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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."
I spent far too much time on that site :(
Safe to say that the torrent community has gone downhill since, I'd say.
~ Crummy
So, summarizing the article:
Nothing happened
Case dropped
Suprnova still gone
Incredibly lucky for the guy, really... but do you think it was because prosecutor couldn't figure out how to get the guy?
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
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.
Good to know that nothing really happenned to the guy. Sometimes us leechers forget that behind every torrent/p2p website, there's still good people working behind the scenes who made it all possible... sadly, they are usually the ones who get all the blame.
I'll be honest. I would have done the same thing as him. I mean really, Everything turned out okay for him in the end anyway. He didn't serve any jail time, and he got all of his stuff back. Hell, hes probabbly glad about the site bein' kaputs. All these people that will say that he should have fought, etc... Well, they need to understand this guy has a real life as well, and not just one that encompases a website that gives torrent files to materials in wich you didn't pay for.
Yay, I have a sig.
Oh hell, anybody here speak Slovenian?
This Like That - fun with words!
Slovenia is a member of the EU, so whatever EU law says about these P2P issues is probably relevant as well.
Any of our Euro-dotters care to comment?
I have a feeling this is not a fully-harmonized area, EU-law-wise, since the good folks at the Pirate Bay continue to entertain us with their responses to legal threats.
This Like That - fun with words!
Then don't use the ones that are.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
it's up again, now it's newnova.org - maybe I shouldn't be sharing this but what the hell.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
(slovenian speaker here)
.. .. .. .. .. ..
The legal document basicly says:
Legal case against Andrej P. (his address blacked out), charged with criminal act of helping copyright infrigment by 1. article of 159. of some law with following objects written into log:
- server with serial number
- server with serial number
- server with serial number
- server with serial number
- personal computer
- personal computer
are returned to the owner because legal charges against A. P. are dropped.
And them some more legal talk where he can get his stuff in 30 days.
That is about as much as I can handle at this early hour.
Huh? The article was written by "Suprnova's admin Sloncek". He is the one who came close to being prosecuted, his computers were confiscated, etc. He is the only one who can give an account of the story, and if he choses to say blah blah and blah blah, there is nothing anyone else can do to fill in those details.
Your remarks would make sense if an original news item was dumbed down for the "general public".
If the guy who got the letter from the prosecutor does not wish to quote verbatim from it, or he thinks it is not relevant, why question it? It's probably not relevant anyway, just some law numbers and dates.
He does provide the original letter (in Slovenian), so read it yourself for the gory details. Or, scroll down for helpful translations below.
NewNova is online, it offers the same content that SuprNova once had.
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.
Needless to say but you seem to be confusing Suprnova with Lokitorrent. Loki pretty much took the money and ran after selling his registered users out. Suprnova never required registration to use the trackers, Lokitorrent did, so when Loki handed over his user logs the RIAA (I think it was) got there hands on the email addresses of anyone who'd used the sites. That's a LOT of hotmail addresses...
vcrs (famous betamax decision) helped people carry out an illegal act.. but it was legal.
just providing the means does NOT equate into illegal actions.
napster got in trouble because they kept the master file list on their own servers- and then couldn't filter out content the riaa & others wanted blocked.
Laws concerning morality never fit in with the 'average' views of the citizenry--
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Suprnova may have been popular at the time, but like all websites, they come and go. There is always someone else to take their place. Remember isonews.com when it was taken down by the FBI years ago? Hey guess what? Their back up and running with a new website theisonews.com
Now we have sites like thepiratebay.org which is probably one of the best torrent sites on the internet. Heck, they even tout the lawyers and post the threating legal letters on their website for everyone to read http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php
Quite hilarious if you ask me.
Of course you have other torrent sites as well, like torrentspy.com which is another popular site.
sites come and go, they come and go....
~Later~
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.
In the US, this would probably have said "after taking advice from my lawyer, I have decided not to say anything more".
I wish him luck.
Crime is the art of knowing when to quit.
-Me
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Looking at just the title, I was wondering about how one would go about stopping the explosion of a star, then I read the blurb.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
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!