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10 More Sites for Free and Legal Torrents
People tend to equate BitTorrent with piracy, and we’re not going to pretend that there isn’t a lot of loot out there on torrent sites. However, there’s also plenty of opportunity to download lots of legal goodies, from free documentaries to Creative Commons-licensed music to indie feature films hoping for some P2P buzz.
It’s been three years since we first published a post titled Ten Sites For Free And Legal Torrents. Unfortunately, a few of the sites mentioned in our original post have since folded, but others have come up to replace them, which is why we decided to update our list of legal torrent goodness with new links and additional information.
Mininova Ordered to Remove All Copyrighted Files
It’s been a rough year for file-sharing sites, legally speaking. Today a Dutch court ordered Mininova to remove all torrents of copyrighted works in the next three months or pay up to $7.16 million in fines.
Copyright holder group Stichting Brein had sued Mininova for inciting and profiting from copyright infringement. The BitTorrent search engine and directory already removes files after receiving takedown notices and moderates pornography, viruses and fakes.
Given that Mininova is already doing some proactive filtering, the court said the site should assume all commercial works are copyrighted.
How to Save The Pirate Bay
News of The Pirate Bay’s impending sale has worried file sharers around the world. Many rights holders, on the other hand, seem to be somewhat optimistic, hoping that the deal will put an end to the world’s largest file-swapping platform. But history has shown again and again that the demise of popular P2P sites and systems doesn’t lead to less file swapping. On the contrary, the gap is oftentimes filled with more sophisticated systems.
It’s been 10 years since Napster’s launch, and some record company executives seem to have slowly realized that they should have struck a deal with the original music-swapping service instead of pushing users to Gnutella, Kazaa, eMule and eventually BitTorrent. Letting The Pirate Bay, with its up to 25 million concurrent users, die could be another mistake — just as big as the failure to embrace Napster. Granted, saving and monetizing The Pirate Bay may be close to impossible, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying.
So What Will Become of The Pirate Bay?
You’d think before you announce a sale that alienates many of your most passionate users you’d figure out what your next steps were first. But no, that wouldn’t be The Pirate Bay way. Swedish software company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) said yesterday it’s in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, for 60 million Swedish kronor ($7.8 million).
We parsed through the salient points, but were still left quite confused about what exactly GGF would do with The Pirate Bay. What’s become obvious is that the folks behind TPB are selling its main asset — its user base — so they can stop being a legal target and abdicate responsibility for the site’s upkeep and liabilities. That 25 million-strong user base, however, which expects to use The Pirate Bay to freely track any and every sort of file on BitTorrent, is far from pleased. So what exactly is next for TPB? Here are some further (if contradictory) clues:
Free Movie Downloads From 5 Filmmakers Who Learned to Love BitTorrent
The war on piracy can be a scary thing, especially if you’re a creative caught between the front lines. Hollywood would love to rid the world of file-sharing. Your audience, on the other hand, seems to consist mostly of pirates that download movies for free, watch unauthorized clips on YouTube and subscribe to Netflix just to make use of their DVD burner.
So how do filmmakers react? Well, some of them have started to embrace piracy and published their own works on sites like The Pirate Bay. Their motivations vary: Some just want to give back to their fans, others don’t like the studio system, and some never would have gotten distribution in the first place. The result, however, is always the same: free movies! For details and download links, read on.
Take That, Apple: Download Torrents With Your iPhone Without Any BitTorrent App
Apple created a little bit of an uproar this week when it refused to approve a BitTorrent application for its App Store. The company explained the rejection by saying that this “category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third-party rights,” but many have since lamented that Apple’s real motivation may have been to get people to download videos from its iTunes Store as opposed to torrent sites.
Well, guess what? You can still access all the free and legal torrent goodness with your iPhone and iPod touch simply by using your mobile Safari browser. We’ll show how to download torrents from your mobile and even convert every download to an iPhone-friendly video format.
Miro Outdoes iTunes with New Channel Guide
The Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) unveiled version 2.0 of its open-source video player, Miro, yesterday. The new version features a revamped UI, a smaller memory footprint and the ability to access streaming video sites like Hulu.com from right within the client. We covered those changes in greater detail a few weeks back, and others have added their own take. However, one important new feature so far hasn’t gotten much coverage at all: Miro’s new channel guide.
Miro uses the guide to offer easy access to more than 4,000 web video shows and podcasts. Users can also access the guide on the web and use it to stream or download shows from right within their browser. The folks from the PCF have been comparing the site to other web video program guides like Odeo, but it’s fairly obvious that they’re really trying to replace the one content catalog that rules them all: the podcast directory of Apple’s iTunes Store. And they might just do it, too.
With UK’s Project Kangaroo Stalled, Viewers Turn To Piracy
Will the kangaroo ever jump? That’s the question observers of the UK’s online media market are asking these days, where the BBC and the public broadcasters ITV and Channel 4 are planing to jointly launch a Hulu-like, video-on-demand web site code-named Project Kangaroo. The site was scheduled to go live this January, but has been held up by regulators looking into claims that the joint venture would stifle competition. A final verdict by the UK’s Competition Commission is expected to be cast any day now.
As is to be expected, Project Kangaroo does not have the support of media giants like Sky and Virgin, nor of online video startups like Joost and Babelgum, but it’s unclear how much the competition is really going to gain if the project fails. A new study reveals that the lack of video-on-demand options in the UK has, to a large degree, benefited torrent sites and less-than-legal YouTube clones. The “VOD State of Play” study, which was published today by Essential Research, concludes that 24 percent of the UK’s online video consumers get their TV fix from torrents and similar sources.
NIN’s Newest Game-Changer: HD Concert Footage Via BitTorrent
Nine Inch Nails (NIN) fans were caught by surprise this week when NIN mastermind Trent Reznor dropped by the band’s web site to announce that 405 GB of HD live footage somehow found its way online. The raw HD recordings, which document three of the band’s latest concerts from multiple camera angles, are available as a free BitTorrent download. Thousands of fans have started to download the footage, despite the fact that downloading 405 GB will literally take days, if not weeks, with an average consumer broadband connection.
This is not the first time Reznor has challenged traditional media distribution models. NIN promoted its 2007 album Year Zero with the help of a complex alternate reality game. The band also released its 2008 album Ghosts I-IV under a Creative Commons license and uploaded parts of the album to the Pirate Bay. That didn’t seem to stop the success of the album, which recently topped Amazon’s list of the best-selling MP3 albums of 2008. Could Reznor’s massive video experiment lead to a similar success story?
Boxee Wants to Enlist TV Pirates to Grow Hulu’s Audience
Forget filters, DRM and locked-down set-top boxes. The makers of the open-source media center Boxee have a novel approach aimed at getting people to watch TV from legitimate sources. The idea behind it is not to punish pirates, but to instead use them as taste makers that could drive others to Hulu, Joost and similar streaming media web sites.
I sat down with Boxee’s head of products, Dave Mathews, at the DCIA’s P2P and Video conference a few days ago. Boxee has been enjoying a busy month, issuing a major announcement almost every week. First it was unveiled that Boxee is now running on the Apple TV platform. Then Hulu came to Boxee, and most recently, the Boxee team won the CES i-stage competition, earning not only $50,000 but a booth at the next CES in Las Vegas. Boxee won the award, in part, because of its social features, which could help turn potential pirates into Hulu users.
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