File-sharing site The Pirate Bay is planning to build robot drone planes to host its servers in the sky. That way, the thinking goes, law enforcement won’t be able to seize their machines without committing overtly aggressive acts such as firing the flying servers down with anti-aircraft weaponry.

“We can’t limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore,” the site said in a blog post Sunday. “These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we’re building, that’s more than enough.”

The Pirate Bay says the small drones will “float some kilometers up in the air.” They seem to be a way of simultaneously provoking and eluding law enforcement, which, according to the blog post, will have to either let their servers operate or commit “a real act of war.” It’s certainly an interesting idea, and something that would be fascinating to see play out.

The Pirate Bay has long connected users with massive collections of music and movie files, without regard for copyright infringement concerns. It’s drawn the ire of law enforcement as well, and is wary of more raids on its servers and property. Read more »

That didn’t take long: The new Danger Mouse album Dark Night of the Soul found its way onto various torrent sites this weekend after reports surfaced that the Hip Hop producer won’t be able to legally publish the record due to a dispute with the major label EMI.

NPR’s website reported last Friday that Danger Mouse recently collaborated with Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous as well as Iggy Pop, Vic Chesnutt, Nina Persson and various other musicians for an album that was supposed to be accompanied with a 100 page photo book by David Lynch. However, it wasn’t meant to be. The artists got into trouble with EMI, according to the project’s website, which reads:

“Due to an ongoing disput with EMI, Danger Mouse is unable to release the recorded music for Dark Night of the Soul without fear of being sued by EMI. Danger Mouse remains hugely proud of Dark Night of the Soul and hopes that people lucky enough to hear the music, by whatever means, are as excited as he is.” Read more »

Luxemburg’s Root eSolutions pulled the plug on dozens of torrent and file sharing community sites after receiving legal threats, according to a gulli report. Some of the more popular sites affected by the measure are www.torrent.to, www.relfreaks.com, www.flashload.org, www.datensau.org, www.sceneload.com and www.ddl-scene.com.

A representative of the hosting company told gulli that it received a court order to take down the sites, complete with the threat that the police would confiscate 30 servers if Root wouldn’t act. Root was able to inform the owners of the sites affected before the take-down, but apparently no on acted upon the warning. Since them, some admins seem to have taken some initiative, as some of the domains redirect to new hosts, albeit without the original sites in place.

The hosting company spokesperson told gulli that some of the admins would probably just move their sites to German or British hosting providers, but expressed doubt that such a step would offer any more protection because those companies would have to follow the same European Union copyright directives.

BitTorrent’s popularity is growing every day. Despite the lawsuits that some of the larger torrent sites are involved in, they continue to grow traffic wise. Let’s take a look at how Google ranks the top torrent sites.

It is hard to make a definite list of the most popular BitTorrent sites. Over the years we’ve made quite a few lists, and reported some of the latest trends.

Most lists we published were based on Alexa’s ranking, mainly because it was pretty much the only traffic source that was available. Recently, however, Google started to rank websites as well, including a traffic estimate.

So, let’s see how well Google does, and how their traffic estimation and ranking compares to actual traffic data and Alexa’s ranking respectively.

One of the interesting features of Google’s site comparison is that it gives an estimation of the daily traffic when you’re logged in on a Google account. The data used for the traffic statistics comes from Google analytics, consumer panels, and other third-party market research.

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The six individuals who are arrested for allegedly sharing music on the OiNK BitTorrent tracker, are due to report to police at the start of July. The five men and one woman, who are suspected of conspiring to defraud the music industry, will have their bail extended. Unsurprisingly, the police need more time to make their case.

On Friday 23rd May, three people were arrested by police, followed by another three on Wednesday 28th May. All six – five men aged between 19 and 33 and a 28-year-old woman – were arrested in the UK on suspicion of “Conspiracy to Defraud the Music Industry”, and other copyright offenses.

It is alleged that the individuals were users of OiNK who uploaded music to other users in advance of its commercial release date.

Suspects were taken to their local police station for questioning and required to provide DNA samples and fingerprints. Sources close to those arrested confirm that most accusations relate to the uploading of a single album by each suspect but despite the fact that uploading music is not a crime in the UK if done for no profit, somehow this civil issue had been transformed into allegations of serious crime, with police paying close attention to donations the suspects made to the site, presumably in an effort to find some financial motive.

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The British government appears to be running out of patience with ISPs as they struggle to come to an agreement with the music industry on P2P music piracy. One ‘top-level’ ISP executive says “The British government just put a gun to our head.” Major UK ISPs are now in “serious” talks with the music industry.

Recently we reported on the agreement between UK ISP Virgin Media and the British Phonographic Industry to start sending out warnings to Virgin’s subscribers who the BPI accuse of uploading copyright music.

Now, according to a Digital Music News report, the British government has started urgently applying pressure to prominent ISPs to find a solution to the ‘problem’ of file-sharing. The pressure includes a threat to bring in new laws, should ISPs and the music industry not come to a solution of their own.

The government previously set a deadline of April 2009 for the parties to reach an agreement but according to sources, pressure is intensifying to deal with the issue sooner. A “top-level executive” gave an indication of the level of pressure stating: “The British government just put a gun to our head.”

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Despite being ensnared in legal proceedings with the MPAA, isoHunt is continuing to grow. Adding fuel to the ’significant non-infringing use’ argument is their latest partnership, with the Creative Commons music distribution site Jamendo.

When BitTorrent sites have come under attack by media groups and their battalions of lawyers, it’s usual for them to pull up the drawbridge and keep the site going as is, and try to get the case over with as soon as possible.

The other option is to close down and hunt for a settlement, but isoHunt, like its other big-site brethren, hasn’t. Despite a legal campaign that’s now over two years old, it continues to grow and add features and functionality.

One of these new developments has been the addition of increasing numbers of Creative Commons (CC) licensed material. Creative Commons media is licensed by the creator, to be shared – usually with some restrictions – and is the same license used by TorrentFreak.

It’s not a niche license, instead it is becoming increasingly popular, with Nine Inch Nails having released their Ghosts album under a CC license earlier this year.

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According to an ever increasing wave of emails to TorrentFreak, it appears that residents of at least two countries can no longer access Demonoid.

Not only are users from the Netherlands complaining they cannot access the site but now it ’s the turn of Brazilian BitTorrent fans to wonder why they’ve been cut off.

Whenever a popular torrent site goes down, it’s fairly normal for us to start receiving emails from users concerned about what’s happening, which then dry up fairly quickly after the site in question returns.

Just recently we’ve been receiving a steady stream of emails asking why Demonoid is down which seemed strange because the site was operating normally each time we checked.

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Today, one of Mininova’s users will will have the honor to download the 5 billionth torrent, an impressive figure for a site that has only been around for little over three years.

If Mininova continues to grow at this rate, we might see the 10 billionth download before the year ends.

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The MPA(A) has announced that it is demanding $15.4 million from the Pirate Bay in the upcoming court case, to cover the damages they suffered from 4 movies and 13 TV-episodes that were made available via the popular BitTorrent tracker.

The movie titles they are claiming damages for are Harry Potter, Syriana, The Pink Panther and Walk the Line and the 13 episodes of the popular TV-show Prison Break.

MPAA demands 222,50 kronor ($37) for each download. For Harry Potter, 261,50 kronor ($43) and for the first season of Prison Break 416 kronor ($68).

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