TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Pirate Bay Teams Up With Lund University and Becomes “Research Bay”
- Google Downranks The Pirate Bay in Search Results
- Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 02/24/14
| Pirate Bay Teams Up With Lund University and Becomes “Research Bay” Posted: 25 Feb 2014 03:05 AM PST
The notorious BitTorrent site has changed its iconic logo and is encouraging visitors to take part in the survey, which examines people's file-sharing habits and their views on privacy and copyright-related issues. The study is the third iteration of a longitudinal study which has already enjoyed participation from 170,000 Pirate Bay users. To learn more, TF talked to Stefan Larsson, one of the researchers involved in the project. Larsson believes that it’s crucial to document values and norms of The Pirate Bay and its users, as it’s one of the defining Internet icons of our times. “It is the biggest, most popular and most resilient hub for free file-sharing, and collects invaluable information on values, norms and conceptions of the file-sharing community,” Larsson says. “Also, it is one of the most interesting phenomena of our times in itself, in the intersection of social, legal and technological change,” he adds. The previous surveys have already resulted in some unique insights which have been published in several academic articles. For example, the researchers found that the majority of Pirate Bay users planned to use VPNs or other measures to become more anonymous. Another observation is that only a small percentage of Pirate Bay users contribute to the site. Most people are relatively passive downloaders. These and other statistics are also available to the public on the Survey Bay website which launched a few months ago. Larsson tells TF that one of the key goals of the project is to look for trends and changes over time among Pirate Bay users. By repeating the survey the researchers can see how attitudes and behaviors of Pirate Bay users develop. In addition, the latest survey also includes new questions to tap into newer trends, among other things. “We have added some stuff, for example a method for measuring the strength of social norms, which we’ve done in smaller surveys before, as well as questions on when and how – if ever – authorities should collect and process information on internet behavior,” Larsson says. The Research Bay project runs from 25 to 27 February, and survey will be linked from The Pirate Bay homepage during these days. People who are interested in taking part can do so here. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Google Downranks The Pirate Bay in Search Results Posted: 24 Feb 2014 09:58 AM PST
These remarks haven't fallen on deaf ears and Google has slowly implemented various new anti-piracy measures in response. For example, the company began filtering "piracy-related" terms from its AutoComplete and Instant services. One of the main demands from copyright holders is that Google should downrank copyright-infringing websites, so these don’t show up as the top results in Google. The search engine promised it would do so, but reports published by the MPAA and RIAA a few months back provided little evidence to back that up. To see how accessible The Pirate Bay is in Google we decided to run a few tests of our own. The results undoubtedly show that Google is now downranking the most-used torrent site, although it is far from completely gone. For example, those who type “The Pirate Bay” in Google’s search box will still see the notorious torrent site as the first result. The same is true for the three-letter abbreviation TPB and several related searches. The results are quite different, though, when people search for specific titles such as “12 years a slave dvdrip“. For these keywords The Pirate Bay doesn’t appear on the first pages of the search results. Several other popular torrent sites do show up of course. In itself the above doesn’t really prove that any downranking is going on, although it’s strange that the world’s biggest torrent site is absent from results. So, the next step is to take content that’s unique to The Pirate Bay, and let Google search for that. We picked a phrase from TPB’s help page, which doesn’t show or link to any pirated files. The phrase in question is as follows: “There are many different clients for bittorrent, this guide explains how to use Bitlord”. As can be seen below, The Pirate Bay is not showing in the top results when we search for it on Google.com, even though it’s the source of the content. Instead, the first result is a Pirate Bay proxy.
We used the same method with a few other targeted searches, including a track Dan Bull uploaded to the site, and got a similar result. The top result doesn’t list The Pirate Bay site, which is the original place where the “Sharing Is Caring” song was uploaded. The above suggests that individual Pirate Bay pages are being downranked. This is confirmed by the fact that the results for the search phrases above do show TPB as the first result on other Google domains, such as Google.ca and Google.co.uk. Apparently, the downranking for this phrase only happens on the .com domain.
It has to be noted though, that the result above shows the Pirate Bay’s old domain, thepiratebay.org, where one would expect thepiratebay.se. The .se site does appear on other Google domains for the Dan Bull song and several other keyword variations we tested. The more phrases and keywords we tried, the more varying results we encountered. For example, searching for a sentence on The Pirate Bay’s “doodle” page doesn’t list TPB’s official site in the top results of any of the Google domains we tried. Clearly, something is going on here. Our findings show that Google is certainly downranking The Pirate Bay in its search results. Whether this is part of the earlier announced anti-piracy initiatives is unknown at this point. In any case, The Pirate Bay is not really bothered by Google’s decision to downrank websites that are accused of linking to pirated material. According to The Pirate Bay team, it will only result in more direct traffic. “That Google is putting our links lower is in a way a good thing for us. We'll get more direct traffic when people don't get the expected search result when using Google, since they will go directly to TPB," the site previously told TF. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 02/24/14 Posted: 23 Feb 2014 11:30 PM PST
12 Years A Slave is the most downloaded movie this week. The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise. RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Over the past few years the entertainment industries have repeatedly asked Google to step up its game when it comes to anti-piracy efforts.
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