BitTorrent’s inventor is known for his passion for puzzles, and more generally speaking, offering elegant solutions to complex problems through lines of code.

When Bram Cohen first launched BitTorrent he offered a solution to the bandwidth scarcity problem, by allowing anyone to distribute large files without having to invest in expensive infrastructure.

In recent years Cohen has closely followed the cryptocurrency boom. Not as a money hungry investor with dollar signs in his eyes, but as a programmer who sees problems that need solving.

In doing so, Cohen hasn’t shied away from offering his opinions and suggestions. Most recently, he presented a paper and a talk at the Stanford blockchain conference, discussing proofs of space and proofs of time.

Without going into technical details, Cohen believes that Bitcoin is wasteful. He suggests that a cryptocurrency that pins the mining value on storage space rather than processor time will be superior.

In an interview with TorrentFreak’s Steal This Show, Cohen revealed that his interest in cryptocurrencies is not merely abstract. It will be his core focus in the near future.

“My proposal isn’t really to do something to BitCoin. It really has to be a new currency,” Cohen says. “I’m going to make a cryptocurrency company. That’s my plan.”

By focusing on a storage based solution, BitTorrent’s inventor also hopes to address other Bitcoin flaws, such as the 51% attack.

“Another benefit of storage based things is actually that there’s a lot less centralization in mining. So there’s a lot less concern about having a 51% attack,” Cohen says.

“Sometimes people have this misapprehension that Bitcoin is a democracy. No Bitcoin is not a democracy; it’s called a 51% attack for a reason. That’s not a majority of the vote, that’s not how Bitcoin works.”

While the idea of a storage based cryptocurrency isn’t new, Burstcoin uses a similar concept, there is little doubt that Cohen believes he can do better. And with his status and contacts in the Bitcoin developer community, his project is likely to gain some eyeballs.

Before diving into it completely, Cohen will first finish up some other work at BitTorrent Inc. But after that, his full dedication will go into creating a superior cryptocurrency.

“In the next few months I’m going to devote myself full-time to the cryptocurrency stuff,” Cohen concludes.

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The full interview with Bran Cohen is available here, or on the Steal This Show website.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Logan, which was released as a HDrip with hardcoded Korean subtitles last week, 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 weekly movie download chart.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(1)	Logan (Subbed HDRip)	8.6 / trailer
2	(6)	The Fate of the Furious	7.4 / trailer
3	(2)	Kong: Skull Island (Subbed HDRip)	7.0 / trailer
4	(…)	Get Out (Subbed HDRip)	8.1 / trailer
5	(3)	Split	7.0 / trailer
6	(…)	Rings	4.5 / trailer
7	(4)	La La Land	8.4 / trailer
8	(…)	The Boss Baby (HD-TS)	6.5 / trailer
9	(5)	Rogue One	8.0 / trailer
10	(8)	Ghost in The Shell (HDTS)	6.9 / trailer

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Founded by BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen, BitTorrent Inc. is best known for its torrent clients uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline, from which it made millions over the years.

Unlike most file-sharing startups the company was well funded from the start. Accel was one of the early investors from early on, and BitTorrent was part of a fund that also included Facebook and Dropbox.

However, over the past decade, BitTorrent Inc. didn’t transform into a multi-billion dollar business. This prompted Accel to step away, taking a loss, while “getting rid of it.”

This is exactly what happened. In 2015 Accel handed over its stake in the company to a group of outside investors who promised to pay $10 million in a year, which they would take from future profits.

The outsiders included Jeremy Johnson and Robert Delamar. They became BitTorrent’s new CEOs and reportedly spent a ton of cash in the months that followed. Soon after it became clear that they had burned through way more money than they’d brought in and they left their positions, a saga that Backchannel documented in detail.

Speaking with TorrentFreak’s Steal This Show, Bram Cohen first talks about what went down in public, and his account doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

“You know the truth is we’ve actually been doing fine for quite a while now. We haven’t had technology problems or business problems, we’ve had investor problems. That’s been our problem,” Cohen notes.

“Basically, Accel took their share in BitTorrent and pretty much just gave it away to these total strangers who they didn’t know. And not only gave away their stock but gave away control of the company.”

While the new co-CEOs of the company spent a bunch of cash, Cohen doesn’t believe they had a real plan.

“Plan, why do you think they had a plan?” They were kids in a candy store. Their plan was like; Oh my god, we got money, we got power, we’re such geniuses, we can do everything here, we’ll make it great,” Cohen says.

The cynical rant continues for a while after that, but the bottom line is that BitTorrent’s inventor had little faith in the capabilities of the newcomers. They took BitTorrent to Hollywood and thought that aligning themselves with celebrities was the key to success, something Cohen isn’t particularly fond of.

“Human beings are a bunch of starfuckers, right? The United States has become this celebrity-obsessed culture, and everyone’s all about, oh, we’ll gain access. That’ll be great, and we’ll make money off of it, everybody thinks this.

“It’s like, how can I find some biz dev people who aren’t humans, so they don’t sell their soul?” Cohen adds.

According to Cohen, Accel’s attempt to close their fund nearly destroyed the company. When it was time for the new CEOs and their investment company to pay up, the money wasn’t there.

“They were just incompetent fuckups. I mean they’re losers,” he blasts, noting that it certainly wasn’t impossible to turn a decent profit in a year.

While the account is a one-sided view, it’s clear that the newcomers weren’t very welcome, or liked, by BitTorrent’s inventor. He goes on to detail how thousands of dollars were spent on first class tickets, private chauffeurs, and parties.

Cohen himself stayed far away from the razzmatazz and continued coding, back at the dull gray office in San Francisco.

“I had nothing to do with any of this. This was all just like, starfucker bullshit,” Cohen says.

When Steal This Show host Jamie King pushed one final time to ask if the new management really didn’t have a plan, the answer wasn’t much more flattering.

“Go around LA being big swinging dicks. Go to 1 Oak and spend a few thousand dollars a night on drinks. I mean, people think that there must be some like rational thought here, beyond being a talking chimpanzee,” Cohen concludes.

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The full interview with Bram Cohen is available here, or on the Steal This Show website.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

^{If you enjoy this episode, consider becoming a patron and getting involved with the show. Check out Steal This Show’s Patreon campaign: support us and get all kinds of fantastic benefits!}

In this episode we meet Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, to discuss the origins of BitTorrent in the Mojo Nation project, why BitTorrent is still relevant given our increasingly low-cost bandwidth environment, how Big Content could have competed with Free, but chose not to – and the bumpy last years at Bram’s company BitTorrent Inc, including a near-death foray into content licensing and production.

—

Steal This Show aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing copyright and file-sharing news. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary, and analysis.

The guests for our news discussions will vary, and we’ll aim to introduce voices from different backgrounds and persuasions. In addition to news, STS will also produce features interviewing some of the great innovators and minds.

Host: Jamie King

Guest: Bram Cohen

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Riley Byrne
Original Music by David Triana
Web Production by Siraje Amarniss

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Anti-piracy enforcement comes in all shapes and sizes and there can be little doubt that’s it’s an extremely challenging and complex arena. Little surprise then that screw-ups are pretty common.

This week’s facepalm moment arrives courtesy of IP Arrow, an anti-piracy outfit working on behalf of clients including California-based movie company Lionsgate.

For some time, IP Arrow has been sending takedown notices to Google asking it to delist thousands of ‘pirate’ URLs for the movie Mechanic: Resurrection. In the main, the company appears to have done a good job, but like so many similar operations, at times it struggles to tell the difference between pirate copies of a movie and completely non-infringing content.

This week, the operator of troll defense blog Fight Copyright Trolls pointed out to fellow troll defenders DieTrollDie that IP Arrow had reported the site to Google for being a copyright infringer, which it most clearly is not.

The problem began in January when DieTrollDie (DTD) published an article about numerous trolling cases filed by ME2 Productions, the company that holds rights to Mechanic: Resurrection.

ME2 has been suing BitTorrent users all over the United States, so the cases naturally came to the attention of DTD, which offered its usual critique of the company’s actions thus far. However, in explaining certain flaws in some cases, the site referenced the hash value (B5201111ACEC1E5025DE3087B15DF84612C02579) of one of the pirate copies of Mechanic: Resurrection floating about on the Internet.

This was enough for IP Arrows’ bots to flag DTD as a pirate site and report it to Google. While this was probably a simple error, this is an extremely sensitive area so it’s easy to see how some might view the takedown as an attempt to silence ME2’s critics.

Certainly, that’s the view of DTD’s operator, who informs TF that he was surprised that IP Arrow had targeted his site.

“I was a bit surprised that IP Arrow asked Google to remove the listing of one of my pages. I knew there was absolutely no reason to justify it,” he told TF.

“They claim that they wanted the links removed because, ‘These links are facilitating piracy of my client’s work.’ What they actually wanted removed was one of the ‘Tags’ I used to index an article concerning the BT copyright troll cases for Mechanic: Resurrection.”

But whatever the conclusion, the problems don’t stop there. The same takedown notice filed against DTD makes matters worse by also targeting yet another website setup to help people targeted by copyright trolls.

Troll-Defense.com is operated by Lybeck, Pedreira & Justus, a Washington law firm that’s extremely unlikely to be infringing upon Lionsgate or ME2 copyrights. Nevertheless, the site was also reported to Google for copyright infringement.

Bizarrely, in each case the target of the infringement notices were court papers referencing ME2’s Mechanic: Resurrection cases against alleged copyright infringers. As in the reporting of DTD, it doesn’t look good that sites offering legal help to citizens are being targeted by companies with connections to the content in question.

“At first I thought IP Arrow was too stupid to understand what a hash file is. But after seeing that they also tried to remove search listings to publically available court documents, it looks like an effort to hide information concerning their copyright trolling operation,” DTD’s operator says.

“They are probably of the opinion that if you throw enough crap at a target, something is eventually going to stick.”

DTD also expressed concern that considering the volumes of notices being received by Google, it’s likely that innocent sites will fall victim to errors like these. It turns out that those concerns are well founded.

Torrent-Defense has been targeted by IP Arrow on several occasions (1,2,3), with Google delisting pages 100% of the time.

This hasn’t pleased lawyer Benjamin Justus, who operates the site for Lybeck, Pedreira & Justus.

“With courts and consumers already concerned that mass copyright suits by ME2 and its affiliates are being pursued in arbitrary fashion, I think that ME2’s agents’ targeting innocent parties with baseless takedown notices will only further the skepticism that these companies are not engaged in legitimate enforcement efforts,” he concludes.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.