__NOTOC__ TorrentFreak (TF) is a

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

dedicated to reporting the latest news and trends on the BitTorrent protocol and

file sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include r ...

, as well as on

copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, s ...

and

digital rights Digital rights are those human rights and legal rights that allow individuals to access, use, create, and publish digital media or to access and use computers, other electronic devices, and telecommunications networks. The concept is particular ...

. The website was started in November 2005 by a

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

man using the pseudonym "Ernesto Van Der Sar". He was joined by Andy "Enigmax" Maxwell and Ben Jones in 2007. Regular contributors include

Rickard Falkvinge Rick Falkvinge (born Dick Greger Augustsson on 21 January 1972) is a Swedish information technology entrepreneur and founder of the Swedish Pirate Party. He is currently a political evangelist with the party, spreading the ideas across the worl ...

, founder of the

Pirate Party Pirate Party is a label adopted by Political party, political parties around the world. Pirate parties support Civil and political rights, civil rights, direct democracy (including e-democracy) or alternatively Participatory democracy, partici ...

. The online publication eCommerceTimes, in 2009, described "Ernesto" as the pseudonym of Lennart Renkema, owner of TorrentFreak. TorrentFreak's text is free content under a

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

Attribution-NonCommercial version 3.0 license. Their lead researcher and community manager is the

activist

Andrew Norton Andrew Norton (born 7 July 1965) is an Australian author and researcher. He was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, and Policy and Government Relations Adviser at the University of Melbourne. He is former director of the CI ...

Specialist areas

According to Canadian law scholar

Michael Geist Michael Allen Geist (born July 11, 1968) is a Canadian academic, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa and a member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society. Geist was educated at the Univers ...

, TorrentFreak "is widely used as a source of original reporting on digital issues". Examples are ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'', ''

CNN CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by ...

'', ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'', and the

Flemish Flemish (''Vlaams'') is a Low Franconian dialect cluster of the Dutch language. It is sometimes referred to as Flemish Dutch (), Belgian Dutch ( ), or Southern Dutch (). Flemish is native to Flanders, a historical region in northern Belgium; ...

newspaper ''

De Standaard ''De Standaard'' (meaning ''The Standard'' in English) is a Flemish daily newspaper published in Belgium by Mediahuis (formerly Corelio and VUM). It was traditionally a Christian-Democratic paper, associated with the Christian-Democratic and F ...

''. Frequent areas of reporting include: * The

City of London The City of London is a city, ceremonial county and local government district that contains the historic centre and constitutes, alongside Canary Wharf, the primary central business district (CBD) of London. It constituted most of London fr ...

Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) is a unit of the City of London Police, the national lead force for fraud. It was established in 2013 with the responsibility to investigate and deter serious and organised intellectual property c ...

United States Trade Representative The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is an agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government responsible for developing and promoting Trade policy of the United States, American trade ...

and

Notorious Markets A notorious market is a website or physical market where, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), large-scale intellectual property infringement takes place. Officially termed Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting a ...

reports * Anti-piracy web blocking *

Torrent tracker A BitTorrent tracker is a special type of server that assists in the communication between peers using the BitTorrent protocol. In peer-to-peer file sharing, a software client on an end-user PC requests a file, and portions of the requested fi ...

news *

VPN A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. The be ...

and

seedbox A seedbox is a high-bandwidth remote server for uploading and downloading of digital files from a P2P network. The bandwidth ranges generally from 100 Mbit/s to 20 Gbit/s. After the seedbox has acquired the files, people with access to the se ...

reviews *

File sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include r ...

website news *

Copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...

law news *

Warez scene The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene, is a worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups specializing in obtaining and illegally releasing digital media for free before their official sale date. The Scene distributes all fo ...

news As well as other news affecting copyright, privacy, file sharing and adjacent topics.

History

On 17 August 2007, TorrentFreak reported that

Comcast Comcast Corporation (formerly known as American Cable Systems and Comcast Holdings),Before the AT&T merger in 2001, the parent company was Comcast Holdings Corporation. Comcast Holdings Corporation now refers to a subsidiary of Comcast Corpora ...

had begun

throttling A throttle is any mechanism by which the power or speed of an engine is controlled. Throttle or throttling may also refer to: Fiction * ''Throttle'' (film), a 2005 thriller * ''Throttle'' (novella), a 2009 novella by Stephen King and his son Jo ...

its upload bandwidth, specifically against BitTorrent users. This made

seeding The term seeding and related terms such as seeded are used in several different contexts: *Sowing, planting seeds in a place or on an object *Cloud seeding, manipulating cloud formations *Seeding (computing), a concept in computing and peer-to-pee ...

, which is an essential part of the BitTorrent protocol, effectively impossible. It was later determined that Comcast was using

Sandvine Sandvine Incorporated is an application and network intelligence company based in Waterloo, Ontario. Sandvine markets network policy control products that are designed to implement broad network policies, including Internet censorship, congestion ...

products, which implement network traffic shaping and policing, and include support for both blocking new and forcefully terminating established network connections.

has denied these claims whenever they have been asked to comment. A guide, for customer service representatives when asked about Comcast's BitTorrent throttling, was leaked to

The Consumerist ''Consumerist'' (also known as ''The Consumerist'') was a non-profit consumer affairs website owned by Consumer Media LLC, a subsidiary of ''Consumer Reports'', with content created by a team of full-time reporters and editors. The site's focu ...

on 26 October 2007. In October 2008 through to March 2011 TorrentFreak ran a short lived video news service titled 'torrentfreak.tv', directed by

Andrej Preston Andrej Preston (born c. 1986), also known under the pseudonym (meaning "little elephant" in Slovene), is the founder of the former BitTorrent site Suprnova.org.Jani SeverSlovenian Pirate, ''Vest'', 25 August 2007. Accessed 2008-11-07. The Slove ...

, founder of torrent site

Suprnova Suprnova.org was a Slovenia-based website that distributed BitTorrent trackers for various music and video files, computer programs and games. Started in late 2002 by Andrej Preston (known as Slonček, Slovenian for "little elephant") and for a whi ...

made available for streaming and download on

Mininova Mininova was a website offering BitTorrent downloads. Mininova was once one of the largest sites offering torrents of copyrighted material, but in November 2009, following legal action in the Dutch courts, the site operators deleted all torrent ...

. On 21 August 2013, Comcast threatened TorrentFreak for writing about publicly available court documents. The underlying document links a Comcast subscriber with the

Prenda Law Prenda Law, also known as Steele , Hansmeier PLLP and Anti-Piracy Law Group, was a Chicago-based law firm that ostensibly operated by undertaking litigation against copyright infringement. However, it was later characterized by th ...

firm. The court case where the document was filed was a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by AF Holdings for alleged infringement of an adult movie. In August 2013,

Sky Broadband Sky Broadband is a broadband service offered by Sky UK in the United Kingdom. With the introduction of Sky Fibre, Sky Broadband now refers to ADSL broadband products. History In October 2005, Sky UK agreed to purchase the ISP EasyNet for � ...

blocked the site for UK customers after torrent site

EZTV EZTV was a TV torrent distribution group founded in May 2005 and dissolved in April 2015, after a hostile takeover of their domains and brand by "EZCLOUD LIMITED". It quickly became the most visited torrent site for TV shows. History Founding ...

pointed its

DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...

servers to TorrentFreak's

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...

and, in July 2014, the site was blocked by the controversial Sky Broadband Shield parental filter system.

References

External links

* {{BitTorrent, state=collapsed News websites File sharing communities BitTorrent Publications established in 2005 Free-content websites Copyright infringement File sharing news sites