Posts tagged as:

Torrents

Eyyy Anvato, Help Me Find My Videos

by Jason Wilk on December 8, 2008

Anvato is a new startup that can identify videos across the web using an automated visual detection engine. Anvato’s technology can recognize content regardless of meta data or destination.
The company has raised $2 million in a partial Series A funding round led by Oxantium Ventures and is currently seeking more investment.
This is a great tool for publishers looking to identify their copyrighted content across the web. Once found, a content owner can decide to have the content taken down or begin an ad campaign to monetize on the videos. We have seen similar technology engines come out for finding licensed photos around the web, and recently YouTube has begun offering content owners a way to take down or monetize their videos that are beinng used illegally.
The problems I see with the company is that it’s not difficult to figure out what destinations are potentially hosting your content illegally. Places like SurfTheChannel aggregate together the sites to go watch free TV shows and if the show isn’t being hosted by one of those sites, it is probably just being downloaded on a Torrent (in which case, you don’t really have much ground to stand on).

by John Jorgensen on December 5, 2008

UPDATE: Amazon has sent a takedown notice to the Netherlands students that created this plugin, and they’ve complied. The students said it was an “artistic parody” and a “practical experiment on interface design, information access and currently debated issues in media culture.” The plugin can still be found around the web.
You know all those Somali pirates who have been hijacking ships on the open seas? Well, now you can play your part by hijacking games, TV shows, movies and mp3s from Amazon’s website thanks to a new Firefox extension.
The extension cross-references products on Amazon with Pirate Bay’s torrent database. If the torrent is there, a “Download 4 Free” link will display on the Amazon product’s page.
The extension made the Digg front page.
This could be the type of thing that might push torrents into the mainstream. Outside of techies, most people my age (20s) and up aren’t frequent BitTorrent users. If they could bypass the search engines and hit a button on Amazon I bet they would be a lot more likely to download a movie.

by John Jorgensen on November 8, 2008

p2p

For 48+ hours, any attempt to access the popular BitTorrent search engines VeryCD, Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay from within China would result in being redirected to Baidu.com, the large Chinese search engine.
The sites are no longer redirected and are now accessible.
The hijacks came right after a move by China to ban 10 video hosting sites due to “regulations violations.” Righttttt.
Wikipedia, YouTube and now torrent search engines have all been censored at one point in time by the Chinese government. Let’s hope this isn’t a sign of further things to come.

If you’re reading this in China, let us know if you’ve come across any other hijacks/cases of web censorship.

by Jason Wilk on November 3, 2008

Today, The Pirate Bay announced they now track more than 20 million unique peers on their torrent service.
It is estimated that the Pirate Bay tracks more than half of all BitTorrent users at any given point in time.
Last year at this time, they were tracking around 6 million peers and just 3 million before that.
Co-founder Peter Sunde notes the constant improvements on the software and hardware side as the main reasons beyond viral growth.
isoHunt and Mininova, two of Pirate’s competitors are breaking visitor records every week as well. What is the entertainment industry to do?