Torrent Freak reported yesterday that the SPFF -- think of it as the French RIAA -- filed lawsuits against the developers of P2P clients Vuze, Limewire, and Morpheus. There is also a fourth target, and I'll get to that particular bit of insanity later.

The SPFF's beef is with the fact that these programs don't provide a system to block copyright protected materials from being shared. Because the programs don't prevent files from being shared, the SPFF argues that the programs are complicit in the act itself.

It's the same flawed P2P argument that agencies have been making for the last decade. This "making available" argument has failed to hold up in US court cases against individual users.

To claim that the developers of these programs are responsible for what their users decide to do with it is pure idiocy. If someone were to author a subversive plot to overthrow the French government using OpenOffice Writer, would there be a lawsuit filed against Sun? OK, don't answer that...

The kicker: Rather than actually going after those who develop the fourth app (Shareaza), the SPFF decided to sue SourceForge - who merely provide hosting for Shareaza's project files. SourceForge has absolutely nothing to do with the actual development of the program.

When I read this, I started having visions of the SPFF headquarters looking like something out of Bizarro World from the old Superfriends cartoon. Clearly the only people that could hatch a scheme like this would be badly animated super villains.

I'm sure there's no possible way this fiasco could backfire on the French music industry. After all, I think we can all agree that the P2P community is usually very good about knuckling under to threats from coporate interests.

In an unrelated note, I have to check uTorrent to see if my downloads are finished.

Remember Azureus? Once upon a time it was one of the most popular BitTorrent clients around. And then the company behind the software tried to build a business model around it by going legit and partnering with content companies to offer free and paid BitTorrent downloads.

The problem is that the people who were already familiar with Azureus, which was renamed Zudeo and then Vuze, were used to getting their media for free, so it's a bit tricky trying to convince them to pay. A few months back, Vuze tried to make its platform a bit more attractive by adding social features. But more importantly, Vuze 3.1 made it easier to search for videos hosted on sites besides Vuze. So you could find legal videos, but you could also search sites like Btjunkie and Mininova for slightly less legal files.

Vuze 4 was released this week, and like in Vuze 3.1, the Torrent search box is front and center, making it almost easier to find illegally shared videos than the legit cntent from the "Vuze HD Network" that Vuze really wants you to find. The goal is undoubtedly to attract back some of the BitTorrent users who have fond memories of Azureus but have since migrated to other platforms with a slick client that lets you search for, download, manage, and even watch videos from a variety of sites.

The paid downloads seem to be gone, but select content in the Vuze HD Network (not all of which is available in high definition, by the way), is ad-supported. For example, you can watch Season 1 of Dexter for free if you're willing to put up with a few ads. And if you don't bother trying to download the ad-free DVD rips from another site first.

[via NewTeeVee]

Now that torrent technology has become one of the most popular ways to distribute large files, it's important to find the right Bittorrent client. If you're on a Mac, that's Transmission. I used to be a fan of Azureus (now called Vuze), but I switched to Transmission because it's less cluttered and takes up a lot less screen real-estate.

Transmission's not bare-bones in terms of features -- you can fine-tune your upload and download speeds, change ports, and check your ratio -- but its design is minimal and not too distracting. I don't want a busy-looking torrent app, I want one that I can set up quickly and leave alone until my downloads finish. Transmission provides that, while still letting advanced users get under the hood where they need to. It's also free and open source! That's why it's one of my favorite Mac apps.

There are several options out now for users that want to search several engines at once for torrrent downloads. My current favorite is still uSniff, but I'm always on the lookout for something newer and better.

Thanks to a persistent commenter, I found out about TorrentFly this morning and decided to check it out.

TorrentFly will search up to twelve sites at once (Sumotorrent, Mininova, PirateBay, Monova, NewTorrents, SeedPeer, Fenopy, TorrentZ, MyBitTorrent, BtJunkie, TorrentHound, Idealtorrent) and you can select which engines you'd like to search.

You're also able to set your preferred column to sort and number of results per page. Clicking any column heading will re-sort your results by health, name, size, seeds, peers, or engine.

Back in October of 2007, a federal jury ruled in favor of the RIAA and fined the defendant, Jammie Thomas, an outrageous $220,000.00 US for sharing 24 songs on a P2P network. Not surprisingly, Ms. Thomas filed an appeal. Her case was indirectly strengthened when a New York federal judge ruled that the RIAA could not strictly sue individuals under the "making available" claim -- the argument that merely making a file available to download constitutes subjects the user to copyright infringement and punitive penalties -- they would have to prove the person actually downloaded said files. Yesterday, a Minnesota federal judge declared a mistrial in the Jammie Thomas case, effectively setting the RIAA's court victory record back to zero.

The basis of the mistrial were the jury instructions. Initially Judge Michael Davis instructed jurors that could find Thomas guilty of copyright infringement if copyrighted MP3s were made available via a peer-to-peer network, "regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown."

In August, Judge Davis had a change of heart and called both sides back to court, requesting arguments over the "make available" claim. With yesterday's decision, Jude Davis ruled that the jury instructions were "erroneous, and that error substantially prejudiced Thomas' rights."

Although a mistrial was declared, the case was not dismissed with prejudice, meaning the RIAA can sue Thomas on the same grounds, assuming they can make the argument that actual distribution, and that Thomas was responsible for infringing downloads.

On page 41 of the 44 page ruling, Judge Davis also commented on the extraordinary punitive damages in this case:
"The Court would be remiss if it did not take this opportunity to implore Congress to amend the Copyright Act to
address liability and damages in peer‐ to‐peer network cases such as the one currently before this Court." We can only hope Congress listens.

The complete ruling can be downloaded here.



[via Tech Dirt]

Watch carefully.. I'm about to talk like a pirate.

Arrh. Avast. Shiver me.. oh forget it.

It's officially "Talk Like a Pirate Day" the world over. Talking like a pirate is kinda lame. It's been done. It's so 2004. Since we've had it up to here with co-workers and their clever attempts to recreate a pirate past that never was a cute or cuddly as the fantasy pirates of today, we decided to go a different direction.

Welcome to Download Squad's "Download Like a Pirate Day". It's just like that other day except, well, lot's and lots better. We'll keep you fat and happy throughout the day with ways to download your fill, even ways to feel like a pirate without breaking any copyrights.

Check out some of our recent posts on burning up your bandwidth and watch throughout the day for more great ideas to keep you downloading like a pirate.

As DownloadSquad gears up for "Download Like a Pirate Day" this Friday, it appears as though our friends from the MPAA and the boys on Capitol Hill are also hard at work. The U.S. Senate appears ready to give Bill S. 3325 - the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Act of 2008 - the green light as early as today.

A quick look at this article by Alex Curtis and this open letter from twelve different advocacy groups will provide some insight into the proposed bill.

Why should you care? Well, for starters, S. 3325 would allow the Department of Justice to sue offenders in civil court. That's a bad thing. A really bad thing.

First, it means taxpayers are footing the bill while the DOJ does MPAA dirty work. Not good. Second, defendants are guaranteed free legal representation. Third, there only has to be a "preponderance of evidence," which is not nearly the same as "beyond a reasonable doubt." As a kicker, it looks as though fines for violation would be doubled.

Over at OpenCongress there appears to be a lot of buzz about this one (64 blog posts and growing), and rightfully so.

Holy crap. The MPAA has filed 30,000 suits over the past five years. Do you really want to pick up the tab?

For the truly interested, you can view the bill's text here. Read up, and then call your Senator. You can use Cause Caller to contact members of the Senate Judiciary, find and call your own senator, or send a fax.

[via BoingBoing]

Hamachi is a great app. So is VNC. Torrents are great, too. You see where I'm going. These are all great on their own - so when Remobo rolled them all in to one, tasty package, I was pretty excited.

Set it up, add your buddies, and you've got an instant, private P2P network. Click the My Shared Files link and create torrents of your folders and files with two clicks. When your buddies view your shares, they'll see a simple web page with links to the torrent downloads. It's simple, and it works quite well.

Clicking windows file sharing on a buddy will display their Windows file and printer shares (like Hamachi does). File access speeds (even over my sluggish DSL) are good, and at least on par with Hamachi's free offering.

Wuala is a social file storage application that we first looked at back in February. At the time, Wuala was in private beta, but starting today anyone can sign up for an account.

Unlike other file storage/sharing services, Wuala doesn't provide you with web space. Rather, your files are encrypted and then stored on the computers of other Wuala users. While this might sound a bit scary, the upshot is that you can store large amounts of data. The more space you allocate for Wuala on your hard drive, the more online space you can access. And your files are duplicated on multiple computers so that you shouldn't have problems accessing your files even if some of the folks in your network have turned their machines off for the night.

Wuala has a desktop client for Windows, Mac, and Linux that you can use to upload and download files. Or you can access a web interface. The service is still in beta, so nobody's promising that all the kinks have been worked out. But as of today, Wuala is in public beta, not private.

Rapidspread is a a simple file upload site that automatically forwards your files to as many as 10 filesharing sites. From the upload page, simply browse for your file(s), agree to the terms of service, and click share. Once the upload is complete, RapidSpread displays a URL to send to your friends as well as direct links to your file on the supported hosts it's been transferred to.

My test rar file successfully uploaded to eight of the ten possible hosts - not too shabby. When I chose to upload several images, RapidSpread was even smart enough to limit mirroring to the media-sharing services (ImageShack, Badongo, ZShare, and ZippyShare).

Anyone that uploads files on a regular basis will appreciate the simplicity and power of RapidSpread. If the developers would just intergrate a short URL service like bit.ly, this would be a truly killer service. Give it a shot, and see how it stacks up against your favorite service.

Thanks for the tip, Eran!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is protecting your rights online again, this time with a tool called Switzerland. Switzerland lets you check your ISPs compliance with net neutrality, making sure they're not trying to shut down specific kinds of traffic, like BitTorrent and VOIP. Naturally, Switzerland is Open Source.

It's also a command-line tool, and still in alpha, so it's not necessarily for everyone. If you're comfortable with this kind of app, and you're concerned about your ISP's behavior, definitely give it a go. How exactly does it know whether your ISP is fiddling around with your bandwidth? The EFF says, "It will spot IP packets which are forged or modified between clients, inform you, and give you copies of the modified packets." It recognizes packets injected or modified by some of the most popular tools ISPs have been using to mess with p2p traffic, including SandVine and AudibleMagic.

Bittorrent has become pretty popular as an efficient, decentralized way of distributing large files, and now the same technology is being applied to streaming. P2P-Next is working on an experimental .tstream format that will share streaming video using a minimum of bandwidth. It works like a regular torrent -- users who have part of a file 'seed' it for download by other users -- but with a twist. Each user grabs the blocks of data that make up a video just before they need them to play the next minute of content, upload it to the next user right away, and then "undownload" it.

The undownload functionality turned out to be the key breakthrough for this project, since part of the appeal of streaming is that you don't have to keep a massive file on your hard drive all at once. The Tstream format has a little help gaining widespread adoption: one of the organizations currently testing it is the BBC. If you want to try it for yourself, check out this trial run of SwarmPlayer. Windows and Linux versions are out right now, and the Mac version is due next week.

[via Torrentfreak]

Attention, law-abiding citizens! If you believe in BitTorrent as a means of distribution for large files, but you're concerned about the claims of piracy that are often associated with it, you should take a look at YouTorrent. Despite having to shut down for a while because of legal issues, YouTorrent is back in operation, with a reported 67,170 torrents that are all legal to share.

YouTorrent is a meta-search that can find verified torrents across a number of popular torrent sites, including Jamendo, Vuze, BitTorrent, Legaltorrents, Legittorrents, Gameupdates, Wortharchiving, BT.etree and Mininova's featured torrents section. With all those sites combined, you can use YouTorrent to search over 6TB of data. This is a very good thing for the torrent community in general, as it shows how widely BitTorrent is used for non-piracy purposes.

[via TorrentFreak]

Cabos doesn't support torrents, and it doesn't have a built in media player, but who needs that anyway? Most of us have favorite apps for handling those files anyways, and Limewire probably isn't either of them. It simply searches the Gnutella network, displays your results, lets you filter and sort them six ways from Sunday, and downloads them quickly. It even offers basic iTunes integration.

There's no lime green splashed around the UI, just a tranquil, muted gray, and 21 languages are supported. It's totally ad-free and there are no nags - Cabos just does what you want it to and doesn't get in the way.

Want to download popular music without paying and without breaking the law? Qtrax is a new advertising-supported service that lets you download music from two of the four major labels, Universal and EMI as well as several smaller labels. The service uses a modified version of the Songbird Media player to let you search or browse for music and download tracks. Some music willbe available through P2P connections while music from Universal and EMI will be hosted on Qtrax servers.

The files use Windows Media digital rights management and are designed to be played with the Qtrax media player. But once you play a song using the Qtrax software and acquire a valid license key, you shold be able to play it using the media player of your choice. The one thing you cannot do is transfer songs to a portable media device like an iPod. That makes sense, since Qtrax makes money by showing ads while you search for and listen to music. There's no particularly good way to do that on a mobile device.

The music selection is somewhat limited at the moment. Not only are Sony and Warner Music Group tracks missing, but there are plenty of albums that show up in the Qtrax interface even though the songs are not yet available for download. But since the service just launched in beta, we're willing to cut Qtrax some slack.

The Qtrax client is Windows only for now, but a Mac version is in the works.

[via Silicon Alley Insider]