ExtraTorrent, one of the largest torrent sites on the Internet, just experienced one of the most turbulent weekends in its ten year history.

While many people were celebrating Christmas, the site’s operators were busy keeping the site online, after it was pounded by DDoS attacks.

“Extratorrent faced tons of cyberattacks over the last three days. Most of them were DDOS attacks. Cloudflare can’t help us because we get 40 to 50 million requests from the U.S. every hour!” ExtraTorrent’s SAM informed us.

To counter the attacks the site temporarily limited several functions to save resources. The login functionality for users is disabled, for example, as is the added protection against unofficial mirror and proxy sites.

Interestingly, this added protection layer may be the reason why the site is under attack. A few days ago ExtraTorrent received an email threatening attacks, if its operators didn’t remove the encryption within 24 hours.

“Some hours ago (12~?) Your main website was down for like 6-7? Minutes… It will happen again, for hours, days…IF you don’t remove the encoded stuff from your website and let proxy operators, like myself, do their job,” part of the email read.

The trouble started soon after this email was delivered, suggesting that the threats were real. For now, however, the torrent site has managed to keep the site afloat. This is in part due to the the measures it took in response.

“ExtraTorrent’s servers are still under high load but we have sufficient resources to keep it online. ET is the place to be!” SaM tells us.

ExtraTorrent is not the only site that has run into trouble lately. The Pirate Bay is also down at the time of writing. Users who try to access the site get a CloudFlare downtime warning, or a new Captcha error.

ERROR for site owner: Stoken expired

It’s unclear whether TPB is also dealing with ongoing DDoS attacks or whether their issues are of a different nature. The TPB team is aware of the problems and said that their technical crew will look into them as soon as they’ve woken up and had a beer.

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

Almost eight years ago and just months after its release, TF published an article which pondered whether the fledgling Spotify service could become a true alternative to Internet piracy.

From the beginning, one of the key software engineers at Spotify has been Ludvig Strigeus, the creator of uTorrent, so clearly the company already knew a lot about file-sharers. In the early days the company was fairly open about its aim to provide an alternative to piracy, but perhaps one of the earliest indications of growing success came when early invites were shared among users of private torrent sites.

Today Spotify is indeed huge. The service has an estimated 100 million users, many of them taking advantage of its ad-supported free tier. This is the gateway for many subscribers, including millions of former and even current pirates who augment their sharing with the desirable service.

Over the years, Spotify has made no secret of its desire to recruit more pirates to its service. In 2014, Spotify Australia managing director Kate Vale said it was one of their key aims.

“People that are pirating music and not paying for it, they are the ones we want on our platform. It’s important for us to be reaching these individuals that have never paid for music before in their life, and get them onto a service that’s legal and gives money back to the rights holders,” Vale said.

Now, in a new interview with The Journal on Sports and Entertainment Law, General Counsel of Spotify Horacio Gutierrez reveals just how deeply this philosophy runs in the company. It’s absolutely fundamental to its being, he explains.

“One of the things that inspired the creation of Spotify and is part of the DNA of the company from the day it launched (and remember the service was launched for the first time around 8 years ago) was addressing one of the biggest questions that everyone in the music industry had at the time — how would one tackle and combat online piracy in music?” Gutierrez says.

“Spotify was determined from the very beginning to provide a fully licensed, legal alternative for online music consumption that people would prefer over piracy.”

The signs that just might be possible came very early on. Just months after Spotify’s initial launch the quality of its service was celebrated on what was to become the world’s best music torrent site, What.cd.

“Honestly it’s going to be huge,” a What.cd user predicted in 2008.

“I’ve been browsing and playing from its seemingly endless music catalogue all afternoon, it loads as if it’s playing from local files, so fast, so easy. If it’s this great in such early beta stages then I can’t imagine where it’s going. I feel like buying another laptop to have permanently rigged.”

Of course, hardcore pirates aren’t always easily encouraged to part with their cash, so Spotify needed an equivalent to the no-cost approach of many torrent sites. That is still being achieved today via its ad-supported entry level, Gutierrez says.

“I think one just has to look at data to recognize that the freemium model for online music consumption works. Our free tier is a key to attracting users away from online piracy, and Spotify’s success is proof that the model works.

“We have data around the world that shows that it works, that in fact we are making inroads against piracy because we offer an ability for those users to have a better experience with higher quality content, variety richer catalogue, and a number of other user-minded features that make the experience much better for the user.”

Spotify’s general counsel says that the company is enjoying success, not only by bringing pirates onboard, but also by converting them to premium customers via a formula that benefits everyone in the industry.

“If you look at what has happened since the launch of the Spotify service, we have been incredibly successful on that score. Figures coming out the music industry show that after 15 years of revenue losses in music industry, the music industry is once again growing thanks to music streaming,” he concludes.

With the shutdown of What.cd in recent weeks, it’s likely that former users will be considering the Spotify option again this Christmas, if they aren’t customers already.

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

For several years in a row Game of Thrones has been the most pirated TV-show, and this year the interest is once again overwhelming.

Game of Thrones has the honor of becoming the most-downloaded TV show through BitTorrent for the fifth year in a row.

This means that its half-decade reign remains unchallenged, despite reports to the contrary.

Although there was no new swarm record, traffic-wise the interest was roughly on par with last year. The highest number of people actively sharing an episode across several torrents was 350,000 at its peak, this was right after the season finale came online.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s no growth in piracy. A lot of people have made the switch from torrents to streaming sites over the past months, which likely had an impact on the numbers.

This year there’s also an important newcomer with the science-fiction western ‘Westworld.’ The new show quickly gained popularity in pirate circles and is in third spot already, which is quite an achievement.

Finally, we see a continuation of the trend of downloaders showing an increased interest in high-quality video. In recent years, many pirates have moved from 480p copies to 720p and 1080p videos, in part thanks to better broadband availability.

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Below we have compiled a list of the most torrented TV-shows worldwide (single episode) for 2016, together with the traditional ratings in the US. The ranking is compiled by TorrentFreak based on several sources, including statistics reported by public BitTorrent trackers.

We have decided to stop reporting download estimates in our yearly top lists. Due to various changes in the torrent index/tracker landscape it’s become more challenging to monitor downloads, so a ranked overview makes most sense.

Most downloaded TV-shows on BitTorrent, 2016

rank	last year	show
torrentfreak.com
1	(1)	Game of Thrones
2	(2)	The Walking Dead
3	(…)	Westworld
4	(5)	The Flash
5	(4)	Arrow
6	(3)	The Big Bang Theory
7	(7)	Vikings
8	(…)	Lucifer
9	(10)	Suits
10	(…)	The Grand Tour

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

This week we have four newcomers in our chart.

Deepwater Horizon is the most downloaded movie.

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	(…)	Deepwater Horizon	7.4 / trailer
2	(3)	Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (HDTS)	8.3 / trailer
3	(1)	The Magnificent Seven	7.1 / trailer
4	(2)	The Accountant (subbed HDrip)	7.6 / trailer
5	(…)	Bad Santa 2	5.6 / trailer
6	(…)	Max Steel	4.6 / trailer
7	(6)	Doctor Strange (HDTS)	8.0 / trailer
8	(4)	Inferno (subbed HDrip)	6.4 / trailer
9	(…)	Trolls	6.6 / trailer
10	(7)	Moana (HDTS)	8.1 / trailer

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

Around this time of the year, Christmas music is hard to escape, including on torrent sites.

While torrents may not be as popular as a few years ago, there are still plenty of people that use torrent sites to get the latest entertainment.

Christmas is a time for sharing, a mantra that suits BitTorrent pirates very well, and that shows. Over the past few days several Christmas compilations have populated Pirate Bay’s list of 100 most-shared music torrents.

At the time of writing ‘The Ultimate Christmas Music Compilation,’ a homemade collection of 300 songs, is the most shared Christmas torrent. The torrent was first uploaded five years ago and is still very much alive.

As can be seen below, more than six hundred people are sharing it at the time of writing. For comparison, late October the same torrent only had a measly thirteen active sharers, barely enough to survive.

It’s that time of the year…

And there’s more Christmas music that moved up the ranks in recent days.

The Pirate Bay’s music top 100 also includes the torrents ‘100 Hits Christmas Legends (2010),’ ‘Boney M – The 20 Greatest Christmas Songs,’ NOW That’s What I Call Christmas [2014],’ and ‘Pentatonix – A Pentatonix Christmas (2016)’ to name a few.

But pirates are not the only ones who are watching torrent sites for Christmas themed music. Music industry groups do too.

Christmas takedowns

They are less appreciative of the sharing culture and have set out numerous ‘Christmas’ takedown requests.

This week alone, Google received thousands of takedown requests mentioning the keyword Christmas. This includes takedown requests to remove various Pirate Bay results, of course, but also many other sites.

And not just for music either. Takedown requests are also going out for classic Christmas films such as Scrooged (1988) and even the virtually unknown Santa Claws (2014).

Christmas or not, it’s clear that the piracy whack-a-mole doesn’t stop. Pirates continue to share, and rightsholder groups counter this by sharing their takedown request in return.

Merry Christmas everyone!

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