Martin Shkreli is the founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals and wherever he appears, controversy is never far behind.

Last year the 33-year-old was subjected to massive criticism when Turing obtained a license to produce antiparasitic drug Daraprim and promptly boosted its price by more than 5,000%.

It was a move that saw him being branded in the media as the most hated man in America.

But it’s not just pharma that has built Shkreli’s reputation. With a reported net worth of between $45m and $100m, the entrepreneur’s flamboyant spending has also hit the headlines. A keen hip-hop fan, Shkreli was revealed in 2015 as the buyer of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, a one-off album from Wu-Tang Clan.

With a price tag of a cool $2m, it’s clear that Shkreli doesn’t mind digging deep when it comes to spending money on exclusive music. However, it appears that the businessman might also have a penchant for getting music for free, when the circumstances are right.

Rising from the ashes of the defunct private tracker OiNK, What.cd is currently the most prestigious music torrent site on the Internet, bar none. The site has a largely hand-picked userbase who in turn are allowed to invite friends. Somehow it appears that Shkreli managed to get on board.

Tweeting from Manhattan late Friday, Shkreli appeared to indicate that he was having trouble with his account on What.cd. This led him to start begging for an invitation to get back on the site.

Somewhat inevitably, people following him on Twitter decided this would be a good time to have some fun.

“Why don’t you use USE.net like a normal person Martin,” one asked, sarcastically referencing the Usenet system.

“Newsgroups?” Shkreli accurately responded. This guy clearly knows his piracy haunts.

As fans already know, What.cd prides itself on covering every musical genre in depth, while offering the rarest of rare releases. With that in mind, if only there was an individual with access to the rarest recording of all time who might upload that to What.cd in exchange for an invitation….

While Shkreli does some wild stuff, uploading Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to What.cd is probably going to be a step too far, even for him. However, he could do so if he wishes. He’s under investigation by the FBI but last year they revealed that they hadn’t seized the album.

#Breaking no seizure warrant at the arrest of Martin Shkreli today, which means we didn't seize the Wu-Tang Clan album.

— FBI New York (@NewYorkFBI) December 17, 2015

<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8">

Contractually, the album can’t be exploited commercially until 2103, but according to Wu-Tang, Shkreli could legally give it away for free.

“It can be exhibited publicly and it can be given away for free. But it cannot be commercialized as a conventional album release until 2103. Even then, it will be the owner’s decision to release it or keep it as a single unit, not the Wu-Tang,” the group said following the album’s sale.

However, there is a bigger problem. If you’ve ever had a What.cd account, you can’t have another. Those are the rules and not observing them can get both you and your inviter banned.

Shkreli’s only real option is to head off to the site’s IRC channels and ask for his account to be reinstated. If the disabling of the account was for a minor issue, it’s possible they’ll just re-enable it. He might also try the “do you know who I am” routine to get some leverage, although that might not go entirely to plan.

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.

Finding Dory 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.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	Finding Dory	7.7 / trailer
2	(…)	The BFG	6.6 / trailer
3	(1)	Suicide Squad	6.7 / trailer
4	(2)	Bad Moms	6.5 / trailer
5	(…)	Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (HDTS)	6.4 / trailer
6	(4)	Sausage Party	6.7 / trailer
7	(6)	Lights Out	6.6 / trailer
8	(10)	Captain America: Civil War	8.1 / trailer
9	(3)	Don’t Breathe	7.5 / trailer
10	(9)	The Infiltrator	7.2 / trailer

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

For many veteran BitTorrent users, 1337x is a familiar name. The site has been around for many years and was generally known for its lively community.

While 1337x hasn’t been at the center of attention much, the past year has been quite an eventful one for the torrent index.

After weathering a revolt of its moderators last December, this summer 1337x suddenly had to deal with a massive spike in traffic after KickassTorrents was shut down by the Us.S Government.

Most new visitors came in through Torrentz, and these disappeared just as quickly when the torrent meta-search engine called it quits in August. However, traffic has been steadily increasing since, as the graph below nicely illustrates.

“To be honest, it has been a rollercoaster with traffic,” the site’s operator tells TorrentFreak in a comment

The end result is that 1337x.to now has a steady place among the most-visited torrent sites, currently ranked in the top five. Still, the site is not always easy to find for newcomers as the homepage has been taken out of Google’s search results due to a takedown notice.

Traditionally, the homepage listed a variety of popular torrents, so Google has no other option than to remove the URL when Feelgood Entertainment reported it last year.

To address this issue and prevent similar problems in the future, the site recently released a new design. Aside from various layout changes and using a responsive design, the homepage now only features a search box, no torrents.

“Due to our old index being blocked by search engines, new users were having issues finding the website. We developed a new index page that contains only search, so we don’t get blocked by search engines in the future,” a notice on the site explains.

TorrentFreak spoke to the 1337x operator who doubts that Google will reinstate their homepage right away. However, the new design should prevent similar problems in the future.

The new design has been in the planning for a very long time already and spiraled a bit out of control. Initially, the plan was to only update the homepage, but it didn’t stop there.

“Seeing how cool a responsive layout could look we decided to make a whole new frontend. That literally took months to develop, and we changed backend code as well, which fixed several bugs and issues that were in the old version,” 1337x’s operator tells us.

And the work is not done yet. The next step is to release the new forums which people will be able to use with their existing 1337x account. If there are no major issues, this will go live in a month or so.

In moderator ‘relations’, progress has been made as well. While some have left the site for good, others came back and continue to remove spam and fake torrents with some new and improved tools.

The 1337x.to operator is mostly looking ahead at the moment. Work on the site and moderator features is far from completed, but the team is trying hard to move a few steps closer every week.

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

Like many European countries, Sweden has millions of file-sharers. Many will have been inspired to take up their hobby through the antics of The Pirate Bay, a site that their government tried and failed to contain.

But despite the site managing to regain and maintain its position as the world’s most popular torrent site, it appears that at least to some extent, file-sharing is falling out of fashion in Sweden.

That’s according to Henrik Pontén, a lawyer with infamous anti-piracy outfit Rights Alliance (Rättighetsalliansen)

“We see a trend reversal. Until now, we have seen a huge increase in file sharing, but we do not see that anymore,” Pontén told SVT.

Pontén and his colleagues have been waging a war against local pirates for more than a decade and despite the progress, it isn’t one that’s likely to end anytime soon. The legal chief says they’re now filing more complaints with the police, who are becoming used to handling these types of cases.

“We do not say how many referrals we make, but it is becoming more and more. The police are becoming better at investigating these cases and now the majority of complaints lead to a prosecution,” he said.

While Rights Alliance isn’t particularly well-known for going after the very casual file-sharer, it has a track record of aggressively pursuing bigger cases. Pontén warns that a successful prosecution these days is likely to end in big claims from the studios.

“It is always millions per movie. It rests on various things, including what a license to distribute the film legally costs,” he says.

“We could claim damages on many more movies, but we usually run with just one, that’s enough.”

While peer-to-peer file-sharing in Sweden and elsewhere may well be on the decline, other instances of piracy are on the rise. In particular, streaming is proving very popular with consumers and Pontén says that his group is currently focusing on people who operate streaming sites.

But in common with other countries facing a similar climate of illicit consumption, it’s now becoming clear that enforcement is only part of the solution. Alice Bah Kuhnke, Swedish Minister of Culture and Democracy, believes that cooperation between stakeholders will play a key role.

“We have collected a number of actors involved in this, and had round tables. There are different players with different interests. A code of conduct is one of the concrete proposals we came up with,” Bah Kuhnke says.

Describing the protection of intellectual property as a central issue for the government, the minister says that developing a voluntary code will assist with that aim.

“The code is also designed to make the Internet a safe and legal place for consumers and businesses. To promote innovation and investment in legal options and limit economic crime based on copyright infringement. I hope that more people want to subscribe to the code to make it a growing platform,” the minister concludes.

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

Founded in 2006 by Rick Falkvinge, the Pirate party movement has scored some significant victories over the years, but what happened in Iceland today trumps them all.

According to the first results that came in over the past few hours, one in seven Icelanders voted Pirate in the national parliamentary elections. This is an impressive victory for the Pirate Party, which increased the number of parliament seats from three to nine in just three years.

This makes the Pirates one of the big winners of the election, and the third largest party in the country behind the Independence Party and the Left-Green Movement which got 29.1% and 15.8% of the votes.

Traditionally, Iceland has a coalition government consisting of several parties. With this outcome the party now has a prominent seat at the negotiation table, where the new government will be formed during the weeks to come.

Today’s success doesn’t come as a surprise as the party has been polling very well this year.

At one point it was close to total majority in the polls. That dropped off quite a bit in recent months, but with the current result the Pirates still managed to nearly triple their votes compared to the previous election.

The Icelandic Pirate Party was formed in November 2012 by several Internet activists including Birgitta Jónsdóttir, who’s well known for her former involvement with WikiLeaks.

Within a year the party participated in its first parliamentary elections, scoring three seats, which was a major milestone for the Pirate movement at the time.

The Pirate Party’s success hasn’t gone unnoticed by the mainstream media either. Several prominent publications all across the world have covered the ‘unusual’ candidates this week, and rightly so.

Pirate MP Ásta Helgadóttir voting today _{(photo via @Senficon)}

Speaking with TorrentFreak last week, Ásta Helgadóttir, Member of Parliament for the Icelandic Pirate Party, said that the party is ready to bring the change many citizens are longing for.

“Firstly, by adopting a new constitution which has already been voted on in a non-binding referendum,” Helgadóttir says.

“This will change how Iceland functions as a democracy, transitioning into a much more meaningful democracy. The Pirates are focused on decentralization of power, access to information and civil and human rights. The pillars of any meaningful notion of democracy.”

Despite the unusual name, at least in politics, the Pirates are by no means a single-issue party.

They have a detailed plan for how Iceland can break free from the ruling political establishment. Their core policy has a strong focus on freedom of information and expression, a right to privacy, transparency and direct democracy.

But first, it’s time to celebrate, which will undoubtedly involve several bottles of rum and plenty of Pirate flag waving.

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