Since 2005 the SXSW music festival has published thousands of free tracks from participating artists.

For some of the first releases the festival organizers created the torrents for the artist showcases themselves, but since 2008 this task has been taken over by the public.

Luckily all of the SXSW showcase MP3s are still freely available on the festival’s site for sampling purposes, so it only takes one person to get a torrent up and running.

For the past several years Ben Stolt has taken the time and effort to put all the MP3s on BitTorrent, and the latest 2016 release consists of two torrents containing 1,593 tracks.

That’s a record-breaking 10.39 gigabytes of free music in total, almost four times the file size of the first torrent in 2005.

All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available for those people who want to fill up their harddrives without having to invest thousands of dollars. The 2005 – 2016 archives now total more than 69 gigabytes.

Every year SXSW torrents are a great success, with many thousands of music aficionados downloading gigabytes of free music across virtually every genre from both established acts and upcoming bands.

TorrentFreak spoke to Ben Stolt who spends several hours preparing the releases each year, in part for his personal pleasure.

“My motivation is in part selfish, because, like many others, my friends and I all use the contents of the torrent to prepare for our week at SXSW Music. But without fail the emails start coming in January and February asking if there will be a torrent,” Stolt says.

“Many people come back every year, so I can’t leave them hanging,” he adds.

The job comes witch challenges though. SXSW doesn’t always make it easy to publish the tracks. For example, a few years ago Stolt had to start re-writing the ID3 tags based on the artist pages, as SXSW stopped doing so.

“Without that, the tracks would be a giant mess and mostly unidentifiable since the file names on the SXSW site are purely numeric. Also in 2014 they abruptly switched to using SoundCloud for the samples, but that was thankfully short-lived and things were back to normal the next year,” Stolt notes.

The efforts pay off though. Many people love the SXSW torrents which attract tens of thousands of downloaders each year. For some, it almost makes up for not being able to attend the festival in person.

“Appreciate the amount of work involved to make it happen. Can’t get to SXSW, so having these torrents available are the next best thing,” one downloader responds.

This year’s SXSW music festival is currently underway in Austin, Texas and ends on Sunday. The torrents, however, are expected to live on for as long as there are people sharing.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

In 2010 a fresh movie piracy brand began to conquer the Internet. Bypassing the so-called ‘Scene’, YIFY joined a new breed of release groups who publish their work directly to torrent sites.

In fact, YIFY, which later rebranded to YTS, started its own torrent website featuring high quality releases of the latest movies.

As the years went by the group amassed a huge following, and a year ago its website generated millions of pageviews per day. A true success story, but one that ended abruptly last October.

Hollywood sources tracked down the founder of YIFY and filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit in New Zealand. This meant the end of YIFY and YTS, but surprisingly the case was never heard in court.

Instead, both parties agreed to a private settlement outside of court, keeping the identity of one of YIFY’s key players out of the public eye. However, this didn’t last long.

Last week a New Zealand court confirmed the identity of the YIFY founder to the local Sunday Star Times. The news outlet reported that the movie studios filed their lawsuit against Yiftach Swery, a 23-year-old app and website developer.

Several years ago YIFY told TorrentFreak that the name was “just a random alias” but this explanation is hard to maintain now.

While we have always doubted the randomness of the popular tag, Yiftach Swery leaves little room for speculation.

Indeed, we confirmed with someone in the know that the YIF part is derived directly from the founder’s name. In theory, the same could be said for YTS but this stands for “YIFY Torrents Solutions,” our source says.

It’s worth noting that Yiftach was not the only person behind YIFY. In fact, towards the end he was no longer actively involved in encoding and uploading movies.

How many other people were involved in the group remains unknown. TorrentFreak did hear that other people connected to YIFY have been “approached” by the movie industry over the years, but Yiftach is the only one who signed a settlement deal.

One thing is very clear though, the original YIFY team is not coming back. Instead, Yiftach and his former colleagues will probably focus on picking up their regular lives again.

That said, the YIFY name lives on in the memories of million of pirates. While most of its shine has been lost, YIFY will certainly go down in history.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

This week following further intense discussions on how to bring Internet piracy under control, rights holders submitted new proposals for amendments to local copyright law.

Supported by communications watchdog Roskomnadzor, one of the key aims of the working group is to bring an end to the game of whac-a-mole caused by the country’s site blocking regime.

Ending the proxy wars

Like other countries, once pirate sites are blocked by local ISPs, proxies, mirrors and clones of those sites reappear elsewhere, rendering the blockades ineffective. This means that copyright holders have to head back to court to obtain a new blocking order if they are to keep up with the pirates.

As is already loosely the case in the UK, rightsholders with interests in Russia want mirror and proxy sites to be classified as extensions of the original blocked site and given the same illegal standing. This would mean they could be quickly blocked without need for a new trial.

Currently the courts require an individual process for each site, a position highlighted recently when ISPs were ordered to permanently block huge torrent site RuTracker but several sites appeared online which effectively circumvented the blockade.

“The Working Group proposes to simplify the blocking procedures in respect of mirrors of sites that have already been recognized by the court as illegal resources,” National Federation of the Music Industry (Sony, Universal, Warner, EMI) chief Leonid Agronov explains.

Circumventing blockades? You can’t talk about that

While the proposed measures against mirrors, clones and reverse proxy sites are not unexpected, demands being made by anti-piracy group Association for the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (AZAPO) really take things to the next level.

Just as sites can take measures to avoid being blocked, users can circumvent blocks with a variety of tools including VPNs, TOR and other proxies. People learn about these techniques online but if AZAPO has its way – and that looks likely – telling people how to circumvent web-blocking measures will become an illegal act.

In a document penned by AZAPO, approved by telecoms watchdog Rozkomnadzor, and seen by Gazeta.ru, the anti-piracy group says that banning discussion of workarounds will enhance the country’s blocking regime.

“The introduction of [a system of fines] for those who promote methods for bypassing Internet blockades will enhance the effectiveness of blocking prohibited Internet resources,” the group writes.

At this stage the proposals suggest fines ranging from around $70 for “entrepreneurial individuals” right up to $14,500 for those operating within a legal entity but it’s not yet clear how these fines will be managed or enforced.

While discussion of circumvention could soon be off-limits, there’s no intention of banning circumvention tools outright. Noting that they have legitimate uses, Rozkomnadzor says it simply wants to draw a line in the sand over the way they’re promoted online.

“These technical software tools have a wide range of useful applications. But advertising these as a way to bypass website blocks should not be a legitimate action,” a spokesperson said.

Not surprisingly, representatives from the Internet industry see things somewhat differently. Karen Ghazaryan, principal analyst at the Russian Association of Electronic Communications, told Gazeta that tightening of the law will only lead to further dissemination of information detailing how to bypass blockades.

Indeed, there would be little the authorities could do about advice pages appearing outside the country, unless they wanted to enter into the biggest game of whac-a-mole ever seen.

Crucially, clamping down on discussion is unlikely to stimulate the market for legal content consumption among consumers, Ghazaryan says.

Presented this week, the draft proposals will now be sent to the Ministry of Communications for subsequent discussion in the State Duma.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Netflix has upped its anti-piracy efforts recently, by taking a more aggressive stance against subscribers who use VPN services.

These changes were implemented to appease the major movie studios, but Netflix is also taking measures to limit access to pirated copies of its own original programming.

During the past several weeks the company has started to report thousands of ‘pirate’ links to Google, asking it to remove these from search results.

With help from their anti-piracy partner Vobile, Netflix has targeted 71,861 links to allegedly copyright infringing material from torrent and streaming sites, most of which have indeed been removed.

The links in question all point to content owned by Netflix, including popular series including House of Cards, Narcos, Sense8 and films such as The Ridiculous 6 and A Very Murray Christmas.

Unlike other copyright holders Netflix is a relative newcomer when it comes to sending DMCA takedown notices to Google. The first request was recorded last December, targeting over 3,000 links at once.

Netflix takedown request

Netflix is targeting a wide variety of torrent, streaming and hosting sites, with uploaded.net and vodlocker.com being the prime targets.

In addition to reporting these links to Google, Netflix also appears to be reaching out to ‘pirate’ sites directly as recent listings for House of Cards and other Netflix originals are frequently removed.

While the takedown efforts are unlikely to make the piracy problem go away, Netflix likely hopes to frustrate pirates enough to convert them into paying customers. That is, if Netflix’s original programming is available in their country, which isn’t as logical as it may sound.

In any case, the takedown efforts are a notable change compared to the casual piracy attitude the company had a few years ago.

Previously, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said that the company was not really bothered too much by people who pirate content via torrent sites. In fact, Netflix admitted to using piracy data to determine what shows they should license in different regions.

“Certainly there’s some torrenting that goes on, and that’s true around the world, but some of that just creates the demand,” Hastings said at the time.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

It’s hard to believe but it was more than eight years ago when a court in Denmark ordered a local Internet service provider to begin blocking The Pirate Bay.

The court found that ISP Tele2 had assisted in the file-sharing infringements of its customers, a decision that put Denmark on the map as the first European country to block the notorious site.

Since then most of the major torrent and streaming sites have also been blocked in Denmark but piracy has continued, much to the disappointment of rights holders.

Services like Popcorn Time haven’t improved the situation either, so it came as little surprise that users of the application were eventually targeted by trolls through the Danish legal system. Shortly after though, the state itself got tough, arresting the operators of two sites which allegedly spread information about the popular application.

In December, Denmark’s largest torrent site shutdown too, but that doesn’t appear to have had much of an effect either.

So for Rights Alliance, the anti-piracy outfit that counts all the big Hollywood studios and record labels among its members, much more needs to be done. Normally the group addresses its issues in private but this week took the unusual step of openly criticizing the authorities for their piracy failures.

In an open letter to the Prosecutor General, Rights Alliance director Maria Fredenslund says that not enough emphasis is being placed on the plight of the entertainment industries.

“As you know, we at Rights Alliance have worked to ensure that intellectual property crime is a priority focus, including that police and prosecutors take better care of intellectual property cases,” Fredenslund begins.

“However, we find that distribution of pirated copies is still extensively used as a platform and source of income for criminals.”

The Rights Alliance director says that public prosecution initiatives from 2013 and 2015 have failed to hit the mark and promises haven’t been kept.

“We write now because we do not see positive results in terms of the specific handling of intellectual property cases, as we were promised,” she writes.

Fredenslund wants public prosecutions of pirates to become a priority for the authorities and wants discussion to begin soon.

“There is from our side an urgent need to see concrete results in terms of cases handled, and a very clear communication from the authorities on what is illegal on the Internet,” she adds.

In publicly asking for a meeting with the Prosecutor General, Rights Alliance are clearly attempting to bring the issue of online piracy into the public eye. Quite what can be done remains up for debate.

With site blocking already in place and international efforts to physically remove sites such as The Pirate Bay from the internet failing, only targeting end users remains.

It’s understood that sending warning notices to Internet users caught pirating is still favored by rightsholders but whether those schemes have had any major effect on sales in other regions is still an unknown quantity.

The so-called “six strikes” system in the United States is still ongoing and has just been extended, but proclamations of the scheme’s successes have been almost entirely absent.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.