The defendant in Britain’s first prosecution over illegal file-sharing has been found not guilty.

A new poll’s revealed more money is being spent on legal downloads by illicit file-sharers than law-abiding folk. According to the Digital Music Survey, fifteen per cent of the British population uses peer-to-peer software – and nine per cent will even admit to doing so in order to obtain copyrighted material they haven’t paid for. At the same time, it’s been shown that shutting down a major P2P site may only lead to a boom in alternatives as file-swappers try to fill the vacuum.

A new BitTorrent program could be good for consumers and even, for a change, internet service providers. The news comes as UK ISP Entanet prepares to implement traffic-shaping measures – citing the heavy demand put on its network by peer-to-peer file-sharers as one of the reasons.

The owner of what’s thought could be one of the oldest BitTorrent sites on the web has had his home raided before being arrested and having possessions seized. UK-based Filesoup, which was founded in 2003, was targeted by police and copyright infringement officers on Monday.

A man who downloaded over three thousand copyrighted movies on the Internet has been let off the hook in the Spanish courts. Meanwhile, police in Russia – previously seen as a safe haven for file-sharers – have launched what could be their first ever raid on a BitTorrent tracker.

The world’s most popular BitTorrent site is blocking off content that infringes copyright ahead of its forthcoming court appearance. MiniNova, which reached the “eight billion downloads” milestone last month, is testing a third party filtering system that stops users getting their hands on hit TV shows and films.

Throttling – or “traffic-shaping” as Internet Service Providers like to call it – is the usual route ISPs take to reduce BitTorrent traffic on their networks. But one Israeli ISP, Bezeq International, is taking the opposite approach: speeding up torrent transfers for its customers. It’s hoping that’ll have the same effect.
BitTorrent files are now thought [...]

Imagine there’s a movie you can’t wait to see. Imagine you go to your BitTorrent tracker of choice and it’s not there. So you go on Twitter and complain to the world at large about it – and who should reply but the film studio that made it, which ends up giving you a free [...]