When an Ubisoft dev blamed piracy for the lack of an "I Am Alive" PC port towards the end of last year, he touched a nerve with a lot of desktop gamers -- at least if the heated comments left on the article are any indication. Now, the Jolly Roger flag-waving torrent crowd has helped Epic Games decide to put the kibosh on a Bulletstorm sequel, and not just for PC gamers. 
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.
The BitTorrent community used to think that law enforcement had better things to do than hunt them down, but that all changed in mid-2005, when US-based EliteTorrents was raided by the FBI and ICE. The site had over 130,000 users, and was run by a small number of dedicated staff, including one 19 year-old who recently spoke about the ordeal. He gives a peek inside the first big Torrent bust of what has become an ongoing war on piracy for US law enforcement.
Turns out the government and Hollywood have been going after the wrong boogeymen the entire time! Pirating data and intangible information is so, like, 2011. While the World (Wide Web) held its breath during the Day The Net Went Dark and its lesser-known sibling, The Day MegaUpload Went Down, the notorious swashbucklers at The Pirate Bay introduced what they called "the future of sharing:" Physibles, or digital files that work with 3D printers to create real, physical objects.
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
The torrent watching website YouHaveDownloaded.com is still astounding us with its hypocrisy-revealing powers. A new search of the site, which tracks IP addresses pulling copyrighted material from a few public BitTorrent trackers, confirms that the U.S. House of Representatives is quite the hotbed of piracy at the same time it’s working to pass the much-maligned Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). 
Ever since the interesting, yet disturbing site YouHaveDownloaded went live, the Internet has reveled in hunting down the IP addresses of copyright cops who have been illegally downloading content via torrents. One group found to have some internal pirates is the RIAA, which records show has 6 IP addresses downloading infringing content. Now the RIAA has responded with a defense similar to some alleged file-sharers: it wasn’t us.
This just in from the “Isn’t it ironic?” department: IP addresses from some of the top content creation companies, including Fox, Sony and Universal, have been caught red-handed downloading torrents of movies, music and TV shows. That’s the claim from TorrentFreak, at least, who sifted through data from YouHaveDownloaded, a Russian site that logs – and exposes! – IP addresses downloading many of the public torrents you can find out there. TorrentFreak did some digging and managed to match several infringing IP addresses to IP addresses registered to the aforementioned companies.
Things work a little differently in Switzerland. The Swiss copyright laws allow people to download copyrighted material for personal use, which has had the entertainment industry up in arms for years. Amid all the claims of billions in losses, the Swiss government undertook a study to find out to affect of piracy on entertainment sales. The results? Well, let’s just say that the Swiss won’t be changing their permissive copyright laws anytime soon.
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