Researchers from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College recently got together to answer one simple question: does BitTorrent hurt U.S. box office numbers? According to this study, the answer is a resounding ‘no,’ much to the chagrin of the movie industry. The study did find a correlation in the data, but it amounts to Hollywood throwing away money.
This isn’t the best time to be in charge of a file-sharing site, with authorities around the world — everywhere from the United States to Middle-earth (or New Zealand as it’s known more popularly) to Sweden — currently on a rampage against online file repositories brimming with unauthorized content. Ukrainian authorities are the latest to crackdown on online file sharing, having taken down popular file-sharing site Ex.ua a couple of days back. But that’s not where the story ends. You know the drill: hit the jump for more.
By all accounts, 2012 hasn't been very nice to the torrent freaks over at Pirate Bay. Megaupload's takedown has them worried, and today, the Swedish Supreme Court ruled that Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström -- the original operators of the site -- will have to pay fines and serve jail time for copyright infringement. Is the ship going down? Nah -- the site says it has things in the bag.
Ever since MegaUpload was hit with arrests and seizures last week, everyone has been wondering how the US government managed to get access to internal communications between the company’s founders. Most of the incriminating conversations cited in the indictment are Skype IMs that would have long been purged from Skype’s servers. According to Cnet, it has been confirmed that the FBI obtained a warrant to obtain the data, and that might have included using government-issued spyware.
The U.S. government's 
A new service from BitTorrent Inc. is looking to challenge established cloud storage and sharing services like Dropbox. Share is a p2p-based system that uses the BitTorrent protocol to share files of any size with an unlimited number of contacts. Share will leverage Amazon’s EC2 and S3 infrastructure to cache files so users don’t even have to online at the same time to share files
File sharing: it’s not just a way to get free stuff anymore. In Sweden, it’s now an officially recognized religion. Philosophy student Isak Gerson has tried and failed several times to get his Missionary Church of Kopimism recognized as a religion, authorities have relented. Kopimism holds as its central principal, that copying data is a sacred act.
The Internet has been around for decades now, and even though we all use it every day, the simple act of sending an electronic file to a friend isn’t always so simple. We’ve grown accustomed to e-mail and instant messengers, which work well for sending small handfuls of small files to small groups of people. As soon as you start trying to send anything en masse there are a lot of roadblocks. So what exactly is the best way to send a large file, or a lot of files, or—dare we say—a lot of large files?
Sweden is no stranger to file sharing cases, but a case that has just gotten underway in the country is a real outlier. A Swedish woman, aged 58, is accused of sharing over 45,000 music tracks online. The staggering scale of this case has the prosecution talking about a possible jail sentence.
When it comes to cloud storage, consumers have a lot of options to choose from. For many people, Dropbox is their go-to service. Others prefer SkyDrive, Amazon Cloud Drive or Sugarsync. They’re all great ways to go, with each one offering it’s own particular perks and quirks. While it might be one of the newest kids on the file storage and sharing block, Minus has enough going for it that we felt it worthy of being our Cool Site of the Week.Connect with MaximumPC
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