The focus of the study is on lag times between U.S. release and foreign release. The study found that longer gaps between a movie’s release in America and its release in foreign countries led to increased piracy in those countries, and correspondingly lower box office sales. The study estimates that pre-release piracy impacted foreign box office sales by as much as 7%
In the U.S., however, box office sales were not impacted by piracy at all. The study concludes that the impact of piracy is driven primarily by the lack of legal availability of content in foreign markets.

The study was conducted by economists Brett Danaher and Joel Waldfogel. Danaher is an assistant professor of economics at Wellesley College. Waldfogel is a professor of applied economics at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. The paper is currently under peer review preparatory to publication in an academic journal. Here is the abstract:

Hollywood films are generally released first in the United States and then later abroad, with some variation in lags across films and countries. With the growth in movie piracy since the appearance of BitTorrent in 2003, films have become available through illegal piracy immediately after release in the US, while they are not available for legal viewing abroad until their foreign premieres in each country. We make use of this variation in international release lags to ask whether longer lags – which facilitate more local pre-release piracy – depress theatrical box office receipts, particularly after the widespread adoption of BitTorrent. We find that longer release windows are associated with decreased box office returns, even after controlling for film and country fixed effects. This relationship is much stronger in contexts where piracy is more prevalent: after BitTorrent’s adoption and in heavily-pirated genres. Our findings indicate that, as a lower bound, international box office returns in our sample were at least 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy. By contrast, we do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy.

Some entertainment companies are already becoming aware of the losses caused by delaying international releases. The BBC network in recent years has begun airing some of their most popular shows (e.g., Doctor Who and The Graham Norton Show) on BBC America on the same day that they air in the UK.

In that story it was reported that the switch to Magnet links would allow the entirety of The Pirate Bay to be stored on a USB drive. That has apparently been confirmed. The Pirate Bay user allisfine has posted a link allowing users to download the entire archive of The Pirate Bay’s Magnet links. The entire file, which purports to be every Magnet link The Pirate Bay hosts, is 90 MB. When unzipped, the archive expands to a whopping 164 MB. Which means that all of The Pirate Bay would fit on the smallest, cheapest USB drives available. Each entry in the archive file includes the Magnet link, the size of the file to be downloaded, and the number of seeders and leechers at the time the snapshot was taken.

This goes to prove how difficult sites like The Pirate Bay are to shut down. While government action like SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and the shutdown of MegaUpload are designed to curb so-called piracy, those who are intent on sharing copyrighted material have proven themselves extremely capable when it comes to finding a way around measures designed to thwart them. During last month’s SOPA blackout, The Pirate Bay insisted that they would survive any legislative attempts to shut them down. Meanwhile, recent data has shown that the US government takedown of MegaUpload has done nothing to slow the torrent (if you will) of file sharing being done on the web.

Mirrors of The Pirate Bay are already all over the internet. They allow would-be file sharers living in countries where The Pirate Bay is blocked to continue to access the site. Now that the entire index of The Pirate Bay’s Magnet links can be shown to fit on a small USB drive, we can expect the number of mirrors to increase dramatically, further stymieing government efforts to block the site.

Tribler is a torrent client that’s been around awhile – it’s currently up to version 5.5. Unlike other clients that require you to obtain .torrent files from the internet and then use the torrent client to open them, Tribler operates on a purely peer-to-peer basis. That is, instead of searching The Pirate Bay, IsoHunt, BTJunkie, or one of the other myriad torrent sites, Tribler’s search box brings you results taken directly from peers who have the files you’re looking for available to download. That means that search for and downloading a torrent file is completely decentralized. That in turn means no domains to seize and no websites to shut down, which makes laws like SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA even less likely to have any real impact on piracy than they already were.

Tribler is open source, and is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

[Hat Tip: TorrentFreak]

BTJunkie, one of the top five torrent sites since 2005, has shut down for good. The reasoning behind the shut down are mostly due to the legal scare caused by the shutdown of MegaUpload and other file sharing sites.

The site has posted a message to their users on their front page that details the heavy decision:

“This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!”

Speaking to TorrentFreak, the founder said that the legal actions taken against other file sharing sites played a major role in voluntarily taking down their Web site. He says that seeing all the trouble his friends and colleagues were getting into was a constant source of worry and stress.

The owner, however, still wants a future for BitTorrents sites. He said that the war is far from over.

It’s important to note that the site was never directly targeted by copyright holders. It was simply listed as a rogue site by the MPAA and RIAA in a report to the USTR.

The site was one of the top five torrent sites with over a million monthy users. Those users will find other places to get their fix like always. It’s just sad to see major players in the torrent business, who do provide legitimate ways for artists to share their work, go the way of the dinosaur.

BitTorrent in association with Dean Guitars will be live streaming NAMM Jam this Friday night from 6:45 p.m. to midnight. The live stream will be using BitTorrent’s new protocol that allows the duties of sharing the stream data among all those watching, just like the traditional peer-to-peer file sharing the company is famous is spearheading.

For those unaware, the NAMM Jam is a metal band festival being held at The Grove of Anaheim. The event will feature “must-see” metal acts including Testament and Jackyl.

The event will be a testing ground for BitTorrent’s new live peer-to-peer streaming protocol invented by Bram Cohen, BitTorrent’s founder and chief scientist. The protocol promises to solve the fundamental challenges of live streaming media over the Internet by eliminating the need for expensive server infrastructure and dramatically reducing latency.

“Dean Guitars are legendary and the NAMM Jam is an iconic event,” Cohen said. “While the live protocol is still in the testing phases, it’s proving to be incredibly stable. We need to push the limits and see what happens when large numbers of people join a live swarm. If anyone can do it, it’s metal fans. Jump on and help us test it.”

Curse Mackey, director of marketing at Dean Guitars and candidate for best name ever award, praised BitTorrent for providing a solution that makes live streaming easy and possible for musicians everywhere.

“Dean Guitars has always pushed to stay ahead of the curve and we’re excited to help BitTorrent break new ground for the good of musicians around the world,” Mackey said.

The BitTorrent live stream distributes the workload amongst peers viewing the stream. Peer-based architectures take advantage of the computing, storage and network resources of each person, the more people who join a stream the better it performs.

The company is currently testing the protocol every Friday at 8 p.m. by inviting a live DJ to perform at the company’s headquarters.

The Pirate Bay has apparently been planning this change for a couple of years now, but the Magnet link technology wasn’t quite ready for prime time. As of today, Magnet links will be come the default format for downloading from the website, though users will still have access to .torrent links for some time yet.

Most users will not see a difference, however, since the majority of torrent software supports Magnet links already. BitTorrent and uTorrent, the two biggest torrent clients, have had Magnet link support for some time. The only difference most users will see is a longer start-up time before downloads start.

Concerns about bandwidth aside, part of The Pirate Bay’s motivation for this move has to come from the efforts that have been taken against them in the past. Repeated efforts to shut down or block the site have occurred all over the Western world. The fact that Magnet links are harder to block and require less bandwidth and hosting space will certainly make efforts to shut The Pirate Bay down more difficult.

[Source: The Pirate Bay]

Either way, the phrase applies well to the results of an ongoing investigation by TorrentFreak into the practice of illegal downloading. Using YouHaveDownloaded.com, a new Russian site that shows an IP address’s BitTorrent activity, several major opponents of internet piracy have been caught downloading a wide variety of copyrighted content. First came reports that people in offices belonging to Sony, Universal, and Fox had been downloading music and movies of all kinds. Then came the discovery of at least six instances of downloading at the residence of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, an outspoken opponent of piracy and supporter of harsh anti-filesharing measures.

And the hits just keep on coming. Today it has been discovered that illegal downloading has been rampant in the offices of the RIAA, and the Department of Homeland Security. People at the RIAA have downloaded not only music (which might be expected) but also a variety of other content, including video (seasons 1-5 of Dexter, for example) and audio editing software. The RIAA has become (in)famous for suing anybody and everybody for downloading copyrighted material, and is a fierce advocate of SOPA and PIPA, harsh internet censorship measures currently working their way through the US Congress. Likewise, the Department of Homeland Security has been responsible for seizing and shutting down hundreds of domains for their suspected role in piracy. Yet over 900 of DHS’s IPs were used to download material illegally.

Throughout this process there has been no comment from any of the organizations caught downloading. No doubt they would claim that the downloading in their offices is not officially sanctioned. That, however, is not in doubt. It is highly unlikely that the RIAA or DHS or Fox or anyone else has encouraged or sanctioned “piracy” in their offices. But the fact remains that these organizations that are so intent on policing the internet use of everyone else are refraining from policing themselves. Though they may well continue to go after grandmas, dead people, and kids, you can bet that you won’t see the RIAA suing one of its own employees for downloading anything.

[Source: TorrentFreak]

This is the second time recently that YouHaveDownloaded.com has been used this way. On Tuesday we brought you news that TorrentFreak had used the site to uncover what appears to be rampant downloading at some of the entertainment industry’s biggest companies – which also happen to be the most vehement critics of filesharing, and the most ferocious proponents of SOPA. TorrentFreak found that people in the offices of Sony, Fox, and NBC Universal had downloaded a wide variety of content, including material to which other companies owned the copyright (for example, somebody at Fox downloaded Paramount’s Super 8).

Among the files downloaded in the French president’s residence are a Beach Boys greatest hits album, a few movies, and The Miracle of Self-Discipline, a self-help audio program.

[Hat Tip: TorrentFreak]

More and more, however, evidence is surfacing that people who download content via file-sharing services like BitTorrent, Limewire, and others are nowhere near the threat to the entertainment industry that the MPAA and RIAA would have us believe. Today TorrentFreak is reporting that an independent film called The Inner Room has begun circulating on BitTorrent. Five thousand people downloaded illegal copies of the movie in less than a day. While many in the entertainment industry would be shocked and horrified at such an event, producer Mark Diestler is actually excited. He says that his production company, Red Giant Productions, even considered leaking the movie themselves after seeing the benefit of piracy on Ink, another independent film that was pirated in 2009. Ultimately, the attention garnered by pirates pushed the movie into into the Top 250 on IMDB. Though it has since fallen somewhat, it remains in the Top 500 as of this afternoon.

This is just the latest in a long string of events that suggest that the “piracy” so despised by the entertainment industry might actually be good for them. Earlier this month, we ran a story about the Swiss government declining to change its copyright laws, which currently allow people to download copyrighted content for personal use. The country’s grounds for refusing the change – which had been requested by entertainment industry lobbyists – was a study the government had conducted that found that those who download content for free also spend more on content than those who don’t. This supported comments made over the summer by Douglas Merrill, formerly of Google, then of EMI, that Limewire users were among the iTunes Store’s best customers.

This past spring, Adam Mansbach’s parody children’s book entitled Go the F–k to Sleep skyrocketed to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list before it had even been published. Prior to the book’s publication, a pirated PDF began circulating, which led to massive pre-orders of the book on Amazon, driving it to the top of the list. Though Mansbach said that he couldn’t condone the practice, he also admitted that it had been a major factor in the book’s success. To that we can add the fact that Neil Gaiman, author of a number of bestselling novels and graphic novels, has said that sales of his books – particularly in foreign countries – have increased dramatically after electronic copies began cirulating. Gaiman has likened the practice to lending books, and called it “an incredibly good thing.”

All things considered, then, it looks like the downloading of music, movies, and books is not the boogieman that the MPAA and RIAA would have us believe, nor will it be the downfall of the entertainment industry as we know it. Quite the opposite, in fact. As has been shown repeatedly, the kind of activity the industry hopes to suppress with the passage of SOPA and PIPA could easily be turned to profit if they could be convinced to embrace the march of technological progress rather than trying to hinder it.

Using Russian site YouHaveDownloaded.com, which identifies a user’s torrent downloading activity based on their IP address, TorrentFreak took known IPs belonging to Sony, Fox, and NBC Universal and tested them. They found rampant downloading of a variety of programming – movies, music, and TV shows – at all three companies. Highlights of the findings include the Paramount Studios film Super 8 being downloaded by someone at Fox, the complete first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones being downloaded at an NBC Universal office in Fort Lauderdale, the 2011 Conan the Barbarian remake being downloaded at Sony, and someone at Google’s New York office downloading a copy of Windows 7. They also checked on the IP of the San Francisco headquarters of BitTorrent, Inc., where they found no downloading activity at all.

As remarkable as these results are, they are made all the more amazing by debate currently raging over SOPA, the anti-piracy legislation currently working its way through the US Congress. The companies whose activity TorrentFreak examined are among the most outspoken proponents of the legislation, and have a history of aggressively pursuing those who violate copyright by downloading their content.

One Twitter user summed up the situation nicely: