TorrentFreak

NOTOC TorrentFreak (TF) is a blog dedicated to reporting the latest news and trends on the BitTorrent protocol and , as well as on copyright infringement and digital rights. The website was started in November 2005 by a Dutchman using the pseudonym "Ernesto Van Der Sar". He was joined by Andy "Enigmax" Maxwell and Ben Jones in 2007. Regular contributors include Rickard Falkvinge, founder of the Pirate Party. 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 Attribution-NonCommercial version 3.0 license. Their lead researcher and community manager was the Pirate Party activist Andrew Norton,from 2007 until 2022. According to Canadian law scholar Michael Geist, TorrentFreak "is widely used as a source of original reporting on digital issues". Examples are The Guardian, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and the Flemish newspaper De Standaard. Frequent areas of reporting include: The City of London's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit United States Trade Representative and Notorious Markets reports Anti-piracy web blocking Torrent tracker news VPN and seedbox reviews website news Copyright law news Warez scene news As well as other news affecting copyright, privacy, file sharing and adjacent topics. In a 2021 article, Andy Maxwell outlined TorrentFreak's editorial stance. He wrote: "As a publication entirely dedicated to reporting on copyright, piracy, and streaming sites (plus all things closely related), here at TorrentFreak we aim to tell all 'sides' of the story. We do not shy away from reports that show that piracy hurts sales and we have no problem publishing research projects that show completely the opposite. It's called balanced reporting and it hurts absolutely no one." On 17 August 2007, TorrentFreak reported that Comcast had begun throttling its upload bandwidth, specifically against BitTorrent users. This made seeding, which is an essential part of the BitTorrent protocol, effectively impossible.