As of November 7, 2005, Grokster, the much-beleaguered file-sharing service, is no longer in operation. Grokster's Web site says:

The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal. Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files using unauthorized peer-to-peer services is illegal and is prosecuted by copyright owners.

There are legal services for downloading music and movies. This service is not one of them.

Grokster hopes to have a safe and legal service available soon.

Grokster was targeted by the RIAA and the MPAA as one that promoted sharing of films and music that were illegally available on their network.

In Hong Kong, the BBC reports, Chan Nai-ming has been sentenced to three months jail time after pirating and sharing three movies using BitTorrent.

Chan's nickname is apparently "Big Crook." He is possibly the first individual to get jail time for this kind of file-sharing activity.

Happily, the article does point out that BitTorrent has other uses besides digital piracy.

Fortune Magazine's Oct. 31, 2005 issue includes an article on BitTorrent titled "BitTorrent: The Great Disrupter; Torrential Reign" in which writer Daniel Roth explores the paradox of a technology that permits pirating of Hollywood movies on a massive scale, but still wins the support of the entertainment industry.

Today there are roughly 1.7 million copies of Hollywood movies—typically the most popular ones—being downloaded at any one time using BitTorrent, a 12% jump from last year, according to online media measurement firm BigChampagne. Analyst Informa Telecoms & Media estimates that in 2004, the downloads cost Hollywood roughly $860 million, or 4% of box office receipts. In the same period the number of TV shows downloaded grew by 150%—about 70% of them snagged using BitTorrent.

Our first review appeared today on Duffbert's Random Musings. The review was written by Dummies book reviewer extraordinaire Thomas Duff. If you're thinking about reading a technical book, Thomas has probably written a review of it!

Here's part of what he said about BitTorrent for Dummies:

If you want to know how to make it [BitTorrent] part of your world, it's worth reading...

Go read the rest of Thomas' review!

When a book is ready to go, the author is sent 10 copies to give away, or roll around on, or whatever... Today my box of 10 arrived!

The book looks great, if I do say so myself. It's always a little nervewracking to open up a book, and there's a certain amount of disbelief that it could actually be real, too.

What a great way to finish a pretty rough week.

From TUAW - the Unofficial Apple Weblog
http://www.tuaw.com/2005/05/19/reminder-azureus-runs-on-os-x-too/

Posted May 19, 2005, 11:00 AM ET by C.K. Sample, III
Filed under: Tips and tricks, Software
azureus

Hackaday today discusses the twin evils of the RIAA and the MPAA, focusing on the way they are attempting to undermine P2P networks on the Internet by targeting tracker sites that host the .torrent files. The good news: there's something called distributed tracking that means you no longer have to depend on a tracker site to host your .torrent file, and Azureus supports the protocol. Also, java-based Azureus runs on Mac OS X.

MPAA Sues BitTorrent Trackers
December 14, 2004
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000737.html
[by Edward W. Felten, at 01:45 PM]

The MPAA has announced lawsuits against the operators of P2P index servers, such as BitTorrent trackers, according to a Wired News story by Xeni Jardin.

A BitTorrent tracker keeps track of who is downloading and/or uploading a particular file, and makes this information available to others who want to find the file. The suits will presumably allege that the person running the tracker knew that the people downloading the file were infringing, and knew that the tracker was facilitating those illegal downloads, and yet the person ran the tracker anyway.

P2P: The Secret's Out

By Jon Newton
www.TechNewsWorld.com
Part of the ECT News Network
02/15/05 5:00 AM PT

Unfortunately for Hollywood, BitTorrent isn't the only game in town. As far back as 2003, Rain Networks engineers in Brazil used Windows Media 9 software to transmit a 90-minute movie by satellite from Rain's central computer in São Paulo to cinemas across the country. And it only took 20 minutes.

Mac BitTorrent client with 3D swarm-visualizer

By Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

Cory Doctorow: Bits on Wheels is a Mac-only BitTorrent client that shows you your current downloading "swarm" as a 3D visualization. Link (via Waxy)

From Easy Bake Weblogs
Fiona Apple Album Leaked
March 23rd, 2005 by Andy Wibbels

Fiona Apple finished recording Extraordinary Machine in May of 2003, but Sony/Epic executives did not think it would sell enough copies to justify the cost of promoting and distributing it. Rather than spend more money, Sony/Epic decided to cut their losses and not release the album at this time.

The album has been leaked online in the filesharing networks - it is getting downloaded a lot. Is this a marketing ploy on Sony's part?