Elite Torrents was a group of users that seeded movies illegally using the BitTorrent platform. The Feds shut down Elite Torrents in 2005. An Duc Do, one of the members of the group was able to avoid jail-time, but still faces a $15,000 fine, 3 years probation, and 400 hours of community service. An Duc Do graduated magna cum laude from Drexel University in 2005 and lost his job with Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE:LMT) in this process.
Elite Torrents caught the attention of the MPAA when they started sharing Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith about 6 hours after the movie had it’s first screening. The movie was downloaded 10,000 times within 24 hours.
An Duc Do pleaded guilty to conspiracy and copyright infringement. Duc Do shared movies like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The Flight of the Phoenix, and King Arthur from a computer server where 133,000 users had access to it.
“They [other Elite Torrent members] threatened to kick him out of the organization because he wasn’t uploading as much as some of the other pirates were doing,” stated Floyd Miller, the prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia.
Previous defendants and Elite Torrent members Scott McCausland, Grant Stanley, Sam Kuonen, Daniel Dove face jail-time. All of these individual’s are in the early to mid-20’s.
BitTorrent is a P2P content sharing protocol used to share large amounts of data. The protocol is maintained Bram Cohen’s company BitTorrent, Inc. Cohen designed the BitTorrent protocol in 2001. Cohen’s company has raised $17 million in a third round of funding according to PEHub. The investors include DAG Venture,s DCM and Accel Partners. This brings BitTorrent’s total funding to $46.4 million.
BitTorrent powers the high quality videos that run on Revision3.com. BitTorrent has also recently signed up 2 game development companies to stream online games to customers. The two game companies are Aeria and IAHGames. Many people use the BitTorrent protocol to share copyright music and movies.
Although BitTorrent Inc. had a recent staff cut at their San Francisco, Calif. office they are actively signing deals with Hollywood distributors for the selling of movies and music.
BitTorrent, the P2P sharing technology has hired their first CFO. Mitchell Edwards, who previously worked as a lawyer at Brobeck, Phleger, & Harrison was also hired as BitTorrent’s general counsel. Edward’s most recently employment was CFO and general counsel at Groxis Inc., creators of the Grokker Desktop Software.
Edwards received his J.D. from Stanford and worked in the White House and the Supreme Court. BitTorrent was founded by Ashwin Navin and Bram Cohen. Other BitTorrent Board members include Ping Li of Accel Partners, Brad Templeton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and David Chao of DCM.
Below is Mitch’s full from the BitTorrent Management Team page:
Mitchell Edwards is the CFO and GC of BitTorrent, Inc. Mitchell has over 20 years of high-tech executive management, finance, legal and transactional experience. Prior to joining BitTorrent, he has served as a senior executive and board member of numerous emerging growth high-tech companies, a private equity fund, and was a partner of a major international law firm. His experience includes serving as CFO and GC of Groxis, Inc., VFC Technologies, Ikano Communications, and Digital Courier Technologies. Mitchell was also a Partner at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison in LA and SF where he specialized in corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions for high-tech companies, and structured, negotiated and oversaw dozens of initial public offerings and venture capital financings. Other experience includes positions at Shearman & Sterling, at the White House and at the United States Supreme Court. Mitchell earned a J.D. from Stanford Law School, a B.A./M.A. from Oxford University and a B.A. from Brigham Young University in Economics.
Often times I am irked by policies and bills laid out by the government such as telecommunication company immunity for wire tapping, but today I was actually impressed by a government decision made. The FCC told the Associated Press that Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ:CMCSA) was wrong for interfering with BitTorrent traffic.
“The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet,” stated FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin. “We found that Comcast’s actions in this instance violated our principles.”
Comcast indicated that they block BitTorrent traffic when there were heavy periods of Internet traffic, but it turns out that this was a façade. Comcast blocked upstream BitTorrent traffic all the time.
Comcast denied the allegations. Sena Fitzmaurice, a spokeswoman for Comcastcast stated that the company “carefully limited measures that Comcast takes to manage traffic on its broadband network are a reasonable part” of making sure that customers get quality service.
Marvin Ammori, General Counsel at Free Press filed the complaint with the FCC. In response to the FCC decision, Ammori stated “The FCC now appears ready to take action on behalf of consumers. This is an historic test for whether the law will protect the open Internet. If the commission decisively rules against Comcast, it will be a remarkable victory for organized people over organized money.”
The whole investigation started when Robb Topolski, a barbershop quartet singer attempted to share legal music files with others. Robb found that Comcast was blocking his uploads. Check out the video below to hear Robb speak about his evidence on Comcast.
YouTorrent is a .torrent file search engine that recently went legal. YouTorrent indexed results from The Pirate Bay, and btjunkie earlier. Basically, YouTorrent just pulled a Napster.
YouTorrent is like the Google of .torrent search. There aren’t any ads on the homepage, just the search engine box and the logo. Now that YouTorrent stopped aggregating content from all the other larger .torrent search engines, less people stayed using YouTorrent.
I did not really use YouTorrent much before because I’m not really into downloading .torrent files. As a matter of fact, today was the first time I actually tried out a search on YouTorrent. But now it seems like there are some interesting DJ mash-ups on here.
Since YouTorrent does not have any ads, the site most likely does not make much revenue (if any at all). But the platform works great. And YouTorrent receives around 10 million unique visitors per month.
“We have had some interest [to buy] from some parties. On that basis, we have presented the site to other parties in the space to see if there is interest there also,†stated Patrick, one of the founders of YouTorrent. YouTorrent may be a good acquisition for BitTorrent to make. BitTorrent acquired µTorrent, the software for downloading .torrent files in December 2006.
Information Sources:
[1] TorrentFreak: YouTorrent Goes Legal, and Up For Sale by Ernesto
[2] TechCrunch: YouTorrent On The Market, Switches To Legal Torrents by Duncan Riley
I found this on a forum via Digg. The amount was not disclosed. On the forum, Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol and Ludvig Strigeus, the writer of µTorrent announced that “BitTorrent has acquired µTorrent as it recognized the merits of µTorrent’s exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together µTorrent’s efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent’s expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client.”
The forum also mentioned that µTorrent’s software will remain lightweight, but the acquisition had mainly taken place to for access to µTorrent’s user-base. Some of the Digg users that have commented on the post see the acquisition as a bad move, but others are hoping that through this acquisition, µTorrent will be compatible for Linux and the Mac.
Two Digg users, akarpo and ikonoclasm were talking about the possibilities of DRM clients being implemented into µTorrent. “BitTorrent Inc. signed a deal with the movie industry last week because the industry wants to stop piracy” stated Digg user, ikonoclasm.
