Soon The Pirate Bay will stop linking to .torrent files. Instead, the world’s largest BitTorrent site will only list so-called magnet links. One of the advantages of the switch is that The Pirate Bay will be much more portable, and easier to copy. A new torrent listing all titles and magnet links on The Pirate Bay proves this point, as the public can download a copy that fits easily on a small USB stick – or even a few dozen floppies.

yay! people organising an exchange of non-freely available research articles. Another thing that has so much useful potential that libraries wouldn't do it.

Let’s hope they end up creating Linked Open Date triples to attach their download URLs to exisiting catalogue information.

“I isolate the causal effect of file sharing of an album on its sales by exploiting exogenous variation in how widely available the album was prior to its official release date. The findings suggest that file sharing of an album benefits its sales. I don’t find any evidence of a negative effect in any specification, using any instrument,” Hammond concludes in his paper.

HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ is on its way to becoming the number one pirated show in America. Of course, they have only themselves to blame for this.

With 2011 nearing its end, today we begin our annual look at the most-pirated entertainment titles across various categories, starting with TV-shows. Dexter comes out on top this year, followed by HBO’s debut series Game of Thrones. Although the years of exponential growth in download numbers have passed, episodes of the top TV-shows are still shared among millions of people.

With its popularity swelling and no easy way to watch for viewers without cable, HBO’s hit series “Game of Thrones” is inspiring massive levels of piracy, according to numbers from the BitTorrent-tracking and analysis firm Big Champagne. By the firm’s rough estimate, the second season of the show has been downloaded more than 25 million times from public torrent trackers since it began in early April, and its piracy hit a new peak following April 30th’s episode, with more than 2.5 million downloads in a day.

“It certainly appears to be the most pirated show of the year,” says John Robinson, a senior media analyst with Big Champagne. He says it’s too early to measure definitively, but the company’s data so far as well as the popularity rankings on download site the Pirate Bay point to “Game of Thrones” as filesharers’ favorite show of 2012. “The fact that it’s consistently at the top of the Pirate Bay’s top one hundred TV show chart seems like a pretty in-your-face leading indicator of the huge volume at which this is being shared.”

File-Sharing Is Linked to Depression, Researchers Find

What, really? Who could possibly have guessed that filesharing might... what do you mean, 'everyone'?

A new academic paper by a researcher from the North Carolina State University has examined the link between BitTorrent downloads and music album sales. Contrary to what’s often claimed by the major record labels, the paper concludes that there is absolutely no evidence that unauthorized downloads negatively impact sales. Instead, the research finds that more piracy directly leads to more album sales.

For more than a decade researchers have been looking into the effects of music piracy on the revenues of the record industry, with mixed results.

Pinterest squatters are snatching up brand identities, the way that cybersquatters grabbed names like Madonna.com and Lufthansa.com. Whether or not a major brand has any interest in Pinterest, it behooves them to protect their identities with a Pinterest usernames.

Pinterest is the social image bookmarking site that lets users "pin" their favorite images from around the Web, recently topped 4 million visitors per day. Major brands like Ferragamo are beginning to take notice and are starting to explore the site's marketing potential.

From Wil Wheaton

If I’d downloaded the [ubuntu] .iso straight from [the] server, it was going to take the better part of an hour, so I decided to grab the torrent instead. Turns out it was a good choice, because it was finished in about six minutes.
My point …is to illustrate that the bittorrent protocol is useful for more than just infringement, so when you hear industry lobbying groups making a lot of noise about piracy, you’ll remember that they aren’t giving you all the facts.