In May, TF broke the news that Justin Sun, the entrepreneur behind the popular cryptocurrency TRON, was in the process of acquiring BitTorrent Inc.

The San-Francisco based file-sharing company confirmed the interest from Sun and while details leaked here and there, there was no official confirmation from the parties involved. That changed today.

This morning both BitTorrent Inc. and the TRON Foundation confirmed the acquisition. This means that the file-sharing company, with uTorrent as its flagship software, will be part of the TRON team going forward.

“We are excited to announce that TRON has officially closed its acquisition of BitTorrent,” BitTorrent Inc. just announced.

“With this acquisition, BitTorrent will continue to provide high quality services for over 100M users around the world. We believe that joining the TRON network will further enhance BitTorrent and accelerate our mission of creating an Internet of options, not rules.”

BitTorrent will keep its current product line intact and will be operating from TRON’s San Francisco office going forward. Both teams will merge and together they plan to take the technology behind TRON to a new level.

BitTorrent + TRON

TRON’s Justin Sun sees BitTorrent as a great fit for the foundation’s goal to decentralize the web. The legacy BitTorrent protocol will remain, but TRON hopes to bring new life to it.

“The BitTorrent acquisition embodies TRON’s ‘All-In Decentralization’ strategy. TRON and BitTorrent share the same vision for a decentralized Web. I believe BitTorrent will gain new life from integrating into the TRON ecosystem, and TRON will continue BitTorrent’s protocol legacy.”

It’s unclear how BitTorrent technology will be integrated into the TRON network. No concrete details have been announced but both parties have decentralization as their main pillars, and that won’t change.

“With the integration of BitTorrent, TRON aims to liberate the Internet from the stranglehold of large corporations, give data rights back to the individual, and reignite the early 21st century vision of a free, transparent, decentralized network to connect the world, because the internet belongs to the people,” Sun notes.

No financial details relating to the acquisition have been released but it was previously reported that Sun had agreed to pay $140 million for BitTorrent Inc. and its assets.

While the acquisition has been causing shockwaves in the already volatile crypto market, BitTorrent’s users have been relatively quiet. Aside from a few confused uTorrent users, who feared that their clients would turn into cryptocurrency miners, the issue has not been widely discussed.

Those worried users can rest assured, though, as the uTorrent team stresses that they have no intention to change, or mine.

“We wish to reiterate that BitTorrent has no plans to change what we do or charge for the services we provide. We have no plans to enable mining of cryptocurrency now or in the future,” the uTorrent team said previously.

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With YouTube now a major force when it comes to online music distribution, recording labels and artists are striving for a better deal.

While YouTube compensates labels for views of authorized content, the labels say the existence of unlicensed content uploaded by users means that the Google-owned video giant gains an unfair negotiating position.

In an effort to tighten the noose on YouTube and owners Google, the music industry lobbied hard for new EU legislation (Article 13) that would see user-uploaded content platforms compelled to install filters to detect infringing content before it gets made available to the public.

Earlier this month and after much heated debate, the wind was taken out of the music industry’s sails when the European Parliament said “no” to the Copyright Directive mandate.

The debate leading up to the vote was messy, with extremist claims on both sides doing little for the quality of the discussion, particularly on social media. As the vote neared, however, claims that somehow the campaign wasn’t being fought fairly came to the fore.

Two days before the vote, UK Music CEO Michael Dugher launched a scathing attack, describing Google as a “corporate vulture feeding off the creators and investors” while claiming the search giant had pumped €31 million into lobbying against the legislation.

“These new figures expose the fact that Google is acting like a monolithic mega-corp trying to submerge the truth under a tsunami of misinformation and scare stories pedaled by its multi-million propaganda machine,” Dugher said.

“Instead of mounting a cynical campaign, motivated entirely out of its self-interested desire to protect its huge profits, Google should be making a positive contribution to those who create and invest in the music. MEPs should ignore the big money lobbying from big tech and back fair rewards for creators.”

Whether Google’s lobbying efforts amounted to unfair practice will be for history to decide but if music industry veteran Chris Castle has his way, no stone should be left unturned in establishing the facts.

Castle is probably best known online for editing the MusicTechPolicy blog but he’s also the founder of his own law firm and has held lofty positions at Sony and A&M. This busy industry man has little time for Google and its practices.

“[T]here have been incredible and probably illegal uses of the Internet to overwhelm elected officials with faux communications that reek of Google-style misinformation and central planning in the hive mind of the Googleplex,” he writes.

“We saw this again with the Article 13 vote in Europe last week with what clearly seems to be a Google-backed attack on the European Parliament for the purpose of policy intimidation.

“That’s right – an American-based multinational corporation is trying to intimidate the very same European government that is currently investigating them for anticompetitive behavior and is staring down a multi-billion dollar fine. Vindictive much?”

Last week the EU Commission did indeed fine Google €4.34 billion regarding the use of Android mobile devices to strengthen dominance of its search engine (a matter it reportedly tried to settle), but what about this attack on the EU Parliament?

Castle doesn’t go into much detail on the precise mechanics of what Google is supposed to have done but he describes the company as engineering “DDOS-type stunts capitalizing on what seems to be the element of surprise.”

This appears to be a reference to the numerous automated web-based forms that were made available online by various organizations, which enabled the public to make their voices heard by the decision makers about to tackle Article 13.

The forms were used, apparently a lot, to send messages to MEPs but whether this was simply a passionate and genuine response or more cynical organized chaos will be a matter for the parties to argue over.

In the meantime, Castle strongly feels there is a case to answer. The lawyer believes that Google is using its dominant position online to gain an unfair advantage in what should be a democratic process.

“[T]he most important thing for the European Commission to take into account is that a company that is the target of multiple investigations is using the very market place monopoly that caused the competition investigations to intimidate the European government into bending to its will on Article 13,” he writes.

“The European Commission needs to launch a full-blown criminal investigation into exactly what happened on Article 13, particularly since there is another vote on the same subject coming in September. Properly authorized law enforcement acting swiftly can set sufficient digital snares to track the next attack which surely is coming while they forensically try to figure out what happened.”

It remains to be seen whether these strong words from Chris Castle and those who share his sentiments will have any effect on the ground but the fact that these accusations are now being made openly is likely to throw more fuel on an already super-heated debate.

Finally, it’s perhaps worth noting that the companies and groups in the image below, which together claim to “represent 4.5% of EU GDP and 12 million European jobs” (and were in favor of Article 13), were apparently outgunned by Google.

Or, perhaps they were simply outgunned by people who just didn’t like the idea of Article 13? Only a couple of months left for round two – it could be a bumpy ride.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Playing games through browser-based emulators is a niche pastime of some of the most dedicated gamers.

For Game Boy Advance fans there are a few websites that offer this option, albeit without permission.

Nintendo is not pleased with these unsanctioned projects which they see as clear copyright infringement. A few days ago, the company took action against a popular JavaScript-based Game Boy Advance emulator that was hosted on the developer platform GitHub.

“The files located at the repository link https://jsemu3.github.io/gba/ contain unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s video game software in violation of the law and GitHub’s Terms of Service,” Nintendo writes.

The repository in question offered JavaScript-powered versions of many popular titles including Advance Wars, Dragon Ball Z, Super Mario Advance, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, and Legend of Zelda.

The DMCA notice was filed late last week and GitHub removed the allegedly infringing files soon after.

Repository offline

The request came around the same time as the lawsuit that was filed against the LoveROMS and LoveRETRO emulator sites. While we can’t see an apparent connection between the two cases, Nintendo says that it is also considering legal action against the owner of the infringing GitHub repository.

“We are considering action regarding those matters but are not including them in this notice,” Nintendo writes.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that Nintendo has gone after an infringing Game Boy emulator. A few years ago the company targeted a similar repository, with a similar name. And it may have more work on its hands, as there are several similar emulators still hosted on GitHub.

One thing is quite clear though. Sites that offer emulators and ROMs are not welcomed by Nintendo, even those that don’t have a clear profit motive.

As for the two sites that were sued last week. LoveRETRO took its site down “until further notice” over the weekend, while its partner site LoveROMS removed all Nintendo titles.

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This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

Escape Plan 2: Hades is the most downloaded movie again.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(4)	Escape Plan 2: Hades	3.9 / trailer
2	(1)	Rampage	6.3 / trailer
3	(…)	Tully	7.2 / trailer
4	(2)	Ready Player One	7.7 / trailer
5	(3)	Overboard	5.6 / trailer
6	(9)	Avengers: Infinity War (HDCam)	9.1 / trailer
7	(5)	How It Ends	8.8 / trailer
8	(…)	Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (HDTC)	6.5 / trailer
9	(6)	A Quiet Place	7.8 / trailer
10	(8)	Sanju	8.8 / trailer

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Founded in 2009, LimeTorrents has been a familiar name in the torrent ecosystem for nearly a decade.

The site is regularly listed as one of the ten most-visited torrent sites on the Internet. However, as a prime source of pirated content, it has also seen plenty of trouble over the years.

During the site’s early days, music group IFPI seized its servers, for example, and a few years later the site’s operator got dragged into a lawsuit by Lionsgate over the Expendables 3 leak.

Despite these issues, the site remains alive and well. That said, running a torrent site isn’t exactly getting any easier.

Earlier this week LimeTorrents switched to a new domain, limetorrents.io, with a new homepage. This is a direct response to the ISP blocking efforts around the world. In addition, the new domain should also get the site’s homepage back in Google’s search index.

“We changed our domain to .io because [the site is] blocked in many countries like India, UK, Australia, and also because our old homepage was removed from Google’s search index,” LimeTorrents’ operator tells TF.

The new version of the homepage no longer lists direct links to pirated material. This means that copyright holders have no reason to ask Google to remove it from the search index, as previously happened with the old version.

The new homepage

With this new look and domain, LimeTorrent hopes to set itself apart from the many copycats that have appeared. According to the operator, there are several “fake” LimeTorrents copies trying to steal traffic, only to generate revenue for themselves.

People who can’t use the official domains can use the official proxies Limetorrents.info, Limetorrents.asia, Limetorrents.zone, the site’s operator says, but he cautions users who choose other sites.

In addition to the torrent index, the operator also runs the torrent cache itorrents.org, which many other sites rely on. ITorrents hosts torrents without a search interface and is used by other torrent sites such as 1337x.to and the mobile version of The Pirate Bay.

LimeTorrents’ operator tells us that iTorrents currently stores over 20 million unique torrents and many more are added every day.

While this may sound positive, operating a torrent site certainly hasn’t become any easier. It gets harder and harder to make revenue, and income has dropped drastically since the early years.

“Earnings dropped around 60 to 70% because affiliate sites are no longer paying webmasters well. Popups and ads are not working either because of ad-blockers,” LimeTorrents’ operator says.

“We keep the sites running because we have some traffic. It’s covering the hosting costs and brings in some extra bucks for other expenses.”

It’s also become harder to find stable hosting, which is likely the result of increased enforcement. However, there is a threat from within the piracy ecosystem as well.

Ten years ago torrent sites were dominating the piracy landscape but today more and more traffic is flowing to streaming sites.

That being said, LimeTorrents’ operator says that people know where to come when they want to get content first, noting that many streaming sites use torrent portals as their source.

“People who know how to find things know where it comes first. If torrent sites die, streaming sites will also be hit hard because they can’t find content to upload to their sites, as torrent sites are their source,” the operator tells us.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.