A group called the P2P-Next Consortium is testing what they’re calling “a next generation Peer-to-Peer (P2P) content delivery platform.” They’re hoping to develop software capable of offering P2P-based streaming, and they’re inviting the public to help them gather data.

If you’re interested in helping you need to use a BitTorrent client, called SwarmPlayer. Once you have it installed you can watch either a 5 minute Video On Demand (VOD) test stream provided by the BBC or a webcam feed from Amsterdam. SwarmPlayer sends performance data back to a P2P-Next server which they’ll use in future development.

You can also give them feedback on the project, as well as viewing some information about the ongoing experiment.

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And organization called the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) will be holding the P2P Media Summit Silicon Valley in San Jose on August 4th. The inaugural conference will be a forum for the various P2P software providers, content owners, ISPs, and other members of the DCIA to discuss everything from technology to business models.

“We are thrilled to be able to present a program devoted to the latest technological innovations and newest business models being introduced in the rapidly emerging P2P marketplace,” said DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty in making the announcement.

Despite the demonization of file sharing among major content owners from movie studios and record labels to software developers, in recent years many have come to believe that the decentralized distribution model offered by P2P technology is the future for delivering content. Conferences like this one are important in order for the various elements to work together on ways to make it work in a way that’s profitable for everyone and still useful to consumers.

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The IFPI and Italy’s Guardia di Finanza have announced the shutdown of the alleged file-sharing forum Downrevolution.net for thousands of instances of copyright infringement.

In connection with the site, four people have been arrested and each will face a “criminal investigation.”

Reports claim that only one of the men arrested was over the age of 18 meaning the rest are minors. There was no word on whether they will prosecuted as minors however. 17 computers, three external hard drives, and hundreds of counterfeit CDs and DVDs were also seized from a house in Sesto San Giovanni.

If found guilty, the men arrested could face 4 years in jail and large fines.

Downrevolution.net, like many other “warez” forums, posted Rapidshare.com and Megaupload.com links, allowing over 30,000 users to share copyrighted movies, music and more. The site stayed in business by selling banner ads and accepting donations in exchange for VIP status.

Jeremy Banks, IFPI’s Head of Internet Anti-Piracy Unit, added: “This shows a real commitment by the authorities to stopping online copyright theft, and it also highlights that forums like these are anything but immune from the law.”

The Guardia di Finanzia usually looks into intellectual property investigations for the Ministry of Finance.

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Nokia’s Ovi portal has added a fifth service called Files, offering subscription-based cloud storage for exchanging files between PCs and mobile devices.

Ovi launched with three services: Nokia’s reborn N-Gage mobile gaming platform, Nokia maps, and a music store that is currently available in 10 countries (UK, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Singapore, Australia, France, Sweden, Spain). The service then grew with the addition of Share, the document-sharing service (still in beta) originally developed by startup Twango.

Now Nokia has added the beta of Files on Ovi, a service developed by startup Avevnu, which the Finnish phone company acquired at the beginning of 2008. The “digital locker” service allows a user’s always-on Windows Vista or XP machine to be remotely accessed via a mobile browser. Content can be marked “anytime” and be hosted on the Files on Ovi servers, allowing access even when the home PC is off.Each subscription has a 10 GB limit on hosted content which is available freely as a part of the beta. During registration, Nokia says this will eventually incur a fee and that in “the near future” it will ask for credit card information.

Once the user has installed the Files on Ovi manager (still called Avevnu Manager) and connected to the service’s site, his mobile device can access content by simply going to Nokia’s site. Though this is the first service from Ovi that utilizes the single Nokia/Ovi account ID, access to Files is not limited to Nokia devices, as it is browser-based. However, the connector software required to run the always-on computer is only for Windows XP and Vista.

In Techachino tests this afternoon, we attempted to access a PC connected with the Ovi/Avevnu client with a Wi-Fi connected T-Mobile Dash, but experienced numerous timeouts. With nearly three-minute long connection times, we’re still attempting to successfully browse and transfer files.

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The RIAA has filed a motion to dismiss what may be the most contentious file sharing case to date. In a letter to the judge the RIAA’s lawyers admitted they don’t believe there is any chance they will be able to positively identify the computer used to share the files in question. They’re now confident it was the same PC owned by the plaintiff’s daughter, which she has since gotten rid of. The letter also mentioned that they’ll be filing for court sanctions against the defense for impeding discovery of this evidence earlier.

To say the case of UMG v. Lindor has been hotly contested would be an understatement at best. The defendant, Marie Lindor, owns a computer but has reportedly doesn’t know enough about it to share a file. In fact the plaintiffs’ investigators have officially stated that her computer wasn’t the one involved in the file sharing they reported to the RIAA.

While RIAA lawyers have focused on who else may have had a computer connected to the internet through Lindor’s account her lawyer, Ray Beckerman, has repeatedly attacked both the legality of the damages claimed, the lack of transparency in the investigation, and even the competence of the investigators themselves.

During one exchange, documented in court records Beckerman said “everybody I speak to tells me that MediaSentry doesn’t know what they’re doing.” He also implied that the RIAA’s campaign of lawsuits was intended to “target disabled people, home health care aides, people who don’t even know how to use a computer”

Throughout the suit, which began more than three years ago, he has consistently taken the RIAA to task for their calculation of damages, which he sees as not just excessive but also beyond the scope of the law. Rather than $750 per song for a total of nearly $7000 he argues that the maximum allowed by law would be the actual cost of the same tracks if purchased ($8.91 for 9 songs) multiplied by a statutory maximum of 9 for a total of $56.70.

Ironically that’s the same argument that Universal Music Group, the plaintiffs in this case, used to get damages reduced after losing a copyright infringement case related to sampling where they were the among the defendants.

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Former RIAA defendant Tanya Andersen has filed an amended complaint in her malicious protection lawsuit against the record labels and RIAA themselves. This marks the fourth complaint submitted by Andersen’s lawyer, Lory Lybeck. All prior submissions have been rejected by the judge. If Lybeck can get the judge to accept this one, it will begin what Andersen hopes to be a long-range investigation into the tactics the RIAA uses to thwart their P2P nemesis.

The first of three dismissed complaints accused the RIAA of racketeering, fraud, invasion of privacy, deceptive business practices, and a number of other wrong doings. The judge presiding over the case, Judge Anna J. Brown, dismissed it sighting they had not properly stated claims for relief, but allowed for the complaint to be resubmitted.

The second of the three dismissed complaints weighed in at 108 pages and outlined scandalous practices and criminal enterprise practices, but the judge threw it out because both the court and the RIAA believed they ignored the judge’s instructions to submit a short and concise complaint.

The third dismissed complaint was intended to be a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of other who have been mistakenly identified by the RIAA as criminals. The RIAA stands accused of conspiracy and abuse of the legal process, negligence, acting criminally in investigating and pursuing claims against class members, wire fraud, mail fraud, and wrongfully filing lawsuits.

The latest complaint is a paltry 39 pages and is believed to be Lybeck’s final attempt at a complaint with this judge. Lybeck has accused the RIAA of “operating a zone of secrecy” throughout its legal campaign, and hopes that last week’s filing will mark the beginning of the end for the labels and their legal campaign.

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YouTorrent only launched in early January, but it has quickly become one of the Web’s most visited BitTorrent sites. According to the company, the site now averages about 10 million unique visitors a month.

YouTorrent has been well received in the file sharing community for its differences from other BitTorrent sites. It does not include advertising, and features the ability to search the larger sites and an easy to use interface.

An official for the site told TorrentFreak that the “uncertainty and accuracy” of some search sites influenced their decision.

In addition, the site had grown bigger than the original owners could handle, so they were looking to sell it. With the switch to a “legal” format, YouTorrent may be palatable to some traditional media companies.

It was not known who may be on the site’s short list of buyers. However, with the site not generating revenue due to its lack of ads, this may be the only way to go for its owners.

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After being shut down by the CRIA last November, the popular public torrent Tracker site Demonoid has seemingly made its long anticipated return.

The greeting message at the site reads as follow: “Welcome back!

Since a few months ago, Deimos, the site administrator, lacks the necessary time to take care of the website, because of personal matters he’s been needing to attend to. For this reason, he has decided to leave the site staff.

Before leaving, he assigned a new site administrator from among his friends to take care of the site. The old moderator team will continue helping with the site, unchanged. We will try to keep running everything just as it always has been.

The trackers and website seem to be working properly, and should any issues arise, they will be taken care of as soon as possible. The site might be going on and offline over the next days as we work out any problems.

Welcome back, and enjoy your stay!

The new reopening is also coming with conspiracy theorists however. Many point out the example of ShareReactor, the large eDonkey site which was closed down by raids in 2004 but made a return in 2006. It was revealed that the site was under ?new management? and traffic declined so low that the site was taken down again.

Time will tell whether Demonoid can make a true comeback

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A lawyer working with Swiss anti-piracy outfit Logistep has received a ban from practicing as a lawyer for six months. Elizabeth Martin sent inappropriately agressive and deliberately false and misleading letters to thousands of alleged file sharers that had supposedly been infringing on the rights of Call of Juarez game owned by Techland.

In short, Martin has written to the file sharers and demanded a payment of ?400.00 in compensation for the alleged copyright offense if the user wanted to avoid going to court. The letter went on to lead readers to believe that they would be found guilty in court and would be responsible for their own court fees, which would be “substantial.”

Along with the promise of a guilty verdict, she warned the file sharers that a decision against them would amount to “hundreds of thousands of euros.” The letter also ended with a threat to seize and resell the personal belongings of any user who was found guilty and couldn’t pay a fine. “If you are not able to pay the damages ordered by the court, our client will seek to gain the amount by the sale of your goods,” the letter concluded.

A disciplinary investigation by the Conseil de l?Ordre du Barreau de Paris disapproved of the legal threats Martin had made. “By choosing to reproduce aggressive foreign methods, intended to force payments, the interested party also violated [the code] which specifies that the lawyer cannot unfairly represent a situation or seriousness of threat,” a decision against the lawyer read.

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The popular BitTorrent tracking site Mininova announced the development of a new online video streaming service latest project in cooperation with a Dutch university development team. The service will offer Mininova users users the chance to videos streamed from .torrent files.

The first beta release of this software will be invitation-only for a small group of Mininova members, with no indication when it will be moved to open beta status.

The Open Source “swarmplayer” which is used for the video streaming service is developed in collaboration with the Tribler team from the Technical University Delft and Free University Amsterdam. Tribler is also working together with the BBC and several other European broadcasters, and they recently received a $19 million grant for P2P research from the European Union.

According to Mininova, the service will only work with the “featured” torrents, which lists all the distributors taking part in Mininova’s content distribution platform..
A check of Mininova’s current list of so-called “features” appears to include some very familiar names, including The Bourne Ultimatum, Ratatouille, and American Gangster — titles whose licensed status from their respective studios does not appear evident.

Though the legality of the site’s operations and services remains questionable, record and movie associations have had very little luck attempting to shut down Mininova thus far.

Mininova already has a music streaming feature for their content distribution platform, based on the Java applet developed by Bitlet

Mininova is listed among the 50 most visited websites on the Internet and has nearly 30 million unique visitors a month.

The site is looking for people to beta test the service, say Erik, one of the admins: “We are looking for people who would like to be in the first testing group who test the software, report suggestions and bugs you find.”

If you would like to join, reply to their blog post here.

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