While BitTorrent Inc.’s uTorrent and Mainline products grab most of the headlines, neither are the world’s most popular torrent client. That honor falls to the Chinese-operated Xunlei or ‘Thunder’ software.

As far back as 2009 the world’s leading BitTorrent trackers reported that Xunlei users accounted for more than 104 million unique users. Currently the client has an estimated 142 million users.

Considering the software’s reach the news today that client owner Shenzhen Xunlei Networking Technologies has done an anti-piracy deal with the MPAA is received with some interest, not least since Xunlei is the 12th largest Internet company in China.

The anti-piracy agreement

The Content Protection Agreement (CPA) will see Shenzhen Xunlei actively protect MPAA content including movies and TV shows. Among other measures, the landmark deal will see Xunlei implement a video recognition system to ensure that all MPAA content being made available via Xunlei is properly licensed.

The Chinese company, which is in part backed by Google, has also agreed to educate its users on the effects of online piracy and where to obtain officially licensed copies of MPAA works.

Xunlei operates a number of online ventures, including a streaming service with 136 million monthly users, so it seems logical that the deal will encompass its entire portfolio. Clearly an agreement without ‘teeth’ across all products wouldn’t be good for either Xunlei or the MPAA. The big question now, however, is what pushed the companies together. The answer, as always, is money.

MPAA hindered Xunlei’s IPO

Early 2011 Xunlei announced plans to go public with a listing on NASDAQ, the largest U.S stock market. But by November the whole thing had been canceled, with a poor economic climate held to blame. However, in the background the issue of copyright infringement was burning away.

According to reports in Chinese media, in April 2013 the MPAA demanded that Xunlei install a software plug-in to block its copyrighted content from appearing online. However, Xunlei was only prepared to install it into a video player, not their other software. Talks collapsed, legal action loomed, and the IPO dream was shattered. Clearly the company would need to regroup and consider its options.

Improving its image for a second run

In March 2014 Xunlei hosted the Chinese Internet Copyright Protection Action Plan conference. A former employee of the company who spoke on condition of anonymity said Xunlei did this to improve its image and put its infringement issues behind it.

“You must make a clean break with the pirates,” he told local media.

Just under two weeks ago came the clearest signs yet that Xunlei was ready to move towards that goal.

On May 23rd Xunlei Ltd filed a registration with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO of its U.S. dollar shares. The offering price was proposed at a maximum of $100 million under the symbol ‘XNET’.

But while doing a deal with the MPAA might stop Hollywood hindering Xunlei’s IPO again, the company’s filing makes worrying reading for potential investors.

Risky business

“Even if we comply with all of our obligations under the content protection agreement, the implementation of content protection measures may affect our users’ experience or otherwise make our services and products less competitive than those of our competitors, which could in turn materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations,” the company writes.

“In the event that the content protection agreement is terminated or we are otherwise deemed not to be fully compliant with its material terms, the content providers may initiate a lawsuit or other proceeding against us, including for any past claims that they might otherwise have made prior to entering into the agreement. In addition, other third party content providers may still initiate lawsuits or other proceedings against us.”

A lack of compliance with the most basic of U.S. copyright protections raises yet another red flag.

“We do not currently satisfy all of the statutory requirements of any DMCA safe harbor. If we are ever held to be subject to United States copyright law, that could increase our risk of direct or indirect copyright liability for our resource discovery, acceleration or other services,” Xunlei explains.

Despite the concerns, others are prepared to put up big money. Last month Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi pumped $310 million into Xunlei boosting its share of the company to around 27%.

With a fresh tagline of “more than just downloads,” Xunlei will be hoping for an exciting future in the United States – without the MPAA on its back.

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

In recent weeks several piracy-related websites lost control over their domain names. Most of these issues could be tracked back to the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) in the UK.

In recent weeks PIPCU sent letters to various domain name registrars of alleged pirate sites, requesting a suspension of domain names that had been classified as “infringing” by copyright holder groups.

This resulted in a temporary suspension for the popular torrent search engine Torrentz.eu, while FileCrop, Cricfree, Delishows and others lost permanent control over their domains.

This week another popular site ran into domain trouble. Putlocker.BZ, a popular movie streaming site with millions of active users per week, had its domain name suspended yesterday.

“We are having an issue with .BZ Registry, so we had to move from putlocker.bz to http://putlocker.is/. IS is the domain name of Iceland – a safe haven for freedom of speech,” the site’s operator announced.

At this point it’s unclear whether Putlocker’s issues are related to the actions of UK Police. TorrentFreak contacted the site for more details but we have yet to hear back.

For now the site continues to operate via the new .IS TLD. Iceland is indeed a relatively safe haven. The domain registry ISNIC previously informed us that it would not proactively suspend a domain, and that it would only take action when an Icelandic Court asks them to.

“Such an action would require a formal order from an Icelandic court. ISNIC is not responsible for a registrant’s usage of their domains,” ISNIC’s Marius Olafsson told TorrentFreak.

The above means that a letter from PIPCU would not be enough to suspend the new Putlocker.is domain name.

While PIPCU’s efforts under the “Operation Creative” flag may not eradicate piracy altogether, they may make some domain names and registrars a no-go area for these types of websites. Whether that will have any effect has yet to be seen, but copyright holders must be pleased with the close collaboration.

Update: The Putlocker.BZ team told TorrentFreak that they received a letter from PIPCU last month, which makes it likely that the UK police is behind the suspension. Putlocker.BZ’s has reached out to NIC.BZ to see if the issues can be resolved.

Update: The Putlocker.BZ team told us that they have the .BZ back, but they will continue to operate from the .IS domain name. The old domain name is currently redirecting to the new one.

Note: Putlocker.BZ is not in any way connected to Putlocker.com, the cloud hosting service that’s now known as Firedrive.

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

First released in 1997, FlightGear is one of the oldest flight simulators still available today.

The open source software is available on all popular operating systems and is used by millions of people, as well as professional organizations such as NASA.

Last week the FlightGear team was taken by surprise after receiving a takedown request from Honda, one of the aircraft manufacturers. In a letter the company asked FlightGear to remove the Honda Jet from the game, as it was infringing on their trademarks.

TorrentFreak spoke with FlightGear project manager Curtis Olson, who explained that in their long history the have never received a similar request.

“As far as I can recall, this is the first request of this type that FlightGear has had to address,” Olson says.

FlightGear has always been cautious to stay on the right side of the law and pays close attention to the licensing terms of source code and data. Until the letter came in, the team believed that the Honda Jet model could be used without problems.

“I am not a lawyer and not an expert in trademark law. FlightGear is simply trying to create an accurate simulation of the real world. If something exists in the real world, it seems fair game to create a simple representation of it in our simulator,” Olson says.

“FlightGear puts quite a bit of effort into always trying to do the right thing, so this situation did catch us off guard,” he adds.

In their letter Honda’s lawyers point out that FlightGear is infringing on the company’s trademarks. They note that the jet’s form and appearance is protected by trademark laws, and the same is true for the logos and names that are used.

FlightGear saw no other option than to comply with the request and has removed the Honda Jet model from its website and aircraft downloads page. In addition, the model has been removed from the FlightGear Git.

Through the mailing list Olson informed all developers about the decision. Initially, the idea of challenging the request might have crossed his mind, but in the end the safest option was take the aircraft down.

“I personally don’t have sufficient time, lawyers, experience and intelligence to battle something like this, and although it makes me sad, an all out legal battle probably is not in anyone’s interest even if we thought we had some sort of legal argument to make,” Olson concluded.

Why Honda would object to being included in FlightGear remains a mystery. While the lawyers probably have the law on their side, it is hard to imagine how the company could be harmed by being included in an open source game for aviation fanatics.

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

Sweden has long been a central figure in the file-sharing phenomenon, not least due to its associations with the The Pirate Bay. As a result, for more than ten years sharing files has been a popular pastime with many young Swedes, much to the disappointment of the world’s largest entertainment companies.

The Cybernorms research group at Lund University in Sweden has been in the news several times during the past few years as a result of its work with The Pirate Bay. On more than one occasion the infamous torrent site as renamed itself to The Research Bay in order for researchers to collect information on the values, norms and conceptions of the file-sharing community.

Cybernorms have now revealed more of their findings which suggest that after years of escalation, online sharing by those in the 15-24 year-old bracket could be in decline.

Survey responses from around 4,000 individuals suggest that the number of active file-sharers has dropped in the past two years. Those who share files daily or almost daily has decreased from 32.8 percent in 2012 to 29 percent in 2014.

“It is a small but significant decrease,” Måns Svensson, head of Cybernorms at Lund University told SVT.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the decrease is the mechanism through which it was encouraged. Historically, entertainment industry scare tactics have been employed to try to reduce unauthorized sharing, but the researchers believe something much more positive is responsible.

“What is interesting is that this is the first time we have been able to see that file-sharing has gone down but without that being associated with a conviction, such as the Pirate Bay ruling,” Svensson says.

“If you listen to what young people themselves are saying, it is new and better legal services that have caused the decrease in file-sharing, rather than respect for the law. There has been a trend where alternative legal solutions such as Spotify and Netflix are changing consumption patterns among young people.”

Also of interest is the apparent effect on up-and-coming youngsters who might otherwise have begun file-sharing themselves. The researchers found that between 2009 and 2013 the percentage of young people who never share files illegally increased from 21.6 percent to 30.2 percent, a boost of well over a third.

Interestingly, in that same four-year period, the percentage of young people who said they believe that people should not share files because it is illegal dropped from 24 percent to 16.9 percent. So, even while young people are sharing files less often, their acceptance of the standards presented by the law appears to be dropping too.

In this case it does indeed appear that the carrot is mightier than the stick.

Image credit

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

With roughly 150 million monthly users uTorrent has a massive user base. This means that when drastic changes are implemented, they are bound to disappoint quite a few people.

One of the biggest backlashes in recent history happened two years ago when BitTorrent Inc. announced its plan to make uTorrent ad-supported. This announcement led to a small user revolt.

The people complaining were mostly annoyed that there was be no option to disable the ads. Luckily for them, BitTorrent Inc. listened to the feedback and quickly decided that users would indeed get a chance to opt-out.

At the time BitTorrent Inc. CEO Eric Klinker said that the backlash made it clear that users should be given the choice.

“We’ve long contemplated an opt-out mechanism for the new offers and advertisements we will be experimenting with. Given all that’s been said here, we’ve decided to release the initial version with an opt-out mechanism, and we will provide them with ways to do so,” said BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker.

From that moment uTorrent’s ads became optional, but turned on by default. Still, the company managed to generate billions of ad impressions per month. Five billion to be precise, according to information released last year.

The optional advertisements were a situation most users could live with, but right before the weekend uTorrent pushed through an unexpected and unannounced change. The latest stable release version 3.4.2, no longer gives users the opportunity to opt out from the banner ad in the lower left corner.

uTorrent with ads, there is no option to disable the bottom left ad

As can be seen below, the option “show plus information” has been removed from the context menu. In addition the advanced setting “gui.show_plus_upsell,” which had the same functionality, has disappeared as well.

uTorrent stable 3.4.1 vs. 3.4.2

At this point it’s unclear why BitTorrent Inc. removed the opt-out. The change is not documented in the release notes, but several users were quick to pick it up and began asking questions.

The uTorrent development team hasn’t responded to the comments yet. Some users are nonetheless quick to draw their conclusions, much like two years ago.

“Just like the coming of the video killing the radio star, ads will kill uTorrent’s popularity,” one user comments in the forums.

While there is no longer an option to hide the uTorrent Plus house ad, people can prevent other ads from showing up there by going into the advanced settings. Setting offers.left_rail_offer_enabled to false should restrict the ads to the uTorrent Plus upsell.

There is no denying that the advertisements, in addition to the toolbars and other software that’s bundled with uTorrent, generate the majority of the revenue for BitTorrent Inc. Perhaps this latest change is an attempt to increase the revenue coming from the banner ads, which eventually goes to paying the company’s bills.

Whether this will be a wise decision in the long run remains to be seen.

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