TorrentFreak Email Update

News Corp Wants Google to Implement Anti-Piracy Algorithms
Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 06/09/14
Popcorn Time For Music Really Has To Be Pretty Epic

News Corp Wants Google to Implement Anti-Piracy Algorithms

Posted: 09 Jun 2014 03:22 AM PDT

Slowly but steadily various entertainment industry groups are applying increasing pressure on Google. Previously the movie industry and record labels have highlighted that Google has a significant stake in pointing the public to pirate sites, and they are now joined by News Corp.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation spin-off owns various major newspapers and also has a significant stake in Foxtel, the Australian pay television network which airs the heavily pirated Game of Thrones series.

News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson says its a thorn in the side of the company that hundreds of thousands of Australians pirate the popular TV-show, instead of buying a Foxtel subscription. With the piracy numbers increasing year-after-year it’s now time for action, and Thomson believes that Google should step up its efforts.

“For a company to have a sophisticated algorithm that knows exactly where you are and what you're doing and maintains ignorance on piracy is an untenable contradiction," Thomson said in an interview with The Australian.

Thomson notes that Google could easily demote links to pirate sites in their search results, and eventually remove these sites altogether. Implementing these anti-piracy algorithms would be a significant step to address the ongoing piracy problems.

"There's no doubt that search giants need to be held to account. It's obvious that it is illegal content or content accessed illegally,” Thomson says.

Thomson is backed by Foxtel chief executive Richard Freudenstein, who sees no excuses for the rising piracy rates now that they’ve made the show available in a timely manner.

"We made Game of Thrones available at a good price on Foxtel Play and yet it was still heavily illegally downloaded. The longer this goes on the more people don't seem to think of it as theft which is what it is," Freudenstein says.

The good price Foxtel’s boss is referring to is roughly $500 USD to access the fourth season of Game of Thrones, or $50 USD per episode. Needless to say, this is still rather expensive for the average teenager.

Thus far Google has taken some steps to address the piracy issue, but the search giant refuses to remove entire domains from its search results without proper takedown notices.

Contrary to Foxtel and News Corp, Google previously advised the Australian Government not to implement draconian ant-piracy legislation. According to Google piracy is mostly an availability and pricing problem, which is best tackled with innovation instead of legislation.

"We believe there is significant, credible evidence emerging that online piracy is primarily an availability and pricing problem. We would encourage the Government to promote new business models and a free marketplace for legal purchasing of content," Google noted.

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

Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 06/09/14

Posted: 09 Jun 2014 12:15 AM PDT

This week we have five newcomers in our chart.

300: Rise Of An Empire 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	(…)	300: Rise Of An Empire	6.6 / trailer
2	(…)	Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist	8.5 / trailer
3	(4)	X-Men: Days of Future Past	8.5 / trailer
4	(…)	The Grand Budapest Hotel	8.3 / trailer
5	(1)	Non-Stop	7.2 / trailer
6	(2)	The Lego Movie	8.2 / trailer
7	(3)	Oculus	6.9 / trailer
8	(…)	Rob The Mob	6.5 / trailer
9	(5)	3 Days To kill	6.2 / trailer
10	(…)	Rio 2	6.7 / trailer

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

Popcorn Time For Music Really Has To Be Pretty Epic

Posted: 08 Jun 2014 10:03 AM PDT

At this very moment, anyone with a keyboard and access to the Internet can listen to pretty much any track currently available.

Much to the annoyance of the music industry, most of that music can be found with a simple Google search and if it’s already been deleted from there, switching to Yahoo does the trick. Hundreds of sites lie a click away, many offering access to millions of free MP3s.

While there’s no doubt that plenty of people use them, there’s no absolute need to access music from unauthorized sources anymore, even if the listener is payment averse. YouTube, for example, works very well indeed, even for the biggest selling tracks.

The story for movies is quite different. Sure, there are unauthorized services a few clicks away but even the hottest torrent sites represent a daunting prospect for Joe Public. Streaming sites bridge the usability gap somewhat with their advanced presentation and simple interfaces but often spoil the viewing experience with waves of popups, fake download buttons and other intrusive advertising.

Then earlier this year Popcorn Time arrived, offering the power of torrents under the hood and a Netflix-style quality interface on top. Unlike its legal competitor, however, the latest spinoff versions of the software have no restrictions on content availability. When all the angles are considered, this software pretty much beats the professionals at their own game – no wonder Hollywood wants to kill it.

It was with excitement, then, that news of a “Popcorn Time for music” reached our ears recently. Called HipHop, the tool has actually been out for a number of weeks already but recently received renewed exposure on Hacker News. The tool has a decent interface and boasts free access to 45 million tracks, that’s better than iTunes and most of the official streaming services around today.

So where are the dozens of news articles charting HipHop’s rise to fame in the way they did with Popcorn Time? Thing is, apart from a token mention here and there, there aren’t any. This isn’t because people don’t like music or that HipHop doesn’t do what it claims, because it does. Maybe it’s because free access to music and music alone simply doesn’t cut it these days.

While pirates have run rings around Hollywood for some time and in some ways continue to do so, in the music sector services like Spotify and even YouTube are doing a much better job than the majority of mainstream pirate alternatives. Sure, anyone can head over to MP3Skull, MP3Juices or GoSong and grab free MP3s all day, but aren’t we demanding more these days?

YouTube provides not only the music but the videos to accompany them. Spotify provides great content discovery opportunities, unrivaled multi-device convenience and is completely free at entry level. It’s been in development for years and it performs better than HipHop in every way. It’s competing with free and winning.

While a Popcorn Time or similar for movies is likely to prove attractive for many years to come due to Hollywood’s archaic release restrictions and unfriendly pricing, pirates are really going to have to up their game to make a Spotify beater for music.

While someone might appear with something amazing, at this point we have to consider that it might never happen. That in itself is quite extraordinary.

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