Popcorn Time Moves to Your Browser Making It Super Easy to Stream Torrented Movies

For those that don't mind the 'legal grey are' of streaming move torrents, Popcorn Time has become a major must have! The nifty little app, which we were first introduced to last year, gave us geeks a quick and easy way to find and download all of our latest movie favorites.

Since its original inception the app and services have come a long way. First moving to mobile platforms such as Android and iOS then adding support for streaming devices like Chromescast. Now, the app often dubbed the Netflix for pirated movies, takes another leap which makes it even easier too use!

Thanks to a new 'anonymous' development team and a service that is a mashup between popular torrenting site YTS that is used to for the content and Coinado.io a cloud streaming service, geeks everywhere have access to video streaming directly in any browser with no apps to install. All they need to do is vista a site called Popcorn Time In Your Browser.

The site features a fairly simplistic user interface, with little more than a few movie suggestions and a search box. However, that shouldn't be an issue with most because all the magic happens behind the scenes! Popcorn Time's servers handle everything, you won't be downloading any applications or torrents onto your computer, and from what we see nothing is stored locally— you'll be streaming the content via the cloud.

Since the site is taking the minimal approach here there is no built-in VPN service like what’s included in the desktop software, so if you’re going to use the Popcorn In Your Browser site, it’s probably best to use a VPN of your own if you’d like to keep your activity private. It’s also important to keep in mind that the Popcorn Time brand operates under anonymity, and different apps are run by different teams—so it’s hard to say who specifically is operating the site. Meaning you never know who might be tracking your activity there!

As always, use tools like this at your own risk and please keep in mind there are still several legal issues surrounding their use!! 

New Site Tracks Illegal Downloads

There is a new website on the web garnering tons of attention from the Torrent community. The site, dubbed Youhavedownloaded.com, keeps track of everything you download from file-sharing sites. When a user visits the site, it scans your IP address and then provides a bit of feedback to exactly what you've downloaded.

How it works:

Youhavedownloaded.com, keeps a huge database of millions of media files that have been downloaded to tens of millions of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from file-sharing websites and services such as BitTorrent. When you visit the site, it automatically scans your public IP address, compares it to their database and then lists a results of any files that have been downloaded by that IP address.

Now this isn't fool-proof, as IP address are recycled by ISPs. However, Suren Ter-Saakov, one of the sites founders has confirmed the site does have access to time stamps and the distributed hash table (DHT) information associated with the torrent files. Meaning they could track the downloads back to specific users if need be.

To date, Youhavedownloaded has a database of more 53,000,000 users and 115,000 torrents made up of 1,992,000 individual files. A glance at the homepage shows a small sample of what people have downloaded, including the film "Spy Kids 4," the AMC show "The Walking Dead" and season four of FX's "Sons of Anarchy."

TorrentFreak got in touch with Suren Ter to find out why they decided to create the site and apparently out people as torrent users. His response, “We just want to remind people that the Internet is not a place to expect privacy. Nowadays many people use it without understanding what information they leave behind. Also, even those who understand choose to ignore it quite often.”

Despite its limitations and innocent nature, Youhavedownloaded.com still has the capability to scare — or shame — people into thinking before they blindly download pirated material.

File-Sharing Dealt A Major Blow In LimeWire Infringement Case

Earlier this week a US District Court judge leaved a major blow against file-sharing when she found LimeWire and it's software makers liable for inducing copyright infringement and engaging in unfair competition.

The ongoing case, Arista Records LLC et al v. Lime Group et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 06-05936, was originally filed in August 2006 but it wasn't until earlier this week that U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood agreed with the record companies that LimeWire's parent Lime Wire LLC and its founder Mark Gorton were liable.

"The evidence demonstrates that Lime Wire optimized LimeWire's features to ensure that users can download digital recordings, the majority of which are protected by copyright, and that Lime Wire assisted users in committing infringement," Wood wrote in her 59-page ruling.

Wood has granted a summary judgment against LimeWire which could amount to millions of dollars. The RIAA along with their partners: Arista, Atlantic, BMG Music, Capital, Elektra, Interscope, LaFace, Motown, Priority, Sony BMG, UMG, Virgin and Warner Brothers are the 13 record companies that sued Lime Group were seeking $150,000 per copyright violation, though the final damages in the lawsuit have not yet been determined. The lawsuit claimed at least 93 percent of LimeWire’s file sharing traffic was unauthorized copyright material. For a site that claims 50 million unique monthly users that could amount to a very hefty fine!

Judge Wood scheduled a June 1 hearing to determine how to proceed.

View the full summary (pdf) and more details via Wired.com and for further reading checkout Ars Technica "LimeWire sliced by RIAA, liable for massive infringement"

Isohunt Becomes MPAA's Next Victim

Popular file-sharing search site isoHunt may be the next inline, behind sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay, to fall to legal actions brought forth by the MPAA.

isoHunt has been in a long standing legal battle, one that the MPAA has won on many fronts. A federal court sided last year with the MPAA, ruling that Isohunt was liable for secondary copyright infringement. Gary Fung, the 27-year-old Canadian who runs isoHunt, said he and the MPAA are now battling over how to comply with the March 23 injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson in Los Angeles.

“It is axiomatic that the availability of free infringing copies of plaintiffs’ works through defendants’ websites irreparably undermines the growing legitimate market (.pdf) for consumers to purchase access to the same works,” Wilson wrote in support of his injunction. The judge added that “upwards of 95 percent of all dot-torrent files downloaded from defendants’ websites” return infringing material or works “at least highly likely to be infringing.”

Wilson ordered Fung to comply within his order within 14 days of the MPAA providing Fung a list of content to be removed giving the parties until April 12 to hammer out an agreement.

In order for Fung and isoHunt to comply with the judge's ruling the site would effectively have to investigate every single file and or link returned by the site's search engine to see whether it's legal or not. Unfortunately this type of hands on verification would be nearly impossible to implement. Therefore it looks like Fung will have little to no choice but to shutter the site for good.

“Filtering against keywords. It amounts to nothing less than taking down our search engine,” Fung said in a telephone interview with Wired.com. His position is that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requires Hollywood and the MPAA to provide links to infringed files to be removed, nit just a simple keyword filter.

Keyword searches, he said, could scoop up non-infringing works adding such keyword filtering is nearly impossible to implement if it's to have any sort of precision, nor can it avoid conflict with fair use cases, free commerce, or extra-territorial law.

isoHunt is not the only site affected by the judge’s ruling. Torrent sites Torrentbox and Podtropolis may to be affected.

Read More:
ARS Technica - IsoHunt told to pull .torrent files offline, likely to close
Wired.com - Isohunt Ordered to Remove Infringing Content

Apple Just Says No To iPhone BitTorrent Handler

Citing concerns over the apps possible use to download copyrighted materials and the potential of copyright infringement concerns, Apple did as Apple often does and denied the inclusion of new app BitTorrent client to the App Store.

According to Wired.com Apple rejected Maza Digital’s Drivetrain, saying “this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third-party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store.”

The irony invloved in the story is that Drivetrain is only a remote application handler, it doesn't actually act a BitTorrent client. You still need to use the Transmission BT Client. The app itself has nothing at all to do with Bittorrent. As Drivetrain doesn't actually upload or download anything, it's just used to manage Transmission running on your desktop.

The apps developer Aaron Scott told Wired he felt that Apple’s decision was “ridiculous.”

“I do think that some people might choose to download pirated works. But they can not outlaw a program because of a few who choose to do the wrong thing. The BitTorrent protocol and client apps are not illegal,” he said.

Pirate Bay Founders Found Guilty

The high profile copyright infringement case against the four founders of the popular torrent site PirateBay.org were found guilty in Swedish court on Friday. The group has been sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay $3.6 million in damages to copyright holders.

The group will be holding a press conference later today at 13.00 CEST (aka Swedish time) or 4am PST. We'll be updating this posting later today as more news rolls in.

Update
The pirate's rejoice and throw a party! During his press conference Peter Sunde aka brokep said they are going to throw a huge party and rejoice. While the initial trial may be over this is just the first step for The Pirate Bay.

TPB responded to the conviction earlier today on the Spectrial page:
On friday we will get the verdict in the trial. We will not make a big deal out of it but we will give everyone a chance to talk to us and get our opinions on whatever the outcome is.

We have to remember that this will not be the final decision, only the first before the losing party will appeal. It will have no real effect on anything besides setting the tone for the debate, so we hope we win of course.

I've embedded the press conference below its a bit long but Peter brings up a few interesting points.

The Pirate Bay Trial Day Two

The trial against popular torrent site The Pirate Bay is in full swing with day two holding some interesting changes. The charges of production of copyrighted material have been dropped to focus solely on "making available".

Pirate's founders arrived in court on Monday amidst a huge spectacle which included the pirate bus, Pirate Bay supports totting mega phones and a flood of Tweeting from the court room. Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström are all charged with facilitating illegal downloads of copyrighted material, charges which they plead not guilty to. That was day one of the long standing fight between The Pirate Bay and the Swedish government.

On day two prosecutor Hakan Roswall arrived in court and amended the original charges. According to the Swedish newspaper The Local Roswall asked the courts to dismiss "complicity in the production of copyrighted material" from the charges. The remaining charge against the four defendants is "complicity to make (copyrighted material) available."

Roswall has confirmed that he now plans to limit the charges to the production of the actual torrent file and not the resultant hard or soft copy. The new charges will be amended to read "complicity to make (copyrighted material) available".

Peter Danowsky, legal counsel for the music companies in the case, said the change would simplify the charges against The Pirate Bay.

“It’s a largely technical issue that changes nothing in terms of our compensation claims and has no bearing whatsoever on the main case against The Pirate Bay. In fact it simplifies the prosecutor’s case by allowing him to focus on the main issue, which is the making available of copyrighted works,” he said in a statement.

For more coverage on The Pirate Bay Trial checkout:

• TechCrunch: Half The Charges Against The Pirate Bay Dropped, But The Circus Ain’t Over Yet
• Ars Technica: Charges Dropped-"making available" now focus of Pirate Bay trial
• CNet News: Some Charges Dropped Against The Pirate Bay
• Torrent Freak: Follow The Pirate Bay Trial On Twitter

Windows 7 Hits Torrent Sites

It didn't take long for Microsoft's newest OS to show up on Torrent sites, in fact leaked copies of Windows 7 hit the Internet only hours after Microsoft handed out a preview copies to attendees at the Professional Developers Conference.

Sites like Pirate Bay and Mininova show as many as 1,400 seeders of the 32-bit version of Windows 7 and 200-300 seeders of the 64 bit version. Unlike the bogus torrents listed earlier this year, these versions should be "legitimate" copies of the pre-beta Windows 7 build.

Personally I'm staying away from it. I'd like to get a first hand look at the new OS but I'm not big on torrents, nor am I big on trying out an OS that isn't even in beta. Once it actually hits beta maybe I'll be able to get a copy to try out until then I'll have to rely on reports from others that have tried it out.

How to Speed Up Movie Downloads

Researchers have designed a new way to get the most out of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, decreasing the time it takes to download movies and music.

By Brendan Borrell TechReview.com

Let's face it: peer-to-peer file transfers on the Internet are slow. More than half of all downloads fail, and the average transfer time for a 100-megabyte file is more than 24 hours. But now, a team of computer scientists led by Himabindu Pucha at Purdue University, in Indiana, say that they can double the speed of these transfers by taking advantage of overlap in data chunks contained within nonidentical multimedia files posted on peer-to-peer distribution networks. This would improve the likelihood of success of these transfers.

Locating that file with just 10 percent similarity could speed up downloads by 8 percent. For music files with greater than 90 percent similarity, a five-minute download on BitTorrent would take just over two minutes with SET.

Peer-to-peer distribution networks such as BitTorrent and Kazaa allow people to download individual files from others' computers. These systems first locate the copies of the requested file in the network's global lookup table using its "hash"--a unique identifier computed from the file's data sequence. Then, the file is divided into chunks so that each user's computer only has to upload a small piece of it. This technique speeds up file transfers because home users typically have greater bandwidth allocated to downloads compared with uploads. Of course, the overall speed of the transfer will depend on the number of file sources and how much spare upload capacity they have. The more popular a file is, the faster it is to download and the greater the chance of success.

Computer scientist David Andersen, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, worked with the Purdue group to develop a way to increase the size of the pool of uploaders called similarity-enhanced transfer (SET). The approach takes advantage of multiple variants of the same music files, video clips, and software, which are often floating around file-distribution networks. "We hope that SET gives you access to a larger pool of people to download from," says Andersen. "And by doing so, we think you're more likely to find one of these people who have more spare capacity."

Before Andersen and his colleagues conducted their study, it was not at all clear how much redundancy existed in file-sharing networks and whether it could be exploited, says Cornell University computer scientist Emin Gün Sirer, who was not involved in the study. The SET team analyzed almost two terabytes of music and video files from file-sharing networks, and it discovered that similar files typically shared anywhere between 20 and 99 percent of their content. With music files, even misspellings in user-defined header labels that identify artist and song titles are enough to throw off BitTorrent, despite the fact that 99 percent of the file is the same. Similarly, multiple versions of the same video are often available with different language tracks.
Next Page