Slashdot Mirror
TorrentBits.org and SuprNova.org Go Dark
Numerous people wrote in with similar stories: "Without providing a reason, both of these sites have shut down: SuprNova.org and TorrentBits.org." We mentioned a few days ago that the MPAA was going after Bittorrent sites.
How am I going to watch Enterprise now? No TV channel in Norway sends it, nor do they have any plans to send it. I buy the DVDs. I watch the movies. And then they fuck people over by removing my only way of watching it before it comes to DVD?
And, no, I don't have access to Swedish channels.
A big point many people miss -- trackers are what keep the torrents together. Indexers like SuprNova, although highly popular, do nothing but point people where to go.
It's like asking a bartender about the street corners where the girls hang out late at night. If he responsible for how you use the information; ie, if you engage in prostition?
It's a sad, sad day when information is made the scapegoat. If anything, they should be applauded, and kept as a means for getting to the real criminals.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
People, please stop posting links to your favorite torrent site that is still up and kicking. They are already under tremendous pressure right now, and I don't want them to have any more attension brought to them. Those that are interested can find the sites themselves, so please, help save the few that are left and stop posting links.
this is the same sort of thing that happened with the original Napster. Any sort of centralization is going to become an immediate target for MPAA/RIAA legal action. At least with BitTorrent there can be other sources for .torrent files, but so long as they can shut down any large repositories like suprnova.org, finding files will be too cumbersome for all but the most determined users.
DC++ seems to have the same weakness, with the hosts, but as long as host lists are legal, it will remain pretty easy to find new hosts. Gnutella seems pretty safe, but they've managed to pollute the network enough to make it almost unusable.
alas, it is only a matter of time before something comes along that perfects this problem and leaves the MPAA/RIAA with no option but to come up with a new business model. Free music seems to me to be a fine way to advertise a touring artist who is making money off of the shows. Movies may have to resort to product placement, or something.
How's this for a solution to film piracy?
...wait a few weeks
.... wait some more
1. Forget chasing 'pirates'. This will save a lot of expensive legal bills. Cut back drastically on advertising too, as you don't need to whip people up into a frenzy to get them to theatres in the first week.
2. Make film (Citizen Kane: starring Adam Sandler or something).
3. Make a VCD cut and make unlabelled cheapo vcd's. Using the economies of scale, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate vcd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies. Your margin is the difference between a bulk pressed cd and a small scale burned copy.
4. Simultaneously sell the film as a download for the same price as you get for the vcd.
5. Make a nicer, longer dvd cut of the film and, again, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate dvd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies.
6. Sell the dvd cut of the film online at the same price as the DVD wholesale price.
7. Theatre release of film in lovely THX/35mm
8. Boxed set dvd release with extra everything.
By doing this you make money from the guys currently selling 'pirated copies' of films and money from people who can't be bothered to find a torrent of your film. The money saved on lawyers and advertising would probably pay for setting up the servers.
At stage 3 you are the sole supplier of vcd of your film, it is uneconomic to burn copies so you own the market. People may share your film over the internet but the hassle of finding a torrent and/or running P2P software is competing against the paid download (4) which is priced as low as a blank cdr.
This is simple economics. Cut back on expensive things like lawyers and advertising, then put out bargain bin priced product to soak up the sales to misers and the poor. You can still make bigger margins on the nicely packaged versions to people who want to buy them.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
What about all those folks who said at the last "SuprNova is going bye-bye" story that it couldn't be touched because it was somewhere in Europe where the MPAA can't reach them?
We can't really say this is the result of MPAA, can we? Can they "get" the folks related to suprnova.org if they are located in Belgium or Turkey or whereever?
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
<sarcasm> Haven't you read the Constitution? It is your God-given right to obtain and distribute copyrighted works without the author's permission! Except when it comes to GPL'd software, of course. We hang motherfuckers who violate that shit. </sarcasm>
Let's face it. The majority of BitTorrent traffic is not strictly legal. What did you expect? The RIAA is going to try to protect its business.
Are you under the illusion that the MPAA would not already know about these sites? I mean, you reckon they don't have google or are you thinking the don't have an internet connection? Maybe they work from a dail-up connection and don't get to check out any forums? A bit more respect for the powers of the dark side might suit you well
I have nothing to say, just want people to read my cool new sig
I wouldn't automatically assume it was the fault of one of the recording industry groups ... it may be that suprnova.org simply couldn't afford their bandwidth costs any more. But until we hear more from the owners, we're all just guessing as to the cause.
Chip H.
... of the MAN trying to keep us down...
I'll miss SuprNova... A lot of good old tv there.
Kenny P.
Visualize Whirled P.'s
Look man, everyone knows he with the gold makes the rules.
So if you really want torrents to continue being available on the internet, and in general any kind of p2p activity to be available on the internet for US customers - then the following must happen.
1) You need to get some gold for your own lawyers. That is just the fact of the matter. It sure is nice to get all this free stuff, but as they say - there is no free lunch.
2) You need to get some gold for your lobbiest to the congress critters. They only know what the MPAA/RIAA mouths tell them. A politician basically knows only how to get elected, otherwise they would be doing something else.
3) You need to get politically motivated. You need that political organization named above. You need your own moveon.org to keep the membership active in letter/fax/email writing and informative campaigns.
Play time on the internet is over. It is time to grow up and realize politics, government, and all that corruption is part of the game now.
A big point many people miss -- trackers are what keep the torrents together. Indexers like SuprNova, although highly popular, do nothing but point people where to go.
It's like asking a bartender about the street corners where the girls hang out late at night. If he responsible for how you use the information; ie, if you engage in prostition?
The big point that you are missing (and most people running torrent trackers) is that if you have a reasonable suspicion that the information you are providing to someone is going to be used for criminal purposes then you are treading dangerously close to the definition of "conspiracy".
Let's take your example of the helpful bartender a bit further. You wander into a bar and over several drinks proceed to tell the bartender about your sleazy business partner and how he is cheating you. The bartender tells you that "he knows a guy" who can take care of your problem for a bundle of cash. You take the number he gives you, meet with a contract hit man, and pay him a wad on money so that your business partner meets a rather violent demise.
Is the bartender a participant in your conspiracy to commit murder? According to the law he is. A reasonalbe person would have no problem conecting the dots here and information that was provided had a purpose...
To drag this back in to the real world, you might want to take a look at how the law deals with flea markets and swap meets where counterfeit goods are being sold. The person organizing the swap meet can post as many signs as they want saying that they have no idea what you are selling and are only providing a place for people to put their goods on display, but the law treats that claim like the BS it truly is. The people running the torrent trackers know what is being provided and what their role in the game is, and if they try to claim that they are shocked that people are trading pirated music, software, and videos on these services they will be bitch-slapped by the law.
MPAA has no "legal jurisdiction" anywhere. They're a trade group, not a government body, and the most likely do have legal standing to sue under Swedish law.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
No one said the MPAA shut them down. It was just only mentioned that these sites went offline around the same time it was announced the MPAA was going to start going after these types of sites.
How can posting a list of files possibly be illegal?
That is all that Suprnova ever did. Now, if its illegal to post a list of files, it must also be illegal to print one in a newspaper, or write one on a piece of paper with a pencil anad photocopy it.
If you go a google search for "index of" apache *.dmg* "port 80" you get lots and lots of links to copyrighted software. By your flawed logic, Google "is just plain illegal" because it provides lists of files just as Supernova did.
Printing a list can never be an illegal act. At least not in a free country it cant.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
"Since I read somewhere that it's closed source, and there is no intent to port it to linux... I hope Exeem dies a firey death, as places like suprnova can easily be replaced.
Now if Exeem because opensource, and becomes availible for Linux... well... another matter entirely."
Only on Slashdot would nonsense like this get moderated up. Please explain what is insightful about this? He proclaims he read something that he cannot backup with a source and he shows that he is a zealot and hopes that all non open source projects fail. That's really insightful.......
Yeah, beacuse the MPAA doesn't already know what torrent sites exist.
^^
Well, I dunno about the "insightful" either, but I for one would never use a closed-source p2p client.
:)) is nothing I'll trust on...
It's really just a matter of safety (and paranoia): only with opensource clients I can be relatively sure that the client won't rat out on me or install malware of various sorts. Honor among thieves (or pirates
The portability is an added (very nice) bonus.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
the MPAA is co-operating in criminal investigations with police in Finland, the Netherlands and France, so it is reasonable to infer that reports of raids in more European countries are likely to surface shortly.
Yes, the MPAA is acting on behalf of its members and copyright holders, ensuring that intellectual property is not distributed for free. They have the law on their side, and can probably buy or lobby anyone of importance that disagrees with them.
That said, I think the MPAA is fighting a losing battle. People like to share, to spread what little wealth and happiness they have around.
BitTorrent enables a system where people of like interests and hobbies can reward one another as they are connected to the same torrent. And yes, this includes both legitimate and illegitimate uses.
Sharing is part of human nature and any organization that throws its weight around in an attempt to circumvent our instinct to share will ultimately prove to be futile.
That unauthorized copying (incorrectly called pirating or stealing) is illegal doesn't change the fact that the current model will never again work (in other words "the genie is out of the bottle"). If a typical (non US) consumer has a choice of e.g. downloading the new episode of Simpsons the day after it was released for free, or wait 1 year until it reaches local TV (and is usually dubbed and I prefer the original), or wait 5+ years until it's released on DVD, how can MPAA keep expecting people to play "nice"?
Why not distribute .torrents by using emule or irc... lets go underground..
You also need the trackers. You can't distribute those.
No sig
Am I the only one who thinks it's stupid to register an account to download warez? It's just one more thing for them to track.
When you pirate a copy of something, even when the creator has no plans to try and sell it to you, you're still harming him by eroding his ability to control the distribution of his own work.
Not entirely: see the fourth fair use factor.
That's a very important thing in the eyes of musicians, writers and filmmakers.
The mere fact that major publishers and copyright industry trade groups have convinced musicians, writers and filmmakers that complete control over distribution is so desirable is part of the problem. How would one go about solving it?
So what you are saying is that it is ok that they are helping illegally distribute software/music/movies/etc because make up for it by helping distribute say 5% of their stuff legally?
Yes. Sony v. Universal.
dam u code fast.....
Julius Caesar - Act I, Scene i: "What mean'st thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow!"
The copyright industry owns the advertising media and has the right under private property law to deny any public service advertisement.
If you think that political will can only be harnessed through advertising, you don't know politics.
You need to find some charismatic people -- NOT anyone who's stumped for OSS, because largely they aren't -- and convince them. They will, in turn, convince others.
Arguments like "Snow White might never have been made if the laws today were in place then. Who knows what new great movie isn't being made because of overzealous copyright laws?" are what you want to go for.
As for entering public office -- get yourself a respectable profession, and pick a political party.
I think those organizations shutting down these sites just started to initiate the next generation of decentralized P2P clients... That's usually the only thing they do, help speed up the next generation of file sharing software, more clever than the last time. It usually doesn't happen if not a great deal of sites are taken down, since then there's not as much need to advance technology.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Everything is running fine until some moderators feel obligated to let the unwashed masses in on the secret of SuprNova.
Next time there is good working P2P systems up and running, please don't WRITE ARTICLES ABOUT HOW GOOD THEY ARE.
Seriously, can we let the lawyers find out about The-Next-Best-Thing(tm) on their own. Do we have to spoon-feed it to them and put a big bullseye on everything good?
You can never stop piracy. People have been sharing copyright material ever since it became available. People have always bootlegged at concerts, copied their friends' music (either onto cassette tape or CD), rented films on VHS and copied them. It isn't legal, but it always has and always will go on. The difference now is that its happening on a larger scale than before, and that people are more easily caught. If I walk over to my friend's house, borrow a CD, take it home and copy it, there's no way anyone will ever find out. If I download the same CD over KaZaA or as a .torrent anyone can find out my IP address, get loads of info on me, and no doubt pressure my ISP into handing over my name/address. I can then be sued.
However, this will not stop piracy. Sure it might stop me (for a while at least) but its not gonna stop the majority. The MPAA/RIAA can shut down all the sites they want but sooner or later, they're gonna have to change their business model.
There's a great line in About A Boy about getting royalty fees from Christmas carol singers. This anti-P2P stuff is almost as insane.
If ignorance is bliss, knock the smile off my face.
From a legal point of view, that doesn't matter. What matters is that the Slashdot editors exercised direct control of the content of the discussion. That, coupled with the "unlimited mod points" that the editors have puts them in a very different position than the bartender with a bulletin board. The barkeep just cleans the board periodically without regard to content. Slashdot's editors constantly monitor the content of the board for content. Bad news from a liability standpoint.
How about this: instead of using Freenet to distribute each individual torrent, could you publish on Freenet a torrent that contains other torrents? For instance, a torrent for each category of files, like what was on Suprnova - a "Movies-Drama" torrent that contained a zipped file of all torrents in that category? This way, you wouldn't be relying on Freenet to distribute every torrent file, just a much smaller index of torrents.
If somebody wanted to take ownership of this, they could create a Freenet page with an anonymous feedback form. When somebody has a torrent to publish, they could submit the info to the anonymous form, and then the publisher would compile all the new torrents into the next version of the index.
I'm only an occasional user of bittorrent, and it's been a long time since i tried Freenet, but does this sound like something feasible?
Now that it's gone, what is there to mirror? The old stuff? That's not really so useful. Also, weren't suprnova also hosting trackers?
Son of a bitch, fucking blizzards, you just don't get it do you? Why do you think you "NEVER hear anything about usenet"? The first rule of newsgroups is you don't talk about newsgroups. You seem to take that as a joke so fuck you. (Don't take that too hard, it's just some venting steam. It's kinda like how you use to open the lid to a pan of something boiling when you were a kid and the steam just about blinded you, but underneath that steam was some goodness awaiting your smacking lips, cheers)
Nearly my entire MP3 and digital video collection (and actually just about everything else) has come from usenet.
Good. And you expect that to be free? You expect nothing is required of you in return? Your requirement is to keep mum which your IQ doesn't apparently permit.
I don't understand why this seems to still be the great untapped resource?
It is tapped. Where do you think you got your complete collection you fucking nut? Don't you realize you were one of the selected few to gain access to? It was either from someone else or you were just born with that odd adaptation of exploring and stumbled across it. (Note this doesn't necessarily make your IQ higher, it could just as well be instinct.)
Especially nowadays with services like newzbin.com, it makes finding and downloading from usenet a real snap!
Despite what is discussed here; OSS, linux, BSD, etc, the majority of users run windows. It's possible the use of linux purges to intelligence, but not necessarily. What I'm meaning to get at is if usenet was a snap people would be talking about it. The rule of thumb is if UN is not being discussed, you don't discuss it. And NEVER do you say it should be discussed.
Just the other day I introduced my brother to usenet, and he couldn't believe what he had been missing for so long.
This is what it is. Just make sure that reading this and learning the code you somehow weren't passed on to learn, you also pass it on to your brother.
In conclusion I hope this information is not accepted as a joke. You have to realize that I wanted to respond earlier, but there was too much attention on the topic with torrents and all. I meant for your post to look like a crazy old person wrote it from the dark ages, not a nimble 15 year old who stumbled upon the elixir of life.
I reiterate my preaching of not being an idiot. Every medium when caught under the nose of common folk meets a dire end. If you think that everybody knowing about this will somehow make it better ... well you don't understand the protocol.
The newsgroup protocol is designed to propagate al l material to other servers handling this protocol. Currently you support or don't support a newsgroup, but do not filter the messages. It's an all or none approach. The ability to break this is not very feasible given this fact and that the networked servers run global. If you may not have already guessed, dictating law globally is difficult thing to do. However, with politics moving more international and with relations extending, we're at more of a peril of obliteration.
The only thing that thus truly keeps the clowns from slapping the proverbial stick upon us is the cost:benefit of arguing a mandatory shift from this protocol to a new one. It's like changing TCP/IP which is the backbone of the internet. You might think NGs are petty and of little importance to big corporations, but many use them for internal communication. Microsoft for instance uses newsgroups for customer relations against products and blah. However they monitor these NG (microsoft.*) so don't use them.
So do us all a favor and keep the big end of the stick into the selected few. It's similar to big CEOs earning millions while you squand
Its laws, like its territory, are inviolable and the business of Slovenians.
That's what Iraq said as well. Don't forget the US government do not care about international law if it goes against their commercial interests.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Doesn't matter whether they are publicised or not - it's the Spartacus effect*. There are far, far too many to take down or disable. It's beneficial to get the word out, too - better to have a few big, efficient networks than many scattered, underperforming ones. Besides, the real killer p2p app (decentralized, full privacy) will come that much faster this way.
*Not sure if I'm using that correctly.
Maybe not, but someone will check. And if they find something that shouldn't be there, word will get around quickly. Even if nobody actually looks at the code, the programmer can count on it happening. Open source keeps people honest that way.
Brain kills internet cells.
I haven't read the proof of Fermat's last theorem. Nevertheless, I think it's probably true, because:
For similar reasons, I also believe that the structure of DNA is what my chemistry teachers told me it is, even though I haven't personally performed the necessary experiments.
*Most* of the things I'm asked to believe on a daily basis are things I've never personally verified. I decide how much faith I should have in them partly by thinking about the processes by which they were arrived at.
Not that I have *that* much faith in the process that produces bittorrent. But still, it's important to realize that there are ways you can get assurances from the open source process without personally verifying every line.
--Bruce Fields
ok to help you out a bit in that article in magazine Mladina...
I live in the country where so called "sloncek" is so much into trouble. And no he's not into trouble. Only servers are down and are not comming back no time soon, as FBI, MPAA and RIAA are making their cowboy dance. The man is harmless, and he didn't do anything illegal at all by our Law.
And to awnser final question! YES USA are the biggest Copyright brakers, as 37% of all suprnova hits was from US.
Things in a rear mirror might be behind you
Nonetheless, the person who owns the copyright has the exclusive right to choose how it's copied.
In that case, corporate personhood is the problem.
If you don't like what somebody does with their own intellectual property, you are completely free to release your own under the terms you choose.
No I can't. If I create what I sincerely believe is an original work, some incumbent copyright owner is likely to come out of the woodwork and claim I copied it. This happened to George Harrison, and statistics show it could happen to any songwriter.
Seriously, can we let the lawyers find out about The-Next-Best-Thing(tm) on their own. Do we have to spoon-feed it to them and put a big bullseye on everything good?
/. doesn't really deserve to be out there in the first place. You're just whining that you can't get to your free warez as easily as you've gotten used to. So what?
What's the point of having a good thing if you can't tell anyone about it?
Obviously it wasn't that good if it went down with the mere threat of a raid by the authorities. It wasn't that good if the authorities in multiple countries could be talked into performing such a raid. Sites that demonstrably use Bittorrent for purely legal distribution of such files that they own the copyright to will not be going down. Your favorite Linux distro, for example, will still be available by Bittorrent most likely.
No lawyer has any legal ground to stand on to convince the authorities in France to shut down Mandrake's Bittorrent tracker, run by Mandrake and published with a link on Mandrake's own website. SuprNova and the others are going down for the same reasons the original Napster went down; because they were too centralized and operated on the fringes of legality, if not totally outside the law.
What's that old saying again? What doesn't kill an Internet technology will only make it stronger. This won't kill BT for 100% legal uses and a new decentralized P2P technology is already evolving (exeem?) to replace BT for stuff like warez that can't be shown to be 100% legal. If you try to keep things secret you just put off the inevitable. The lawyers will always find out about and attack questionably legal things eventually, that's their job. Plus, the more people you keep out with your secrecy, the worse performance you'll get from your BT downloads.
In the end, the next "working" P2P system will be that much closer to being indestructible. They certainly won't be able to take it down just by shutting down one website or writing an article about it on Slashdot. Anything that can be killed by a simple article on
Bittorrent was never even designed to do what it has been used for by sites like SuprNova, despite how cool it may have been while it worked. The creator of Bittorrent said so himself. It was not designed to be an instructible way to exchange copyrighted data illegally without fear of reprisal. It's not Slashdot's fault that you and others decided to use it for this purpose anyway. Slashdot is really doing you a favor by hastening the evolution of the next generation P2P clients. You'll get access to your warez and old TV shows, don't you worry. It just won't be via SuprNova.org after today.
You have no defensible point and yet you were modded +5, Insightful. At least 3 mods should be ashamed today.