TIGA, a company that represents and serves the interests of games developers and associated businesses in UK, has recently published a study according to which an important percent of its members regard piracy rather as a problem than an imminent danger to hovering over their revenue.

Gamasutra posted some edificatory figures:

“60 percent of developers said piracy is a problem; of these, 90 percent believe the problem is "constant or increasing," according to TIGA. But of those surveyed, only 10 percent said the threat level was "high," while 20 percent called it "medium" and 60 percent believe it is "low." (10 percent had no opinion).”

When it came to how illegal file sharing should be dealt with in light of the latest anti-piracy measures taken by the UK government, 50 percent of the developers opposed the "three strikes" policy of disconnecting copyright infringers.

"The results of the TIGA piracy survey clearly demonstrate that UK developers are taking the initiative when dealing with the issue of piracy, and looking for new ways of delivering content and communicating directly with their consumers," says TIGA CEO Richard Wilson.

Worth mentioning is also that only a small percent (30 %) of the developers say DRM would be relevant in combating piracy.

photo credit: download.cnet.com

After last week’s hot talks about Congress members bringing sensitive data home and inadvertently sharing it through file sharing software, now a new leak makes the headlines. Microsoft’s digital forensics software made its appearance on p2p networks, The Inquirer reports.

Dubbed COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor) this tool was developed for as a small, accessible program that can fit on a USB drive to be used by police forces in PC forensics.

While the program is offered for free to police worldwide as an extra help in cybercrime cases like online fraud, identity theft, child pornography and illegal downloading, its use by civilians is strictly forbidden.

The irony is that the software was specifically developed for extreme ease of use but that simplicity might turn out to be a downfall as it allows about any Internet user to completely master it within minutes. The big worry now is that once in the hands of online criminals, the program would help them come up with the ‘antidote’ that would guarantee being one step ahead of police by removing incriminating information from their computers.

Microsoft said about COFEE that it "enables the officer to take advantage of the same common digital forensics tools used by experts to gather important volatile evidence, while doing little more than simply inserting a USB device into the computer."

KICKASSTORRENTS

Genre: General

Language:English

Registration: not required

– the site kicks ass indeed! With more than 2,550,000 torrents indexed this fast-mounting torrent tracker seems set to become a reference on the BitTorrent scene. First off, the site has one of those clean, stylish looks for which you fall instantly. Then there are its unique features –this is a short ‘inventory’ and I won’t be getting too much into details but I can name a few – a very fast searching function, lots of verified, thus100% safe to download torrents (a ‘crown’ symbol signifies just that), latest popular torrents in main categories displayed on the main page, comprehensive detail pages for individual torrents, categories extended to sub-categories and further to specific grouping and many other. No doubts about it, Kickasstorrents is definitely one site no file sharers should neglect.

BESTMMATORRENTS

Genre: Sports

Language:English

Registration:required

– this is a great site for those looking to download martial arts related content. Just set up an account which only takes a few seconds and you’ll be able to grab awesome stuff from MMA fights to MMA instructional, from Boxing to Traditional Martial Arts and Self-Defence; it’s all here- conditioning videos, eBooks etc, well organized in many categories and subcategories (I even found taiji videos!) for easy navigation. (careful with the ratio though!)

LASTTORRENTS

Genre: General

Language:English, Romanian

Registration: required

– the ex-BiTT Torrentstorrent indexer resurrected under a new name and ‘face’. A Romanian torrent tracker with a large database, great torrents, nice categories and a fine design. You have to register to be able to download content or browse files.

FILES24

Genre: General

Language:English, Romanian

Registration: not required

- P2PON has posted a recent review of this site whose growth in both torrents indexed and users we’re looking forward to. Here’s a fragment from our post: “[Files24 is] a mixture between IMDb and BitTorrent. The site lists a number of movies each with useful movie data included such as a genre, plot summary, director, list of cast members etc plus the IMDb rating and a direct link to IMDb.”

These sites will be also added to our extended lists of Top Most Popular Torrent Sites

Zombieland - the most downloaded film this week

TorrentFreak has published the data they collected with the top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent for the week ended November 8th. All the films included in this chart are DVDrips (unless mentioned otherwise).

‘Zombieland’ has made a comeback on the chart, this time as the leader (over a million downloads) with the newly entered ‘500 Days of Summer’ following closely (Terminator: Salvation dropped to the bottom of the chart where it belongs) and the ‘Surrogates’ resting same as last week on third position.

Half of this week’s list is made up of new apparitions so the chart is pretty fresh we can say.

(via TorrentFreak)

Ranked 199 by Alexa, isoHunt is a most prolific p2p file sharing site which managed in 6 years of existence to gain extreme popularity, gather millions of users, but also dodge lawsuits from copyright holders.

The founder of the popular BitTorrent search engine, Gary Fung, has been interviewed recently by Computerworld in light of rumors about him hoping for a collaboration with the movie and the music industries. In the Q&A interview Fung also revealed some details about how he succeeded in keeping the site on the surface despite legal matters and his plans for his new ‘baby’ – another p2p site.

Here’s Gary Fung talking about what makes the difference between isoHunt and other similar search engines:

How did you start isoHunt? I was studying engineering and physics at UBC when I started isoHunt. I just wanted to learn some new programming.

Were you an active file-sharer? Not really. Frankly, I wasn't even using Napster back then. But I saw how potentially disruptive P2P was to the entertainment industry and content distribution in general. There was a gap in terms of a good search engine for file-sharing networks. Google was getting big back then, but wasn't yet on top. Neither Pirate Bay nor MiniNova were around yet.

How is isoHunt different from them? The Pirate Bay gathered the torrents that point to files and hosted them on its own servers on something called a BitTorrent tracker. A tracker is like a traffic cop for content: it tells a downloader who else has the content you're looking for.

Pirate Bay also categorized torrents for easier browsing. Both BitTorrent trackers and categorization are touchy issues, legally. Because the law is all about intent, whether you are intentionally leading people to copyright infringement.

isoHunt is a search engine, which most of the others are not. We go out and index the torrents on other BitTorrent trackers, including MiniNova, LegalTorrent.com and others: sites with Creative Commons-licensed music, as well as BitTorrent sites with just Linux and open-source software.

As a search engine, we don't host torrents, nor do we edit or categorize them. We just link back to the sites hosting the torrents, as well as cache a copy of those torrents.

Google does the same thing. If you go to Google and type in a TV show's name and add "filetype:torrent" you will see torrents, too.

I don't think isoHunt would be better as a directory. You saw the competition between directories versus search engines: Yahoo versus Google. We all know how that went.

While complaints against piracy from the music and movie industries are pouring in daily, and book publishers as well as game producers are catching up with lawsuits and anti-piracy strategies too, others have adopted an entirely different approach.

RedLynx, developer of Trials HD, a game you can quickly become addicted to, has decided to take matter into its own hands and be one step ahead of pirates – so, the company has voluntarily made its own game available on popular torrent sites.

However, there’s catch – the version distributed for free on p2p networks was short of one key feature, namely – Leaderboard support, a feature which RedLynx CEO Tero Virtala, called "the soul of the game." The strategy is that the pirates would love the game so much as it is – without leaderboard – that they would want to buy the full version of Trials HD and enjoy all it has to offer.

Whether or not the plan will be proven inspired it remains to be seen but the mere fact that a game company thought out-of-the-box for a change is worthy of laud.

The entertainment industry is a crybaby again. A recent ruling from the district court for Asker and Bærum was given against its claims and hopes. The court decided that Norwegian ISP Telenor will not be forced to block access to The Pirate Bay.

From the beginning of the year, the movie and music industries have looked for ways to determine Telenor to block the popular file sharing site. The ISP, however, kept a firm stand and refused to give in to warning letters or trail threats saying that there is no legal grounds for any company such as itself to serve the interests of copyright owners by blocking individual sites.

Telenor pointed out repeatedly that “It's not reasonable to saddle ISPs with a censorship role on the Internet, Telenor said in a statement,” and that “blocking sites doesn't solve the problem of illegal file sharing — it just moves the problem elsewhere.”

The company sees only a way out of the trouble for the industry – to improve its services so that popularity of file sharing sites like The Pirate Bay would decrease.

In the light of the latest events linked to p2p regulations, such as Lord Mandelson’s announcement for implementing disconnection plans and EU’s scheduled amendment for the current legislation which we reported earlier today, file sharers could still benefit from a discarded "three strikes" piracy model.

One of the artists opposing such a model has always been Radiohead’s guitarist Ed O'Brien, who while not supporting UK government's decision to enforce the cutting-off plans, believes that something must be done to stop online piracy and he sees bandwidth throttling as a good solution.

Here are some good points why "three strikes" legislation is, ultimately an aberration.

File sharers in Europe could be given some (legal) break.Later this month the European Parliament and Council will decide upon its Telecoms Reform Package. Internet users from all 27 EU states accused of copyright infringement will be granted through this package a "fair and impartial procedure" before having their Internet connection cut off. However, so far, we have no clear definition of the syntagm "fair and impartial".

All Europe's telecoms regulations have been subjected to thorough examination which will result in this amendment.

Monique Goyens, the director general of BEUC, the European Consumers' Organisation, was quoted by the BBC News: "It has been long hard battle but at least all sides have acknowledged that fundamental rights of users need to be guaranteed in the digital world."

She further added: "However, these rights will be meaningless if Hadopi-style laws are allowed to be enforced at national level."

For those unfamiliar with the Hadopi law – it equals the ‘three strikes’ rule – illegal file-sharers would first be sent an e-mail warning, then a letter, and, it they don’t stop downloading files, would be disconnected. In France, Hadopi was adopted earlier this year.

This is no Star Treks or Star Wars! This is emotional!

Sam Rockwell - a great performance in 'Moon'

This film has substance and, personally, it reminded me that you can still find intelligence and deep concepts in Sci-Fi movies in this epoch dominated by sub-mediocre Hollywood productions in which hundreds of millions are invested.

Two things lie at the core of this production – an extraordinary idea and an extraordinary interpretation of the character Sam Bell delivered by Sam Rockwell(also remarkable in “Choke”, “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”) who practically carries all by himself the entire film.

“Moon” is really admirable for the way in which it addresses human loneliness, identity and existence altogether. Perhaps, at some points, by half-way, the film loses some of its initial ‘weightiness’ but though it pays many tributes to films of the genre from70s (the robot Gerty, for instance, whom Kevin Spacey borrowed his voice, reminds us of HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey”) it can still stand on its own feet.

This is actually the directorial debut of Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s son) and he brilliantly unfolds a psychological drama/thriller using Sci-Fi merely as a pretext to investigate the human mind. You won’t be seeing much of the astounding effects latest Sci-Fi productions have got you used to besides those having Sam Rockwell playing a double-role in long, complex scenes, plus, the moon base setting which has quite a realistic feel to it (as far as my poor perception and imagination can lead me to assume that).

Ultimately, “Moon” is a film worth watching by any movie lover not just Sci-Fi enthusiasts.

Plot Summary for Moon (imdb)

With only three weeks left in his three year contract, Sam Bell is getting anxious to finally return to Earth. He is the only occupant of a Moon-based manufacturing facility along with his computer and assistant, GERTY. The long period of time alone however has resulted in him talking to himself for the most part, or to his plants. Direct communication with Earth is not possible due to a long-standing communication malfunction but he does get an occasional message from his wife Tess. When he has an accident however, he wakens to find that he is not alone. He also comes to realize that his world is not what he thought it was.

Movie Data

Moon (2009)

Country of Origin: UK
Year of Production: 2008
Running Times: 96m 43s
Length: 8,704 ft
Format: 35mm/Super 35
Colour Format: colour
Ratio: 2.35:1
Sound: Dolby
Director: Duncan Jones

Watch the trailer below:

Important: (support film-making!) Go watch the movies you like in theaters, or buy the official DVDs when released.

Download "Moon" (via Kickasstorrents)

Last week's movie recommandation