In the beginning of this month I covered the IPRED law that was applied in Sweden to hunt illegal Peer 2 Peer file sharing. I also said that I will give it 2 weeks before it starts to fall apart. It seems that I was right !

Exactly 2 weeks later, internet service provider (ISP) Banhof declares that they will destroy their customers internet traffic information. The law is based upon getting traffic information about file sharing from ISPs. Now if the IPSs decides not to store information about their customers, the court won’t get any proof about illegal file sharing.

The law doesn’t state that ISPs should store information but rather leaves it open to each ISP to decide whether to store such information or not.

I would say Banhof has made a good marketing strategy which will push a lot of internet users to switch provider. In return, it could be a signal to other ISPs to follow the same strategy to protect their customers and by that killing IPRED law.

Copyright owners will certainly not stand still, they will basically induce a new law forcing ISPs to store information about internet traffic. Until then, Banhof customers are surfing safely.

IPRED stands for International Property Rights Enforcement Directive and it is the new directive from the EU to stop illegal file sharing over the internet.

In short the law forces ISPs to reveal the names of people attached to IP addresses suspected of sharing copyrighted music, movies, other files illegally on the internet.

The law took effect in Sweden on April 1st which means all internet activities starting from that date are being recorded and serious consequences will be taken against illegal file sharing.

Below a graph from NetNod shows the internet traffic fall dramatically after IPRED took place which implies according to analyzers that most swedish internet traffic comes from P2P download and file sharing.

Many protests have been raised against IPRED and many believe that the law will not manage to stop piracy.  There are already ways to surf anonymously and to hide one’s identity on the internet. The Pirate Bay already offers this solution for 5 euros/month.

I give it 2 weeks so let’s just wait and see what will happen. I will try to keep you updated about the situation as soon as I have more information. Keep in touch.

I got an email from Helen Anderson at brainz.org asking me to mention her article about “How to Download & Watch Free Movies & Video Online”. After I read the article I started to wonder about the real purpose of that article. If it was intended to give the readers a list of source to download videos or watch online movies than in my opinion it is a very poor list. First of all, Youtube, Veoh and Vimeo don’t fit in this context as these services are intended to allow users to deliver their own video content and they are very strict about that especially Youtube. I already covered copyright infringement cases with Youtube. That is the main reason behind the short time limit.
The article lists few online streaming movies providers, covers the most popular P2P clients and bittorrent clients but not the torrent search engines like thepiratebay and Mininova.
The information though about each service is very basic (paid or ads support, high or fairly good quality, availability of movies)
In conclusion, I would like to draw a line between a blog post and an article. An article should be as objective as possible, be based on a research and covers all aspects of the subject in question.

A friend of mine contacted me the other day complaining that his youtube account has been completely removed including all his video content. He got an email from noreply@youtube.com about one copyright infringing video and the next day he was unable to access his account and could not find any of his other videos.
The copyright infringing video was a video clip for arabic singer that he had uploaded. It’s kind of ridiculous when the most popular videos are all video clips.
We tried to contact youtube to get the account back. There were many video contents of his family and kids that are not copyright infringing (I guess).
Anyone had such an experience before and would like to share it here please be welcome.

Youtube launched yesterday a swedish version of the video site with personalized channels for the swedish language. Google doesn’t aim to get more traffic from Sweden but to have more active users from the scandinavian region. Partners like Bonniers (media), Socialdemokraterna (political party), Djurgården soccer team and the music band Ace of Base will have their own channels on Youtube.
For Bonniers this means that Expressen, TV4, DN and Newsmill will put their own content on youtube. Revenues from page views will be shared between Google and Bonniers said Patrick Walker, Youtube european manager to metro.se

For TubePress.NET this will increase this will attract more swedish bloggers to import swedish videos from youtube to their wordpress blog using TubePress plugin.

I would like to thank all the users, testers, debuggers, fans, suggestions makers, even those who hate TubePress.NET plugin (if exist). I would also wish to thank in particular all the donators for their generosity. I really appreciate your help and support.
A special thanks goes to those who are recommending the plugin for their friends and promoting it on their blogs and communities. Their efforts are very much appreciated to help grow the TubePress community.

In the end, I have to thank Wordpress team for the nice job they are doing and to Youtube team as well for opening the ways. Afterall, without both services, this wordpress plugin wouldn’t exist.

While most people are using TubePress.NET plugin for mass importing youtube videos to their wordpress blog using tags, others prefer to have more control over the import situation and to actually ask for the video by ID. This feature was introduced in earlier versions of this plugin, however during the recent rewrite procedure, I assumed that youtube always returns the ID of the queried video in the XML response. However it turned out after I checked the youtube API docs this morning that for queries by ID, youtube doesn’t return the ID.
Obviously, because the user already knows it… I would like to thank Mark Robertson for pointing out this problem.

I suggest that those who wish to use this function, please update your plugin. Download available as usual from the download button at your right in this website and from the WordPress plugin directory as well.
Another tip of the day: Never ASSUME anything as my old university professor used to say: “When you ASSUME, you make and ASS out of U and ME” and always check the documentation.

Finally I managed to update the website template and fix the layout. The right sidebar has been floating to the bottom of the page for “a while”
Now everything looks in a good shape, for the time being at least! I also noticed that the final release of TubePress.NET with the latest bug fixes was not updated on the website (available through the Download button). However to those who are downloading TubePress from the wordpress plugin directory here should not have any problems.
Anyway, I also updated the package on the website now.

Despite all recent efforts in rewriting the plugin code to make as simple as possible and seemless to the wordpress engine yet usefull to the user, one should always keep in mind that the environment where the plugin (wordpress installation) is running could affect the overall performance.
This mainly depends on your hosting plan: the PHP configuration on the server. In the current release, the plugin is able to automatically detect whether the required environment is available or not. It can even try to adjust the settings but in some cases, (usually on shared hosting), PHP scripts don’t have privileges to change configuration, so the plugin will fail to adjust the environment and will print a warning message about the required settings and asks you to contact your hosting provider.

Hopefully, you should not see any strange warning or error messages from now on. My tips to check whether the import was successfull is not to rely on what you see in your website. Instead go to Manage in you admin panel and check the sub section Posts or Pages and see if you find the videos that you recently imported. If the videos are there, then TubePress has done its job successfully.

So now we are sure that TubePress is working fine, but you go to the website and for some reason you don’t see the videos.
First thing to do is to check the template. Although it never happened before that a template affects the performance, but it’s a good start to check that no posts / pages are being rejected by the template.
Next and the most important is to check the plugins and boy what a list! I intended to avoid Wordpress plugin API in TubePress to avoid compatibility problems with other plugins.
This is a real problem, if 2 plugins (at least) are accessing the same information and making some processing before presenting it to the visitor’s screen, each plugin should take into account the other because basically you can’t control which plugin is running first so you don’t know which plugin is accessing the original data and which one is getting the output of another plugin.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter what data is presented to the plugin, since each plugin does a totally different job, but what if the plugin is getting an input from trigger from the content data of a post or changing the layout ?

Can you imagine in what mess the post will end up if you have more than 20 plugins running on your site?

TubePress.NET works on the same level as the wordpress engine which means that it uses core functions together with its own classes and functions, and does not make use of the WP plugins API (hooks).
The only api function that TubePress actually uses is to create the menu inside the admin panel. This should be safe as long as the functions called have a unique name.

If you get stuck and still having problems with importing youtube videos to wordpress please let me know and I will be pleased to assist you.

It has came to my attention that some of you are having problems running TubePress.NET on their hosting servers.
If you are getting Warning Messages like this one
Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/wp-content/plugins/tubepress.net/tubepress.php on line 384
Where xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx is the path to the wordpress installation on your server

This means that your server configuration is blocking external file access, which in consequence blocks TubePress from accessing Youtube.
Solution:
allow_url_fopen should be ON in PHP configuration (php.ini). Probably, you don’t have access to edit this file and it could also be that your hosting company has restricted changing the allow_url_fopen value. In this case, you should refer to them and ask them to set the value of allow_url_fopen to ON.

On my side, TubePress will try to change the value of allow_url_fopen but if this action is restricted, it will ask you to contact your web hosting provider.
Many users have been asking me to recommend a good hosting. To be honest none cheap web hosting provider is perfect, you have to make a compromise between budget and requirements. It is obvious that the more you require from your server the more you will need to pay and the more you disregard features the more your hosting bills will shrink.
Good web hosting companies that have affordable hosting plans are mediatemple, dreamhost, ThinkHost. I would also recommend you to have a dedicated server instead of a shared hosting, it gives more freedom and saves you some headaches.

Feel free to use this youtube downloader script to download your favorite video from youtube to your computer in a flash video format.
This service is FREE so please do not abuse.

If you are interested to run this script on your own website you can purchase the script for 20 USD only per each domain.