UPDATE: A reader over at Cinematical was kind enough to point that AP jumped the gun. A release from Paramount corrected the story saying that it was a mistake.

"The cancellation mistakenly reported today was simply the result of a change of venue. UIP Japan had originally planned the world premiere at the Budokhan; however, after due consideration, the world premiere was then confirmed at the Virgin Roppongi, given its more central and convenient location."

Hmmmm…

The world premiere of Steven Spielberg's The World of the Wars, scheduled for June 13, got cancelled because of concerns of piracy. There's fear that the film could be illegally captured during the exibition for 7,000 guests at the Budokan Arena in Tokyo.

According to an Associated Press story the film distributor UIP (United International Pictures) claimed also security concerns with Tom Cruise: "To our regret, we have decided to cancel the showing because of safety concerns."

After the impacting news of the FBI and ICE raid on Elite Torrents some BitTorrent sites might not have the nerve to remain active. Slick reports that bit-ance.net—a large BitTorrent indexing site with over 24,000 registered users—has decided to shut down voluntarily. Their home page now reads: "Thanks for being a part of bit-ance.net, your data has disapeared and so have we …" and has a link to an IRC channel #bit-ance.

We logged into the channel and all we could get (other than boring chat between kids) was: "In the interests of protecting you, yes, you—we've concluded that the best course of action will be to suspend Bit-Ance.net indefinetely. We continue to value your membership; thank you."

These were their stats as of last week:

BitTorrent's search is apparently functional now. The big entertaiment groups MPAA and RIAA are going to be all over this, not because it's changed the way people download files but more on the effect that the BitTorrent brand brings to the file-sharing war.

Interesting that when searching for "revenge of the sith" the #1 banner spot served by Ask Jeeves displays a Moviefone ad to buy tickets for the film. Another proof that BitTorrent can potentially drive more revenue to studios and labels.

We'd love to hear from our readers their first impression on the service. 

The BitTorrent search engine that we reported two days ago is up. The site seems extremely overwhelmed with huge traffic right now, we have tried a few searches but it just doesn't respond. The search page footer has the following credit "Bandwidth generously provided by Hot or Not". It's apparently not hot as it doesn't seem to be handling the load. We'll keep trying and update you in a few.

With the news below we realize that BitTorrent wants to make money not only by selling t-shirts and mugs. Another clue is that Ashwin Navin, its current Chief Operating Officer (yes they have a COO), has played roles as a Yahoo! Strategist, Goldman Sachs Research Analyst and Merrill Lynch Investment Banker.

Ash has also a blog where he's been writing about all sorts of subjects BT-related.

BitTorrent plans to launch an ad-supported search engine for Torrent files. The ads and sponsored links displayed on the results page will be served by Ask Jeeves. Already in beta, the website will link to any BT files, legal or not. Wired News saw a demo where the results for a search on "The Interpreter" (film with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman) returned a link to a illegal torrent file located on Pirate Bay.

We anticipate a lot of complains—perhaps legal actions—coming from the entertainment industry. Last week the MPAA accused BitTorrent of "providing users with illegal copies of Revenge of the Sith." According to the Wired article, Stanford law professor Mark Lemley sees potential legal issues related to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Del Oro Theatre: downtown Grass Valley, about 60 miles north of Sacramento, California.

That's where Star War fans noticed a man "aiming a camera" at the screen and notified the authorities. The man was held and indicted for violating California Penal Code 653 (Z) which prohibits operating a recording device in a motion picture theater without the proprietor's consent.

The MPAA released a new threat press-release blaming BitTorrent for facilitating the file-sharing of the recently released final Star Wars movie. The announcement comes with some direct statements from its president, Dan Glickman, saying things like:

"We must stop these Internet thieves from illegally trading valuable copyrighted materials on-line"

and

"My message to illegal file swappers everywhere is plain and simple: You are stealing, it is wrong and you are not anonymous. In short, you can click, but you can't hide"

Since the MPAA don't seem to care if Google crawls and indexes their content they released the statement as MS-Word file. Click on the jump link to read it.

Our favorite billionaire (that happens to blog with us here at Weblogs Inc) wrote an interesting piece about how Yahoo (and other digital music services) should force the RIAA cutback their staff—and stop suing file-sharers.

Why? Because with a service like Yahoo's Music Unlimited Service the new market value for all-you-can-eat music download has been set at  $5/month. How can the RIAA claim legally that  downloaders cost them thousands of dollars? In Cuban's own words: "In essence, Yahoo just turned possession of a controlled music substance into a misdemeanor. Payable by a $5 per month fine."

Hard to believe anti-piracy groups didn't see this coming. Tarun Sawney, the Business Software Alliance anti-piracy director for Asia acknowledged that the rules of the game will have to change now that BT offers trackless file-sharing. "Currently, if a tracker site is shut down, many downloads are disrupted…so, removing the trackers from the equation will obviously cause those of us on this side of the battle to regroup." 

The BSA faces a very difficult challenge, they recently released a study relating that, in 2004, about 35 percent of the software used worldwide was illegally copied. The estimated losses were of $32.7 billion.

We are on the watch to see what reaction will be coming from the RIAA and the MPAA. Keep tuned.

has been released with a major improvement: it allows people to publish a torrent file very easily. This is made possible because the new version has a trackerless mode which means that all you need to publish a file is a website and (obviously) a Internet connection.

Trackerless in fact means that BT makes every client a lightweight tracker using the DHT protocol—based on a Kademlia distributed hash table—that allows clients to store and retrieve contact information for peers in a torrent. You still can choose to utilize the traditional dedicated tracker if you want to collect statistics about downloads. According to BitTorrent's website the trackerless system makes no guarantees to reliability.

This is not a spoiler but the light dark side has prevailed.

Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith is already up for grabs at your closest Torrent site. Our friends from Cinematical reported to have learned of a low-quality version floating around since last month but we don't know at this time if the copies out there are the same version or another high-quality capping. Any tips?

File-sharing development and distribution—company RazorPop will launch a new unlimited music subscription service ($9.95/month) to compete with Napster and others. The service, called RazorPop P2P Music Subscription, will pay music copyright owners a cut of the subscription revenue. An independent clearing house will collect customer fees and distribute licensing fees based on sample network downloads monitored by an independent research firm.

The interesting part is that the service includes copyright infringement insurance: as the RIAA continues to sue regular P2P users, RazorPop's customers are protected by insurance that covers $5,000 per subscriber.

PS: This report is based on a Slick post, but we could not find the press release on RazorPop's website.

Backstage is a project—currently in beta—launched today by BBC that allows anyone to use their content. It's, basically, a developer network that provides a public API yet to be released where people can use and remix BBC's content. Anyone can access the content via the API and must host the application on their own.

Here are some of the prototypes already submitted. Link.

After Suprnona.org was shut down, its creator and maintainer, Sloncek, became the spokesperson for an alternative file-sharing network that our readers are already familar with, eXeem. Last week we heard rumors that he was back with another BT site, Seedler.org, but that's false.

Seedler posted a note on their website denying the rumor: "This site has nothing to do with Suprva [sic] and or Sloncek, thank you."