While unauthorized copying on Xbox and Playstation has largely been kept under control, complaints about piracy on the PC platform are a regular occurrence.

Studios including Ubisoft have even stated that some games might not be released on the format due to its vulnerability.

There are, however, clear signs that developers are finding ways around the problem. One particularly cute approach was taken in 2011 by game developers Alex Nichiporchik and Tom Brien. The baby of their new company tinyBuild was ‘No Time To Explain, a title that was funded through a Kickstarter campaign.

Like all games it ended up on The Pirate Bay but this one came with a twist. The characters in the game were donned in pirate attire.

“We thought it’d be funny to leak a pirate version ourselves which is literally all about pirates and pirate hats,” Alex told TorrentFreak at the time. “I mean, some people are going to torrent it either way, we might as well make something funny out of it.”

And, as Nichiporchik now explains to PCGamesN, it worked out really well. tinyBuild received dozens of emails from Pirate Bay users who found the game on torrents but went on to buy it afterwards.

“The press coverage spiked our sales,” he said. “Don’t buy into developers blaming piracy for lost sales, it’s just silly.”

So, with tinyBuild’s new game SpeedRunners, the company intends to give pirates what they want – a version of the game for free.

“I’ve seen it multiple times when people pirate some sort of software, fall in love with it, and then due to constant updates reminders end up buying it, just for the convenience. Basically, when developers provide a good service, people see the value in spending money,” Nichiporchik says.

The game will allow users to play the single player for free and then if they like it they get to choose whether to pay to take the game online. This try-before-you-buy approach is often put forward as a reason for piracy and surprisingly Nichiporchik not only agrees, but also participates in it himself.

“I am pirating Battlefield 4 right now,” he told PCGamesN.

“It’s a 23gb download. I want to see if it runs fine on my Bootcamp installation of Windows 8, as in if it’s playable. If it runs fine, I’ll happily install Origin and buy BF4 for the multiplayer.”

There’s no indication that there will be a special ‘pirate’ version of SpeedRunners this time around, but it’s nonetheless interesting to see how a reality that few can do much about is able to be better framed and redirected towards a net positive. In a sea of negativity surrounding piracy, that’s something fans can get behind.

Source: Pirate Bay Downloaders Inspire Free-to-Play Game Model

This week we have five newcomers in our chart and one returnee.

Red 2 is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected 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.

Week ending November 03, 2013

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	Red 2	6.9 / trailer
2	(back)	We’re The Millers	7.1 / trailer
3	(…)	The Last Days on Mars	6.1 / trailer
4	(1)	Turbo	6.3 / trailer
5	(2)	Despicable Me 2	7.7 / trailer
6	(…)	The To Do List	5.8 / trailer
7	(…)	Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (Cam audio)	6.4 / trailer
8	(3)	Man Of Steel	7.5 / trailer
9	(…)	The Wolverine (Webrip)	7.4 / trailer
10	(6)	Elysium	7.0 / trailer

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week

Early October City of London Police approached several domain registrars, demanding that they suspend the domains of various torrent and other file-sharing sites.

Although there appeared to be no legal basis for the requests, India-based registrar PublicDomainRegistry (PDR) was quick to suspend several domains, including those belonging to Extratorrent.com and SumoTorrent.com, some of the largest torrent indexes on the web today.

The Canadian company easyDNS responded very differently. The company is outraged by the seemingly unsubstantiated police threats and has refused to take action, arguing that the police request has no legal basis.

EasyDNS’s approach was welcomed by the operators of several torrent sites, and motivated the owner of three domains to transfer his suspended domains from PDR to easyDNS. However, this was easier said than done, as the Indian registrar is refusing to transfer the domains out without the blessing of City of London Police.

After inquiries from easyDNS and the domain owner PDR did restore the original nameservers, but the domain names in question remain locked.

According to easyDNS this refusal to transfer the domains goes against the policy of domain regulation body ICANN, and this week the Canadian company took action against PDR.

EasyDNS filed a Request For Enforcement (RFE) with Verisign, the registry responsible for .COM/.NET domains. Through this enforcement request easyDNS hopes that PDR can be compelled to transfer-out three domains, as ICANN’s Tranfers Dispute Resolution Policy prescribes.

In a blog post easyDNS CEO Mark Jeftovic voices his disbelief over PDR’s stubborn refusal to cooperate.

“It’s hard to understand why they are taking their marching orders directly from the UK Police, given the stated aims of the London Police ICPU (to shut down the domains of websites they have summarily declared to be criminal) it’s not likely that they will admit the truth of the matter,” Jeftovic notes.

“In other words, the London Police are not going to come back and tell them: ‘Since we don’t have a court order, we guess you have to let those domains transfer away to some other registrar who has a better understanding of the utter lack of legal basis behind these takedowns than you do’,” he adds.

Instead of waiting for a green light from the City of London Police, Jeftovic believes PDR should comply with the rules and regulations of ICANN as all other domain name registrars do.

“They should not be waiting for the London Police to articulate this, what they should be doing is reading up on the ICANN Inter-Registrar Transfers Policy, since they are actually bound by their Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) to abide by it,” Jeftovic says.

TorrentFreak contacted the apparent operator of the three domain names in question but we are yet to receive a response.

The City of London Police crackdown has had minimal impact thus far, as all affected sites we are aware of have continued their operations under new domain names.

Source: Registrars Clash at Verisign Over Seized “Pirate” Site Domains

In early September we reported on TorBoox, a site on the Tor network providing millions of unauthorized ebooks to the public.

The site made the news when reporters in Germany were subjected to a criminal complaint by publishers who objected to the site being named.

With that complaint withdrawn, TorBoox indicated they were about to take radical action to shake up the ebook market by hurting Amazon. The idea was quite complex, but essentially involved offering all-you-can-eat books to the public for a flat fee – a Spotify for ebooks with eyes on legitimacy.

However, with 1.2 million ebook downloads per day things couldn’t continue the way they were. TorBoox implemented a paywall and asked users for 3.33 euros per month to try and pay for the servers. Around a third of the site’s users left, but according to the site’s operator things went better than expected.

“Every user had to pay € 10.00 with Paysafecard (which is the minimal amount at the stores). We were in need of about € 500 per month but got much, much more. The money we were in need of we got in a few hours. Ordinary German citizens of any age and background went to the petrol stations and asked for a coupon that has no other imaginable purpose than an illegal one,” TorBoox operator Spiegelbest informs TorrentFreak.

“We could easily have deactivated the monthly payments from the start. Just the newcomers would have contributed much more money than we would have needed for books and servers. The initial payment would have be sufficient for a year long membership – at least. My concept was to spend the money before asking for new payments.”

But while things were taking off, they were also getting out of hand.

“I saw the amounts of money steeply rising to five-digit [euro] amounts from the start. And without a lot of imagination a six-digit number of euros will be reached by the middle of November,” Spiegelbest explains.

“If you look at a currency like Bitcoin you can handle it this way or that way. A steep rise in the value of Bitcoins lately helped to tear down any remaining caution and reluctance. A decent and reasonable ending to all this money accumulation became more and more out of sight.”

Running alongside this somewhat unusual financial crisis was TorBoox’s quest for legitimacy and things weren’t looking good there either.

“We tried to get into contact with ‘Börsenverein’ which is the organization of German Publishers. We tried to keep our titles safe from any other site to have something to offer. For us and for me it would have been okay if the people get their books with a legal low-cost flatrate – I am not illegal by principle. But we were ignored completely,” Spiegelbest reveals.

With too much money at hand and no deal with the publishers, Spiegelbest quit TorBoox as an operator.

What will happen with TorBoox now remains uncertain, but TorrentFreak is informed that the archives of TorBoox have been obtained unknown individuals, possibly members of the warez scene. As a result, sometime during today, November 3, TorBoox’s archives – 43,000 ebooks – will flood onto the Internet for the free-of-charge enjoyment of all. An announcement of some kind is expected to be published on Avaxhome.ws during the evening.

“This archive does not belong to TorBoox. It comes from all the sources surrounding it,” a source close to the forthcoming leak told TorrentFreak.

“Sources go back to the early days of scanning. TorBoox was just like a magnet. If anyone has a right to get the archive it is the poeople having done all the work on it in the last year. But even those people didn’t have access to the archive which is very odd indeed and rather paranoic. The operators themselves did not do much work other than keeping the archive locked away.”

Whether the publishers will consider the above developments as good or bad news is a matter for them, but if Spiegelbest is to be believed there is a real demand for a Spotify-for-books, if it comes at the right price. Food for thought.

Source: Too Much Cash Causes Pirate Admin to Quit, 43K Ebook Dump Imminent

As thousands of news reports, articles and research papers agree, today’s Internet is absolutely awash with infringing content. As a result, dozens of companies have appeared to try and stem the tide by sending out DMCA takedown notices on behalf of rightsholders.

The number of notices being sent out is nothing short of incredible. During the last full week of September, Google reported that it had processed a record breaking 5.3 million URL takedowns, that’s around eight every second. But yet again the record was short lived.

During the first full week of October, Google processed very close to 6.5 million notices in a single week, that’s an incredible 10.7 notices every single second of every single day.

Faced with a monumental task it’s no surprise that rightsholders make mistakes, everyone is prone to them of course, but some have the potential to cause real havoc.

In an effort to keep an eye on the situation TorrentFreak regularly scours Google’s Transparency Report and the archives on Chilling Effects, and every now and again we find some classics. Yesterday was one of those days.

On the front page of Google’s report the company now lists a few takedown notices that it received but decided not to take action against. As can be seen from the image below listing four instances, the final one targets Gmail.

The notice, which can be found here, was sent by a company called Piracy Patrol. It clearly lists https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/ as an infringing URL. Of course, that cannot sensibly be the case, and Google spotted the mistake on this occasion and on several others (1,2,3).

“I can only say it was human error – and a rather silly one at that,” Piracy Patrol’s Michael Ward told TorrentFreak.

Of course we all make mistakes, but this incident piqued our interest – do other companies also try to take down parts of Gmail in error? It turns out they do.

In an effort to protect its products from piracy, Microsoft Russia has been sending Google DMCA takedown notices over the past year, around 61,400 in total. One of the products it targets is Windows 8 but as can be seen from this DMCA notice and the accompanying image below, Microsoft can make pretty big errors.

Strangely enough, there are even more instances. UK-based anti-piracy company RipBlock has targeted Gmail on many occasions over the past year, the image below illustrates just one.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, RipBlock said that the submissions were a genuine mistake.

“It’s a simple case of human error. We are not in any way trying to have parts of Google mail taken down,” operations director Lee explained.

“All URLs we submit to Google for removal are checked by our staff, who do their best to avoid submitting incorrect URLs – but we are human and we occasionally make mistakes. Embarrassing for us, for sure, but that’s all.”

Other companies targeting Gmail during the past year include Czech takedown outfit Netlook (notice).

We’re not sure what would’ve happened if Microsoft or the others had been successful in taking down https://mail.google.com/mail/, but we can’t imagine it would help the operation of Gmail. Fortunately Google appears to be staying sharp.

Source: Gmail Stays Up as Google Rejects Microsoft DMCA Takedown Notice