In recent years the intellectual property division of AT&T has patented quite a few unusual inventions. Today we can add another to the list after the telecoms company was granted a patent which aims to keep torrent files available for as long as possible.

In the patent (pdf), which was awarded yesterday, the ISP points out that BitTorrent is a very effective way of sharing files online. However, AT&T also signals some drawbacks, including the fact that some torrent swarms stop working because there are no complete copies of the file available.

“As more and more peers download a complete copy of the file, the performance of the torrent deteriorates to the point that it becomes difficult for the file to be located and downloaded. As a result, current BitTorrent systems are not desirable for downloading older files,” the patent reads.

Since there are often many swarms downloading the same content via different trackers, it could be that the file lives on elsewhere. Similarly, other peers might be willing to start seeding the dead torrent again. AT&T’s patent pairs these sources to increase the availability of files downloaded via BitTorrent.

AT&T’s torrent patent

The patent proposes to add “collaboration information” which may be obtained from each peer when it joins a torrent swarm. If a torrent has no active seeds available, this information can point the downloader to “dormant peers” or external trackers that still have active seeders.

“If the file is not available at an active peer, the tracker node has two options; it may contact some of the listed dormant peers to see if they are willing to make the file available, and/or it may contact a remote tracker node listed for the file,” the patent reads.

“If the file is made available by a dormant peer and/or at a remote torrent, the local peer can then establish a peer-to-peer communication with the dormant peer or a peer on the remote torrent, and download the file therefrom. As a result, the local peer can locate and download files that are not available on its current torrent from both dormant peers and peers in other torrents.”

The idea to point people to other trackers is not new. Most torrents come with multiple trackers nowadays to ensure that a file remains available for as long as possible. AT&T’s proposed invention would automate this feature.

The idea to contact “dormant peers” is more novel. In short, that means that people who previously downloaded a file, but are no longer seeding it, can get a request to make it available again.

Whether the ISPs has any real life applications for their invention is yet unknown. The current patent was granted this week, but the first application dates back to 2005, a time when BitTorrent wasn’t quite as mainstream as it is today.

The patent certainly doesn’t mean that the ISP encourages sharing copyrighted files. Among other anti-piracy innovations, AT&T previously patented systems to track content being shared via BitTorrent and other P2P networks and report those offenders to the authorities.

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

With the launch of legal streaming services such as Netflix, movie and TV fans have less reason to turn to pirate sites.

At the same time, however, these legal options invite people from other countries where the legal services are more limited. This is also the case in Australia where up to 200,000 people are estimated to use the U.S. version of Netflix.

Although Netflix has geographical restrictions in place, these are easy to bypass with a relatively cheap VPN subscription. To keep these foreigners out, entertainment industry companies are now lobbying for a global ban on VPN users.

Simon Bush, CEO of AHEDA, an industry group that represents Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros., Universal, Sony Pictures and other major players said that some members are actively lobbying for such a ban.

Bush didn’t name any of the companies involved, but he confirmed to Cnet that “discussions” to block Australian access to the US version of Netflix “are happening now”.

If implemented, this would mean that all VPN users worldwide will no longer be able to access Netflix. That includes the millions of Americans who are paying for a legitimate account. They can still access Netflix, but would not be allowed to do so securely via a VPN.

According to Bush the discussions to keep VPN users out are not tied to Netflix’s arrival in Australia. The distributors and other rightsholders argue that they are already being deprived of licensing fees, because some Aussies ignore local services such as Quickflix.

“I know the discussions are being had…by the distributors in the United States with Netflix about Australians using VPNs to access content that they’re not licensed to access in Australia,” Bush said.

“They’re requesting for it to be blocked now, not just when it comes to Australia,” he adds.

While blocking VPNs would solve the problem for distributors, it creates a new one for VPN users in the United States.

The same happened with Hulu a few months ago, when Hulu started to block visitors who access the site through a VPN service. This blockade also applies to hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens.

Hulu’s blocklist was implemented a few months ago and currently covers the IP-ranges of all major VPN services. People who try to access the site through one of these IPs are not allowed to view any content on the site, and receive the following notice instead:

“Based on your IP-address, we noticed that you are trying to access Hulu through an anonymous proxy tool. Hulu is not currently available outside the U.S. If you’re in the U.S. you’ll need to disable your anonymizer to access videos on Hulu.”

It seems that VPNs are increasingly attracting the attention of copyright holders. Just a week ago BBC Worldwide argued that ISPs should monitor VPN users for excessive bandwidth use, assuming they would then be pirates.

Considering the above we can expect the calls for VPN bans to increase in the near future.

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

While most people have been enjoying the summer months, Peter Sunde has been locked away in a Swedish prison. After his Pirate Bay-related sentence was made final in 2012, Sunde remained at large, a man wanted by Interpol for aiding copyright infringement offenses.

During the final day of May 2014, a two-year hunt came to its conclusion. A special Swedish police unit tasked with tracking down fugitives carried out a raid at a farm in Skåne, a rural area near Malmö, Sweden.

Despite continued protestations that he had committed no crimes, Sunde was transferred to the high-security Västervik Norra prison to begin an eight-month sentence. A month later Sunde applied to be moved to a lower security unit, a place more in keeping with his alleged white-collar crimes. His application was rejected.

With his release date now less than 50 days away, Sunde should have reason to be looking to the future, but instead a family tragedy has marked his final weeks in prison. After succumbing to a long illness, Sunde’s father has passed away. The event has prompted Peter’s brother, Mats Kolmisoppi, to speak out for the first time on the Pirate Bay founder’s imprisonment conditions.

“I have deliberately said very little about what happened to my brother, Peter Sunde, the last few months. Partly because he can speak for himself and does not have difficulty being heard, even though he sits in a prison with a high safety rating in Västervik,” Mats wrote on Facebook.

The problem, Mats says, is with a system that has forgotten that its job is to support offenders in order to ensure that they never return to prison.

That system has deemed that despite his non-violent crimes, Sunde should be detained in a high-security prison, a placement that was allocated to him even before a guilty verdict had been passed down and in spite of an official assessment that he presented a non-existent violence or escape risk.

As a result, Sunde has paid the price. After a continued struggle with the food provided, Mats Kolmisoppi reports that his brother has now lost 13kgs in weight. When a smiling head of department visited Sunde to deliver information on his earlier transfer request he was told: “I have good news for you Peter, your application is rejected.”

Kolmisoppi documents a long list of systematic and casual cruelties such as these, but few are as disturbing as the one he now reports.

For some time Peter and Mats’ father had been seriously ill. This summer he ended up in hospital with a catalog of issues including suspected cancer in his remaining lung. While persistent applications to see his father failed, Peter was eventually granted permission to make a hospital visit. Mats’ says that he and Peter discussed when to say goodbye to their father – they decided that should be at the funeral.

Shortly after, Peter and Mat’s father passed away. Coinciding with an incident at the prison which resulted in heightened security measures, this meant more bad news for Peter. While he would be allowed to attend the funeral, two guards would accompany him – but on the condition that he remains handcuffed.

“But I will carry my father’s coffin,” Mats’ reports Peter as saying.

“You can not count on it,” the guards responded. “You will be wearing handcuffs.”

Peter is a non-violent prisoner accused of copyright infringement offenses who at 13kgs lighter in weight represents an even lower risk of flight than his 50 days left in custody might suggest. And while there will be those in the entertainment industries who argue he deserves his punishment, the effects of his custody spread well beyond the former file-sharing site spokesman.

“As the Swedish criminal system is designed it punishes not only my brother. It punishes me, it punishes my now dead father, it punishes my mother, my family, my relatives and my friends,” Mats’ writes.

While these sad events cannot be undone, Peter is at least likely to receive a warm reception following his release. He is undoubtedly bright and has a future, as his work with micro-donation service Flattr and the NSA-proof messenger app Heml.is has shown. Indeed, he already appears to have plans. And with all the vegan food he can eat less than two months away, November can’t come soon enough.

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

In recent years Hollywood and the music industry have taken a rather aggressive approach against Google. The entertainment industry companies believe that the search engine isn’t doing enough to limit piracy, and have demanded more stringent measures.

One of the suggestions often made is to remove or demote pirate sites in search results. A lower ranking would lead fewer people to pirate sources and promoting legal sources will have a similar effect.

Google previously said it would lower the ranking of sites based on DMCA complaints, but thus far these changes have had a limited effect. A few weeks ago the company also began promoting legal options but this effort is in the testing phase for now.

The question that remains is whether these changes would indeed decrease piracy. According to new research from Carnegie Mellon University, they can.

In a paper titled “Do Search Engines Influence Media Piracy?” the researchers ran two experiments where they let participants use a custom search engine to find a movie they wanted to watch. The respondents could pick from a list of 50 titles and received a $20 prepaid virtual Visa card as compensation.

All search results were pulled from a popular search engine. In the control category the results were not manipulated, but in the “legal” and “infringing” conditions the first page only listed “legal” (e.g Amazon) and neutral (e.g IMDb) sites or “infringing” (e.g. Pirate Bay) and neutral sites respectively.

While it’s quite a simple manipulation, and even though users could still find legal and pirated content in all conditions, the results are rather strong.

Of all participants who saw the standard results, 80% chose to buy the movie via a legal option. This went up to 94% if the results were mostly legal, and dropped to 57% for the group who saw mostly infringing results on the first page.

To Pirate or Not to Pirate

TorrentFreak contacted Professor Rahul Telang who says that the findings suggest that Google and other search engines have a direct effect on people’s behavior, including the decision to pirate a movie.

“Prominence of legal versus infringing links in the search results seem to play a vital role in users decision to consume legal versus pirated content. In particular, demoting infringing links leads to lower rate of consumption of pirated movie content in our sample,” he notes.

In a second study the researchers carried out a slightly modified version of the experiment with college students, a group that tends to pirate more frequently. The second experiment also added two new conditions where only the first three results were altered, to see if “mild” manipulations would also have an effect.

The findings show that college students indeed pirate more as only 62% went for the legal option in the control condition. This percentage went up gradually to 76% with a “mild legal” manipulation, and to 92% in the legal condition. For the infringing manipulations the percentages dropped to 48% and 39% respectively.

To Pirate or Not to Pirate, take two

According to Professor Telang their findings suggest that even small changes can have a significant impact and that altering search algorithms can be instrumental in the fight against online piracy.

“The results suggest that the search engines may play an important role in fight against intellectual property theft,” Telang says.

It has to be noted that Professor Telang and his colleagues received a generous donation from the MPAA for their research program. However, the researchers suggest that their work is carried out independently.

As a word of caution the researchers point out that meddling with search results in the real world may be much more challenging. False positives could lead to significant social costs and should be avoided, for example.

This and other caveats aside, the MPAA and RIAA will welcome the study as a new piece of research they can wave at Google and lawmakers. Whether that will help them to get what they want has yet to be seen though.

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

When it comes to polarizing figures standing accused of copyright infringement in New Zealand, there can be few more famous than Kim Dotcom. The entrepreneur and now political activist is in a bitter battle with not only the New Zealand and US governments, but also the world’s largest entertainment companies.

That’s why the news today that the ruling National Party is being sued for copyright infringement has somewhat amused the German-born businessman. The party is led by political rival Prime Minister John Key, one of Dotcom’s most vocal critics and a leader who the Megaupload founder says played a key role in having him arrested in 2012.

The lawsuit, filed by Eminem’s publishers, follows allegations that the song “Lose Yourself” was used in a 2014 New Zealand General Election advertising campaign run by the National Party.

Eight Mile Style and Martin Affiliated told local media that Eminem’s publishers were not approached to use the songs.

“It is both disappointing and sadly ironic that the political party responsible for championing the rights of music publishers in New Zealand by the introduction of the three strikes copyright reforms should itself have so little regard for copyright,” the publishers told 3News.

“We do not hesitate to take immediate action to protect the integrity of Eminem’s works, particularly where a party, as here, has sought to associate itself with Eminem and his work.”

The National Party insists that it obtained all necessary licenses by purchasing the track from official sources known to work with the film and entertainment industry. However, in order to try and calm down the complaint by the publishers use of the song by the party was withdrawn two weeks ago, an unusual thing to do if money had indeed been invested in a legitimate license.

“We think it’s pretty legal, we think these guys are just having a crack and have a bit of an eye for the main chance because it’s an election campaign. I think they’re just trying to shake us down for some money before the election,” said National’s campaign manager Steven Joyce.

While “pretty legal” probably isn’t the standard required by Eminem’s publishers, Kim Dotcom was already made up his mind on how to end the dispute. Posting on Twitter, the Internet Party founder didn’t let a golden opportunity pass to take a shot at his arch political rival.

“Extradite John Key,” he wrote.

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