Tag Archives: torrents

Over the years, torrent sites have evolved to not just offer downloads, but streaming options too. Apps like Popcorn Time have helped popularise BitTorrent streaming and now the most infamous piracy site in the world is also rolling out the feature with a new site called ‘BayStream'.  The Pirate Bay …

After a long waiting period, Rick and Morty Season 3 officially began airing in the US late last month. At the time, Netflix announced that its UK subscribers would get new episodes of this season every week, the day after it airs in the US. Unfortunately, Netflix didn’t plan for …

Administrators and moderators of the original KickassTorrents file sharing website have helped bring about its resurrection. Without access to the original database and code, they had to start from scratch, but the end result is a site that looks and feels very much like the KAT of old. KickassTorrents was, …

Media companies have been trying to battle piracy and online torrent sites for years without much success. However, NBC Universal recently been granted a patent that details new technology designed to detect and track those downloading torrents. The “Early Detection of High Volume Peer-to-Peer Swarms” system is designed to detect …

Although services like Spotify, Netflix and Amazon Instant Video have gone a long way to make buying content legitimately an easy and affordable way to consume media, piracy is still alive and well. If there was any need for proof of that fact, KickassTorrents has just entered the top 70 …

With the official debut of this season's episode one of Game of Thrones, millions of people around the world have been eagerly watching to find out what is set to happen to some of their favourite characters. Not everyone did so through official channels though. Indeed, more than a million …

Despite receiving a lukewarm reception from critics and moviegoers alike, The Expendables 3 will likely always be remembered for its impact on the piracy scene. It heralded a dramatic response from the authorities as it was leaked before the official cinematic release and now the sites that helped distribute it are …

EZTV is one of the most iconic names in the torrent scene and has been so for the best part of a decade. However in recent months, following some issues with its site and services, the team finally shut down and has halted all ripping and distributing actions going forward. …

The last time the Pirate bay was taken down it ended up not returning with full functionality for a couple of months, so yesterday when a district court in Stockholm, Sweden, took down ThePiratebay.se and PirateBay.se, some fans of the long running torrent search site were worried. They needn't have …

Update: And it's gone. That was fast. Back to the original for now then. While the Pirate Bay might be the most iconic torrent search site online, over the past few years due to lack of updates to its system and repeated down time, it's been eclipsed by competitors in …

A German music company has attempted to claim copyright on some of the world's most popular downloads, including Skype, AMD drivers, Linux and many more. Over the years we have seen many copyright holders attempt to abuse the DMCA takedown system to censor legitimate content and the worst part is, there are …

The Pirate Bay might be back in some shape or form, but KickAss Torrents is now down following a domain name seizure. The .so Somalian domain of the heavily visited torrent site is now listed as banned by the .SO registry, meaning that the site's operators will need to find …

The Motion Picture Association of America recently released a statement claiming that complaining about availability with movies was ridiculous, as clearly there are many legal avenues to go down when it comes to buying and renting movies in your own home. However research suggests that most of the top-torrented films …

The Pirate Bay, perhaps the world's most well known torrent site, is officially back online after weeks of downtime, marking the site's longest outage in its 11+ year history. However, it isn't all smooth sailing, as despite its seeming imperviousness to traffic spikes and overloaded servers before its downing, TPB …

The effectiveness of warning letters sent to households that are thought to have downloaded media that's copyright protected is pretty much unknown. Some people pay up if money is demanded to make the whole thing go away, some ignore it and others fight it saying that it certainly wasn't them. However …

What is going on with the Pirate Bay? Something tells me that's what the current admins want us to be asking. On the .se homepage that recently updated with a waving pirate flag, a pop-up ad and a countdown timer following a multi-week disappearance after a December raid, a new image …

First the Pirate Bay website itself went down and all its proxies and mirrors with it and now it looks like the torrent site's official Facebook has been deleted too. It's not clear at this time whether the admins of the site wilfully pulled it offline or if it was …

While Sony might not want anyone talking about the leaks, I don't know if many people will complain about everyone knowing what the MPAA has planned over the next few years. It's future anti-piracy strategy has been revealed as part of the hack and it shows that it plans to …

UK based ISP, BT, has gone on another torrent site blocking spree this week, shutting down access to sites that use private trackers and require invites from current members to download from, such as IPTorrents and TorrentDay.  This is the first time that a UK ISP has decided to block …

A federal court judge in Washington has gone ahead and rejected a $30,000 damages award against internet subscribers accused of downloading a pirated movie through a torrent client. The judge, Thomas Rice, expressed doubts that the filmmakers were really hurt that much and branded the $30,000 request as “excessive punishment”. …

Last week saw Google instigate a new round of copyright wagon circling by implementing a new downranking system that saw many of the internet's most popular torrent search sites all but removed from the search engine's results pages. While this had a surprisingly hefty impact on those sites' traffic, it's …

One of the oldest arguments on the internet, is whether the illegal download of movies negatively affects sales numbers, especially when it comes to downloads during the film's theatrical run. Movie studios understandably claim that there's a direct correlation between a download and a lost sale, while pirates argue that illegal …

The BBC has weighed in on recent copyright and piracy talks, suggesting that Internet service providers should monitor network traffic and automatically be suspicious of customers using a VPN while consuming large amounts of bandwidth- assuming that all VPN users are pirates. In a submission to the Australian government, the BBC …

The UK government has sent out warnings to Microsoft, Google and Yahoo stating that if these companies don't address the issue of online piracy and stop linking to illegal content voluntarily, then legislative action will be taken. Over the last year or so, the UK government has shown its full …

It turns out that Google is currently receiving and processing an all time high of one million piracy link removal requests per day, proving that copyright holders and media lobby groups just don't give up. The media Industry's new tactic is to simply overload Google with DMCA takedown requests, all …

Certain Internet providers around the world have been ordered to block The Pirate Bay in some countries and so far, media groups have claimed that these blocks are effective and sufficient enough to deter piracy. However, new statistics are suggesting otherwise as it turns out that TPB's traffic has doubled since …

Britain's relatively newly formed Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has been making modest waves since it first appeared on the scene, stating that one of the fresh tactics it was going to bring to the war on piracy, was to try and eliminate advertising from torrent sites. In its …

The number of people illegally sharing media like songs, music and games in Sweden, the home of The Pirate Party and original host country for The Pirate Bay, have plummeted in recent years according to a new survey by the Cybernorms research group of Lund University. In a bold move, …

The UK's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) hasn't been around very long, having only been formed in September 2013, but it's been making waves since its arrival, shutting down torrent and streaming search sites by the bucket load. It doesn't do it with legal precedent mind you, it just …

For two years, Cinavia anti-piracy protection has been a thorn in the side of pirates the world over, by popping up a message that mutes audio and halts visuals on DVD and Blu-Ray players if an unauthorised copy is detected. The technology has been around so long, it was often …