With millions of unique visitors per day KickassTorrents (KAT) has become the most-used torrent site on the Internet, beating even The Pirate Bay.

The site also has a very active community of torrent aficionados from all over the world. On March 30th the site staff and its members come together to celebrate their beloved pastime on “Happy Torrents Day.”

The event was started by KAT administrator Mr. Pink. Initially it was a small celebration but over the years it has turned into a recurring tradition with many thousands of people participating.

TF spoke with Mr. Pink who notes that Torrents Day is a celebration of file-sharing. With the news being dominated by lawsuits, domain name trouble and torrent takedowns, this day is focuses of the positive.

“The main purpose is to get everybody to believe that what we do is worth fighting for. Everybody is equal. Yes it started on Kickass with us but it’s not about us. It’s about every person that believes in file sharing,” Mr. Pink says.

In recent weeks a lot of torrents have disappeared from the site as a result of an increase in DMCA takedown notices. The idea behind Torrent Day is to get people focused on something positive again.

“The DMCA is clamping down on us hard lately. And it’s becoming tougher so we need to give the userbase something to believe in,” Mr. Pink notes.

In celebration of the festive day several challenges and initiatives have been launched. A Happy Torrents Day album has been released for example, as well as the first issue of KAT’s official magazine “The KATalyst.”

Besides KAT, Torrents Day is spreading to other sites as well. ExtraTorrent, another large community, previously joined in and is expected to do the same again this year.

If everything goes according to plan Torrents Day 2015 is expected to drive a lot of traffic to the site and perhaps set several new records.

“The support from other sites and the KAT team has been amazing,” Mr. Pink says. “We expect the site’s traffic and upload records to be broken today. We have a few ideas up our sleeves to make that happen.”

Records or not, judging from the activity on KAT’s website there’s definitely plenty of interest. So to all those who are celebrating: Happy Torrents Day!

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

One of the major strategies of the world’s leading entertainment companies is to have sites like The Pirate Bay blocked at the ISP level. The idea is that when subscribers can’t access ‘pirates’ sites they will flock to legal alternatives.

While there can be little doubt that some will take the opportunity to test out Netflix or Spotify (should they be available in their region), other users will be less ready to take the plunge.

In Spain, where online piracy is reportedly more widespread than most other European countries, users faced a Pirate Bay problem on Friday when a judge ordered the country’s service providers to block the site within 72 hours.

Some ISPs blocked the site immediately, provoking questions of where to get free content now that The Pirate Bay is off-limits. Of course, there are plenty of alternatives but for those a little more determined, access to TPB was just a click or two away.

The problem is that for whatever reasons, thus far Spanish ISPs are only implementing a Pirate Bay ban on the most basic of levels. In the UK, for example, quite sophisticated systems block domain names and IP addresses, and can even automatically monitor sites so that any blocking counter-measures can be handled straight away. But in Spain users are finding that blocks are evaded with the smallest of tweaks.

By changing a computer or router’s DNS settings, Spaniards are regaining access to The Pirate Bay in an instant. Both Google’s DNS and OpenDNS are reported as working on several Spanish discussion forums.

“I’ve [followed the instructions] and in two minutes you can enter Pirate Bay. And I am a computer illiterate and have no idea what a DNS is,” a user of a gaming forum writes.

Another user, who moved away from his ISP’s DNS a while ago, wasn’t even aware that any block had been put in place.

“If the block is using DNS, I would not call that blocking, really. I’ve been using the DNS of Google for years and I have not even noticed anything,” he notes.

While Spaniards will be pleased that the blockade is easily circumvented, it’s the reaction to the news that’s perhaps the most interesting aspect. News that the site is being blocked is hardly being welcomed, but there is a definite absence of panic among those who are supposed to be some of Europe’s most hardcore pirates.

Whether that’s chiefly down to the weak blocking method being employed by some ISPs is up for debate, but having seen blocks do little to stop file-sharers across Europe – particularly in the UK where the practice is widespread – the Spanish probably see no real reason to break into a cold sweat just yet.

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

This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

Interstellar is the most downloaded movie for the third week in a row.

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 BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(1)	Interstellar	8.8 / trailer
2	(…)	Cinderella	7.6 / trailer
3	(2)	Exodus: Gods and Kings	6.2 / trailer
4	(10)	Seventh Son	5.7 / trailer
5	(3)	Into The Woods	6.2 / trailer
6	(9)	Paddington	7.4 / trailer
7	(6)	Fifty Shades of Grey	3.9 / trailer
8	(8)	The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies	6.0 / trailer
9	(4)	Focus	6.9 / trailer
10	(…)	Kidnapping Mr Heineken	6.2 / trailer

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

People started sharing files with each other – text, games, music – as soon as there was a storage medium you could copy.

Originally, this meant the compact cassette which was used for music and programs for the first home computers. Cassette decks at the time had a convenient copy mechanism where you’d insert an original in one slot, a blank tape in another slot, and press a prominent “copy” button to get an analog replica – not perfect, if it was music, but if it was a digital computer file, it would be readable and usable. The one-push copy was even a sales point.

Everybody had their circle of friends who contributed to the common collection between them, and we’d always be carrying some copy of something else we anticipated was in demand. People would copy something from you more or less every day. You would copy things from several people pretty much every day.

Copyparties were huge fests where hundreds of teens (or pre-teens) rented a school building for a weekend, brought their entire catalog of tapes and diskettes, an equivalent amount of blank media, and just copied everything they could from each other instead of sleeping. These copyparties frequently had pallets of Jolt Cola for sale.

In this setup, completely before the Internet, if something in high demand was published, it would take three days on average for that piece of media to get to everybody who wanted it.

In other words, in a complete shutdown of the Internet where people go back to sharing by copying media by hand, the very best the copyright industry can hope for is three days until saturation instead of today’s one day. It’s almost funny how the copyright industry still delays releases by weeks if not months between neighboring countries and think they can determine who gets to see what when. That was never the case, and won’t ever be the case.

File sharing is here to stay and the reason it’s still traceable is mostly because the risk of getting caught by stale, obsolete, and outdated laws is considerably lower than the risk of getting struck by lightning. There’s no real push to improve it, like there was right after Napster shut down. But let’s imagine for a moment if there was a real push to move sharing back under the radar.

Today, the storage of an ordinary mobile phone can effectively store all music except the most narrow. And with fourth-generation Bluetooth, it can wirelessly – and tracelessly! – share all of it to all mobile phones in a 50-meter range. Subway cars, cafés, even cars at red light stops become torrent swarms without somebody acting – or even noticing. The notion of being able to stop, control, or contain this files under “what’s the weather like on your planet?”.

Not only that, but the best-generation scenario that the copyright industry can ever hope for is the equivalent of a shutdown of the entire internet. That would mean a regression from today’s 24-hour saturation to a pre-internet 72-hour saturation. Think about that. The best conceivable scenario for the copyright industry, if they really manage to destroy the entire Internet, is that it would take three days instead of one day for something to get shared to everybody who wants it.

Moore’s Law further suggests that in a decade or so, an ordinary mobile phone will also have capacity to store most TV and movies ever made.

So once you accept that file-sharing is here to stay for good, and that any attempt to contain it is a Canutian attempt to order the tide back, you can let go of that and instead focus on all the positive aspects of that development:

The income is there for artists. In fact, more than twice the income is there for artists with file-sharing. There’s no need to fret and worry about that development, no need to hunt license fees for every copy manufactured without a license. Rather, as soon as you realize that chasing license fees for every copy is actually a cashflow net negative, you’ll start to chill and realize the revenue is still there. (Well, not for the parasitic middlemen: not for the actual copyright industry. But artists have always hated those with a passion.) As a significant bonus, you won’t be turning your customers into enemies.

But more importantly, it means that every human being has 24/7 access to humanity’s collective knowledge and culture, and that every human being is able to add to that pool. That’s the equivalent of when the first public libraries opened in 1850, but on an enormously larger scale. Even though the copyright industry is trying again and again to burn this Library of Alexandria, it’s worth more than pause to consider what a huge leap ahead for humanity this really is.

And while the copyright industry may order the tide held back, waging war against future generations is rarely a winning proposition in the long run.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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

Every month copyright holders and anti-piracy groups send hundreds of thousands of takedown notices to Internet providers.

These notifications have to be forwarded to individual account holders under the DMCA law, to alert them that their connection is being used to share copyrighted works without permission.

Cox Communications is one of the ISPs that forwards these notices. The ISP also implemented a strict set of rules of its own accord to ensure that its customers understand the severity of the allegations.

According to some copyright holders, however, Cox’s efforts are falling short. Last December BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music sued the ISP because it fails to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.

The companies, which control the publishing rights to songs by Katy Perry, The Beatles and David Bowie among others, claim that Cox has given up its DMCA safe harbor protections due to this inaction.

The case is a critical test for the repeat infringer clause of the DMCA and the safe harbor protections ISPs enjoy. In recent weeks both parties have started the discovery process to gather as many details as they can for the upcoming trial.

Cox, for example, is looking into the ownership of the 1,000 works for which they received seven million DMCA takedown notices. In addition, the ISP also wants an expert opinion on the source code of the Rightscorp’s crawler that was used to spot the alleged infringements.

For their part, BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music have asked for details on Cox’s policy towards repeat copyright infringers and extensive details on the company’s financials. The ISP believes the latter request is too broad and as a result is refusing to produce the requested documents.

In a response the music companies have filed a motion asking the federal court to force the ISP to comply (pdf). Among other things, they argue that the financial details are needed to calculate damages and show that Cox has a financial motive to keep persistent pirates on board.

“The financial information that Cox refused to produce is directly relevant to Cox’s strong motivation for ignoring rampant infringement on its network because ignoring this infringement results in a financial benefit to Cox,” they argue.

“Moreover, Cox’s financial motivation for refusing to take meaningful actions against its repeat infringing customers is important to both the knowledge element of contributory infringement and the financial benefit element of vicarious liability,” the music groups add.

In its response Cox states that the rightsholders’ demands are too broad (pdf) since the documents requested include those related to the ISP’s market share, capital expenditures, profits per customer for each service, and so forth. According to Cox most of the information is irrelevant to this case.

“Plaintiffs’ document requests seek virtually every financial record that Cox maintains about its internet Customers and its provision of internet services,” Cox notes.

The ISP says it’s willing to share some financial detail but with a far more limited scope than demanded by the rightsholders.

“To be clear, Cox has been and remains willing to produce high-level, aggregate financial data of the kind that courts permit in cases involving statutory copyright damages, for example corporate tax returns. But Plaintiffs have never offered to entertain even minor limitations to the scope of their discovery requests, making any compromise effectively impossible,” the ISP notes.

The court has yet to decide how many of its financial secrets Cox must reveal but judging from the demands being made from both sides, it’s clear that we can expect more fireworks during the months to come.

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