TorrentFreak Email Update

Torrentz.eu Domain Unsuspended and Back In Action

Posted: 27 May 2014 02:30 AM PDT

With millions of visitors per day Torrentz is one of the largest torrent sites on the Internet.

Yesterday many of its regular users were in for a surprise though, after their favorite search engine suddenly became unreachable.

It turned out that the site’s domain name registrar, the Poland-based company Nazwa, had suspended the Torrentz.eu domain. This drastic step was taken after they received a letter from the UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit.

In recent months City of London Police have targeted dozens of domains through their registrars. Some complied, but others refused to take action without a court order, which is appropriate in these cases.

At first Nazwa placed themselves in the first group, as they were quick to suspend the torrentz.eu domain. However, it appears that the company was willing to listen to reason since their initial decision has now been reversed.

This morning Torrentz.eu’s old DNS entries were put back in place, replacing the ns1.blocked.netart.pl and ns2.blocked.netart.pl ones.

The Torrentz team informs TorrentFreak that their lawyer contacted the registrar yesterday afternoon. In a long letter the lawyer explained that the domain can’t simply be held hostage based on a third-party request.

Among other things, this argument is based on an earlier decision by ICANN's Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy panel which concluded that a court order is required to take such drastic action.

While the registrar has not yet replied to the letter, the fact that the old DNS entries have been restored suggests that they admit that the suspension was in error.

The Torrentz team is happy with the outcome thus far and will continue operating from the .eu domain. The site should be accessible again worldwide, at least to those who have the latest DNS information.

The UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit informs TorrentFreak that the recent efforts to ask registrars to suspend domain names is part of “Operation Creative.” The websites targeted by the police are identified by copyright holders, and then verified by police officers.

Update: Responding to the inquiry we sent yesterday, the police sent the following statement explaining how websites are identified and what actions are taken in response. As with the previous initiatives, such as the pirate site advertising blocklist, these fall under “Operation Creative.”

“As part of Operation Creative, rights holders in the creative industries identify and report copyright infringing websites to PIPCU, providing a detailed package of evidence indicating how the site is involved in illegal copyright infringement. Officers from PIPCU then evaluate the websites and verify whether they are infringing copyright. At the first instance of a website being confirmed as providing copyright infringing content, the site owner is contacted by officers at PIPCU and offered the opportunity to engage with the police, to correct their behaviour and to begin to operate legitimately.”

"If a website fails to comply and engage with the police, then a variety of other tactical options may be used including; contacting the domain registrar informing them of the criminality and seeking suspension of the site and disrupting advertising revenue through the use of an Infringing Website List (IWL) available to those involved in the sale and trading of digital advertising.”

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

Huge Wolfenstein Download Infuriates But Doesn’t Deter Pirates

Posted: 26 May 2014 12:31 PM PDT

Just how far we’ve come on the bandwidth front in the past few decades is astonishing.

In the early 80s the 8-bit demo scene manage to thrive with pedestrian transfers of 75 characters per second. By 2002 in the heyday of Kazaa, users still on dial-up were pondering whether an awful 28mb cam rip of 28 Days Later would be worth the herculean effort.

These days, some users are still happily gobbling up 700mb YIFY movie rips but for others bandwidth has become so plentiful that only multi-gig Blu-ray releases will suffice. However, there is a point at which even the swarthiest of pirates begin to complain.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is the long-awaited re-imagining of the cult classic game of the same name and as expected upon its release last week it quickly turned up on torrent sites. However, its huge size had some potential downloaders wondering whether to bother or not.

“43GB? holy fuck,” exclaimed Pirate Bay user sealtmx2.

“I have to uninstall like 10 games to play this shit!!” added ucci4life.

Reports suggest that the massive file size is due to uncompressed graphics textures but it comes as no surprise that some believe that annoying downloaders was in the developers’ minds. Bethesda had deliberately padded out the game with junk as a clever anti-piracy deterrent, some concluded.

While extremely unlikely, for some the big download was simply too much.

“43GB, the hell? No thanks, guess I will buy this when the price drops to £29.99,” said user u2konline.

The impatience in torrent sites comments sections was interesting to behold, with several downloaders reporting the abandoning of the download in favor of paying for the game instead. For them, waiting two or three days (according to times estimated by their torrent client at the time) was simply too much.

“I was gonna get this torrent but I saw the size and how long it would take me to download it, I said fuck it I’m getting it from Steam,” said user Caxtilteca. “Took me 2 hours to download 40GB including the day one update.”

Part of the problem, especially when the torrents were fresh, is that due to the time to completion there were a tiny amount of seeders (users with the whole game) compared to leechers (those still downloading). The effect of that was highlighted by speed157.

“38 hours later I finally finish my download and have uploaded 122.15 GB,” he wrote.

But while the huge download clearly deterred some, it appears to have had no serious effect on the number of downloaders overall. Although its size clearly had something to do with it, Wolfenstein: The New Order had the largest torrent swarms of any game last week and by the weekend more than 100,000 pirates had endured the wait to grab themselves a copy.

Reports on exactly how long people had to wait varied, from a few hours to a few days. However, it’s still interesting to see how that desire for content right here and right now led some to the doors of Steam or retailers when they became more convenient than the pirate option. For once and for a few, the boot seemed to have switched to the other foot.

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