Common Paradox Tech Blog

With the rise of popular streaming services such as Hulu, many would probably speculate that BitTorrent usage would be on the decline, but according to the folks over at TorrentFreak, nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly doubling its 28 million a year user base to 52 million, uTorrent usage is continuing to rise with no end in sight. “In addition to this, at the start of this year we saw almost 5 million monthly users of BitTorrent Mainline,” said Simon Morris, BitTorrents VP of Product Management. “In November 2009 we saw over 10 million”. “We see no evidence whatever that BitTorrent clients are any less popular”.

It seems pretty obvious that the legal woes of The Pirate Bay, Mininova, and others have done little to stem the tide of torrent adoption, and unless things change drastically, its hard to figure out what will. The uTorrent development team has several major improvements planned over the next 12 months, and hope to add options to increase file security, and even the ability for torrent site owners to promote their own content from within the client.

I’m sure all 52 million users are downloading the latest Linux build right? I had no idea it was becoming that popular! If you would like to join me in leaping to conclusions, feel free to leave your comments below.

The world of BitTorrent has turned all kinds of topsy turvy as of late. First the uber popular PirateBay sinks its tracker and urgers others to do the same, and in an equally surprising move, Mininova says its going completely legit. Can you believe it?

"Today is an important day in the history of Mininova," the site admins wrote in a blog. "From now on, we are limiting Mininova.org to our Content Distribution service. By doing so, we comply with the ruling of the Court of Utrecht of last August."

Mininova’s Content Distribution service was actually launched back in 2007, but the commitment to go legit came only after a judge last summer ordered the site to remove all copyright infringing links within the next three month. If it didn’t comply, Mininova would have faced up to $7.5 million in fines.

Interestingly, Mininova’s commitment could be short lived. The site’s admins said they’re "still considering an appeal at this moment."

Image Credit: blogs.jwatch.org

Mininova, the other popular BitTorrent tracker, just went legal-only. No more downloading episodes of Dexter or Mad Men off of it, but there plenty of other trackers out there still. [Mininova Blog]

Pabugs writes with news that popular torrent site Mininova has abandoned their attempts at filtering and simply deleted all torrents other than the legal ones they facilitate through their Content Distribution service. According to their blog post, they were left “no other option than to take [their] platform offline” after a court ruling from August. “The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.