IsoHunt Shut Down? 297
psic writes "One of the most popular torrent search sites, IsoHunt, was taken down on tuesday. The owners of the site say that the move came from their ISP without prior notice, though it is probably linked with the MPAA's lawsuit against various torrent search sites earlier this year. They plan on moving ISPs from the US to Canada, and say that moving the servers so someplace like Sweden or Sealand is not an option, as they put it: "BitTorrent was created for legitimate distribution of large media files, and we stand by that philosophy as a search engine and aggregator."" This is a story we've heard before with other sites, only serving to further demonstrate that playing wack a mole with torrent aggregators isn't the solution to anything.
the obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:good idea, bad idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Who's fault is it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Only reason this is personally a bummer... (Score:1, Insightful)
a Rose by any other name is still full of crap (Score:1, Insightful)
What they DIDN'T say... (Score:3, Insightful)
"BitTorrent was created for legitimate distribution of large media files, and we stand by that philosophy as a search engine and aggregator."
"...and at the same time, we know that 99% of what our customers are looking for is pirated, and we've made handsome advertising revenue. We'd like to keep making money off of the huge demand for piracy -- it's not like copyright owners have a monopoly on the concept of 'greed', you know -- so we're going to keep doing it, and keep throwing around that 'legitimate distribution' phrase, just because we enjoy the irony."
At least TPB is a little more honest and straightforward in their goals. "legitimate distribution." Right, that's exactly what the typical isohunt customer is after, and that's exactly why they were purportedly sued by copyright holders. All that "legitimate distribution."
Bow to the upstream, for he is your master. (Score:5, Insightful)
With the end of network neutrality, it could easily happen.
Bullshit Taco... (Score:1, Insightful)
What is it? You get pissed off when they go after the aggregators and hypocrically say Go After The Individual Pirates, and when they do, you scream I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY ARE GOING AFTER SINGLE MOTHERS!!! WHAT BASTARDS!!! IT ONLY GOES TO PROVE THAT COPYRIGHT DOESN'T WORK!!!
So WTF is it? Go after aggregators or go after the pirates? And its funny, no matter who they go after, the Copyright Doesn't Work mantra is thrown in as proof...
I'm sorry, you don't have a right to software or media that wasn't given to you legitimately. These ISO sites are purely there to provide pirated software and rarely anything more. You know it, the owners know it and the people searching there know it. Sure, there MIGHT be a few legal items...I've seen this site before come up when I was looking for CC'd media, but almost always surrounding it was hundreds of others that were obviously not Creative Commons in origin.
So which is it? State your preference for the record? Do you believe folks should be able to profit off their hard work, or should those of us that provide intellectual properties for a living be marginalized for your 'greater good'. This was one of the reasons I left a profitable realm where I worked in the creative field for hard cold gov't paid for science...at least here I can pretend I'm doing it for the greater good while getting screwed by both my employer and the industry.
I'm posting this semi-anonymously because my beliefs do not reflect my employers beliefs and I really don't want to connect the two (or alter my sig).
--clif
Re:a Rose by any other name is still full of crap (Score:2, Insightful)
I thought that's what we are accused of? Not buying, that is.
Did you take one of those courses yourself? The cost of a product generally follows the simple equation demand / supply. When supply is infinite, as it is when you can copy something with zero effort without affecting the original, the cost approach zero. In order to be able to extort the consumers in paying a lot more than the products are worth, there are lobbied laws in place to force an artificial scarcity of the product.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is anyone suprised? (Score:2, Insightful)
In the pro-piracy crowd, there are no illegal content. If you buy a CD or a DVD, it's yours and you should be able to do what you please with the information.
Re:You're damned right... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that's a dangerous, counterproductive way to phrase it. Just because you disagree with their philosophy, or think that they're greedy or evil, doesn't make them less than human. That's a very dangerous game that historically led to very bad results.
How funny... (Score:3, Insightful)
Please, someone bitch-slap them off the planet, they really annoy me... perhaps to the same planet the buggy-whip makers are on...
Re:Same Task, Different Tools (Score:4, Insightful)
Torrents generally encompass people-shifting, which isn't quite legal...
Hydra (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who's fault is it? (Score:3, Insightful)
They created the site specifically to allow people to download illegal content. And, with the ads, they profited from it.
Re:May not be intended to be a solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:good idea, bad idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, most of the time they don't have that right.
Depending on where you live and what is stated in the EULA:
- Software, you may make 1 backup copy of the disk. The copy would be of the disk that is in your possession (i.e. copy would have the same CD-Key).
- Audio CDs, the verdict is not out on what is legal and not legal. If the *AA have their way, we won't even be allowed to RIP to mp3 format.
- Books, I believe that, in most places, you cannot even make a copy of a book for yourself without paying some fee. So it would likely be illegal to download a copy of the book. It's not illegal to make a photocopy of it since you'd be paying a copyright fee. Again, this is only true in some places, libraries actually pay copyright fees for their copy machines. Legit copy services will charge you a copyright fee or refuse to copy.
- when something is stolen from you, you have LOST it, by law you need to PAY for another copy. This is what happened when my car was stolen, I lost all of my CDs and my insurance paid out cash to replace them.
And please give us all a break. I'm sure your ISP can figure out that the 350GB you downloaded last month was NOT all legit.
Re:You're damned right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh dear. you REALLY think that statement is true?
firstly, they are not 'subhuman'. secondly, there is nothing preventing you going home right now, writing some music or making an amateur movie, and releasing it free on the web. The fact that you don't bother, but would rather make illegal copies of other peoples work instead, speaks volumes about the issue. They are not restricting the supply of entertainment. not even vaguely.
If you really gave a damn about the issue, you would avoid *evil RIAA* content entirely and stick to free content, or purchase your content directly from the content creators. Either way, downloading hollywood movies from isohunt makes their point, not yours.
Re:a Rose by any other name is still full of crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright is an arbitrary ARTIFICIAL law -- whose time has come and past. Why is illegal? Because the government says so; and who creates the government? The people, and the people clearely are showing that it's an archaic hold-over when information was a scarce commodity.
Sharing is caring. That's the best kind of (free) advertising you can get!
Cheers
Re:Is anyone suprised? (Score:3, Insightful)
1) a communist
2) a leecher
3) an idiot.
Choose.
Or explain why you have the RIGHT to take my hard work for free? Then explain my incentive to do any further work if that's true? note that this generalises to everyone on planet earth that makes any content at all that can be encoded digitally.
Re:a Rose by any other name is still full of crap (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who's fault is it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:the obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, its just the nature of politics in the states. There are plenty of countries in Europe with much fairer political systems which do a much better job of representing the people who elect them.
If you just accept that your political system is never going to represent your opinions it never will.
If you try your damnedest to change it you MIGHT be successful.
Re:the obligatory... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, spoken like a true 8 year-old.
How about next time you be original and quote something like Ren and Stimpy?
The fruit of your labour... (Score:4, Insightful)
My problem is that I find it socially irresponsible to fund media cartels who manipulate the legal systems of various countries in an effort to artificially inflate prices and maintain a monopoly over the distribution channel.
Is that more irresponsible than pirating content? I don't know; I honestly struggle with that question. I do not believe that "information wants to be free" means that people are entitled to take and enjoy the creative works of others without paying. Doing creative work is partly an act of investment, and like any other, one of the rewards can be passive income after the work is created. Some seem to believe that people should be denied rewards on that investment if their trade happens to be creative works. I don't agree, and I don't think that view represents the majority, either.
But along the same lines, I don't believe those who control the market for content creators' products (payola, etc.) are entitled to misrepresent the revenue stream on their balance sheet & rip those artists off, either. I don't believe corporate entities are entitled to retroactively rescind the public domain status of works that have passed into that domain. I don't believe that media corporations are entitled to force internet and satellite broadcasters into using expensive, proprietary streaming formats by legislatively mandating "approved" DRM frameworks. And I don't believe that distributors or creators are entitled to multiple payments for each device I wish to use my purchased content on. Except for a few bright spots, what we've got right now is a crap system, IMO.
Ultimately, I hope a system evolves that enables me to be a good customer of the artists I like and feel good about it. You going independent is a seedling of such a system; I hope something resembling an aggregator of your distribution system becomes the norm instead of the alternative in the near future.
Re:Only reason this is personally a bummer... (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't you realize that BitTorrent is designed as a zero-sum game? If some people have ratios over 1:1, other people must have ratios under it because the average of the whole community has to be exactly 1:1.
Re:a Rose by any other name is still full of crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly you have never created anything you hold valuable.
I'm going to have to stand up and give my unpopular opinion here. Copyright does have its place. People SHOULD have the right to retain ownership of things they worked hard to create. They SHOULD be allowed to choose what happens to what they have created. If that means letting a limited number of people seeing it, if that means only allowing it to be seen in certain galleries or theaters or sold in certain stores, if that means charging what they feel is a fair price for each reproduction of that work, if that means not allowing other people to distribute their work freely then they have the right to that - for a finite, and fair, amount of time. I create stuff. I write stories. One day, I hope to publish and make money from what I write, which is why not everything I write is freely available online. I don't want people to randomly copy and paste my stories elsewhere without asking me. I'm lenient, but I draw the line at people who profit themselves from it, or don't give me due credit. Is that so bad? Don't I have the right to draw that line?
The argument is this: the movie studios and recording companies believe that they are losing staggering amounts of money from piracy. They believe - or have convinced themselves - that EVERY downloaded song or movie is a lost physical sale and therefore they SUE indiscriminately, for appallingly disproportionate sums and prison terms (decades in some cases), to make it so that the general public FEARS piracy.
But the fact of the matter is: when you copy me, I may lose sales - or, I may not. But I also gain a wider audience for my work. And through that wider audience I may gain sales - more than I originally lost (whatever that number is). If I am an artist and I created solely so that people could see my work, then I lose NOTHING. If I am a businessman and created solely for profit, I MAY lose something, or I may gain something.
The pro-piracy argument here is surely not that "all information should be free, everything you ever created should be available to everybody for no cost and they shouldn't have to pay you". That's insane. The argument is that choice should be with the creator - something the internet has facilitated, to the **AA's chagrin.
I'm beginning to ramble so I'll stop here.
Re:the obligatory... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, spoken like a true 8 year-old.
How about next time you be original and quote something like Ren and Stimpy?
Re:a Rose by any other name is still full of crap (Score:3, Insightful)
The people made J.K. Rowling richer than the Queen of England. The people paid damn near a half-billion dollars for tickets to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest [imdb.com]
The people are buying the DVD in similiar numbers.
The Geek could stand a touch more humility when he claims to know what "the people" want.
There are perhaps a half-dozen studios world-wide that have demonstrated they can finance and produce theatrical animation at the Pixar level. It takes about five years, $100 million dollars, and the labor of four hundred people to bring a project like The Incredibles to completion. That, to my mind, is a fair definition of scarcity.
The Geek never sees the distinction between production and distribution, the original and the copy.
Re:Same Task, Different Tools (Score:4, Insightful)
I can record The Office and watch it later at my home, if I want to spend the time to program my VCR. But let's say I'm busy or technophobic: I can pay someone to come to my house, set up a VCR, and program it to record The Office, right? Nothing wrong with that.
Now take it one step further. Why shouldn't I be able to pay someone to record The Office using his VCR, and bring the tape over for me to watch? It saves him the hassle of coming over to my house just to push a few buttons on my VCR, and the end result is the same: I watch the show later, on tape, instead of live.
Now, one final step. Tapes are a dying technology. Why shouldn't I be able to pay someone to record The Office at home, encode it as an AVI file, and send me the file over the internet? The effect is exactly the same as bringing over a tape, which in turn is the same as recording it myself - I'm just delegating the work to someone else who's better at it, or at least more willing to do it. The fact that I'm paying is irrelevant; he might just as well decide to do it for free, and in fact that's what happens every day on the internet.
We can extend the same logic to music that's broadcast over the radio: I can record the song myself and listen to it again, so therefore I should be allowed to have someone else record it and send me a copy. It's nothing that I couldn't do myself, and there's no sensible reason to force me to do it myself when someone else is willing to do the work for me.