When Spotify launched its first beta in the fall of 2008, we described it as “an alternative to music piracy.”

From the start, the Swedish company set out to compete with pirate services by offering a better user experience. Now, a decade later, it has come a long way.

The company successfully transformed into a billion-dollar enterprise and is planning to go public with a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. While it hasn’t completely evaporated music piracy, it has converted dozens of millions of people into paying customers.

While Spotify sees itself as a piracy remedy, backed by the major labels, its piracy roots are undeniable.

In a detailed feature, Swedish newspaper Breakit put a spotlight on one of Spotify’s earliest employees, developer Ludvig Strigeus.

With a significant stake in the company, he is about to become a multi-millionaire, one with a noteworthy file-sharing past. It’s unclear what is current stake in Spotify is, but according to Swedish media it’s worth more than a billion Kroner, which is over $100 million.

Strigeus was the one who launched uTorrent in September 2005, when the BitTorrent protocol was still fairly new. Where most BitTorrent clients at the time were bloatware, uTorrent chose a minimalist approach, but with all essential features.

This didn’t go unnoticed. In just a few months, millions of torrent users downloaded the application which quickly became the dominant file-sharing tool.

Little more than a year after its launch the application was acquired by BitTorrent Inc., which still owns it today. While that part of history is commonly known, there’s a step missing.

Strigeus’ coding talent also piqued the interest of Spotify, which reportedly beat BitTorrent Inc. by a few months. Multiple sources confirm that the streaming startup, which had yet to release its service at the time, bought uTorrent in 2006.

While some thought that Spotify was mainly interested in the technology, others see Strigeus as the target.

“Spotify bought μTorrent, but what we really wanted was Ludvig Strigeus,” former Spotify CEO Andreas Ehn told Breakit.

This indeed sounds plausible as Spotify sold uTorrent to BitTorrent Inc. after a few months, keeping the developer on board. Not a bad decision for the latter, as his Spotify stake makes him a billionaire. At the same time, it was an important move for Spotify too.

Ludvig (Ludde) is still credited in recent uTorrent releases

In addition to having a very talented developer on board, who helped to implement the much needed P2P technology into Spotify, the deal with BitTorrent Inc. brought in cash that funded the development of the tiny, but ambitious, streaming service.

It might be too much to argue that Spotify wouldn’t be where it is without uTorrent and its creator, but their impact on the young company was significant.

The file-sharing angle was also very prominent in the early releases of Spotify. At the time, of all the tracks that were streamed over the Internet by Spotify users, the majority were streamed via P2P connections.

And we haven’t even mentioned that Spotify reportedly used pirate MP3s for its Beta release, including some tracks that were only available on The Pirate Bay.

Spotify’s brief ownership of uTorrent isn’t commonly known, to make an understatement. When BitTorrent Inc. announced that it acquired “uTorrent AB” there was no mention of Spotify, which was still an unknown company at the time.

Times change.

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BitTorrent users today have several basic ways to download content. The most popular is via a dedicated torrent client installed on a Windows, Linux, Android or similar operating system at home.

While this kind of activity is necessarily ‘local’, power users over the years have turned to systems that enable them to download and share potentially huge quantities of data.

Essentially computer servers running torrent client software in remote locations, these so-called ‘seedboxes’ became a must-have for anyone looking to stand out in the torrent world as a sharing sensation.

While widespread, companies selling access to seedboxes haven’t really generated much noise publicly over the years. However, this week an announcement from one of the longer-standing companies caught our attention. After being founded eight years ago, popular provider SeedStuff.ca has decided to exit the seedbox business.

“We originally opened in 2010, however we have seen an ever changing climate in the industry and as new technologies emerge and people shift to more conventional means of file sharing our services have seen a steady decline over the past few years,” the company said in a statement published on its website.

“At this time, it simply is no longer viable to continue offering the services we do.”

Considering BitTorrent itself made its mark as a disruptive technology, it’s interesting that a company like SeedStuff would have its business disrupted by other file-sharing methods. So, we asked the provider a little more about its history and its ultimate decision to close down.

“We started from the backroom IRC channels on 56k connections, so torrents have always been a blessing,” a spokesperson said.

“Between 2005 and 2010, I think the rise of ‘Private’ trackers really started to make the scene shine. You were able to find and connect with the content you wanted as well as the communities of people who shared interests as well.

“The private trackers gamified seeding and rewarded their best members, this is what really paved the way for seedboxes. The users felt a need to compete and often did not have access to the means to do so, but could contract these machines out to help them succeed. The demand for seedboxes started in about 2010, which I think you will see coincided with a huge spike of private tracker activity.”

SeedStuff says its initial aim was to improve user experience by not following the decision by many existing providers to “stuff as many users as possible” into each server. Restricting each unit to a maximum of four users and accepting just a small profit on each, the service grew while gaining support from customers.

“At our peak, we serviced over 4000 customers per month. Our total email database was well over 10,000 customer accounts. We did not monitor bandwidth or user activities as we felt this to be intrusive. We only dealt with server providers who offered unlimited bandwidth so that we were able to allow for the best user experience without limits,” the company explains.

But after several years of growth, SeedStuff noticed a change. In addition to suffering a painful database crash caused by a host and a failed backup regime, in 2015 the company observed a shift in user patterns.

“We noticed around this time that streaming services had started to become mainstream in almost every home and people were simply not using our services anymore. The main cancellation reason for the last three years has been ‘Not needed anymore’,” SeedStuff notes.

“I think torrenting developed for many reasons including ease of use, availability and cost to access media. Many of these issues have been improved by current systems so there is no need for consumers to use torrents for half their content, but we aren’t there yet and the industry seems to be dialing it back again.”

SeedStuff believes that while there will be a steady decline in torrent usage, the protocol will remain relevant for a long time to come. It could even enjoy a resurgence if distribution companies restrict availability or require multiple accounts to access all content.

“If a customer needs dedicated Netflix, HBO, CBS and Hulu accounts to access the shows they want, they might see these costs as too much compared to a decent torrenting connection,” the company says.

Of course, market changes can always have an effect on a company’s direction but SeedStuff says that in addition to tackling a myriad of technical issues, in the end there were also problems with team members migrating to other areas.

“Some of our team also moved on to new projects and started new companies which are now more exciting to them. Everything compounded and eventually lead us to split and go our separate ways. We just wanted to thank everyone who remained a customer through the years and are sorry we had to shut down,” the company concludes.

While there are plenty of other seedbox providers around, it seems fairly clear that things aren’t what they used to be, with streaming and other technologies all helping to disrupt the market. SeedStuff points towards IPFS as yet another potential torrent disrupter of the future. Time will tell.

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While site-blocking on copyright infringement grounds is now widespread, in most countries it requires intervention from the courts.

The process nearly always involves rightsholders grouping together with claims that customers of ISPs are infringing their rights by using ‘pirate’ sites to obtain movies, TV shows and music. As such, it isn’t pirate sites that are targeted by rightsholder legal action, but the ISPs themselves.

Of course, none of the ISPs targeted are breaking the law by providing access to the sites. However, the demands for a blocking injunction frame the ISPs as the wrong-doers, even if there is an underlying understanding that the pirate sites themselves are the issue. For this reason, ISPs around the world have regularly found themselves in an adversarial process.

In the Netherlands, for example, ISPs took their fight to the highest court in Europe to avoid blocking but will almost certainly fail after spending large sums of money. In others, such as the UK where the blocking process has matured, ISPs rarely object to anything, smoothing the process for both them and the rightsholders.

With the knowledge that site-blocking injunctions are likely to be granted by national courts in Europe, rightsholders and ISPs in Belgium now appear to be taking a collaborative approach. Sites have been blocked in the country before but future blocking efforts will be much easier to implement if a case before the Commercial Court of Brussels runs to plan.

It involves the Belgian Entertainment Association (BEA) on one side and ISPs Proximus, Telenet and VOO on the other. Rather than squabbling over the details, it appears that the parties will jointly present a list of 33 websites and 450 domain names to a judge, alongside claims that they facilitate the illegal downloading of copyrighted material.

According to a report from L’Echo (paywall), the companies hope to avoid complex and costly legal proceedings by working together and accepting the inevitability of a blocking injunction.

The case has been running for a year already but during a hearing before the Commercial Court of Brussels this week, Benoît Michaux, lawyer for the Belgian Entertainment Association, explained the new approach.

“The European legislator has put in place a mechanism that allows a national judge to request injunctions to order the providers to block access to the websites in question”, Michaux said.

After being presented to the Court, the list of sites and domains will be assessed to determine whether they’re acting illegally. Michaux said that the parties have settled on a common approach and have been able to identify “reasonable measures” that can be ordered by the Court that are consistent with case law of the European Court of Justice.

“This joint request is a little unusual, things are changing, there is a certain maturation of minds, we realize, from all sides, that we must tackle the problem of piracy by blocking measures. There is a common vision on what to do and how to handle piracy,” he said.

While the ISPs are clearly on a path of cooperation, L’Echo reports that concerns over possible breaches of the E-Commerce Directive mean that the ISPs don’t want to take action against the sites themselves without being ordered to do so by the Court.

“The responsible actors want to demonstrate that it is possible to stop piracy through procedural law,” says Benoît Van Asbroeck, lawyer for Proximus and Telenet.

The Court is expected to hand down its judgment within a month. Given the cooperation on all sides, it’s likely to be in favor of mass site-blocking.

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Last year, American satellite and broadcast provider Dish Network targeted two well-known players in the third-party Kodi add-on ecosystem.

In a complaint filed in a federal court in Texas, add-on ZemTV and the TVAddons library were accused of copyright infringement. As a result, both are facing up to $150,000 in damages for each offense.

While the case was filed in Texas, neither of the defendants live there, or even in the United States. The owner and operator of TVAddons is Adam Lackman, who resides in Montreal, Canada. ZemTV’s developer Shahjahan Durrani is even further away in London, UK.

According to the legal team of the two defendants, this limited connection to Texas is reason for the case to be dismissed. They filed a motion to dismiss in January, asking the court to drop the case.

“Lackman and Durrani have never been residents or citizens of Texas; they have never owned property in Texas; they have never voted in Texas; they have never personally visited Texas; they have never directed any business activity of any kind to anyone in Texas […] and they have never earned income in Texas,” the motion reads.

Dish, however, sees things differently. Yesterday the broadcast provider replied to the motion, submitting hundreds of pages of evidence documenting TVAddons and ZemTV’s ties to the United States.

According to Dish, both defendants utilized US companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Cloudflare to facilitate their infringing activities. In addition. US residents were directly addressed in various messages on the TVAddons site and social media.

“Defendants used TV Addons to target residents of the United States and it was designed to appeal to United States television consumers. The TV Addons Home page stated ‘Whether you’re in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, India or anywhere else, Kodi Addons will work great for you!’,” Dish writes.

Furthermore, TVAddons own data showed that most of its users came from the United States, more than one-third of the total user base.

“The United States was Defendants’ largest market with approximately 34% of all TV Addons traffic coming from users located in the United States, which was three times the traffic from the second largest market.”

Dish points out that the Court has personal jurisdiction under the “Calder effects test,” because defendants knew that the focal point of the harm from their action was in the US, and because their actions connect the defendants to the US in a meaningful way.

The focal point of the harm from TVAddons and ZemTV was in the United States, Dish states, adding that both defendants were well aware of their infringing activities.

“Defendants’ boasting on TV Addons that their services allow users ‘to cut down your cable or satellite television bill substantially, if not entirely’ shows that Defendants were well aware that TV Addons and ZemTV were harming DISH and other legitimate, subscription television service providers in the United States,” Dish writes.

Without getting too deep into the legal jargon, Dish relies on an alternative basis for jurisdiction as the defendants did in their motion to dismiss, which means that they don’t have to address specific connections to the state of Texas.

The broadcast provider hopes that the Court agrees, and wants the case to proceed.

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A copy of Dish Network’s reply is available here (pdf).

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