[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]
Saturday, December 6th, 2014
| Time | Event |
| 9:32a | ExtraTorrent Reveals Most Pirated Files of All Time
Over the years ExtraTorrent users have downloaded billions of files, and this week the site revealed the top 20 most pirated files of all time. The data gives a unique insight into the downloading habits of torrent users and comes with a few surprises. While no exact download counts are provided the ExtraTorrent team told us that the top ten were downloaded at least 10 million times. This number represents the downloads of the .torrent files from the site where different releases of a music album or movie are counted as one. One of the biggest surprises is that the top three is made up of music. Drake’s album ‘Nothing Was The Same’ is listed in first place, followed by the Maroon 5 track ‘Payphone’ and Jay Z’s album ‘Magna Carta Holy Grail.’ Iron Man 3 is the most pirated movie in fourth place, followed by The Expendables 3, which leaked onto the Internet three weeks before its theatrical release this summer. The rest of the top 20, all music and movies, are listed below. While this data only applies to ExtraTorrent it’s a decent representation of what’s popular on other torrent sites as well. 1. Drake – Nothing Was The Same (Mp3 Album) The most pirated files include a lot of relatively new files. This can be attributed to the fact that ExtraTorrent has grown significantly over the years. ExtraTorrent released the ten most downloaded files as part of a contest in celebration of the site’s 8th birthday. The rest of the top 20 was provided to TF exclusively. With the contest the person with the most correct answers could win an iPad Air. Perhaps not a surprise, but none of the 3,000 contestants could name all titles. The winner guessed seven of the ten correctly, but missed the top three. Most lists were heavily based on movies. For example, Drake’s ‘Nothing Was The Same’ was only mentioned in one entry, while Maroon 5 and Jay-Z weren’t listed at all. Finally, it’s worth nothing that there are no TV-shows and only one porn title in the top 20. While both categories are relatively popular these downloads are usually spread over more files compared to movies and music. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. |
| 4:31p | LionsGate Targets Reddit Over Christmas Movie Piracy
Copyright holders know the feeling only too well. While it may traditionally come around on February 2, for them every day is Groundhog Day. Check torrent and other file-sharing sites for infringing content, send takedown notices. Hope content disappears. Rinse and repeat. No one knows how many DMCA notices are sent in total each week, but during the past seven days Google alone received 8.68 million. It’s believed that the majority of these notices are accurate, but the truth is no one really knows. Google rejects thousands every day, often due to notices targeting the same URLs time and again. Other errors are more easily spotted, such as when copyright holders target content they don’t own the rights to. Another ‘trick’ is not targeting infringing content precisely – why send a DMCA notice for a single URL when one can move up a level and take out a whole bunch of content in a single swoop? This week that’s exactly what LionsGate tried to do. In a single DMCA notice to Google the movie studio targeted 9,000 URLs spread over 379 domains. As usual dozens of URLs were duplicates and as such were rejected by Google, but a trio of links targeting Reddit were dismissed for different reasons. Each targeted a Reddit sub called BestOfStreamingVideo after someone posted a link to the LionsGate movie ‘Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas‘.  However, instead of targeting the precise link as required under the DMCA, LionsGate tried to have the whole sub-reddit delisted from Google. It didn’t pay off. Faced with wiping the very existence of /r/BestOfStreamingVideo from its search results, Google refused to go full nuclear and rejected all three attempts by LionsGate.  It’s not clear why the search engine refused to comply but it’s possible that by being over-broad the studio shot itself in the foot. That being said, one of the URLs does link to the content in question so other factors could be at play. The “over-broad” strategy has certainly paid off in the past, though. The MPAA previously managed to have the homepages of several popular sites removed from Google’s search results, including that of KickassTorrents. On the other hand, more recent efforts have produced less impressive results, with Google rejecting an MPAA attempt at removing dozens of ‘pirate’ site homepages just last month. So at least for now /r/BestOfStreamingVideo remains findable using Google, but it’s quite possible that it will be targeted again before the Christmas period is over……  Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. |
| << Previous Day |
2014/12/06 [Calendar] |
Next Day >> |