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The Truth About Suprnova Shutdown
Romeo E. Cabrera writes "You might remember it was exactly a year ago when Suprnova, once the most popular BitTorrent search engine went dark. Today, Suprnova's admin Sloncek, reveals the truth and details, about the events occurred then."
However, if you live and host in the same country as him, you might be able to do it again and still nothing will happen. Sounds good to me.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Why normal people are catapulted into a spotlight they didn't ask for will always be a question of concern. If you want to be famous, you can be. But think about it. If you want to be famous, you're not thinking straight. As small site owners are plummeled with traffic and legal issues, how can we help them survive? This reminds me of the blogosphere, which recently experienced growing pains with the servers and datacenters struggling to cope with demand.
Sloncek's story is disputed by Slyck here.
slyck of course being the most prominent file sharing news source on the web.
The people at pirate bay arent scriptkiddies either, see this url: http://static.thepiratebay.org/
am i the only person here who goes to mininova.org instead? seems like the same library of media, justabout
On my end, Adobe lawyers contacted my ISP and sent a short, but curt letter: "Shut him down, or we will." I balked and so did my ISP after some heated conversation. I ran a VERY popular macintosh serial # site and yeah, serial numbers are sort of a grey area as far as I was concerned (and so thought my ISP thought, as well).
Whoops.
Yeah, it was stupid on my part but I enjoyed the money that rolled in from my sponsors. In the long-term I got burned, much like this fellow will. I had to claim bankruptcy, due to my mounting legal bills. I'm basically screwed for the next 7 years. Hooray. Some people can walk that thin grey line between legal and illegal but I found a way to trip over it. Oh well.
How the hell does an admin go a week, let alone "November to December" without having a single clue as to why police would raid his servers? Why his site was shut down? Fear or apathy?
His statement strikes me as someone who was simply hoping the problem would go away (as quoted) from the onset. More pressure on both the police and a legal defense from the onset could have both quelled the investigation as groundless and gotten the site back up.
It's an unfortunate truth that law enforcement often only succeeds in setting legal precedent in computer investigations only because people aren't more diligent in defending themselves.
The problem with countries like Slovenia (and my native Croatia) is that nothing of that would ever happen if there wasn't a major news piece about the service. If someone just came to the police and say "you know, there is such and such server in Slovenia" they would shrug them off; but as the media picked up the hype, someone saw it ad said "wow, we must do something about it" (even though that person probably had no idea what "it" was all about).
There are plenty of influences beyond police and the military. The RIAA or MPAA could impose economic sanctions on sales in that country, until the local organizations did something about that.
For example, if I was the ??AA them, I could impose an extra USD $5 surcharge on every piece of media sold to vendors in that country, due to their lack of cooperation, making it clear of why they increased the cost. The local vendors would either need to tack that onto the price of the media, or eat it. If they increase their prices, sales will go down. If they eat it, profit goes down. So in the end, they can (and would) put start pressuring the local government to do something about the crimes.
The next reply suggests invasion or mercenaries. That's not their MO, and it wouldn't be necessary.
The recording industry is huge, no matter where you are. They do have an influence. They showed a bit of force with the initial arrest. They'll show more force next time to get their way.
They still don't understand, bringing the costs down would solve a lot of their problems. If I can get an album (record, tape, cd, or whatever) for $5, why bother pirating it? But, looking at a $20 price tag, that may encourage me to pirate. At $5 each, I'd consider actually going to the store and buying music. If I could buy 5 CD's for $25, that's reasonable. 5 CD's for $100 isn't justifiable to me, even though I do have the money to do it.
For the record, I don't pirate. I have a small collection of store bought DVD's. I listen to broadcast or streaming radio. I watch most movies on DirecTV. We actually find it's more comfortable to watch movies in my home theater, than it is to watch in a traditional movie theater. I'm satisfied. Why bother download songs and burn them to CD? I'd say iPod, but I don't even own one. I'm not the coolest geek on the block, as far as that goes.
I don't use BitTorrent, but I do use other P2P programs to get the occasional piece of software to try out. For example, I wanted to try 'Poser'. I installed it, played with it for abotu 20 minutes, grew bored of it, and uninstalled it. I also downloaded several video editing programs, for editing home movies. I picked one that I liked, and bought the current version from the store.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Crime is the art of knowing when to quit.
-Me
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Because Corporations are always getting Merc and Terrorists to stop things they don't like. For example the MercCo raid on Shanghi Windows XP pirates in '02 that resulted in...
Actually they don't, and the United States Government really doesn't do much militarily to protect corporate interests these days, not like the Fruit company fun in the 20th century. Yea, War for Oil, War for Kosovo's Tin, the geopolitical ramifications of the US and/or NATO going to war are much larger than Corporate Interests these days.
However, if a Nation-State has a relationship with the United States, there will be treaties and frameworks usually that'll help shut this stuff down. Plus, your ISPs could just block thier domain names.
That all said, if you are really intent on pirating other people's property, and it's not about "Sharing", come on, it's about gettng crap for free, look at Indian Reservations in the United States. The legal issues between a Reservation, County, State and the Federal Governments are a goddamned mess. Plus, theres a whole lot of corruption so with some cash, you might get a Rez to go for this model.*
* - I'm Indian and from a Reservation and have known a fair share of Tribal Council and Chairpeople over the years that I can say they are corrupt for the most part without being a Troll or a Flamer.
The Jolly Green Giant's Toe!
/.rs might think "Great, a win for the small guy." It was on several levels, including that JGG went away, and I had no more restrictions. But do you have any concept what happens with multiple teams of rapacious lawyers over 5 years who work for you & me, who figure you are going to lose and go bankrupt anyway, so "Let's just bleed the chicken now, before he dies, so we can pay our overhead". I paid for more criminals to defend me than the JGG did to attack me. In the end, a single lone attorney, talked to the other side one time about the RICO issue, and in two days, the JGG was only a bad memory.
You may be right. JGG may have harmed you. JGG may have taken your property or deprived you of assets or income wrongly. But the JGG is so large that one little nudge can spell the end of your life, & (in the U.S.) he can get a legal judgement that goes even beyond bankruptcy. The JGG can get a judgement that locks you out of your field of expertise (unless you want to leave your native country, and even then today that may not help).
Trust me that when they accuse you, it is a curse, and when they claim (rightfully or not) that you have caused $60 million (or pick the number they invent) of damages, and are willing to spend millions to shut you down (because they only claim something might not be right, and can say without penalty later, "well, I guess he didn't do anything wrong, but we didn't know that until we did discovery and got a jury verdict", and the JGG has no fear of being sued for malitious prosecution), you generally have no choice (though you might just be stupid enough to fight). What a horrible sentence (in so many ways).
It happened, and stupidly I figured I did not have anything to worry about, since I did not cause them harm. The JGG just assumed I would eventually cause harm & they said "So hammer the SOB".
In the end the JGG made a FATAL mistake, and David caused JGG to go back to his hole, but ONLY because the JGG organized a really horrible RICO crime operation, which I found out about when gathering evidence to defend my self (from where I will not tell), which would have landed the multi-national JGG in world headlines had they gone a single step further.
It worked out to about $1 million in defense fees, out of pocket, the JGG was not harmed and I won?
"You don't tug on Superman's cape and you don't mess around with JGG", to coin a variation which I suppose could infringe someone's copyright, except we are allowed to do short quotes for literary review.
Some take longer than other to learn...some lie...some view themselves as immortal...but the time and money are what will take you down, if you insist on stomping on toes.
Safe to say that the torrent community has gone downhill since, I'd say.
On the contrary! Torrent sites have split up and decentralized, that is true. But that, in many ways, is a good thing, and the content has in many ways improved in quality; back in the days of Suprnova I still would search for most things via DC++ or IRC because the general level of quality and content was better, even if Suprnova had the quantity. But nowadays, even if they're harder to get into, the torrent sites have precisely for that reason grown more vibrant and connected within themselves. Instead of faceless posts of questionable content, we have tightly knit communities!
Really, look me straight in the eye and argue that places like Demonoid and Dimeadozen aren't stellar examples of what the torrent community can be (each in their own ways; Dimeadozen perhaps the most notable, considering that it works expressly to share media from live music, and in doing so ensures a rather high quality of content, something that just wouldn't happen with stuff of similar subject matter back on Suprnova).
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
now anyone who owns an island or a small country and is willing to donate the domain name? What would MPAA or RIAA do? They can't invade a country.
Everytime we have this discussion, I always say the same thing, and here it is again:
I run a small/medium ISP in Russia. We host tons and tons of copyrighted material. When various bittorrent sites started going down in fear, I spoke with many of the owners on transferring their domain and business to our servers. I was willing to host their content for free! Most of the reason is because I'm not Russian and I don't want to miss the new western movies or latest western television shows (I depend on these sites!).
The problem is: most of these sites are run by teenagers that are unable to see logic through the thick veil of ego and attitude. They think they know everything. I can't deal with people like that. It totally reminds me of the cracking groups back in the heydey of the Amiga. I refused to deal with it then, I refuse to deal with it now.
I have since moved on, and found other membership sites where I can get the latest television shows, etc. I don't miss those old attitude sites one single bit. Good riddance.