Tag: bittorrent

The Corporation available for free, but is it remixable?

The Corporation poster

From Torrent freak, which I've been meaning to blog for a while…

The award winning Canadian documentary The Corporation has been released on BitTorrent for free. Filmmaker Mark Achbar just released an updated official torrent of it. Everyone is free to download, watch, discuss, and share it. Although the torrent download is free, the filmmakers encourage people to donate a small fee if they like what they see. We asked Mark Achbar how the first round of donations went. He said, since my initial torrent launch of The Corporation at the end of August, there have been $635.00 in contributions. They ranged from $2 to three very generous gifts of $100 each. All are very much appreciated. He added, my only regret is that I didnt put up my own torrent sooner.

Although this is great stuff, I couldn't find the licence anywhere. So I'm assuming its downloadable, sharable but not remixable? Shame because its a great documentary but I would like to see a slightly shorter version which I could lend to some friends without them falling a sleep. You could easily do a 1hour version which gets the core message across and then the 3hour version full of examples and more depth.

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Digital Music is not a loaf of bread which can be stolen

In a long series of things which I've been meaning to blog for a while. I saw this on Torrent Freak.

Singer/songwriter Jeff Tweedy is part of the growing group of artists that understands that there’s more to music than selling pieces of plastic, and suing your fans.

In an interview with Wired Magazine (from a while ago), Tweedy said:

A piece of art is not a loaf of bread. When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that’s it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it’s just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work.

Jeff Tweedy is the leadsinger of the popular band Wilco, that won two Grammy’s back in 2005. He doesn’t consider copying and remixing as evil, but as a way to facilitate creativity.

On the official website of the band from Chicago we even see a link to the BitTorrent tracker where Wilco fans actively share high quality recordings.

Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator. People who look at music as commerce don’t understand that. They are talking about pieces of plastic they want to sell, packages of intellectual property. I’m not interested in selling pieces of plastic.

For those who are interested in the copyright debate, here’s a presentation by Larry Lessig titled “Who owns Culture“. The presentation served as an intro to conversation about p2p and free culture by Jeff Tweedy and Larry Lessig (audio link).

This all comes at a time when EMI music CEO and Chairman Alain Levy tells an audience at the London Business School that the CD as we know it is dead. And to top that, the IPPR released a study on why copying of CDs and DVDs for personal use should be legalised.

IPPR Deputy Director Ian Kearns said:

Millions of Britons copy CDs onto their home computers breaking copyright laws everyday. British copyright law is out of date with consumer practices and technological progress.

A recent survey among 2135 British adult consumers shows that most people don’t even know that they are breaking the law. Of all the people that participated in the survey, 55% said that they have ever copied CDs onto other equipment. However, only 19% actually knows that this behavior is illegal.

Well what more can you say? Three interesting stories in the downfall or change of the music industry.

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How mininova.org stays a float

Torrent freak has done some digging and found that the Torrent sites are becoming even more popular. Mininova.org is still the most popular (no suprise there), Torrentspy is 2nd and The PirateBay is 3rd. The freak have also followed up on Mininova and done a post about itsServer setup. When I first saw this graph of the Mininova server setup, my first thought was wow, that's really not a complex setup at all. I was expecting at least 5 webservers to deal with the daily load it must get hour. However the servers are pretty good spec /images/emoticons/laugh.gifual AMD Operton's). Generally its not a complex setup and makes me wonder what software is running on each server.

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A future without DRM

Bittorrent

I wasn't sure if I should title this post with a ! or ? So I decided to leave it for now. Anyway with DRM getting worst than ever according to BoingBoing, I found this post about Bittorrent's future without DRM a breeze of air. If you don't know, Bittorrent made a deal with a few movie studios to distribute there content across the bit torrent network. Then everyone shouted fowl because its content included Windows DRM. Well Bittorrent Inc have come out and said they see DRM as a current solution but they expect Add supported content will eventually win over.

The reason its bad for content providers is because typically a DRM ties a user to one hardware platform, so if I buy my all my music on iTunes, I cant take that content to another hardware environment or another operating platform. There are a certain number of consumers who will be turned off by that, especially people who fear that they may invest in a lot of purchases on one platform today and be frustrated later when they try to switch to another platform, and be turned off with the whole experience. Or some users might not invest in any new content today because theyre not sure if they want to have an iPod for the rest of their life.

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Steal this film – thePirateBay movie

I wish, mine would download at 2.5meg a second!

Quoting from Torrent Freak

Steal this film is a series of documentaries about filesharing, and p2p networks. The first part is about the Piratebay, and their vision on the things that went down the end of May.

Steal this film has full details and a selection of torrent which can be used to download it in ipod, dvd and quicktime formats. I'm sure someone will transcode it into divx, xvid, mpeg4, etc soon.

In other Bittorrent news, Disney's very senior Anne Sweeney admits to downloading pirated desperate housewives. Yes and it turns out that, at that point she realised that she was also competing with Digital pirates. Oh did I mention there is a new version of Azureus too? Yum, yum!

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Bit Torrent, as the middle man?

Tape it off the internet

All I can really say is these guys observations of TV are pretty damn sharp…

Interesting story about how Channel 4 in the UK are pushing for more secondary new media rights from their independent programme producers. I've talked about this for ages, but essentially it can't be beyond the wit of programme producers to hire an ad sales team, and go direct to their audience. They are currently missing out on a large slice of the revenue pie, this would enable them to get some of that. In these early days, call it an online exclusive, create a buzz, sell it to a 'traditional' tv network later. You know when your time is up when you get called 'traditional', huh?

The BBC also gets the retouch treatment, which could become a viable solution for the BBC when geoip finally falls apart. Matt's original screenshot and the new updated screenshot.

Theres no douht we need to deliver to the rest of the world and subscription, advertising, drm and geoip are not the solution. Well to be fair advertising works up to a certain point (i'm sure google will be exploring this more in the future).Geoip works for less-savy internet downloaders, but as we know obfuscation (as in security through obfuscation) is a bad idea and its really a problem waiting to happen when you least expect it.

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Tape it off the Internet, no really do!

Thanks to a comment by Duncan in my kill TV post a while ago, I've now checked out Tape it off the internet.com. Although its not actually a web 2.0 application or social tool yet. Its got a lot of potential as idea at least.

They seem to have a lot of the simple things right, for example there is a post about why recommendations could be important when you drop off the schedule. There right, when you drop off, you end up relying much more on friends recommendations and what people and things around you say. So for example me and sarah have become big fans of Firefly and Serenity, browncoats some would say. The reason I engaged with Firefly and the movie serenity was a couple of things. My friend doug, a lot of blogs about the treatment Firefly got from Fox and what tipped the balance a Wired article. I was recommended Lost by my buddy Waheed and Prision Break from Tom but another way I gage interesting shows is by torrents which have lots of downloaders times by the time it was published. Some Torrent sites make this easy to sort by, others dont. It would be nice to have a webapi for these things sometimes.

But back to tape it off the internet, another thing which made me shake my head in agreement is the friends x episode tracker. Its best explained in the post.

Let us take the problem outlined below, that of different friends of yours not all being on the same episode of a show, making conversation about said show… delicate to say the least, lest you drop a clanger of a spoiler.

Seriously this happens all the time, i usually have to ask what episode someone is on before talking about it. Lost is a nightmare right now because a ton of people are on the UK series which I believe is coming to the end of series 1 soon. A couple of friends have seen the whole series 1 but not started on 2, and then about 3 people I know are fully up with ep5 of series 2.

So guys behind the idea, when's the vaporware going into Permanent BETA with a Open API, tagging and tons of Ajax? hehe…

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To the person(s) who put prisonbreak.s1.ep1 inside of lost.s2.ep1

To the person(s) who put prison break.season 1.ep 1 inside of the lost season 2.ep1 torrent today and yesterday. I was, (lets say it gently) slightly pissed off. This is the kind of thing you see on old school p2p networks like Kazaa not on Bit Torrent.

This is the first time I've ever downloaded something which was labled something else on bit torrent, maybe this is a growing trend? Has anyone else experienced this? I noticed the torrent in question has been removed from the piratebay. But I had already almost uploaded 3 times the contents of the torrent without knowing by the time I had got home today. So sorry to everyone else who was also duked. But to add aditional insult, I also downloaded Prison Break ep1 too, so I ended up with two of the same file. You can tell I was very very pissed off. At least Tom's recommendation for Prison break was a good enough choice to finally calm me down. Certainly no Oz, but interesting none the less. I'm just waiting for Fox to ruin it with some 24 type government propaganda.

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Torrents and the long tail

So today I finally found the pirate bay's RSS feeds. They must have just launched them, because I've looked hard before. There quite plain RSS2 feeds but enabled across all the different genres of the site. You can all access everything via rss.php which delivers all the newest torrents regardless of category. I cant seem to find a way to get the Top 100 yet, but I'm sure its coming. Ben Metcalfe has told me RSS has been enabled for quite some time. So with that information I checkout the news page and he was right. Seems to be enabled since at least June. Oh well at least its been blogged now.

On another branch, I was looking through my Torrent RSS feeds and saw “Pump up the volume.” Some of you will instantly think about that film with the same name and Christian Slater. But no no, i'm talking about a Pump up the volume: A History of House. Its a documentary on Dance and House music by Channel 4. See i've been meaning to show Sarah it for years as shes American and lived in small Citys during her teenage years. So has little concept of what Dance music is and where it came from.
If Channel4 had made this available via DVD to buy, I would have bought it at some point. But its too late now, because its here on UKnova. One word for Channel4, Longtail. Maybe they could have done something simlar to PBS with there NerdTV? I'm hoping the BBC take the PBS NerdTV example as a good way to serve the longtail.

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IPTV stuff I have been watching recently

The TV is certainly a dead medium in my house, but me and Sarah do watch mainstream shows like Extras, Catherine Tate, Daily Show, etc like everyone else. But video content is growing online and with free services like youtube, ourmedia, bittorrent and TVRSS making distribution easy. Its easy to see why more of my TV watching time is used up watching content you dont see in the mainstream.

I kept meaning to write something about all the IPTV/vidcasts I have been watching recently. Then today on Digg I found this entry titled Top 15 Tech Shows

This is a list of the best free downloadable tech shows currently available on the Internet. These shows are also referred to as vidcasts, VODcasts, videozines, and IPTV

The once I watch myself are,
Diggnation, my current fav. Two people from TechTV (krose and alex) talk about the top 10 stories on Digg every week. Simlar to Slashdot review but in video form.
Digital Life TV, downloaded the videos but not actually checked this one out yet.
Systm, very polished and professional mainstream hacking show, perfect for airing on a TV network.
The Broken, the first decent hacking show to appear on the web as a vidcast. Kevin rose again and techtv people but all good fun.
From The Shadows, very good hacking and modding show. Quite professional but full of interesting hacks. Well worth checking out there recent Defcon coverage.
The Scene, a slightly geeky but somewhat lame soap about the movie scene. Entertainment value is not bad, when I was sitting on the crowded train.
Hack Point Five, is pretty funny and doesnt take its self so seriously like from the shadows etc.
Channel 9, as it tends to have previews and quite interesting interviews with people behind Microsoft products. It can be hit and miss however.
Rocketboom, because amanda congdon is a geek goddess and this show is as somewhat like the jon stewart's daily show but for internet culture. Think of it as BoingboingTV crossed with the daily show and your close.

I'm going to check out the others soon, maybe you should give them a try? I only wished they all supported TVRSS, but I'm working on ways to get them all into one feed a bit like how Jon did for Systm and Diggnation.

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Skype opens up

Skype

Just as google talk hits the news, Skype unleashes a response which answers a few of the questions about Skype and its openness.

Skype has a present to give back to the internet for all of the amazing support we have received from the internet community. We are announcing two new initiatives that make Skype and the Web a little more interesting and open up new possibilities for the developer and partner community. After all � sharing is good

The full text is here. Theres also a developers area and a official skype blog. Which is weird because I kinda of assumed Skype Journal was almost it. Skype is also tipping its hat to the community efforts through there extras gallery, which is really a large directory of links.

For those wondering about Google Talk vs Skype, check out this good summary of the difference from a normal user point of view.

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