Over the past years dozens of apps have been rejected from the App Store because they mention the word BitTorrent.

Apple defended this policy and told developers that their apps were not allowed “because this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third-party rights.”

This BitTorrent aversion is also one of the main reasons why popular BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent, Vuze and Transmission don’t have an Apple-approved presence on the iPhone and iPad.

This week the BitTorrent client “Blue Downloader” was approved by Apple and added to the App store. The application allows users to control and add torrent downloads through a built-in browser. The torrents can then be directly downloaded to the device.

The application handles torrent downloads without any problems, but there is one rather big restriction. The developer has decided to only allow downloads from a few trusted sources.

Trying to add files from The Pirate Bay or KickassTorrents wont work, but white-listed sites such as Archive.org, Linuxtracker and Bitlove are freely accessible.

Talking to TorrentFreak, Blue Downloader developer Harrison Tyler says that he implemented these restrictions to improve his odds of getting the app approved by Apple.

“Apple is very restrictive about torrent downloading, so I thought I would take the same precautions. If Apple were to see a completely unrestricted torrent downloader, they would not take it as well as what I have now,” Tyler tells us.

“I am not for restrictions normally, but as I am bending the accessibility of the app based on Apple’s will,” he adds.

This strategy appears to have worked, for now, as the torrent client is still available in the App store. There is a chance that it may not be around for long though. Blue Downloader carefully avoided the B-word and Apple may still ban the app if they spot the connection.

The self-censoring developer believes that BitTorrent is unfairly stigmatized. Pirated files can be found all over the Internet, and Apple has no restrictions for apps that download from direct sources.

“There is an unfortunate stigma associated with torrent downloading. Even though there is almost an equal amount of illegal files on the Internet to regularly download, people still crack down on the evils of BitTorrent,” Tyler says.

For those interested in giving the rather limited Blue Downloader a try, it’s available in the App Store for $2.99.

Update: Censorship no more? The developer is now allowing access to Google as well. This provides access to all torrent sites on the Internet.

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

One of the most fascinating things about early “shared folder” P2P networks and protocols such as FastTrack (Kazaa) and Gnutella (LimeWire) was the amount of unusual content that turned up online.

In the end, however, this ungoverned and unmoderated publication of content became the undoing of these and similar networks, with malware, viruses and badly (even maliciously) labeled files taking over.

With the advent of BitTorrent with its reliance on managed indexes, publication of content became significantly less accessible. That cut down hugely on junk but also much of the desirable oddball content too. However, torrents ate big files for breakfast and heralded something new and exciting – leaks of movie content never intended for public consumption plus exclusive fan-modified versions.

Also noteworthy with BitTorrent is longevity of content availability. With both in mind we took a browse around to see what unusual movie content is still being seeded today.

Fight Club – Workprint – 1998/1999

According to the iMDb, Fight Club is one of the world’s most-loved movies with countless millions having seen it to date. However, lurking away on file-sharing networks is a special version of the movie sporting hundreds of changes from the final version including 13 reported cuts for violence.

Showing that something as important as the intro isn’t always set in stone, this video claims to depict an earlier intro to the movie accompanied by “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters instead of “Stealing Fat” from the Dust Brothers.

Curiosity value: At least 127 documented differences compared with the original.

Halloween – Workprint – 2007

As the world waited for the return of Michael Myers in the 2007 remake of Halloween, scene release group mVs (Maven Supplier) had a surprise in store. On August 27, 2007, three days before its official release, mVs released an unfinished version of the movie online.

Curiosity value: Missing final edits, some scenes added, and general polish. Full extensive details are available here.

Alien “Virtual Workprint” – 1979

From release notes: A fan-edit of the film ALIEN which interpolates all existing deleted scenes and a variety of unseen footage and unused score cues to create a version that runs considerably longer than both the 1979 theatrical release and the 2003 director’s cut.

Curiosity value: Runtime of 139 mins (117 mins original, 116 mins director’s cut)

Apocalypse Now – Workprint – 1979

According to the information posted along with the release, this is the best workprint copy of the movie outside “Mr Coppola’s archives” although as the screenshots show, quality is stuck in the VHS era.

“I was given this on VHS many years ago. It was from a higher up source on the food chain and quite possibly one or two generations down from the source that leaked it to begin with,” a note with the release reads.

“The workprint ended right during the cow slicing. I then tacked on the finished
film ended but before the credits I also added the Kurtz compound destruction.
Now you have a super edition of the film running 30 mins short of 6 hours!!

Curiosity value: Unfinished, yet still 5.5 hours long. (original 153 mins)

The Mask – Workprint – 1994

This Jim Carey classic was nominated for a special effects Oscar in 1995, but people who stumbled across an unfinished version of the movie were seriously but interestingly short-changed in that department. This workprint copy is missing many special effects and in some of the more dramatic morphing scenes everything is replaced by hand drawn story boards.

Curiosity value: A full 20 mins longer than the DVD with unfinished scenes, scenes not present in the final version, additional dialogue and Jim Carrey acting scenes before CGI is added in.

Dune The Reconstructed Workprint Edition – 1984

From release notes: This edit attempts to reconstruct David Lynch’s workprint better than the official Extended Edition. It removes most (if not all) of the offensive elements that led Lynch to remove his name from the Extended Edition.

Erroneous FX shots are eliminated, and as much of the Theatrical Edition as possible is used for the sake of better sound and score. It also restores most of the
deleted scenes that were not present in the Extended Edition but finally showed
up as a supplement on the DVD.

Curiosity value: 41 mins longer than the official 137 min runtime.

The Nightmare Before Christmas Workprint – 1993

From release notes: The film was half-complete at this point. You’ll see a lot of finished scenes, including a few that don’t appear in the final movie, but you’ll also see scenes which are only storyboard drawings.

There is a lot of temporary audio and music. Oogie Boogie’s scenes, for example, aren’t ready yet – they’re storyboards, with temporary audio on his song, which is a longer version probably sung by Danny Elfman. “Making Christmas” is also just storyboards with an extra verse.

The final confrontation between Jack and Oogie (and pretty much the entire ending) is also just storyboards, and a bit vague compared to the final film.

Curiosity value: Seriously unfinished

This Is Spinal Tap (1984) – 4.5 Hour Workprint

From release notes: This workprint of the film contains about 3 hours of footage not included in the commercial release. The picture quality is pretty bad; it’s dark and muddled, but you can see everything pretty okay.

The sound is really great, however. The audio also falls out of sync at certain points because it is an extremely rough cut of the flick and that stuff wasn’t finalized yet.

Curiosity value: Three hours of extra footage.

If you’ve found any obscure video content hiding away online, please feel free to detail your discovery in the comments section below. Please do not link to any copyrighted material or torrents since those posts will be removed.

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

Two weeks ago a high quality leak of the upcoming Expendables 3 film appeared online.

Fearing a massive loss in revenue, movie studio Lionsgate issued thousands of takedown requests to limit the film’s availability. While most sites swiftly removed links to the pre-release leak, according to the studio some did not respond at all.

Late last week Lionsgate sued the operators of six file-sharing sites that allegedly failed to remove the infringing files – Limetorrents.com, Billionuploads.com, Hulkfile.eu, Played.to, Swankshare.com and Dotsemper.com.

Lionsgate accused the sites of several copyright infringement offenses and asked for a permanent injunction to stop further distribution of the film, as well as seizure of the sites’ bank accounts and other assets.

Yesterday the case appeared before Judge Margaret Morrow at the California federal court. None of the file-sharing sites had responded to the allegations and the judge granted Lionsgate’s request for a broad preliminary injunction.

The preliminary injunction prevents the sites from hosting and linking to copies of the movie. The same applies to all companies that provide services to or in connection with the sites, which means that the sites are at risk of losing their domain names.

In addition, the court also ordered that all bank accounts and other financial assets of the sites can be frozen.

“All banks, savings and loan associations, payment processors or other financial institutions, payment providers, third-party processors and advertising service providers of Defendants or any of them must, upon receiving notice of this Order, immediately locate all accounts connected to Defendants,” the injunction states.

The seized funds may be needed to compensate Lionsgate for the losses it suffered as a result of the leak, the judge argues.

“Such an asset freeze is appropriate in this case to preserve Lions Gate’s right to such recovery against Defendants, who are trafficking in the Stolen Film and may secret assets to insulate them from judgment,”Judge Morrow notes.

This is not the first ruling in favor of the movie studio. Earlier this week Lionsgate also obtained permission to subpoena various third-party web services including Google, Cloudflare and GoDaddy to obtain personal details on several of the defendants.

With the preliminary injunction, Lionsgate now has the potential to severely cripple the accused file-sharing sites. Whether it will be enough to stop the distribution of the leaked film has yet to be seen.

Thus far all six sites remain operational and links to the Expendables 3 leak are still widely available.

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

Since the launch of Operation Creative last year, UK police have contacted a range of so-called ‘pirate’ sites while giving their operators the opportunity to shut down quietly to avoid further action. It was pretty much certain that torrent and streaming sites would be prime targets, and we’ve seen that play out in recent months.

This week, however, PIPCU delivered a surprise. Instead of going after sites that host or link to infringing material, they targeted a series of sites that have never done so, arresting their alleged operator in the process.

Reverse Proxies

So-called ‘reverse proxies’ are not file-sharing sites, they merely restore access to third-party sites that have been rendered inaccessible by ISPs, as the result of a court order for example. The sites that were closed down this week enabled users to access The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, even if their ISP actively blocks the site.

The police intervention raises many questions, none of which will be officially answered while an investigation is underway. So, in order to try and fill in some of the blanks, TorrentFreak spoke with expert intellectual property lawyer Darren Meale to explore a possible basis for this week’s arrest of a proxy site operator.

“Internet users have sought ways to continue to access the sites by getting round the blocking put in place by the ISPs. One of the ways to do this is to use proxy servers. This operation is a major step in tackling those providing such services.” – FACT director Kieron Sharp commenting this week on the proxy shutdowns.

Breach of a High Court order?

Darren Meale: “The individual has been accused of helping Internet users access websites which the English High Court has ordered the major UK ISPs to block. That order arose in a civil, not a criminal action, and only applies to the ISPs in question. If it applied to the individual and he ignored the Court order, he would be in contempt of court and a judge could commit him to prison. But I don’t understand that to be what is going on here.”

Assisting a criminal enterprise?

So, with the High Court blocks a potential red herring, our attention is turned to the activities of the sites being unblocked by the proxies, and how merely facilitating access to those sites might be perceived as an offense by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit.

Darren Meale: “Sites like The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents have been the subject of all sorts of civil and criminal actions around the world, but are tricky to target because of where they are based and the way they operate. That’s why initiatives like site blocking have become popular in the UK.

“The rights owners, police and other authorities can’t get their hands on the sites directly, at least not practically. Of course, that doesn’t mean that those sites aren’t still committing criminal offenses.

“Although we tend to think of copyright infringement as a civil wrong, it is also a criminal offense provided it is carried out ‘in the course of business’. Sites like KAT run as a commercial enterprise and make a lot of money out of advertising, so there is a pretty strong case that they are committing criminal offenses, including in the UK.”

If sites like The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents are committing crimes, others can also commit crimes by helping them, Meale says.

Darren Meale: “The Serious Crime Act 2007 makes it a crime to intentionally encourage or assist someone else committing a crime, in the same way as it used to be a crime to ‘incite’ someone to commit a crime.

“The UK’s National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) has previously accused operators of file-sharing websites of committing crimes of this nature. PIPCU’s statement in this matter also refers to its intention to ‘come down hard on people believed to be committing or deliberately facilitating such offenses’.

“These kinds of ‘inchoate‘ offenses are, in my view, the most likely candidate for what this individual has been arrested for.”

But other ISPs are facilitating access to illegal sites too..

Only six ISPs in the UK have been ordered to block sites like The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, the others are, at this very moment, knowingly facilitating access to these potentially criminal sites. How is it that a proxy service operator now finds himself in hot water while these ISPs continue with no repercussions?

Meale points out that the L’Oreal v eBay decision found that service providers (eBay in that case) had no duty to police their services for infringement. Also, service providers benefit from safe harbors under the E-commerce Directive, rendering them immune from prosecution in certain circumstances.

Darren Meale: “However, there is a difference between providing Internet access generally (which ISPs do) and providing a service or website which sets out to link to another, illegal, website. An attempt to make ISPs liable for what flows through them in the same way as someone running a file-sharing site failed in Australia in a case called iiNet. I think the same distinction would be drawn in Europe and the UK.

“Providing general Internet access: OK subject to exceptions such as if the ISP is hosting. But setting up a service designed to help people access illegal websites: that’s much more dubious. That’s not to say that the legal issues that surround all this are straightforward – they’re not.”

Conclusion

What shines through following the events of this week is how untested the waters are in cases such as these. Whether PIPCU intends to follow this matter through to the bitter end (risking a potentially unfavorable outcome) remains to be seen, but it’s possible that won’t be needed.

At this point they have already achieved the total closure of all targeted sites along with the seizure of their domains. That, along with a clear message to others mulling the same course of action might, in the overall scheme of things, be considered “mission accomplished.”

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

Earlier this year a landmark ruling from the European Court of Justice confirmed that ISPs can be forced to block “infringing” websites, providing it’s done in a proportionate manner.

The ruling was prompted by a movie distributor case originating in Austria, so it comes as no surprise that local record companies are now seeking to make the most of it.

Earlier this week the local branch of the IFPI wrote to local ISPs with a demands that they block The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 1337x and H33t within days. While the development was welcomed by many pro-copyright entities, among many in the Internet community the feeling persists that site blocking amounts to censorship.

Now, IFPI Austria CEO Franz Medwenitsch has countered with his opinion, explaining that the term “Internet blocking” is both misleading and controversial, and that web blockades cannot be considered a restriction of free speech.

“Barring is misleading and downright polemical. No one wants to deny access to the Internet!” the IFPI chief explains.

“[Our action is] therefore isolated to prevent access to specific websites that offer illegal content and massively engage in copyright infringement. This is a legitimate means of legal protection, the Austrian Supreme Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union have justified it.”

In his FutureZone piece, Medwenitsch discusses critics’ perception that blocking websites interferes with fundamental rights such as freedom of information.

“Blocking access to illegal sites is explicitly compatible with the Charter of Fundamental Rights,” he contends, adding that comments to the contrary cannot be equated with the those shared by “the people of Europe.”

“According to a GfK survey last year, 83 percent of those surveyed in Austria alone – equivalent to more than six million people – held the opinion that artists have a right to their intellectual property and to be paid for the use of their works,” Medwenitsch notes.

But just as it’s clear that the blocking of websites has many opponents on fundamental rights grounds, the notion that blockades amount to censorship is an even more thorny issue. Medwenitsch does not share those feelings.

“Censorship is the suppression of free speech and everyone who lives in a democratic society categorically rejects censorship,” the IFPI chief says.

“But what has freedom of expression got to do with generating advertising revenues by illegally offering tens of thousands of movies and music recordings on the Internet with disregard for creators and artists? And yet the freedom of the author to determine the use of their works themselves is trampled!”

Medwenitsch says that individual freedoms have their limits and must be brought to an end when they begin to limit the freedoms of others. In other words, people can have free access to sites while those operating them aren’t infringing on the rights of the recording industry.

Finally, Medwenitsch criticizes those who accuse the industry of concentrating on blocking sites like The Pirate Bay while failing to adapt their business models. The industry has indeed adapted, the IFPI chief insists, but unauthorized services inhibit growth and need to be dealt with.

“The fact is the digital music services on the Internet today carry 37 million songs. There are 230 digital platforms in Europe – in Austria there are 40 – and the European user numbers have already reached 100 million,” he explains.

“The development of the digital market will take a long time due to the inhibiting factors of illegal offerings. Therefore, on the one hand we will investment in new platforms, and on the other hand, take measures against illegal sites.”

It remains unclear whether site blocking is having any effect on the availability of infringing content or the numbers of people consuming it. Safe to say, no group has yet put their head above the parapet and presented sales figures to clearly show that is the case.

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