PirateBay: February 2014

TorrentFreak Email Update

Lawrence Lessig Wins Damages For Bogus YouTube Takedown

Posted: 28 Feb 2014 02:05 AM PST

Lawrence Lessig is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School but is probably best known to readers for his work with Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Federation.

As a fair use advocate he seems a most unlikely adversary to quarrel with on those grounds. Nevertheless, that was exactly the path chosen by Australian music label Liberation Music in 2013.

The story began in June 2010 when Lessig delivered the keynote address at a Creative Commons conference in South Korea. The lecture, discussing cultural and technological innovation, included several clips from amateur music videos, some of them depicting people dancing to a song called “Lisztomania” by the band Phoenix.

The “Lisztomania” craze had developed when young people all around the world latched on to a video created by YouTube “avoidant consumer” and used the Internet and technology to develop and distribute their own derivatives. In his lecture, Lessig described the phenomenon as the latest iteration in the classic “call and response” tradition of communication.

In June 2013 Lessig’s video, which necessarily used snippets of the Lisztomania track, was uploaded to YouTube. On the last day of that month Lessig received a notice from YouTube warning him that the video had been blocked after it was deemed to contain content from Viacom. Liberation Music, the label behind the Phoenix track, then issued a DMCA notice and caused YouTube to shut down the video.

Lessig was subsequently warned by YouTube that further copyright breaches could lead to his account being closed down. In response Lessig submitted a counter-notice but was informed by Liberation Music that they would “commence legal proceedings in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts … for copyright infringement" if Lessig didn’t withdraw his notice.

While Lessig did retract his counter-notice, in August 2013 and with support from the EFF he sued Liberation Music, asserting his right to use the music clip under the fair use doctrine. Liberation acted in bad faith when it sent the takedown notice, Lessig’s lawsuit said, and “knowingly and materially” misrepresented Lessig’s video as infringing copyright.

Now, according to the EFF, Lessig has settled his dispute with Liberation after the label agreed to pay him damages and “fix” its copyright policies.

Liberation will pay Lessig an undisclosed sum for the damages it caused with the wrongful takedown. The money will go towards supporting the EFF’s work on open access and the label will also “adopt new policies” that respect fair use.

“Liberation Music is pleased to amicably resolve its dispute with Professor Lessig. Liberation Music agrees that Professor Lessig’s use of the Phoenix song ‘Lisztomania’ was both fair use under US law and fair dealing under Australian law,” the label stated in the settlement agreement.

“Liberation Music will amend its copyright and YouTube policy to ensure that mistakes like this will not happen again. Liberation Music is committed to a new copyright policy that protects its valid copyright interests and respects fair use and dealing.”

When Liberation took on Lessig they clearly picked the wrong person, but the professor hopes that the label’s mistakes will help others understand that fair use has its place, but copyright abuse does not.

“Too often, copyright is used as an excuse to silence legitimate speech,” Lessig said in a statement.

“I’ve been fighting against that kind of abuse for many years, and I knew I had to stand up for fair use here as well. Hopefully this lawsuit and this settlement will send a message to copyright owners to adopt fair takedown practices — or face the consequences.”

A Lisztomania mashup

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

Bitcoin Donations Now Integrated into BitTorrent Client

Posted: 27 Feb 2014 10:41 AM PST

While content distributed via BitTorrent is almost always free (a situation most users would like to keep intact) there has long been a desire to find a straightforward mechanism for optional donations.

The possibilities are intriguing, from artists being able to seed their own content to the public and getting paid directly by fans, to curators of already free content being rewarded for their distribution efforts.

In file-sharing circles there has been a traditional reliance upon PayPal transactions to show appreciation, but with the rise of alternative cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, new avenues have opened up. Many sites, The Pirate Bay included, accept donations in Bitcoin and Litecoin, and some artists have adopted the currencies for fans who want to chip-in.

Despite these developments there remains a disconnect between downloading content and a subsequent donation, meaning that split-second urges to hand over cash in appreciation often have time to cool. That, however, is about to change.

Following their teaser in December 2013, a brand new build of FrostWire’s BitTorrent client (Windows, Mac, Linux) now includes torrent creation supporting not only Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and PayPal donations, but also the selection of appropriate Creative Commons licenses for delivered content.

We’ll bring you comment from the FrostWire team in just a moment, but first let’s look at the simple process from the creator’s perspective.

After loading up FrostWire one simply goes about creating a .torrent file in the usual way, by selecting the tracking options and pointing it to the relevant content on the host computer. If the torrent creator would then like to give fans the option to donate, two extra screens appear.

The first allows the user to select an appropriate Creative Commons license under which to spread the content.

Frost2

The next screen configures payment/tips/donation options, whether Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, PayPal, or a mix-and-match between all four.

Frostdonate

Obviously the creator/distributor will now need to seed, at least until plenty of other people download and start sharing the content.

For the downloader it’s simply a case of installing the correct version of FrostWire (this is a must at the moment until other clients implement the feature) and clicking on a donation-enabled .torrent file.

FrostWire have made a couple available for testing, one of which is a track by FriCtrl labeled Bitcoin_Revolution. Downloading that reveals a box next to the torrent title labeled “Tips/Donations”, with Bitcoin’s logo highlighted. Hovering over reveals the text shown below.

Hover

Once an option is clicked, FrostWire launches a payment process which opens a web page containing the target wallet’s cryptocurrency address in QR, hyperlink, and text form.

Donate

Of course, there will be those who immediately see possibilities for monetizing piracy. But, speaking with TorrentFreak, FrostWire’s Angel Leon says their objectives actually run counter to that.

“We believe piracy is best fought by giving consumers the options of getting legal content, and we want to build solutions that use this technology to empower content creators no matter how big or small they are. We want them to try BitTorrent as an alternative, an additional channel. We think it will be easier to convince more and more artists to join us with the new possibilities,” Leon told TF.

“Putting it bluntly, Bitcoin and BitTorrent integration give us the tools to create the P2P equivalents of iTunes and Netflix, which are centralized venues which work great for big content but not so much for the little guys who have to jump through many hoops to get in.”

Leon says that the end result could be a decentralized media store “owned by nobody and available to all,” one which allows consumers to deal directly with content creators “without the corporate interests, censorship issues and draconian rules that make it hard for the little guy to publish his work.”

The possibilities don’t always have to be commercial either.

“Just imagine a BitTorrent bundle powered by this technology in which Bono from U2 shares free songs or a free video documentary to raise awareness and collect Bitcoin donations for the (Red) foundation to further the fight against HIV worldwide,” the FrostWire team teases.

Further information, including the experimental builds and info on how to activate .torrent-enabled donations, can be found here.

^{Photo: Steve Garfield}

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

TorrentFreak Email Update

Torrenting “Billboard 100″ Pirates Slapped With Automated Fines

Posted: 27 Feb 2014 03:58 AM PST

billboard100 It’s been more than five years since the RIAA stopped its controversial legal campaign against individuals, an effort which resulted in thousands of private settlements with accused file-sharers.

In recent months, however, the music industry has shown renewed interest in extracting payments from pirates. In a scheme pioneered by the Santa Monica based firm Rightscorp, several major rightsholders are targeting alleged BitTorrent pirates.

After the company went public last year, this number has been expanding steadily. Rightscorp now says it protects over 1,000,000 copyrights which includes 13 tracks from the most recent Billboard Hot 100.

“We are pleased to announce that we are monitoring and protecting 13 songs on the current Billboard Hot 100,” Rightscorp says.

In common with other works they are protecting, Rightscorp sends settlement requests to U.S. ISPs who are asked to forward them to subscribers. In addition to commercial ISPs, this also includes universities and all other companies that have IP-addresses registered in their name.

“We can confirm that we send notices to every ISP with a registered block of IP-addresses. This includes universities and corporations,” Rightscorp CEO Christopher Sabec told TF.

Thus far the company has received settlements from subscribers of more than 50 ISPs across the country. In the near future it hopes to add more copyright holders to its client base to increase this number.

“We are in discussions with content creators and rights holders of additional copyrighted property including many other tracks in the Hot 100 as the entertainment industry places more value on our unique service,” Rightscorp notes.

Internet users who are caught don’t face bankruptcy, as the settlement demands are usually around $20 per pirated file. The costs can increase quickly though, as an album of 14 tracks results in separate settlement offers for each song.

Below is an example of a notice Charter forwarded to one of its subscribers. It lists John Mayer’s track “Wildfire” from the album “Paradise Valley,” and warns that the recipient may be liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars, unless he or she settles.

“Your ISP account has been used to download, upload or offer for upload copyrighted content in a manner that infringes on the rights of the copyright owner. Your ISP service could be suspended if this matter is not resolved. You could be liable for up to $150,000 per infringement in civil penalties,” the email warns.

Rightscorp notice

Interestingly, John Mayer and his label are not involved in the matter in any way. Instead, the settlement request was sent on behalf of BMG, who bought Bug Music, which has one of the co-writers of Wildfire under contract, as Rightscorp explained to us.

The above brings up an important issue regarding the settlements. Since most copyrighted works have several stakeholders, a settlement with one party doesn’t automatically mean that other interested parties are barred from also seeking settlement. In the example shown above, Sony Music or John Mayer could still sue for the infringement that was settled with BMG.

While many ISPs kindly forward the settlement requests, not all do. Comcast for example, only appears to forward the infringement details and not the part about the settlement. This means Rightscorp’s scheme doesn’t work with the country’s largest ISP.

However, that doesn’t stop Rightscorp from stepping up its efforts. According to the company their system is much more effective than the voluntary “copyright alerts” and with millions of dollars rolling in, they are not expected to change course anytime soon.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

World’s Largest BitTorrent Trackers Suffer Prolonged Downtime

Posted: 26 Feb 2014 11:24 AM PST

OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent are two non-commercial BitTorrent trackers running on the beerware-licensed Opentracker software. Neither service hosts or links to torrent files and both are free to use by all torrent users.

The services, which were listed as number one and two in our latest list of most-used trackers, coordinate the downloads of 30 million people at any given point in time.

This means that the trackers handle a staggering three billion connections per day – each.

However, starting a few days ago the trackers stopped working entirely. While the trackers have had their fair share of downtime in the past, it’s not often that both of the top trackers are offline for more than a day. Needless to say, this caused concern among some of the most avid file-sharers.

PBT and OBT down

trackers-down

To find out more TF contacted the owner of OpenBitTorrent, who told us that the current downtime is intentional. The tracker is replacing some hardware, a process that could take a week or more to complete. In any event, there is no doubt that the tracker will continue business as usual in the near future.

We also reached out to PublicBitTorrent, whose owner confirmed they are also working on maintenance issues. There is currently no ETA for when the tracker will return, but the current downtime will continue for several days at least.

The upside to all the bad news is that most people can still download torrents. In fact, the majority of BitTorrent users probably failed to notice the downtime to begin with.

Instead of using a tracker, most downloads work fine when they rely solely on DHT and PEX, which allows downloaders to get info on other peers from each other, instead of a central tracker. This works just fine in most situations, especially for popular files.

The downtime is most problematic for users of BitTorrent proxy services. These often advise users to disable DHT and PEX to prevent their real IP-addresses from leaking out, so unless a torrent has other working trackers, nothing can be downloaded for the time being.

For users of proxy services there is no other option than to wait until the trackers return. Meanwhile, udp://tracker.istole.it:80/announce is the largest BitTorrent tracker that’s still online.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

TorrentFreak Email Update

YouTube Ordered to Remove “Illegal” Copyright Blocking Notices
Six Strikes Anti-Piracy Scheme Turns One Year, But Does It Work?
Paramount Sets Lawyers on ‘Top Gun’ Frame-By-Frame Tweets

YouTube Ordered to Remove “Illegal” Copyright Blocking Notices

Posted: 26 Feb 2014 01:46 AM PST

Simply searching for the terms “unavailable in Germany” reveals the scale of the problem. Thousands of complaints, from the man in the street right up to record label bosses, show that the licensing dispute with collecting society/anti-piracy group GEMA has hit in every corner.

It is a complex battle with a simple disagreement at its core. In 2007 the entities reached a licensing agreement for YouTube to use works from GEMA’s extensive repertoire. Two years later negotiations to extend that deal broke down when GEMA’s long-term demand of around €0.12 per stream was rejected by Google.

In May 2010 GEMA sued to have YouTube block certain titles so that they could not be viewed locally. In April 2012 and after much legal wrangling, the Regional Court of Hamburg ruled that YouTube could be held liable for the “infringing” videos and must therefore take measures to render content unavailable in Germany.

And herein lies the problem. YouTube is a constant source of frustration for German users thanks to the blocking of thousands of videos as a result of the GEMA dispute. When local users try to access popular videos being enjoyed by their fellow Internet users (GEMA claims that YouTube overblocks unnecessarily) they are greeted with a message informing them that they should blame GEMA, not YouTube, for the inconvenience.

GEMA

Time and again, users are informed that videos are blocked due to GEMA not granting the necessary music rights. As a result, GEMA has become very unpopular indeed.

Trying to remedy the situation, GEMA applied for an injunction to force YouTube to change the messages, claiming that they misrepresent the situation and damage GEMA’s reputation. YouTube alone is responsible for blocking the videos, claiming otherwise is simply false, GEMA argued.

Yesterday the District Court of Munich agreed with the music group and issued an injunction to force YouTube to comply, stating that the notices “denigrate” GEMA with a “totally distorted representation of the legal dispute between the parties.” Changing the message to state that videos are not available due to a lack of a licensing agreement between YouTube and GEMA would be more appropriate, the Court said.

“For almost three years, YouTube has misled the public with these blocking messages and unlawfully influenced public opinion at the expense of GEMA,” GEMA CEO Dr. Harald Heker said in a statement.

“The decision sends an important and positive signal: It’s not GEMA preventing the enjoyment of music on the Internet. It seeks merely to license YouTube, like all other music portals. Our concern is that the artists participate in the economic exploitation of their works and can earn a livelihood in the future.”

YouTube parent company Google said it was studying the decision.

“We need to examine the reasons for the judgment, before we can make a decision about what to do next,” a spokesperson said.

Once the judgment of the District Court of Munich is made final, YouTube faces fines of up to 250,000 euros per breach.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

Six Strikes Anti-Piracy Scheme Turns One Year, But Does It Work?

Posted: 25 Feb 2014 01:42 PM PST

February last year the MPAA, RIAA and five major Internet providers in the United States launched their "six strikes" anti-piracy plan.

The Copyright Alert System's main goal is to educate the public. People are informed that their connections are being used to share copyrighted material without permission, and told where they can find legal alternatives.

These alerts start out friendly in tone, but repeat infringers face a temporary disconnection from the Internet or other mitigation measures.

The program has not yet revealed how many people have been warned thus far or how many have been punished. Data obtained by TF earlier this month showed that Comcast had sent out 625,000 alerts to its subscribers.

Today it’s a year since the Copyright Alert System officially rolled out, so it’s time to look back at what happened over recent months.

What stands out most is the lack of news. The Center for Copyright Information (CCI), which oversees the program, has issued no press releases over the past 12 months, and nor have any of the participating parties.

The only time CCI hit the mainstream news is when it lost its company status temporarily, and when it was criticized for its efforts to teach copyright classes at kindergartens. None of these issues were directly related to the Copyright Alert program.

The big question that has to be answered somewhere in the future is how effective the six-strikes scheme is. The ultimate goal of the program is to reduce online piracy, but thus far there has been no clear indication that this is happening.

On the contrary, recent research shows that these type of anti-piracy efforts are rather unsuccessful. This is confirmed by data provided by The Pirate Bay, whose growth in U.S. traffic continued after the system went into effect.

Similarly, there have been no reports indicating an increase in movie or music industry revenues that can be linked to the introduction of the Copyright Alert System.

The only industry that clearly profited from the new anti-piracy measures are the providers of anonymity services. This suggests that many people prefer to hide what they are sharing, instead of kicking their piracy habit.

The above suggests that the Copyright Alert System may not be as effective as the copyright holders had hoped. In a few weeks CCI is expected to release more details on the program’s results, so we might know more then.

Aside from analyzing the effectiveness of the program, CCI is also looking to include other copyright holders and ISPs. No official announcements have yet been made on this front.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

Paramount Sets Lawyers on ‘Top Gun’ Frame-By-Frame Tweets

Posted: 25 Feb 2014 08:09 AM PST

Back in 1986 the movie Top Gun was nearing the pinnacle of cool.

With the Navy’s elite fighter weapons school as a backdrop, the perfect smile of Tom Cruise to charm the beautiful Kelly McGillis, and the bleached flattop of Val Kilmer to wow the masses, the flick ticked all the 80s boxes. Throw in Kenny Loggins’ ‘Danger Zone’ and to those born in the 70s it didn’t get much better than this.

Nearly three decades on and to ensure that a whole new generation is exposed to Tony Scott’s masterpiece, for the last month Twitter account @555uhz has been tweeting Top Gun to the world, but with a twist. The movie, which runs to 110 mins in regular format, is being relayed frame-by-frame in the JPG format, a feat that could take months to complete.

TG4SS

At the time of writing the account has pushed out 1,525 tweets to the delight of nearly 6,900 followers. But as they ponder where best to invest in a pair of much-needed Aviator shades, the whole 80s nostalgia trip could already be on the verge of extinction.

Even though modern movies fly at dozens of frames per second and this reenactment is struggling to get off the ground with a couple every hour, it seems that the lawyers in Hollywood have decided this Twitter account is an existential threat to their near 30-year-old Top Gun revenue machine.

TG4SS

Sometime in the past few days, exactly when is unclear, Paramount Pictures sent a lone MiG 28 on a dangerous mission to end the rampant copyright infringement being carried out by @555uhz. The plane, flown by a pilot from the Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP lawfirm, dropped a single but potentially devastating DMCA notice on Twitter in San Francisco. It contained a chilling message.

“We are writing to you on behalf of our client, Paramount Pictures Corporation (‘Paramount’). Paramount is the owner of copyright and other intellectual property rights in and to the ‘Top Gun’ motion picture (hereinafter referred to as ‘Top Gun’). No one is authorized to copy, reproduce, distribute, or otherwise use Top Gun without the express written permission of Paramount,” the notice warned.

“Notwithstanding this, it has come to our attention that a user of your website, @555uhz, is distributing the Top Gun film, frame by frame, via your website. The following URLs are some examples from the user's Twitter account, with additional frames being uploaded continuously.”

What followed was a list of URLs, each representing a slow but steady destruction of Paramount’s near thirty-year-old Top Gun business model.

“Paramount has the good faith belief that the use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by Paramount, its agent or the law. We request that you immediately remove all the Top Gun images from this website relating to the @555uhz user account,” the law firm concludes in tones that can only be described as Cold War-esque.

However, it appears that Twitter hasn’t been fazed by Paramount. The notice, which just appeared on Chilling Effects, has clearly been already processed by Twitter yet none of the tweets listed in the notice have been removed. Claim dismissed.

TG5SS

More tweets are going up every few minutes too, meaning that thus far Twitter hasn’t bowed to Paramount’s request to remove all images from the account either. This could mean that there will be dozens of new complaints and an entire squadron of MiGs heading for Twitter in the future.

Maverick, your country needs you. Again.

Update: Twitter nuked the account….

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

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 Pirate Bay renamed itself to The Research Bay today for a new collaboration with the Cybernorms research group at Lund University.

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

tpb-logo Over the past few years the entertainment industries have repeatedly asked Google to step up its game when it comes to anti-piracy efforts.

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

12yearsa This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

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.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	12 Years A Slave	8.4 / trailer
2	(1)	Thor: The Dark World	7.6 / trailer
3	(4)	Frozen	8.1 / trailer
4	(2)	Gravity	8.2 / trailer
5	(…)	After The Dark	5.7 / trailer
6	(…)	RoboCop (CAM)	6.7 / trailer
7	(5)	Ride Along	6.5 / trailer
8	(3)	Homefront	6.8 / trailer
9	(7)	The Wolf Of Wall Street (DVDscr)	8.5 / trailer
10	(10)	The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (DVDscr)	7.7 / trailer

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.