There has been a lot of talk about Rapidshare, a free file-hosting service, in which has been handing over information about their users who might have been comitting copyright infringments to major record labels. According to TorrentFreak since the information has been leaked German authorities has raided the home of at least one uploader.
Among other albums, Metallica’s “Death Magnetic” was made available on Radipshare by an anonymous user on the day before its official release.
TorrentFreak cited the German local Gulli, which reported that copyright holders there are citing the law they have used to compel ISPs to disclose the identities of suspected file-swappers, to get Rapidshare to disclose information on its users.
TorrentFreak posited that this strategy could potentially be duplicated to go after other free file-hosting services, such as MegaUpload, and even BiTorrent sites.
Copyright holders have already sued Rapidshare, and a German court ruled in October that the company must work proactively to remove copyrighted material uploaded to its servers.
Torrent giant The Pirate Bay has launched an interactive map showing where people are seeding and leeching torrents around the world, with data for every country giving a percentage of users, and how many connections are going through that country.
It’s a Google Maps mash-up, which is already serving up some fascinating data. “In the near future more statistics will be added, such as the type of BitTorrent clients people use, and the average download and upload speeds per region,” claims TorrentFreak, which reported the news.
Today it was repoted by Torrentfreak that according to a report in the Norwegian press today, some companies have reacted uncomfortably to the news that their Google Adwords text ads have been appearing on IsoHunt, the world’s third largest BitTorrent site.
Google has a policy of not displaying ads on sites that are involved in or linked to copyright infringement, with many torrent sites previously excluded from the scheme. Of course, some still carry Google ads, purely because Google is unaware of the nature of those sites, but with IsoHunt the situation is different. On IsoHunt the Google ads aren’t directly served by Google, but by Ask.com, a Google AdWords ‘reseller’.
Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, works with several other BitTorrent sites. Only on IsoHunt have they displayed search based ads that came from Google AdWords campaigns. They have been doing so for several months, perhaps years, but up until now nobody complained, or knew.
In a statement, Jan-Henrik Ohme, head of digital marketing at Sony BMG said “We have stopped the section of the campaign that goes to the third party until Google cleans up the issues. We have contacted Google, and they took immediate action.”
For its part, Google Norway has apologized for the situation, and said that the advertisers should not be held responsible for the placement of the ads, since due to the 3rd party involvement, they had no way of knowing where they would appear. The campaigns are not limited to Norway though, and Ask.com certainly has something to explain to Google.
This situation was bound to happen but some of the companies dont really understand why it happened. Ask.com was only allowed to have their ads on Isohunt because the deal they started with Google was done after the Isohunt deal. Thus, Google allowed all historical deals to continue as normal. Therefore, it is impossible to now have Google ads on new bittorrent related sites.
Additionally, the ads are not done through Ask.com, they are from Ask.co.uk. This is because Ask.com sell their own adwords type program still and Ask.co.uk controls the Google Adwords reseller program.
Another win for The Pirate Bay. After a long running feud with the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), in which saw a failed attempted by the IFPI to secure confidential files from the Swedish police, has now seen The Pirate Bay secure the old IFPI domain (IFPI.com).
The Pirate Bay has now taken control of the domain (IFPI.com) and will promote the International Federation of Pirates Interests.
The Pirate Bay is, of course, infamous for being the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker with over 630,000 torrents that comprise illegal rips of audio CDs, TV shows and movies, as well as software and video games.
The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak how they got the domain: “It’s not a hack. Someone just gave us the domain name. We have no idea how they got it, but it’s ours and we’re keeping it.”
