But the sheer volume it pretty staggering – in fact, it broke records.

TorrentFreak has the numbers: In just a few hours after the first torrent of the show was uploaded, 163,088 people were sharing the single torrent. That broke down to 110,303 actively sharing and 52,786 still downloading.

That’s a record in the world of BitTorrent tracking – the largest previous swarm belonging to a season premiere of Heroes with 144,663 peers.

If you take into account all of the torrents, TorrentFreak reports that estimates put the total number of Game of Thrones season 3 premiere downloads at over a million. That’s a performance that even a hard-to-satisfy Lannister patriarch can be proud of.

If you break down the numbers, the majority of sharers came from the United States (12.9%), barely topping the U.K., who took 11.5% of the pie. Australia came in third with 9,9% of the total downloaders.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons that so many people decided to torrent the show. It has a huge following, first and foremost. HBO’s international release delays don’t help either. Plus, there’s a large contingent in the U.S. (and elsewhere) that simply don’t subscribe to HBO and can’t get HBO GO because they don’t have cable. Many of these people would pay for a standalone HBO streaming service, but HBO is yet to offer that outside a few Scandinavian countries (although the prospects have gotten a bit better as of late).

But according to one HBO exec, this piracy is more of a compliment and less of a problem.

“I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts,” HBO programming head Michael Lombardo recently told EW. “The demand is there. And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network.”

If you ever wondered which U.S. Universities were the most torrent-happy, you’re in luck. TorrentFreak (with the help of ScanEye) has produced a list of the top 50 institutions for BitTorrent use.

And New Jersey’s Rutgers University takes to top spot.

Rounding out the top 10: NYU, University of Houston, USC, Texas A&M, George Washington, University of Minnesota, State University of New York at Buffalo, University of Maryland, and Tennessee State.

According to the study, the most downloaded files at Rutgers were Fast Five, Cars 2 and Puss in Boots, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (game), and the album The Dreamer, The Believer (Common).

Check out the top 25:

Of course BitTorrent use doesn’t necessarily equate to unauthorized file sharing. But TorrentFreak confirms that it’s that kind of use that’s the most popular.

If you don’t see your current college of alma mater on the list, that probably means one of two things – either your school is not very torrent-happy, or they’re just really good at hiding their tracks. Evidence of the latter? Another recent study said that Gainesville, Florida was the piracy capital of the United States. Absent from this list? The University of Florida, which is located in Gainesville.

British data tracking firm Musicmetric took on the massive task of tracking BitTorrent traffic across the United States. It was found that Gainesville, Fla is the pirate capital of the US. The study focuses solely on music downloads, but the results would probably be similar if they included movies.

Other cities rounding out the top five pirate centers of the country include Albany, GA, Fairbanks, AK, and our own Lexington, KY. It seems a little strange that smaller cities like these are pirate havens, but they all have one very important thing in common – they’re all university towns. It’s been a long standing assumption that college age students pirate more than anybody else.

These cities may be contributing the most to music piracy, but there are a number of metro areas including the usual suspects like New York City and Los Angeles that are contributing as well. All of these cities combined download 97 million BitTorrent files. The research indicates that 78 percent of said files were albums while 22 percent were individual songs. If you assume that the average album has 10 songs, the number of songs downloaded reaches 759 million.

The research obviously says something about the widespread influence of piracy in younger generations. All of my classmates, dorm mates and everybody else I knew in college pirated music at some point. It’s just part of the college experience. That’s beginning to change thanks to services like Spotify, but piracy is still used mostly by the young.

If music execs want to stop piracy, they’re going to have to start talking on their level. The youth, especially in college, aren’t stupid. They know a rotten deal when they see one and the preferred method of marketing music is rotten. That’s why Spotify has taken off among college students. It’s convenient and cheap. Record labels need to offer more services like Spotify if they want to survive.

[h/t: CNET]

It was revealed this morning that RevolutionTT, a private BitTorrent tracker, had been hacked. A group simply calling themselves “Afghanistan Hackers” uploaded a text file containing 19,000 username/password combinations for the exclusive torrent tracker. They encourage people to log in to private accounts, change the password, and enjoy the site for themselves.

TorrentFreak reports that the information leaked in the document is real. People have been using the username/password combinations to log into paid accounts. From there, people began to send fraudulent emails from the hacked accounts, or began looking to see if the same usernames or passwords had been used on other sites.

It’s already strange to see a torrent tracker get hacked, but the response has been even stranger. The admins at RevolutionTT are claiming they were not hacked. They have even started to ban members who are asking legitimate questions about the hack.

Regardless, old and current members of RevolutionTT are encouraged to change their passwords now. These kind of attacks can have ripple effects across the Internet. A victim on one site can find that all of their accounts across the Internet have been hacked simply because they used the same password across all of them.

There is a sliver of good news in all of this. The data leaked by the hackers may be an old dataset. Some of the usernames/passwords combinations work, but others do not. The hackers say they will release more information in the next few weeks though. The next batch could be more recent datasets that could cause even more harm.

A hack of this level is nothing new. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the kind of world we live in now. The significance of this particular attack shows that nothing is sacred. Hackers aren’t drawing lines anymore, and they will attack anything that has the potential for profit or chaos. The group here has obviously obtained the latter, and they may just obtain the former if the information from RevolutionTT proves to be useful.

The Internet Archive, a wonderful place to find everything from the public domain, has collected its material and published it on BitTorrent. That’s over one million files including “live music concerts, the Prelinger movie collection, the librivox audio book collection, feature films, old time radio, lots and lots of books” and some stuff from the community.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Internet Archive, all of this content is completely free and within the public domain. There is some content that companies protect long after its copyright has faded through extension laws (see Mickey Mouse), but the majority of old film and radio is now completely free through the public domain.

The Internet allows us to preserve these old recordings and writings in a way that was never possible before. While the physical media on which these films and books were originally recorded slowly decays, the Internet makes sure that they stay around for as long as the Internet is around.

The move to BitTorrent is especially important because the Internet Archive now relies on its users to help spread the content that’s available. On top of the new servers that the Internet Archive will be using to share this content, other users will also be contributing to the seeding of said content. It will be the definitive way to gain access to everything that the Internet has to offer.

You can start looking through the all the knowledge contained in the torrents here. Some of the old propaganda films from World War II are simply hilarious. You should definitely check them out.

BitTorrent Inc. announced a crazy new plan today that will monetize BitTorrent. What’s this crazy new plan? Ads will now be included in the torrent. Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but the basic premise is that of any other monetization plan on the Internet. Give away content for free and support it with ads.

I mentioned that it’s a bit more complicated than that, but not by much. The first bundle on offer today is a sample from DJ Shadow’s new album “Hidden Transmissions From The MPC Era (1992-1996).” Alongside the download is some bundled software. If the person downloading the tracks also installs the software, the artist and BitTorrent get a cut of the ad revenue.

If you already have uTorrent installed, expect to see ads for DJ Shadow’s new album pop up in your client sooner or later. If you just downloaded uTorrent, the package will be advertised in the installer. It’s a simple, but effective, way to get the word out.

Oh, and before you start to get mad about ads in your downloads, nothing is being forced on you. You can skip on the software entirely and don’t even have to download it. It’s offered as a complimentary add-on and only helps the artist if it’s installed.

Of course, the argument here is that people will just download the music and skip on the software. That’s true and it will probably happen more often than not. That’s why the package only includes a selection of tracks while advertising the full album release which people will pay for. Those same people can still pirate the entire album, but music fans generally buy music from the artists who treat them right. By releasing a free sampler package, DJ Shadow has guaranteed himself at least one sale from this fan.

You can grab DJ Shadow’s uTorrent package right now. While you’re at it, grab the free album sampler from Counting Crows as well.

[h/t: TorrentFreak]

Over at the BitTorrent blog, the team discusses the launch of BitTorrent Torque, which is related to the lead image in name only. Although it’s still in the alpha stage, it’s hard for them to discuss the program’s potential without a modicum of excitement:

BitTorrent Torque is a JavaScript interface to a custom torrent client that exposes all the power of BitTorrent to web developers. Simply put, it allows anyone to utilize our powerful technology to create completely fresh and new experiences for users with just a couple lines of code.

This alpha allows BitTorrent to move beyond desktop clients. We believe web developers are pioneers when it comes to creating beautiful, intuitive user experiences. Torque will empower them to create powerful applications that will appeal to broad audiences.

Considering the ideas some have when “torrents” are mentioned, it’s clear there are many more options available than just sharing ripped movies and music. That being said, the majority of the apps being created are to make the act of file sharing that much easier. As an example, the four featured apps over at the BitTorrent Torque Labs offer such capabilities:

Turns all torrents links into regular downloads. No torrents to manage. Just content.

And:

Create a sharable link to a file on your computer. No cloud, no hosting. Just a link directly to your file.

So while the capabilities increase, it doesn’t look like the associations that are made when the word “torrent” is used will be going away anytime soon.

TorrentFreak is reporting that the CCI told them that the July 1 date was not set in stone and that the date could slip. The problem seems to be stemming from the fact that not all the ISPs are on board yet. The six-strikes plan currently being implemented by the CCI and ISPs is going to take a long time to actively implement. There’s a lot of different things to consider with such a plan especially keeping it consumer friendly as the CCI claims the plan will be.

The six-strikes plan will see a user found pirating content being sent a warning by their ISP. The warnings will escalate with stricter punishments for subsequent offenses. It’s more about educating consumers on legal alternatives than flat out punishing users. Although, the ISPs do have the power to throttle Internet speeds after a number of offenses. The CCI claims that the ISPs will not be able to completely restrict access, but I wouldn’t take their word for it.

The CCI also said that they have found a partner to monitor BitTorrent swarms for signs of piracy. They did not say who the partner was, but TorrentFreak speculates that the delay could be due to this partner. As has been proven time and time again, IP addresses are not an accurate method of finding out the physical address of a person. Since BitTorrent users are only identifiable through IP addresses, they need to find a method that doesn’t target legitimate users.

I think that the current plan being implemented by the CCI is about the best we’ll get if the RIAA and MPAA must have their way. As long as the CCI makes sure to protect the consumer by not taking away their access to the Internet. I think that a warning is going to be enough to sway most people to legal alternatives, but hardcore pirates have their own way of evading detection. We’ll have to see if the partner that the CCI has hired will be able to detect those of us who encrypt our torrents through proxies.

The six-strike plan should be implemented by the end of the year at the very least. Of course, the CCI said the same thing last year as well and they missed that date. It’s up in the air right now if the CCI and ISPs actually have the reach to monitor the Internet on such a massive scale. I’m very interested to see how they implement such a plan, but their unwillingness to discuss details makes me not very confident in their ability to deliver.

If the band was still with a traditional label, they wouldn’t be allowed to do such a thing. The RIAA still thinks that BitTorrent does nothing but facilitate piracy. Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz told TorrentFreak that BitTorrent is the new radio. In that spirit, the band has teamed up with BitTorrent Inc to release a sampler with four songs for free to their fans.

It isn’t a weak release either. The download comes with high-resolution album artwork and liner notes from Duritz himself. It’s the kind of digital release that you see from the likes of iTunes Special Edition albums that usually cost $5 to $10 more than the regular album.

Duritz didn’t just stumble upon the idea of giving away music for free to drum up support for an album. He told TorrentFreak that he has been a longtime proponent of giving away music. He says that you just can’t ignore the 150 million people who actively use BitTorrent. He explains his thinking while taking a shot at the recording industry:

“I can dwell on the negatives, but I don’t want to miss out on the fact that there’s 150 million people who I can give songs to. You either treat it as just a money drain, like the record companies do. Or you can treat it as it actually is, which is a conduit, meaning it runs both ways. You can either cry about it or make use of it. File-sharing is no different from the rest of the Internet, it is a tool that connects the entire world.”

He goes on to say that the Internet has liberalized music. According to Duritz, the record labels have never been good for bands. Only the big stars got a contract, and even then, they only saw 20 percent of the revenue after the labels took their cut.

BitTorrent may be the new radio, but it’s more than just that according to Duritz. Radio implies that the consumer has no control over the content they listen to. It’s all up to what the record industry wants you to hear. With BitTorrent, the consumer has control over what they like and don’t like.

He finished up by saying that giving away the songs for free will draw people to the record, which will then draw people to the concerts. That’s all they can ask for. He says that it’s no small thing when the Internet has enabled him to give something to so many people.

This isn’t the first time that a major artist has come out in support of BitTorrent and file-sharing as the new form of radio. Music legend Neil Young came out in January saying that piracy was just the new way for music to be shared among the masses. Unlike Young, however, Duritz doesn’t see a future for record labels.

Regardless, it’s nice to see artists being proactive in regards to the Internet and what it can do for artists. I’m not afraid to admit that I have downloaded music before to try it out. If I liked it, I went out and bought it. My CD collection is a testament to that. If I didn’t like it, I just deleted it. Bad music isn’t even worth keeping on your hard drive.

To download the new Counting Crows sampler, you can do so here.

Pirate Pay is a Russia-based company that has one simple goal – to kill torrents. It’s actually not as simple as it sounds. As TorrentFreak explains, the technology that Pirate Pay has built doesn’t get rid of the torrents, but rather stops users from sharing the information between each other through BitTorrent.

According to Pirate Pay CEO Andrei Klimenko, the idea started when they were building traffic management software. They found that they were able to effectively kill BitTorrent traffic so they went head first into what may become a huge business for them if entertainment companies come knocking.

While they have only had one major client so far, they’re already received plenty of funding from Microsoft. The software giant has reportedly invested $100,000 into the company through the Microsoft Seed Financing Fund. I bet Microsoft will want to use the service to stop all the pirated copies of Windows 7, and soon to be Windows 8, floating around the Internet.

As mentioned, Pirate Pay has had one major client so far. The film “Vysotsky. Thanks to God, I Am Alive” was distributed through Russia by Walt Disney Studios Sony Pictures Releasing. The joint company hired Pirate Pay to stop any BitTorrent traffic in regards to this title. After 30 days of protection, they were able to prevent 44,845 copies of the film from being shared over BitTorrent.

As TorrentFreak points out, Pirate Pay didn’t say how many people got through their blockade. They also don’t make any mention of the fact that people could just try again when Pirate Pay wasn’t blocking P2P traffic.

If anything, Pirate Pay is an interesting concept. It seems that the company only stops BitTorrent traffic for the amount of days that the companies pay for their services. While it could be a good block to keep people from pirating a film or album for the first month after its release, it does nothing to stop later piracy unless the company keeps paying for their service which costs anywhere between $12,000 to $50,000.

While I don’t think it’s right to punish legitimate users or sue consumers over piracy, I think I’m ok with Pirate Pay’s tactics. It would be especially nice if they only go after torrents during the first month then let off the enforcement. That way studios can have a better chance of getting sales in the first month, and then hopefully get more sales in later months through word of mouth and social media. Once again, the old mantra is true: If you treat your customers right, they’re going to reciprocate the motion.