Another tool in the war on anti-piracy is torrext, a free torrent metadata service.

How it works is you upload a torrent to it, or provide a URL to a torrent on say mininova, and torrext will extract the data from the torrent file and save it to a page under the torrents info_hash.

The data it extracts looks to be the created date, comment, and the files in the torrent. If it was uploaded to torrext via a URL from mininova it will provide the link to the torrent file as well. Plus because the info_hash is unique to every torrent, you can add a URL for a torrent from thepiratebay, mininova and torrage and it will add the download links for each site. REDUNDANCY!

The best thing is, the site hosts no torrents, no trackers, and the database isn’t searchable.

Except by Google. Because they have the most recent torrent URLs listed on the main page the Google spider can access and index torrent data that is on torrext. So if you wanted to search for a torrent on torrext you can use google… like so:

Video files? “.avi” site:torrext.appspot.com
ISO files? “.iso” site:torrext.appspot.com
Videos of Megan Fox? “megan fox” “.avi” site:torrext.appspot.com
How bout EZTV releases? “EZTV” site:torrext.appspot.com
Liberal talk shows? (”the daily show”|”the colbert report”) site:torrext.appspot.com

Google has indexed all the files in the torrent data it finds on torrext so in a way its a bit better. However it does not show the number of seeders or leechers – but I may make a script to scrape the trackers to tell you. Watch this space.

So I was thinking just before, all these movies that get pirated and stuff and all the MPAA or whatever try to sue people for copying their movies.

This was while I was reading the wiki page for 10,000 BC and I see the budget was $105 million but the gross worldwide revenue was $268 million. So they got $168 million for doing that movie. And this is a movie that got rated poorly.

That is quite a pretty penny, of course it has to be distributed amongst all the actors/writers/directors etc, but seems like they’d be living comfortably off that.

So I wouldn’t feel guilty pirating that movie. And thats $168 million from cinema’s alone, so there is still all the rentals, and the DVD purchases for the many many people who do buy DVD’s. It still feels cheap to give someone a copied DVD as a gift for a birthday or christmas and stuff.

So I think they should stop being so greedy.