As we reported earlier today, The Pirate Bay is being sold to another Swedish company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF). The publicly listed software company stated that the acquisition will have an effect on the business model of The Pirate Bay which has been known to be the most popular BitTorrent site on the Internet. In addition to these changes some less expected changes are going to happen too.
Peter Sunde, co-founder of TPB, has told TorrentFreak that The Pirate Bay will be shutting down their tracker and remove torrent files from their servers. After closing the tracker The Pirate Bay will use the torrents of an upcoming third party service which will introduce an API accessible by other torrent sites as well.
It’s still unclear how GGF intends to compensate the content providers and copyright owners. Neither has the company revealed further information how the acquisited Peerialism and its file-sharing technology will affect The Pirate Bay.
Result for: torrent file
The civil trial against Mininova, brought forward by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, has been postponed one month today.
The outcome of the case will determine whether the torrent indexing site will have to “actively filter” torrents from its index daily. If BREIN is triumphant, Mininova will be forced to remove all .torrent files that lead to unauthorized content such as pirated movies, music or TV shows.
“The reason for this postponement is solely due to personal circumstances of our attorney and has explicitly nothing to do with the content of the case,” says Mininova’s staff.
Additionally, Mininova President Erik Dubbelboer notes:
“The case wont say much about the legality of torrent sites, but it will give more insight into what measures BitTorrent indexers and similar services have to take in order to make sure that they don’t link to illegal content. In particular, it deals with the question of whether or not website owners have to actively filter content. In other words, is a notice and takedown policy sufficient or not.”
Result for: torrent file
A new service called Vertor launched recently with a goal to make the BitTorrent protocol even more popular, easy-to-use and reliable. It uses an automatic system to download content from various BitTorrent sources and verify that the contents are real and safe. The downloads are snagged by an array of 5 servers, running on dual-core technology with 8GB of RAM each currently.
Vertor has a number of ways to avoid adding a bad torrent to its database…
When a torrent file is retrieved it is queued on the servers for download. If the download does not start after a number of attempts, a “download error” status is tagged and the torrent file is not added to the database.
If the download turns out to be an archive (or set of common archives), the system will decompress the data and create a file list. If this fails, the content is marked as “protected” and is not added to the database.
If the download includes video content, the system will automatically take screenshots from the files. If the screenshots are blank, then the downloads are marked as DRM protected and not added.
If the download contains audio content, small chunks of the data is cut for verification purposes.
If a text file is determined to contain a description of the contents, it is saved and is downloadable for users on the site.
The Vertor system can also determine if the downloaded content contains viruses or other malicious files. It is certainly a clever concept and it will be interesting to see how it evolves as a service.
