Mininova Removes All Copyright-Infringing Torrents 352
Pabugs writes with news that popular torrent site Mininova has abandoned their attempts at filtering and simply deleted all torrents other than the legal ones they facilitate through their Content Distribution service. According to their blog post, they were left "no other option than to take [their] platform offline" after a court ruling from August. "The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros."
Debate! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Debate! (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole thing smells more and more like the old P&P RPG Paranoia. Everyone hates secret societies, everyone hates mutants, yet everyone is a mutant in a secret society.
I worked for our version of the RIAA for a while (I didn't mean to, they were part of the bundle of companies I had to support). My moment of "wtf" came when one of their lawyers approached me and asked if I knew anything about flashing a Nintendo DS for their kids so they can play copies.
My answer was "since you're suing people who know aynthing about flashing Nintendos or even do it, my answer has to be no". This is when he offered money...
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The problem is "morals". And I don't mean antiquated decency laws or waggling index finger sermons, I mean examples and principles. When you see people who are allegedly moral models, from politicians to economic leaders to celebrities, be selfish, arrogant idiots who have nothing but their own agendas in their mind, people start to wonder why they should be different. It's not like they weren't in the past, but at the very least they kept the facade up that they don't. Politicians tried to appear honest an
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Morals have always been for the common people and not for the powerful.
It's just easier to catch the president of france breaking copyright law while pushing Draconian copyright laws these days.
I think the combination of computers, cameras, and suppression of computer and camera evidence against the powerful (re: england) will put the nail in the coffin and we will indeed end up with an endless future of a boot on the face of humanity.
Not necessarily (Score:4, Interesting)
> But, collectively, we have to have room for compromise or we will all get nothing.
I can think of a lot of futures where this is not true.
For example, the future where copyright law is unchanged, infringement is rampant and unenforceable, and the content industry merely has to scale down because of lowered profits.
Or the future where the content industry pushes copyright law so out of whack that no one infringes, but their profits are just as lowered because many people are so afraid of the possible penalties they totally avoid buying their products and instead go for the safe indie products which have CC/alternative licensing and/or viewing the content only in ephemeral ways (like on television or a movie screen).
BTW, when I finished school I was a model "responsible citizen" in that I would never have thought to break any laws. Now that I am an adult, I see that the simplistic "law == morality" equivalence is far from being correct. So you might have a big problem in your plans, there, eh?
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Re:Debate! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Debate! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Debate! (Score:5, Funny)
In the 1990's our primary industry, fishing, collapsed as the stocks were not properly managed from a government and citizen perspective.
Not to mention from the perspective of the fish!
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We should replace copyrights and patents with some other system. Reforming it by measures such as reducing monopoly lengths to sane amounts, reducing the scope of the monopolies, and spelling out what can be copyrighted doesn't go far enough. The entire notion of owning an idea is fundamentally flawed. As long as there is a legal foundation that supports this inherently ridiculous notion, vested interests will continually seek to expand it, and engage in rent seeking, and destructive actions such as thre
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Re:Debate! (Score:5, Informative)
Eg.
Q:Could you help me flash my NintendoDS?
A:No
Q:Could you find me the latest cd on thepiratebay?
A:No
Q:Could you grab me a coke?
A:No
Q:Could you call 911 since I am about to go into cardiac arrest?
A:No
Q:Could you stop aliens from kidnapping my children?
A:No
Q:Could you give me the time of day?
A:No
See, its easy.
Re:Debate! (Score:4, Insightful)
+1. If more people learned the power of saying "no" the world would be a better place.
Q: Want to work a 60 hour week for 30 hour pay?
A: No
Q: Want to let us look after your money so we can leverage it and then give you a tiny fraction of the profit?
A: No
Q: Want to borrow some of that money to buy an overpriced house?
A: No
The only reason "no" is not a viable answer to any of these and many similar questions is because there are far too many suckers who are willing to say "yes."
Re:Debate! (Score:5, Funny)
If more people learned the power of saying "no" the world would be a better place.
No
Re:Debate! (Score:4, Interesting)
Depending on where you live, that answer may technically be illegal. Plenty of countries and a few states (oh and Quebec too) have a "Duty to rescue" law which, in a nutshell, states that you must attempt to assist an individual in peril provided that it doesn't also put your life at risk. At the very least, you would be expected to call for help.
It's all semantics though. I can't imagine any decent human being simply standing there and watching while another human has a heart attack, no matter who they work for.
Re:Debate! (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's see.
Imagine that other human being destroyed your life and put you in prison for five years.
How about, your children were sexually abused while in child protective services and one committed suicide.
Of course, if the law requires that I go get help, I'd have
to
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get
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help
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as
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fast
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possible.
I've done the non-vengeance thing and I've done the vengeance thing and let me tell you, vengeance was damn sweet and I have no regrets. It's the only thing that made me smile now and then for a couple years while I recovered back to human.
Re:Debate! (Score:5, Funny)
I thought that duty to rescue only applies to fellow humans and not RIAA lawyers?
Let me get my video camera... (Score:5, Funny)
You called that one, I sure couldn't just stand there and watch. I mean, how often do you get a chance to kick a RIAA person WHILE they are having a heart attack?
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Not everywhere in the US. In Pennsylvania, for example, "Depraved Indifference" can be tantamount to "involuntary manslaughter."
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Unfortunately, when you're working for them, such a denial of service could be seen as a refusal to work. Which not only could cost you your job but also seem a bit suspicious. And ya know, this time and age suspicion is all you have to raise to be a criminal.
What is a copy? (Score:2)
[A record label lawyer] approached me and asked if I knew anything about flashing a Nintendo DS for their kids so they can play copies.
By "copies", do you include homebrew games that implement the same rules as a non-free commercial game? Would Lockjaw [pineight.com], for instance, be considered a "copy" of Tetris DS?
ObTopic: I've seen torrents of just homebrew. I imagine they'd go away too because Nintendo would object to including them in "Content Distribution" on patent grounds.
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The problem is that, homebrew or not, altering the DS alone is already considered illegal in some countries. Yes, altering something that you legally bought and should by any means own, i.e. altering your property, is illegal. So even if he asked for homebrew my answer would have had to be "no". But he directly and bluntly asked for a way to play what they labeled pirated copies.
Re:Debate! (Score:4, Insightful)
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The Pandora box was open a long time ago
The box of Pandora [openpandora.org] isn't even packed, let alone shipped or opened.
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There is obviously an issue with regards to copyright in our society. Millions and more are sharing all the time. This points the finger at the issue being systemic. We need to educate people to enable a wider debate. That is the only thing that will lead to fair change. Piracy is not the answer.
You're not giving people enough credit. Sharing is the answer, and the're doing it. Copyright is going the way of "droit de seigneur" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_de_seigneur). Come to think of it, "copyright" in French is "droit d'auteur". Kinda makes the analogy a lot clearer.
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Re:Debate! (Score:5, Interesting)
There is obviously an issue with regards to copyright in our society. Millions and more are sharing all the time. This points the finger at the issue being systemic.
I'd rather look at the cause of this "issue" - i.e. *why* does it exist. And I'll offer an answer - because it is harder and harder to get rich quickly while staying legal. The fact that I download movies all the time didn't influence my moviegoing one bit - I still go out to the movies every week or two because of the experience and the company of friends - both of which suck over DIVX. My problem is that there usually isn't anything good out there to see. Some nights, we don't remember what we watched around 5 minutes after leaving the cinema! I doubt the problem is with a lack of quality writers or actors or directors - I think most of it comes from producers and other financiers trying to cram in special effects, political correctness and crowd-pleasing stories (especially endings) to try to maximize the profits, like art can be expressed by equations. I don't feel one bit bad about downloading "2012" but I watched Inglorious Basterds and Watchmen twice (just a recent example) and I have a hefty collection of (legal, bought) DVDs of good films and TV shows. My point is that that a significant part of the piracy issue (not all of it!) is the direct result of the fall in quality and resorting to formulaic "this script equals this much $$$" thinking on the part of producers.
I'm sure the same thing goes for music.
One other large thing is convenience - sometimes people just don't feel like going to the movies and it's easier to download the film right now and watch it than waiting months for it to come on DVDs, etc. It is human nature - the baby wants what it wants. There are surely more problems, but I have a feeling these two combined are the cause of over 50% of the piracy issues. Heck, solve the distribution issue (make it cheap and easy and at the same time worldwide as the cinema releases) and I'd bet that 40% of all piracy would simply disappear over night.
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Re:Debate! (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a place for copyright
I used to think that, but I don't any more. Any monopolies handed out by the government and whose cost is borne by the public and the distributed economy will be treated as of interest for the receiving stakeholders only, and thus will permanently expand as the paying parties will not be represented in discussions around the issue. See the claims about IP jobs 'lost' to piracy, yet where are the discussions about jobs among plumbers, pizzamakers or other branches of the economy when copyright shifts money and resources from one part of the economy to the other? Are those branches represented when it's arbitrarily decided that they should be deprived of resources in favour of media industries? Copyright creates no resources, it merely redistributes them.
So no, there is no place for copyright. Any honest industry or creators support scheme requires that it be managed within the normal budget of governments and, like any other redistribution scheme, have its benefits weighed against its costs, and accounted for to the public. No other government scheme has anywhere close to as bad efficiency of copyright; if any other program had less than 5% of funding going to the actual intended beneficiaries there'd be an uproar.
That's not to say there can't be reasonable schemes for encouraging creativity; the easiest would simply be mandatory licensing which dispenses of any contracts no matter what outlet or reproduction, and simply requires a percentage (50-75%, for example) of any revenue derived from the copying to be paid to the creators (via a public agency, such as the IRS, not through private entities like in radio, and modulated by policy). Then it would also be easy to manage reasonable cost/benefit levels (should there be a ceiling on payouts and the rest spread along the long tail to encourage more production, for example, how many years of payout is the optimum to keep creative material flowing, etc).
Boycotting is not enough, the corrosive effect of corruption on politics is too strong, and politically it's only used to claim that anyone boycotting is pirating anyway. But it's certainly a right thing to do; paying for anything from the RIAA/MPAA corps means supporting the type of corruption going on as ACTA and other back-room deals, which I find utterly unacceptable by now.
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Tip of the iceberg (Score:3, Interesting)
You've made a good start, but forgotten all the rest of the bad things of copyright law.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em (Score:2)
I liked this comment from TFA:
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Here is an idea, since these great websites are taken away from us one by one and our freedom along with it.
Maybe we need a more "legal" approach to file sharing.
I propose to have a site that would have deals with distributors to have their tvshow/movies/music etc. in torrent form on the site. In exchange for a percentage of the money made by ads. And also the idea that if someone really likes a product they will probably buy it. I think there is alot of people who
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non-commercial is a bit of an interesting misnomer.
If I would download every movie/piece of music i want to watch/listen too, is that non-commercial?
Up to a point, i agree that current copyright is problematic. There needs to be a reward for making things people want, limited in time/ownership maybe.
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Yes. That constitutes a noncommercial, private use.
Granting copyright owners an exclusive right to profit from their works is reward aplenty. Legalizing noncommercial copyright infringement isn't going to cause
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Some copyright is quite reasonable. What we need is a legalization of noncommercial copyright infringement. Leave the rest of copyright law perfectly as it is. I should be able to share all the files I want, but as soon as I start trying to make money doing that, that's when it should become illegal (as it is today).
I don't think there should be a distinction between commercial and non-commercial, there should be a distinction depending on the amount of damages, and obviously commercial copying would give more evidence of damages.
But consider what could happen if non-commercial infringement wasn't punished: Let's say Steve Jobs has an argument with someone who happens to be the boss of a record company. So Steve Jobs buys two dozen XServes, goes to a record store and buys all CDs made by that record company, plus or
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That distinction already exists today in our legal system and there already is an adjustment to the amount of damages awarded depending on whether or not an infringement is commercial.
Re:Debate! (Score:5, Insightful)
And stop with the stupid after copyright. It's not like Miles Davis can benefit from any copy of Kind of Blue sold today. The purpose of copyright is to provide a source of revenue for the creator, so more people will create stuff, not for some label can profit more.
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Some copyright is quite reasonable. What we need is a legalization of noncommercial copyright infringement. Leave the rest of copyright law perfectly as it is. I should be able to share all the files I want, but as soon as I start trying to make money doing that, that's when it should become illegal (as it is today).
The interesting part here is that the person in question wouldn't have paid for the product anyways, unless it was something that was critical to their work or life(ie - physical item like a lig
Um what? (Score:4, Insightful)
LeTS JuST GIvE iT aWAY FoR FREE!!! LOLOLOLO!!! THATS THE ANSWER!!
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Note also that the concept of copyright originates with a machine which could make cheap copies if you wanted many copies of the same thing. Bein
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Another site will replace it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't know, quality of (public) torrent sites has been on the decline for a while. Now with demonoid still down, mininova dead and the piratebay in limbo what will replace them ? This feels like after Napster when the last of the replacements like audiogalaxy were running out of steam.
Another site already replaced it (Score:3, Informative)
kickasstorrents.com
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Now that TPB and Miniova are no longer cool. What good public sites are left these days?
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torrentz.com
Re:Another site will replace it. (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet is actually a smaller place than most people think. When it comes to any given field, no matter how large, there are really only a few dozen major sites to consider. Sometimes less.
How many large torrent trackers are there really? Twenty, Thirty? I doubt it's over a hundred. Depends on your definition of large perhaps, but I'll make mine; A tracker which hosts TV, Movies, Music, Games and Software, and which has a large number of seeders and leechers (>10000). How many of these site are there? I estimate that there are about a dozen who really count.
Throw out as many platitudes as you like, but the RIAA et al are putting the bittorrent genie back in the bottle. Technology has not kept pace with legal manoeuvres and one by one the top sites are being shut down. With them goes the hundreds of thousands of technically inexperienced seeds and leechers need to keep torrents healthy. Trackers need critical mass for torrents to be useful, but this mass makes them an easy target for legal action.
This is still whack a mole, but the ratio of moles to hammers is, at most, 10:1. The decline of bittorrent began with the Pirate Bay but it will not stop there. Without major changes to how it is centralised, bittorrent will go the way of napster before it and you'll be back to getting your stuff on irc again.
The Net has changed. The Chinese government has proven that the internet and its users can be brought to heel on a massive scale. Netizens in general, and in particular the geeks whose obligation was to defend the network, have shown though lack of innovation that they are not going to defend users freedoms, anonymity or rights online. We'd all rather give our data to webhosts, ISPs, and Google; trusting them not to betray us. Technology has given power back to the big players, and not delivered on its promise to ordinary people.
Re:Another site will replace it. (Score:4, Insightful)
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The top of the iceberg is always small, as popularity in social networks resembles a power law. The network itself is for all practical purposes unlimited. Like the iceberg, if you chop off the top, it rises slightly and you have a new top (which is again small).
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Hint : there's several piracy methods that are going strong right now that have never been touched.
IRC is better than torrent sites ever were for obscure stuff
usenet is faster and more reliable for just about anything, but it costs money for access
megaupload/rapidshare link sites are the hottest new piracy method, and work very well for sharing recent and/or popular files. They work a lot better than torrents because you don't have to seed.
And this is just internet piracy. If the government were to REALLY
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With the monstrous hard drives, you could swap collections such as "every watchable TV drama aired between 2000 and 2005" or "top 1000 songs by month 1970-2009" or "best 100 PC games published in last 5 years by metacritic scores" and so forth. Takes a lot less time to transfer the data if it's plugged into your machine by SATA or eSATA cable than it does by a typical broadband connection.
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Mininova replaced Suprnova, and Mininova will be replaced by another site. It's like playing whack-a-mole, except there are 1000 moles and 1 hammer.
Next up: Moderatelysizednova.
This may kill their CDN (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the success from the CDN service relied on the fact that millions of users visiting Mininova for general torrents would also be exposed to the CDN torrents. With Mininova's general torrent index deep-sixed, traffic will plummet to a tiny fraction of what it was before, and activity on CDN torrents will drop correspondingly.
While this means that users of the CDN won't get any extra exposure, it's still a useful service for pure distribution (they handle the tracking and seeding). Unfortunately, with no revenue stream, mininova won't be able to support that for long.
Whack-A-Mole (Score:2)
So Mininova is gone. The King is dead. Long live the King!
The media industries have been playing Whack-A-Mole with the internet since Napster and nothing has changed.
As long as they don't get any ISP level laws passed, let them have their minor victories.
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Yes, Whack-A-Mole is fun. But as a user, where is the next mole?
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*cough*nntp*cough*
Also there are places like isohunt, but they're not a tracker. There are other P2P techs in the pipeline, such as oneswarm, but in order to truly darken p2p traffic we need faster connections and to put up with slower, multi-hop transfers.
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EMule / EDonkey stopped itself, without any outside help. Last time I checked (over a year ago), there was 1 decent search server, and about 1000 spam servers that fed you millions of dummy hits to any search term, only to send you a WMV virus.
The benefit of centralised servers was in the "trust" value, and the ability to see the comments of other sharers. Bad torrents were quickly detected as such, and good torrents were evident by the numbers of seeds / leeches.
Decentralised searches rely on the premise t
This is great (Score:5, Funny)
It's always annoying to have loads of stolen software music and films come up when I am searching for a torrent.
Having mininova get rid of all the illigal stuff will make it much easier and more pleasant to use. Legitimate stuff gets buried as there is so much more stolen stuff.
I hope other torrent sites follow suit, even just for the ease of use reasons.
At least the judge is sane (Score:5, Insightful)
The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements
After seeing the Google/Italy article, it's nice to see that sanity holds elsewhere.
Not too sorry to see Mininova die (Score:5, Interesting)
Mininova included far too many torrents on private trackers. Sort of defeating the purpose of BitTorrent, actually.
No great loss, all things considered.
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Odd Physics (Score:2)
Apparently a mininova does collapse into a black hole...
"search item" type:torrent (Score:2, Insightful)
So mininova turns into www.legaltorrents.com. What they could do though it just de-reference the links, but keep the torrent names in the list. That way people could simply do a websearch on them. That way the only way to take them down would be to outlaw web searches :)
Oh no! What will I do? (Score:5, Funny)
Mininova is gone!
If only there'd be some kind of alternative! I guess I'll just have to rely on sumotorrent, btjunkie, eztv, fenopy, isohunt, seedpeer, torrentz, torrentbox, torrentdownloads.net, torrent portal, torrentreactor.net, torrentreactor.to, alivetorrents, demonoid, boxtorrent, animelab, animesuki, kickasstorrents, torrentplaza, movietorrents, torrentomega, flixflux, overget, superfundo and all the other sites I can easily find on google by doing a simple search.
I hope I'll be able to survive!
Re:Oh no! What will I do? (Score:5, Informative)
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Typo in summary (Score:2, Funny)
> Mininova Removes All Copyright-Infringing Torrents
Mininova Removes All Torrents ...Here, fixed that for ya
I'm curious... (Score:4, Interesting)
...how can Mininova not be liable for any copyright infringing links, but still be ordered to remove the links? If they're not liable for that content, then they shouldn't have to remove anything.
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because their name was not google
and as usual... (Score:5, Insightful)
And as happens so often, a judge basically says "Well, technically what you're doing isn't illegal, but I still don't like what you're doing, and people are breathing down my neck to do something about you, so stoppit or we're going to bring the legal system down on you anyway. We may not be able to make it stick, but we certainly can make your life hell in the attempt." Surrender your rights and we'll leave you alone - persist and we'll make you regret it. Wonderful legal system we have here.
Judges that make rulings like that need to either be re-educated, or removed. Their job isn't to make the law, but to judge whether or not you've broken a law. (except in trial by jury, and then they don't even get that) Whether or not they like what you're doing, or whether or not they think what you did should be illegal isn't supposed to have anything to do with it. If they're more interested in writing the law, they need to give up their bench and run for senator.
Senators make laws and place restrictions on police and judges. Citizens break laws. Police arrest citizens that appear to have broken laws. Juries (/judges) interpret law and decide if citizens have broken a law. Judges insure a fair trial. Problem here is everyone wants a piece of everyone else's action. Oh if it only weren't for that pesky "separation of powers" thing...
Not all bad (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, I didn't really know Mininova before this. I had heard of it, but that's about it.
I did visit the site just now, and I saw lots of items about music that I'd never heard of.
Maybe it can become a good site to find new music from non-RIAA signed artists, who generally don't have much of a marketing/distribution platform? RIAA, meet foot, gun.
Black Thursday! (Score:2)
Alas, poor MiniNova, I knew him well...
Oh well, that's life in the big city. *shrug*
Mininova Removes All Copyright-Infringing Torrents (Score:2)
They were lucky (Score:2)
Quoted from the TorrentFreak website..
Mininova was founded in early 2005 by five Dutch students, just a month after Suprnova closed its doors. The site started out as a hobby project created by tech-savvy teenagers, but in the years that followed the site’s founders managed to turn it into a successful business that generated millions of dollars in revenue.
This is what got them into trouble, besides, "Aiding and Abetting", (spare me the jurisdictional nonsense please) since even companies that don't seriously object to their software ending up on torrent sites start looking at the bottom line and looking at all the money someone else is making from their product and they are not getting a cut of it.
Greed on all of the parties sides is the problem. If the torrent sites, pointers, indices's, maps, sources, call them what y
Time to move to Freenet... (Score:2, Interesting)
Freenet is where the next generation of filesharing will happen. It's working very well at the moment, Speeds are pretty good and there is a lot of content. Files of 1GB can be easily downloaded in a day, just queue them up. And of course there is a lot of chat on the forums, just like Usenet used to be.
It is a lot more user friendly than it used to be, although the Slashdot crowd are the kind of people who will be the early adopters.
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It will work, for a while.
Then it will suffer that same fate as usenet did with massive amounts of spam and drive the coasts of keeping it up and running until it collapses under it's own weight, much like usenet did.
Distributed systems work well when they are controlled or at least carefully health monitored.
Bandwidth isn't free and never will be and so someone or some group of people must bear the costs and at some point it will be like usenet and become prohibitively expensive because you are not just mo
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FTFS, whitelist: "simply deleted all torrents other than the legal ones they facilitate through their Content Distribution service"
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Re:i wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bah. Remember Suprnova? It is only a matter of time until something else replaces it.
I've always wondered about this. Pirates get all upset and "they are traitors!" when the website operators give up and move on with their lives under heavy pressure from lots of multinational corporations and governments.
But when something bad happens to the guys running these websites, everyone goes "bah. someone else will replace it" and everyone turns their back to them.
Is this a growth some few persons like to fight for on their free time against such a power?
Re:i wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pirates already have an entitlement complex. Why would they want to do stuff for the sites they are using?
Re:i wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
Pirates already have an entitlement complex.
No, you've got it backwards.
Copyright holders have an entitlement complex: they expect to get paid over and over in the future for work they did decades in the past. They think one big hit entitles them to a free ride for the rest of their lives, and they think they're entitled to tell everyone else what they can or can't do with their own property.
Pirates only want to be able to freely exchange information. The only "entitlement" a pirate feels is the right to communicate. Pirates don't expect other people to change their behavior to benefit pirates; copyright holders do expect other people to change their behavior to benefit copyright holders.
Re:i wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright holders have an entitlement complex: they expect to get paid over and over in the future for work they did decades in the past.
What crap. A TON of pirated content happens to be recent movies, games, music, books, etc. Your argument is intellectually dishonest.
They think one big hit entitles them to a free ride for the rest of their lives
This is BS. Content creators invest millions each year into creating new content. A significant proportion of music,movies,etc are never going to become hits. The major incentive to continue pumping out new content is the hope that one of those investments will turn into a hit and pay off. That is the current business model in existence. The incentive of earning a lot of money seems to work in motivating people to create better content. Pirates are effectively destroying this incentive. Yes there will be people who will continue to create content and give it away for the "love of the art" or whatever (even they need to find a way to get paid). I haven't seen anything that will lead me to believe this is going to be anything but a small minority.
Pirates only want to be able to freely exchange information
So where are the "information wants to be free"-pirates who are hiring people to create content they like? Then they can exchange this information all day long on their terms. Why is it almost always "information" that somebody else paid millions of dollars to create? What is the percentage of 'legit' content to content violating copyright law? A cursory glance at TPB and other sites leads me to believe little to no popular content on those sites is of the legit kind.
Re:i wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
What crap. A TON of pirated content happens to be recent movies, games, music, books, etc. Your argument is intellectually dishonest.
No, it's quite honest. Don't you think the people who hold the copyrights on works released this year will still expect to be paid for copies ten or twenty years from now? Why would they act any differently from the people who hold copyright on works from past decades?
Besides, expecting to be paid today for work I did a year ago, a month ago, or a week ago is no better. It's still an attempt to enforce a contract on someone who wasn't a party to it at the time. I didn't ask Lady Gaga to record "Poker Face", so regardless of whether I listen to it or download it, why would I have any obligation to pay her for that effort?
Content creators invest millions each year into creating new content. A significant proportion of music,movies,etc are never going to become hits. The major incentive to continue pumping out new content is the hope that one of those investments will turn into a hit and pay off. That is the current business model in existence.
Yes, it's a stupid framework that barely qualifies to be called a business model. It's like calling "lottery player" a career. The major incentive to continue buying lottery tickets is the hope that you'll win the jackpot... but you probably won't. Why play the copyright lottery when you could be getting paid directly for creating art?
The incentive of earning a lot of money seems to work in motivating people to create better content.
You know what works just fine as an incentive in every other industry? The incentive of being paid for doing quality work. The best lawyers command a higher rate than the worst lawyers. The best carpenters get more work and get paid more for it. What makes you think artists can't muster up the motivation to do good work without special incentives that involve the rest of us giving up part of our free speech?
So where are the "information wants to be free"-pirates who are hiring people to create content they like?
They're on sites like Sellaband and Kickstarter.
Then they can exchange this information all day long on their terms.
Surely you've noticed that they can already exchange any information all day long on their terms. The question is, will content producers adapt to that reality, or will they remain in denial with a business model that depends on being the sole source of copies?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
1,320,433 according to Google's cache.
Same droppings, different pile (Score:5, Insightful)
The MPAA/RIAA are not the ones to blame for this..
It was BREIN, the dutch RIAA... bastards.
Same droppings, different pile. The nine members of the MAFIAA (Sony, GE, Disney, Fox, Time Warner, National Amusements, Vivendi, WMG, and EMI) are the same no matter which country they operate in.
Re: (Score:2)
Heh.
The tracker with one torrent: Minnova.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Let me tell you a true story from real life.
While traveling the endless lands of The Barrens and sipping my Mountain Dew drink with ices, I remembered a note my mother left for me in my childhood. It was on the fridge door, with a lovely heart magnet on top of it. I read the note and it said she'll be late home today
Re:Well, dang. (Score:4, Funny)
Where do those of us looking for not-legally avaliable stuff, like dubbed anime go now?
You could always go teach English in Japan.
Re: (Score:2)
animefreak.tv, DUH.
LegitTorrent (Score:2)
How they knew which torrents were illegal?
Some of these trackers have "LegitTorrent" services designed for publishers of quality works that aren't blatant copyright infringements. Mininova just deleted every torrent that wasn't in its LegitTorrent section [mininova.org].