and other file sharing services. BitTorrent Inc. is widely known for its peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, BitTorrent. Thursday marked an important day for the company with the launch of Share. With other services such as DropBox, SkyDrive, and Box.net available, Share will have some competition, but Share offers its users what others cant.
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Google blacklisting file-sharing sites The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and more
Google has started blacklisting many of the top file-sharing websites on the Internet, including torrent site The Pirate Bay, as well as isoHunt, and 4Shared. According to file-sharing blog TorrentFreak, "the changes were quietly processed and appear to be broader than previous additions". Google's blacklist also evidently blocks the names of these websites in their Google Instant, auto-complete search services, while the webpages themselves remain indexed. Why? Possibly because the search giant most likely wants to be on good terms with copyright holders, such as major movie and music studios.
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The Pirate Bay Blocked by Comcast?
The Pirate Bay, a Swedish site that hosts BitTorrent files, may have been blocked by Comcast to their subscribers. TorrentFreak reported this morning that Comcast subscribers were unable to access The Pirate Bay's site. The Pirate Bay has been no stranger to downtime, but this time around, it seemed to be only affecting certain people. Comcast has denied that they are the ones blocking the site. So what is going on?
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BitTorrent-based DDoS tool outlined at hacker convention
A system for turning trackerless BitTorrents into DDoS tools has been described at a hacker convention, potentially using peer swarms for inadvertent botnet-style cyberattacks. Hacker "Astro" revealed the process in a talk called "Lying to the Neighbours" earlier this week, whereby a decentralized DHT could be maliciously co-opted to target certain websites by overloading their servers.
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Call of Duty: Black Ops was Reportedly the Most Pirated Game in 2010
While publisher Activision and developer Treyarch are busy dealing with a bunch of angry customers on Sony's PlayStation 3 video game console, it looks like a lot more than a few individuals out there decided that, instead of buying the game, they'd rather download it from the Internet. Not that that slowed down the sales of the game at all, considering it managed to amass $1 billion in the short time it has been out in global sales. But, with the numbers we're seeing here, it's almost staggering to think how much bigger it could have been.
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Pirate Bay appeal sees jail time cut but fine boosted to $6.5m
Pirate Bay founders Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström have seen their convictions upheld by the Swedish court of appeal, and while the jail terms for each have been reduced, the fine levied against them has been significantly increased. Having originally been ordered to pay 30 million kronor in damages, that has been bumped up to 46 million kronor ($6.5 million).
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Pirate Bay membership records hacked [Video]
The Pirate Bay hasn't had a great year, what with the ongoing legal issues, and so an SQL injection hack that has pulled out emails and IP addresses of their over 4m registered users probably isn't the sort of news they may have hoped for. The hack is the handiwork of Argentinian security researcher Ch Russo, who claims that a relatively straightforward process broke through some the TPB's softer spots and thus opened up the database. Check out a video of the whole thing in action after the cut.
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Brite-View CinemaGo BV-5005HD Mini CG HD Media Player Announced, Pre-Order Now
It's been almost a full year since we reported on Brite-View's CinemaTube media player, and that means it's just about perfect timing to get an upgraded, new model, right? Well lucky you, because Brite-View agrees with that sentiment. They've just pulled the cover off their CinemaGo BV-5005HD Mini CG HD media player -- and yes, that may be the longest title for a gadget we've seen in awhile.
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MvixUSA ULTIO Pro MX-880HD home-theater box and PVR
MvixUSA have launched their latest PVR-capable media player, the ULTIO Pro MX-880HD. The new set-top box supports Full HD 1080p via HDMI, and can play back H.264, MKV, DivX HD, MPEG 2-TS, VC-1 and WMV video formats; inside there's a 3.5-inch hard-drive bay happy with up to 2TB disks.
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