In 2013, one TV show above all others generated controversy, discussion and ideas on a level rarely seen before.

Game of Thrones was a worldwide smash-hit, but it was the show’s effects on unauthorized downloading that provided the fuel behind many of the headlines.

The season premiere got the ball rolling on unauthorized consumption, setting a BitTorrent swarm record in April. By the time the finale aired in June, pirates were still having fun, setting a new record in the process.

While most GOT pirates could be tracked back to the United States and United Kingdom, the number three spot was taken by Australia. There are just over 22 million people Down Under so per head Aussies easily took the worldwide downloading crown. It was this ‘feat’ that yesterday prompted yet another high-ranking executive to mention the show and another smash-hit, Breaking Bad, alongside their dubious records.

Speaking at a Goldman Sachs investment conference, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said that piracy was showing no signs of letting up Down Under.

“Piracy in Australia is at an extraordinary level,” he said.

“Sixteen per cent – that’s one in six – of all illegal downloads of Breaking Bad are in Australia. There aren’t that many people in Australia,” he joked.

But again it was Game of Thrones generating the most interesting debate. News Corp owns 50% of pay television company Foxtel, the outfit with the rights to show Game of Thrones in Australia. At last count during August the company had around 2.5 million subscribers, but despite the show being legally available to them, the News Corp CEO said that 20% of Foxtel customers still chose to watch the show illegally.

“People are just in the habit of illegal downloads,” Thomson said. “Australians have very bad habits – piracy happens to be one of them.”

Of course, Thomson does have a point. Habits can be very hard things to break, especially ones that have proven so useful over the years. Australians have long complained of being treated as second class citizens when it comes to media availability, so BitTorrent networks have proven extremely popular, as borne out by prominent Aussie placings in TV show downloading charts.

Some moves have been made to get content to Australia quickly. In March, Foxtel announced that it would make available season 3 of Game of Thrones within two hours of its U.S. premiere, but by May things were going backwards again. Foxtel said it would stop offering the show quickly due to a deal it signed with HBO in the United States.

Then in July, Foxtel gave customers more reasons to pirate when it locked down its Foxtel Go “watch anywhere” service, banning users of jailbroken iPhones in addition to Android users not using “selected” Samsung devices.

During yesterday’s conference Thomson said that consumers of unauthorized TV shows should be made better aware of the “inherent value of content and obeying the law” but the fact that 20% of his customers chose to pirate something they already paid for should send a very strong message indeed. For whatever reason, free BitTorrent is better than a premium subscription service. That has to be fixed.

Source: Subscribers Pirate Game of Thrones Even Though They Already Paid For It

For the last couple of years the music and movie industries have kept up the pressure on Google, blaming the search engine for connecting would-be pirates with unauthorized online content.

One of the main remedies touted by copyright holders is that Google should tweak its systems here and there in order to make pirated media harder to find. Google says it has done so, but entertainment industry groups remain unimpressed.

The RIAA has been particularly vocal but last week it was the turn of the MPAA to crank up the pressure. With the publication of a new report the MPAA insisted that changes made by Google to its search algorithm had not been effective in reducing piracy.

So, while the MPAA, RIAA and Google continue to fight it out, TorrentFreak took the opportunity to listen to the opinions of those meant to be hardest hit by Google’s tweaks. With the assistance of his SEO experts the administrator of one of the world’s largest torrent sites agreed to tell us about his recent experiences with Google.

Penguin and Panda

The admin, who requested anonymity, told us that there are two key algorithms that influence file-sharing sites – one called ‘Panda’ and the other called “Penguin”. In December 2012 both algorithms received updates that were very important for file-sharing sites.

“Penguin started downranking sites with a huge amount of links assuming they were spam. Old torrent sites had millions of links from all over the net and that turned out bad for them,” the admin explained. “Panda compared loads of content and found many identical pieces on torrent sites because they grab content from each other. This made the situation worse.”

The Autocomplete effect

As previously reported, Google also began removing the word ‘torrent‘ and other related terms from its Autocomplete. With other tweaks it now appears that infringing content is being pushed further out of sight, unless users specifically ask for it.

“If in 2012 you typed in the name of some new movie, the top 10 results would mostly contain file-sharing sites, but after the first three months of 2013 those links had moved far away from the first page or had disappeared completely,” the admin said.

“Now, if you don’t specifically put the word ‘torrent’ in a search query you don’t get results that might be copyrighted. Search traffic began to fall down pretty badly for file-sharing sites after these updates.”

Link analysis and the DMCA takedowns

In April 2013, Google introduced a new Penguin update.

“Targeted mostly at the U.S., the algorithm analyzed links to a website and if most links were outside the U.S. then the website was assumed to be targeting non-US visitors. This meant that Google could put the website lower in search results shown for U.S. visitors,” the admin revealed.

And of course, this year Google has had to work harder than ever before to respond to millions of copyright holder complaints.

“This resulted in a ban of home pages for many torrent sites as well as many internal pages too, of course,” he said.

The web blocking effect

Sites like The Pirate Bay are blocked by court order in many countries around Europe. As a result dozens of proxies have sprung up to help users regain access to their favorite file-sharing domains. But while workarounds are always available, blocking has apparently had an effect on file-sharing site placement in search engine results.

“When websites lost a big portion of traffic from a certain location, Google downranked them in search results for that specific location. That made it possible for new small sites to take high positions instead of the big sites, such as proxies or similar sites that allowed people to avoid the blockade. Actually the traffic to file-sharing sites remained the same but became more decentralized,” the admin explained.

The most recent changes

Last month there were yet more developments, bringing both positive and negative.

“The bad news was that after another update Google started to focus more on the ‘core’ search queries that lead visitors to a website. Less frequent queries were considered less important and file-sharing websites lost some positions with these queries too,” he said.

But the changes weren’t all bad. For example, Google Webmaster Tools informs what pages are violating the guidelines and allows site owners to fix these problems.

“Google Webmaster Tools now allows a webmaster to see if a website or a page is filtered out of search results, making it possible to make changes and avoid the filter in the future,” the admin concludes.

Overall

In conclusion it seems that Google has indeed made a number of changes that have affected the search rankings of file-sharing sites, whether directly targeted for anti-piracy purposes or other reasons. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the entertainment companies will keep coming back for more, no matter what concessions Google makes.

The big question is whether any changes will actually reduce piracy at the same time as they reduce search traffic to file-sharing sites. At the moment, at least according to the MPAA and RIAA, that isn’t happening.

Source: How Google Algorithm Changes Hit Torrent Site Traffic

For two years Google has been filtering “piracy-related” terms from its ‘Autocomplete‘ and ‘Instant‘ services.

Google users searching for terms like “The Pirate Bay”, “RapidShare” and “isoHunt” will notice that no suggestions or search results appear before they type in the full word. While no webpages are removed from Google’s index, there is sharp decrease in searches for these terms.

What triggers a keyword to be included in the blacklist is not clear. A Google spokesperson told TorrentFreak two months ago that they remove terms that are “closely associated with piracy” without providing further details.

The full list of banned words also remains secret, but we do know that the search terms BitTorrent and uTorrent were included from the start. Both words are trademarks of San Francisco-based BitTorrent Inc. and the company was rather disappointed that Google labeled them as “piracy related.”

Over the past several months BitTorrent Inc. has continuously emphasized that BitTorrent does not equal piracy, and a recent upgrade to Google’s search filter show that this effort has paid off. Both BitTorrent and uTorrent are now absent from Google’s piracy filter and as a result searches for both terms spiked, resulting in an increase in visitors to the respective sites.

“This is almost certainly a result of that improving understanding helped by products like BitTorrent Bundle and BitTorrent Sync. They help those who are confused about BitTorrent understand that it is not a piracy website,” a BitTorrent Inc. spokesperson told TorrentFreak.

Google searches for BitTorrent

As far as we’re aware this is the first time that Google has removed terms from its search filter. Interestingly, Megaupload still remains blocked even though the site has been offline for nearly two years.

Unfortunately the reasons to include or remove certain terms remains a mystery. Recently Google added the name of the popular music streaming service Grooveshark, which has had its fair share of legal troubles in recent years but is currently licensed by several of the major labels.

While some people worry about possible over-blocking, the copyright holders have been arguing the opposite. Just last week the MPAA released a report claiming that Google and other search engines are major piracy facilitators, and that they should step up their anti-piracy efforts.

It’s now up to Google to find a balance between these two forces, which may prove to be quite a challenge.

Update: added a comment from BitTorrent Inc.

BitTorrent returns to autocomplete

Source: Google Removes ‘BitTorrent’ From Piracy Search Filter

Earlier this month H33t, one of the largest BitTorrent sites, mysteriously disappeared from the Internet. The nameservers had been wiped from the domain records, rendering it useless.

TorrentFreak contacted H33t’s domain registrar, the German company Key-Systems, who confirmed that they were forced to take this action following a local court order obtained by Universal Music Group.

“We have indeed been served with a court order granting a temporary injunction requiring us to ensure certain content is not made available,” Key System’s Volker Greimann previously told us.

Recognizing that the case sets a dangerous precedent, the registrar is going to fight the injunction in court. One of the issues Key System plans to raise is that the site owner himself was never contacted by the music group.

The registrar asked H33t owner Shelby whether he is willing to testify to this in court, and he agreed to do so.

“I am ready to go in person. If they don’t already know my name then they truly are disorganized. It was never a secret,” Shelby informs TorrentFreak.

H33t’s owner has previously spoken out against the commonly adopted DMCA-style takedown procedure most copyright holders expect him to comply with.

H33t will take content offline, but only if copyright holders pay an administrative fee to cover some of the costs. Shelby believes that this is ultimately the issue that has to be tested in court.

“I don’t believe my identity is the issue, but the sharing of costs for takedowns. Given the opportunity, since this is a test of a takedown procedure, I will ensure my testimony and the court record contains my solution for equitable management of takedowns. The lawyer who said my takedown procedure was not serious is now going to find out how serious it actually is,” he says.

H33t has always been one of the most pro-sharing communities, and the site’s owner sees himself as a frontrunner in the battle against an old and outdated industry.

“The enemy is not a person. There is no hive mind conspiring against us to repress us in some Orwellian nightmare,” he says.

“The enemy is a dinosaur system which might have been good enough to manage an analogue industry of vinyl records and VHS cassettes, but if the Internet has taught us anything it is that the digital revolution is full of surprises and opportunities. The last thing we need is outdated systems and laws getting in the way, holding us back from basically doing what we do best, being social, making friends and improving ourselves by learning and developing new tools.”

H33t’s owner believes that the law is on his side. The DMCA doesn’t apply in Europe where there are no clearly defined notice and take-down procedures, and H33t believes their policy is reasonable.

By showing that Universal Music Group misrepresented the facts, he eventually hopes to get his domain back.

“If I win this appeal and win back my domain then it is because anti-p2p [companies] acted illegally and dishonestly by misleading the court and telling lies. To quote Plato: ‘The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.’

“This is as good today as it was two and half thousand years ago. That is why I stand for filesharing,” Shelby concludes.

The date for the testimony is yet to be scheduled and for now H33t’s .com domain remains unavailable to the public. The site is still available on its .eu domain for the time being.

Source: Torrent Site Owner to Protest Domain Seizure in Court

BitTorrent is most often associated with peer-to-peer file-sharing and the downloading of media such as music, movies and TV shows.

The protocol makes the headlines every week but some of its other skills go much more underreported.

In addition to its public file-sharing abilities, BitTorrent is a particularly useful tool for companies that need to shift large amounts of data around their networks. In 2010 it was revealed that Twitter had begun using the technology to deploy files across its many thousands of servers.

Codenamed ‘Murder’, the technology does not use the bandwidth of Twitter users but instead arranges the company’s servers into a BitTorrent swarm to efficiently distribute updates. But while this is a fantastic use of BitTorrent for Twitter, yesterday the company was associated with torrents in a way which had web users scratching their heads.

When visiting many webpages small widgets also load from external sites, things like buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn and Google+1 for example. These normally load transparently and without issue but for some reason on many sites Twitter’s button began acting strangely yesterday.

Instead of loading the iframed HTML for the familiar blue ‘Tweet’ button, website visitors were offered a .torrent file, variously titled ‘widgets_tweet_button.html.torrent’ or ‘widgets-tweet_button.html.torrent’.

Of course, this strange behavior led many users to speculate that Twitter had been compromised. However, on closer inspection it became clear that the problem was almost certainly of Twitter’s making.

So what was the payload inside the mysterious torrent file? The HTML for Twitter’s button distributed using BitTorrent trackers hosted by Amazon, no less.

While few can doubt that BitTorrent is one of the most effect file-sharing methods on the Internet, this implementation must be the most inefficient yet.

It’s likely that this is just a simple error but when so many sites are affected and users left concerned, clarification is useful. TorrentFreak approached Twitter for a comment and we’ll update this article when we receive a response.

Source: Twitter Bug Requires Users to Torrent its Tweet Button