For many the idea of downloading a movie to merely watch it once and then remove it from their hard drive has become rather unappealing and that’s why services like Put.io are starting to open new prospects for new ventures and a new segment of audience.

What is Put.io?

A service that gets files from the Web and enables either storage or direct streaming.

Put.io has the ability to fetch files from bittorrent, FTP, Direct download, Rapidshare, and also standard websites. Moreover, it can even pull links from an RSS feed and stores the files allowing you to come back and access them anytime you want.

Currently in beta, Put.io offers 50 GB of storage with 150 GB of bandwidth. While downloading files to the service will not count for the bandwidth usage, accessing the files will; this means the more you watch a file, the less bandwidth you have.

Naturally, a service like Put.io couldn’t have come without file sharing features – the site allows you to share files and folders with other people and access files from any browser supporting device. Apart from a mobile version, Put.io intends to release an API together with a Boxee plugin.

With regard to copyright issues Put.io states: "It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") and other applicable intellectual property laws. Responses may include disabling access for all users to the material claimed to be the subject of infringing activity and/or terminating submitters of the material ability to use the Put.io service at all."

Hetfiled & Trujillo firing up the crowds

Metallica’s fans from Israel who haven’t had the chance to see their idols since the tour in 1999 and feared the possibility of losing the upcoming concert of the band due to the high price of the tickets took the matter into their own social hands.

It seems that a real army of headbangers launched a campaign on Facebook to try obtaining a more reasonable ticket price for the concert scheduled for May 22, 2010. And they did succeed! From the actual price of the ticket – way too high – $159, the fans lowered it to around $80.

The power of many, right? – While initially the group included 600 followers, in less than 4 days more than 6,000 users joined the noble cause. To be honest with you, the news makes me glad, especially since I can easily remember the desperate joy at spending the few bucks I could afford back in high-school on my first ticket to a Metallica concert.

Now, I can’t help but wonder what inspiration will be drawn from this?

P2P (pie-to-pie) Fable

Surfing the net the other day I came across a great article by Mike Masnick at Techdirt, a sort of a reply to a recent RIAA statement. First of all, let’s remember some of the trade group’s latest desperate attempts to demonize file sharing and anyone coming close to it – from its efforts to link the Chinese hack of Google to Google's stand on copyright, the foolish claim that file sharers were having a negative effect on humanitarian aid in Haiti to the recent use of a fable to describe what’s wrong with file sharing.

Here’s the “exposition” courtesy of Mike:

Perhaps it's part of the RIAA's propaganda campaign for school children, but in a recent blog post, RIAA VP Joshua Friedlander compared the file sharing situation to the children's fable Nobody Stole the Pie by Sonia Levitin.
You may have heard the story. It's about a bunch of villagers all taking a little nibble of a pie, insisting that just a little bit won't hurt — and then, of course, the entire pie is gone, and everyone claims that it was "Not I" who ate the pie.

Now let’s check out what’s wrong with the picture, RIAA so keenly and self-infatuatedly presents:

“The reason the pie story functions the way it does is because the pie is a scarce and limited resource. As such, each time someone takes, it means that there is less for others. It's a zero-sum game. In contrast, with a digital file, the content is abundant and an infinite resource. Each time someone makes a copy, rather than less for everyone, there's actually more for everyone. You're actually growing the pie. Neat!”, points out Mike.

The author then goes on emphasizing the true source of the concern RIAA has when it comes to file sharing:
“The problem the RIAA and its labels face is not everyone nibbling on the pie. It's that it has always focused on selling pie at greatly inflated prices, because in the old world, you could only get the pie from a few RIAA-run pie shops. In the new world, with abundant pie, where each copy of a piece of pie expands the pie, suddenly people can get their pie from many other places. And it's been great for pretty much everyone, other than the proprietors of the RIAA pie shops.” Then he adds: “More musicians are able to get their "pies" out there, since the old pieshop gatekeeper is no longer the bottleneck. More musicians are able to make money since they no longer have to rely on the pieshop to fund their ability to make new flavors of pie.”

Artists taking the matter of selling their music in their own hands and on their own terms and keeping a revenue much larger than they would do if collaborating with a large record label, is a prospect not very appealing to music industry. Bands like Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead have proved it. Leaving aside the fact they were already famous when they made the decision to give away their albums for free and paradoxically ended up more money than they had expected, new artists could be inspired to adopt similar ways to promote themselves and that would just mean a lot of companies being forced to retire or change. And who wants changes when everything is going lavishly smoothly?

So let’s wrap it up with another fragment of Mike’s post addressing the issue of music industry vs. file sharing.

Recent studies have shown that the music industry has been growing, not shrinking over the past few years. It's just that the money is going to different places. Again, the RIAA has a blindspot for all the other places where people can get pie, and how they've build up great business models around it, assuming that if you're not getting pie from an RIAA shopkeeper, then you must be "stealing." But that's like saying every time I order pizza from Domino's, I'm stealing from Pizza Hut. Or, even worse, every time I make my own pizza at home, I'm stealing from Pizza Hut.

The real problem is not different people taking "just a little bit." The people haven't been taking, they've been growing the pie. Massively. And the musicians and record labels who understand this have been growing and profiting nicely. So, seriously, RIAA, let's leave the children's fables where they belong and start focusing on updating your antiquated business model to deal with the twenty-first century.

Nice piece of writing Mike!

LimeWire is trying  its best to keep its popularity, legit appearance and relevance in the business. The company has recently announced their plans to secure their network.

Says the press release: "LimeWire Pro users will see the 'Protected by AVG' assurance whenever a downloaded file is safely scanned and cleaned." It's great to see a developer taking a proactive approach. Plenty of P2P users don't understand the risks associated with what they're downloading, so I appreciate LimeWire doing something to mitigate that risk.

As expected, the new protection feature will only be included on LimeWire's pro version (the one you pay for) probably to make it more appealing for people who really want to spend money on file sharing apps.

Jason Herskowitz, VP Product Management for LimeWire, states "LimeWire is committed to providing peer-to-peer's best user experience and we are vigilant about user security." He continues, "We are always looking for ways to improve, and with AVG's seamless integration into LimeWire, we will be providing users with peer-to-peer's most secure technology."

TorrentFreak has published the data they collected with the top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent for the week ended March 7. All the films included in this chart are DVDrips (unless mentioned otherwise).

‘From Paris With Love dropped one place this week and let vampire flick ‘The Twilight Saga: New Moon’ lead the chart after a surprising return in the top most downloaded films on p2p networks. ‘Ninja Assassin’ occupies the third position.

(via TorrentFreak)

The tables turn – Atari and other major game publishers have chosen Davenport Lyons to represent them numerous times and the law firm quickly made a reputation for hunting alleged copyright infringers. However, according to GI.biz, the firm is now being investigated for harassment and bullying by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, an industry watchdog.

It’s been two years since the consumer group Which? started to point to the wrongdoings of the firm which had adopted the policy of sending out letters accusing people of illegal file sharing.

The letters relied very much on intimidation, demanding a £300 damage fee or risk being be taken to court. This caused Which? to dub the warnings as "excessive" and "bullying". The group in a recent statement said that "Davenport Lyons was making incorrect assertions about the nature of copyright infringement and ignoring evidence presented in defence. It added that the letters incorrectly claimed their recipients were legally responsible for ensuring their internet connections were properly secured."

The investigation which blows a little wind of change in the system was hailed by Adds Deborah Prince, head of legal affairs at Which? who said: "We're pleased to see some action at last from the SRA and hope the tide is finally turning in favour of consumers. We now want to see some decisive action to stop these bully-boy tactics."

With this latest edition, SXSW music festival continues its much-acclaimed convention of publishing free tracks from participating artists, accounting for the distribution of thousands of quality songs since 2005. On multiple occasions in recent years, SXSW itself has been involved in encompassing festival song collections into single torrents for simplicity purposes and uploading them online. Since 2008, however, the public was asked to contribute in fulfilling this task.

Although the song list is quite extensive, setting up the torrent and uploading it online can be handled by one person alone, as all of the MP3 files are all gathered on SXSW’s website. While in 2008 this assignment was completed entirely by Greg Hewgill, Ben Stolt volunteered to do the same for the following song editions, in 2009 and 2010, respectively. So far, torrents created through the courtesy of SXSW have registered a huge success among online file sharers, accounting for more than 100,000 downloads.

The great thing about the tracks is that the artists themselves have approved them for distribution, which means that they can be downloaded without the risk of raising suspicions from the RIAA. This year’s first release comprises 646 tracks totaling 3.35 GB, but SXSW have promised to top that by making an additional 200 tracks available in the near future.

The torrent includes quality festival performances from all kinds of artists in a wide scope of music genres. If you are a music enthusiast looking for a free fix, then you should definitely give it a try.

This year’s highly anticipated SXSW music festival is scheduled to take place between March 17-21 in Austin Texas, so plan ahead and make sure you don’t miss it!

Week ended March 7

(http://download.cnet.com/windows/)

We’re back this week with the music chart posted by the guys at Kickasstorrents. The Music Top 5 presented here applies for this site alone and represents just a random selection from the most popular album downloads picked by the site’s crew.

# 1 this week is the release from Gorillaz – “Plastic Beach” followed by a new hit record by DJ Drama & Fabolous and also the latest album by Massive Attack which is not a stranger for this top. As it’s often the case with this chart, it also includes a top-notch discography – this time is Led Zeppelin’s.

Probably the most surprising apparition this week comes from a true legend of rock music – Jimi Hendrix with a NEW album (yeah, there’s no miswriting there, a new album launched in 2010!). According to jimihendrix.com website, the album includes:

• 12 previously unreleased studio recordings
• Features "Valleys Of Neptune," one of the most sought after of Hendrix's commercially unavailable recordings
• Includes exciting 1969 arrangements of classic signature songs "Red House," "Fire" and "Stone Free"
• Limited edition LP to be individually numbered out of 5,000 pieces and pressed by RTI in California

1. Gorillaz – Plastic Beach;
2. DJ Drama & Fabolous – There Is No Competition;
3. Massive Attack – Heligoland;
4. Led Zeppelin – Discography;
5. Jimi Hendrix – Valleys of Neptune;

Engaged in an overwhelming battle against online piracy they are planning to win, the UK government has not been taking the best decisions lately as we already noted in a previous post this week.

After the politicians’ intention to alter the Digital Economy Bill by introducing a regulation that empowered judges to block access to a specific website if suspected to promote copyright infringement caused a wave of public discontentment, the UK government tried to fix things but only managed to come up with yet another outrageous solution. In fact, the “reassessed” proposal announced by politicians may have an even more pronounced negative impact on perfectly legitimate online resources, as Cory Doctorow describes in his write up in The Guardian:

“As our routine media files have increased in size – multi-megapixel images, home videos, audio recordings of meetings and so on – it's become increasingly difficult to use email to share data privately with family, friends and colleagues, because most email servers croak over really big files. For example, the sound editor for my podcasts uses a web locker to send me the mastered audiofiles for my review (and he's not the only audio person who relies on this; many's the time I've had an audiobook publisher send me an MP3 of an audiobook for review through a web locker).

There are plenty of personal uses too: my parents live in Canada and are always hungry for video of their granddaughter, but I don't want to make our home movies available on the public internet, so web lockers save the day for us. And when my immigration attorneys needed a mountain of scanned bank statements sent to their office for my application for permanent residence in the UK, a web locker made it easy to convey an encrypted archive to them. There's no way to square this need for private file sharing with the entertainment industry's demand that all files be placed in the public sphere, where they can be inspected for infringement.”

In addition, Doctorow explains that the restraints put forward by the government aren’t likely to succeed in stopping illegal file sharing anyway. He believes that politicians’ measures will only work in the detriment of legitimate Internet users whose activities depend on such technology, while also placing these people at risk of privacy violations.

Politicians seem to have strayed far from the right track in their effort to stop copyright infringement and are now missing important aspects of the overall picture. They have associated technology with piracy, and are now trying to block the latter indirectly by constraining access to various resources on the Web, whether for legitimate use or not. UK authorities could surely use a change of perspective in their current approach.