Australian P2P Sites Disappear Overnight

An anonymous reader writes "In the wake of a raid on an Australian ISP, local P2P site operators are shutting down operations in droves, according to community site Whirlpool. The raid was the result of an investigation by Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), who claim they have a number of targets lined up for future raids. Overnight, a number of sites have shut down or been shut down, and ISPs are reporting major drops in bandwidth usage."

Comments

Re:Dang It!

[smudge8]

I live in Australia, and I woke up this morning to find that my connection speed was shocking. About 1000ms ping to local sites. Roughly 1 out of 2 packets dropping.

Amazingly enough, I quit aMule and everything came good again instantly. Equally amazingly enough, all the downloads which I had queued and were going fine last night had disappeared.

I don't actually think it's really linked (especially since we're not exactly talking about emule networks, are we?), but it's certainly odd.

Am I a pirate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use P2P, in the form of bitorrent, for one purpose...

I have a very busy work schedule with a lot of travel. There are 2 or 3 broadcast TV shows that I like so I download episodes when I miss them. Is there any real difference between that and just programming my VCR to do the same?

Frankly, if they make this impossible, it won't make me watch more TV. It will just mean I'll miss the episode(s) in question. With the exception of the times I am home for "my shows," I simply refuse to watch TV anymore due to the 15+ minutes of commercials to watch a one hour show. Hell, I don't even keep the file after I've watched it since I don't want to fill up the hard drive on my computer.

So I'm not really sure what the broadcasters hope to gain, other than trying to protect their advertising revenue as they lose eyeballs to people who are tired of the noise level on broadcast TV.

So I just hope they don't shut down my favorite tracker site and keep my fingers crossed.

Now, usually I would have no problem with this....

[gt_swagger]

But seeing has how the RIAA and its many incarnations worldwide have been deaf [dum dum TISHHH] to the demands of those they depend on for SO LONG, I say pirate on my friend. It's quite simple really... the RIAA can quit living in the mid-to-late 20th century and get with the program, or alternatives will find their way into market and force the RIAA to change to survive. A brief rundown of the MANY shortcomings of the RIAA: - They DO NOT do justice to your average artist [Steve Albini, producer of Nirvana's "In Utero" album, explaining how the artist is screwed: http://www.negativland.com/albini.html ] - Convicted of breaking federal anti-trust laws for price fixing et al multiple times - They keep pushing forward this one-hit-wonder crap assembly line style, making you pay the $12 (use to be $20 before anti-trust suit) for one or two songs. They don't want you to download online per-song [see the older Slashdot article about them wanting to raise the rate for an online download], because that threats this model of forcing you to pay for extra music that sucks. - They have NO concept of fair use. They've made it pretty evident they don't want you to rip your CDs into your own mix... or *gasp* put your mix on an mp3 player. How pirate of you. iTunes? Hope you don't like burning your mixes too often to change them around. We wouldn't you to get fair use of that piece of "intellectual property" you just PURCHASED THE RIGHTS TO now would we? For extra credit class, please view KoRn's music video "Ya'll Want A Single" --> it is bootlegged online in many places, and the video even requests you download it. "Film makers can offer their audience a choice of ways to see movies -- they can view them in the theater, rent them, or buy them. Music companies are much less flexible. It's hard to buy one song. You're forced to buy the CD." - Peter Chernin, CEO Fox Entertainment Group Quite frankly, the RIAA has shown it doesn't care if it craps on me, so I don't mind seeing everybody crap on them. Karma is a b**** aint it?