TorrentFreak

The legality of BitTorrent sites has always been highly debated. As of today, no court has ever ruled that a website offering .torrent links is legal or not. This might change soon, as isoHunt and the MPAA once again clash in court.

After experimenting with free BitTorrent distribution on their last album, ‘Ghosts’, The Nine Inch Nails are today releasing their latest single ‘Echoplex’ for free, to tens of millions of Facebook users. Also, everyone should check out NIN.com tomorrow - apparently a “surprise” awaits.

In 2005, DVDr-core was the first BitTorrent site that was targeted by the MPAA outside the US. A classic story: Man runs site, man gets sued over site, nothing more is ever heard. Whilst in most cases, this means that the defendant bowed to pressure, paid an out of court settlement, and promised not to do it again, that is not the case here.

This week, a 30 year old man was sentenced to 30 months in prison for his involvement in the so-called pirate ‘warez scene’. In what appears to be some sort of bizarre parallel universe, it’s been revealed that another notorious pirate has an interesting job - he’s chairman of the San Diego Republican Party.

Over six months have passed since the popular private BitTorrent tracker OiNK was raided in a joint effort by Dutch and British law enforcement. Today, the bail date for OiNK admin Alan Ellis has been extended for the third time, now until the 1st of July.

The last year has seen the IFPI shift its focus from the individual filesharer, to their ISPs. After Denmark, Norway and Ireland, the anti-piracy lobbyists have now announced that they will go after a Swedish ISP, claiming that the company facilitates copyright infringement.

An anti-piracy documentary created by the music industry and supposedly supported by artists has been grabbing headlines during recent days. However, one of the artists isn’t happy as he claims he was conned by the music industry into appearing in the video, which he says is part of a “witch hunt”.

The BitTorrent popularity explosion is still underway, with some torrent sites now amongst the most visited sites, anywhere on the web. One of those, Mininova, now gets well over half a billion page views a month and is now 100% bigger than it was this time last year. And the site is still growing.

The top 10 most downloaded DVDrips on BitTorrent, “The Bank Job” tops the chart for the third week in a row.