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Razorback2 Servers Seized
An anonymous reader writes "Slyck is reporting that Belgian and Swiss authorities have raided and seized Razorback2's servers. From the article: 'Razorback2 was an eDonkey2000 indexing server - very different in nature from an indexing site such as ShareReactor. Unlike indexing sites, Razorback2's index was only available through an eDonkey2000 client such as eMule. While it does not host any actual files or multimedia material, it does index the location of such files on the eDonkey2000 network. The legality of such indexing remains questionable, however this has not deterred copyright enforcement actions.'"
Here's the address of a bank down the street that you can rob if you want:
334 South Main
Now come arrest me.
You can link to illegal content. You're pointing to it, you aren't hosting it. It's perfectly legal. What's wrong with these people ^h^h^h^h^h^h lawyers? Is this how the new administration uses it's "terrorist" powers to do what they like when they like to do it?
Perhaps.
But until we the people stand up for our rights, we wont have any.
>
>That's because regular citizens "loot" these materials, while Microsoft "find" tax loopholes
I am erotic. You are kinky. They are perverts.
We protect. Our allies enforce. Our enemies oppress.
Congress appropriates. Microsoft lobbies. Citizens steal.
With apologies to Calvin and Hobbes - if you think verbing weirds language, wait'll you try conjugation!
Just goes to show how clueless you are. I get excellent speeds with emule (often better than the torrents which are leeched to death lately), and often over a thousand sources. Downloading a 2 or 3 movies in a day is not uncommon at all.
BT like NGs has the very latest stuff (telesync and such), but other than that it fucking sucks. To find stuff, you gotta look thru thousands of posts everyday - most of which are total crap and old shit. Quite a waste of time (the torrent search sites hardly help).
On emule, search for ANYTHING - ANYTIME! It WILL be there basically. From old stuff like Louis de funes movies or Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, to TV episodes, to entire discographies zipped, endless GBs of ebooks of all kinds (IT, electronics, woodworking, cooking, etc), magazines, apps, games, anything! You name it, it's there! Anything you could ever want just one search away, no need to go thru websites with tons of crap posted everyday to find anything worth DL'ing. There's got to be about 100 trillion more times as much stuff on ed2k than BT. You'll easily find the very latest build of every app out there on ed2k as soon as it's out, whereas go to any common BT site like TPB, you'll see old crappy versions of everything being posted everyday - it's beyond ridiculous the amount of crap posted everyday (things like nero 6.0 when 6.6.x.x has been out for over a year, and even v7 has been out for ages, old insecure builds of winamp, etc).
In fact, if you had been paying attention lately to news, you'd see it's becoming more popular than ever - more than BT, and for a reason. I couldn't care less if BT died, it may have been a good idea, but the thing sucks. Especially with the latest issues we see (overloaded trackers like TPB, some of the best clients banned, etc). Fuck BT, long live emule!
Swiss authorities arrested the site's operator at his residence in Switzerland this morning and searched his home.
Searched his home? For what, burned copies of Spider Man 2 and illicit Metallica albums?
By shutting down Razorback2, the ease with which pirates can obtain illegal content online will slow dramatically.
Two comments about this part....
One, I hate it when they make it seem like the main users of these systems are organized crime lords sitting in their pirate CD distribution warehouses. I guess that image is more dramatic than nerds looking for episodes of StarGate Atlantis though.
Two, slow "piracy" down dramatically? Do they actually believe this? Taking down one ed2k server, however large it is, hardly strangles p2p file sharing....
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
The operators of this eDonkey site chose not to exercise control over files being traded by users which including those containing child pornography, bomb-making instructions and terrorist training videos.
In other news, phone directories choose not to exercise control over people they list, which include paedophiles, bomb-making experts and terrorists.
Who is this "we" you are talking about...
in all honesty it would be OTHER people developing, you simply using it, and pretending you are part of something.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
I find it somewhat worrying. It's an index, right? It's not the infringing content per se, but a list of where such content could be found. Morally, pointing the way to some of this content is wrong...but what law is it breaking?
Look at it another way. Let's say I've learnt of someone who gives away burnt CDs. I don't have any myself but but I'm fully aware of how to contact this guy and get freebies. So in conversation I let other's know too. I'm not forcing anyone to do anything and although it may be immoral not to turn the guy in, I'm fully within my rights to share what I know. I'm basically indexing this guy's contact details for other people to obtain. How they use those details is beyond my control.
Shakey analogy aside, where does protecting copyright end? Shall we go close down a library because a few of the books describe how to perform an illegal act (Shock! Horror! This book describes how someone murdered an innocent! No!)?
Or am I just getting pissed off and ranting? Probably both to be honest...
"...So I hung back and lurked. For 18 months. Can't beat a good old-fashioned lurking."
As long as products like iTunes charge a reasonable price for a reasonable product (both reasonables debatable, but the point stands), I will happily plunk down my $.99 cents per song.
In other words, don't make me feel like you're screwing me, and I won't feel like I have to screw you back.
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
It's not questionable. That's like saying the postal service is "questionable" because illegal things make it into the mail. Is the telephone network questionable because you can call criminals, or plan an illegal activity? Are fricking lightwaves questionable because you can see things you're not supposed to see?
No, in fact, it's not questionable. Copyright infringement is illegal, therefore illegal stuff has made it into a perfectly normal information conduit. This is not the conduit's fault, it is the fault of the individuals who are putting the material on there.
End of story.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
So.. i read this and decided to kick on amule just to check things out.
a search for "spiderman" in the absence of razorback is still producing results.. over a thousand and still going. Not that I want or like spiderman, but hey.. it still works you **AA klods, you missed a few thousand other servers.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The indexing servers are there to directly facilitate piracy and connect users to other users.
No.
Look.
P2P filesharing does one major thing that previous mechanisms *did not do*. It spreads the costs of distribution out over all the users. That means that the original content publisher need not spend lots of money to distribute his content.
Sure, Paramount doesn't like this, because Paramount has an *existing* business model that has been developed and can address the costs of distribution. It provides no benefit to Paramount.
A lot of our legal publication channels have evolved to deal with (and even rely on) a system where distribution is the primary cost. Book authors get money from publishers, who perform the task of publication and distribution.
If I run out and make a cool movie or a Linux distro or *anything*, *anything* at all that's large and that a lot of people would like, I have to offload distribution costs. There are a couple ways to do this.
(a) Get someone like sourceforge to pay distribution costs.
(b) Offload costs to all users.
(c) Other approaches that haven't seem to have caught on much.
(a) works okay for some content. However, (b) is not illegal or criminal or anything else along those lines.
The reason that there is so much copyright infringement on P2P filesharing systems is simply because there is a lot of demand for infringing content, and the main barrier was cost of distribution. I can't print up thirty thousand copies of Stephen King's latest novel and send them out to people who want infringing content for free. P2P filesharing cuts the cost of distribution down to so low a level that this barrier goes away.
Now, I happen to get a lot more good out of noninfringing content that is given away freely than infringing content. I use a huge amount of entirely free software every day, whereas my infringing content is the occasional ebook or movie, plus a couple CDs worth of audio that I listen to on loop. The fact that I can write a bunch of high-resolution textures for Quake II and distribute them over a P2P filesharing system at little cost to myself is phenomenal. Maybe this isn't true of everyone -- I don't know.
All I want to point out is that shutting down of P2P servers as "criminal" is absolutely absurd. If you are *not* content-neutral, if you are doing something like "download the latest and greatest movies here" on your main webpage, then there might be an issue. However, if you are doing nothing other than providing content-neutral services, then you are simply providing a service that changes (in a good way) the costs of distribution. The fact that this conflicts with the systems that we've built up to fund content creators, which are currently adapted to a different set of costs, is simply an unfortunate quirk.
I can understand maybe shutting down Napster, because it was definitely not content-neutral -- searching for the year of someone's album seems to be very likely to be intended for copyright infringement. But ed2k servers are content-neutral. Shutting one down simply *because* distributed distribution costs lend themselves well to infringement and because they are thus often used to infringe is simply unacceptable, in my view.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Will you give me:
* The floorplans to the bank?
* The hours of the guards?
* Details on the type of security, and escape routes?
* Instruction for nerve agents to attack the staff with?
At some point you would be going to far.
You Imply that the address is not enough, well fine, its not. But there is a line, it can be crossed, and it won't get clarified by bad analogies on slashdot.
If you were to be used in an equivalent example, you would be a phone company which chose to let others freely place calls on their phone network.
I am Swiss, and I recall having read on the local newspapers that the authorities would "stop toleranting file-sharing" starting in the first quarter of the year 2006. This looks like a demonstration of that intention. It's possible that the "raid" just served as an example for other big networks. Everybody knows, however, that shutting down a server will certainly not stop the network it belonged from being active, and on the contrary it may well push people to find new, better, more anonym ways of indexing and sharing files. (see the shutting down of Suprnova.org and the rising of decentralised tracking for bittorrent)
"Words of wisdom: drop that zero and get with the hero" -- Vanilla Ice
Check what these kids are pirating...it is all mainstream poppy shit that they want because advertisments, MTV and their MTV advertiement watching peers all say you should like it.
If we keep pirating and make music distribution less profitable, perhaps that bland BS will go away.
The Music I like was released on tiny little labels, and I'm sure there isn't much profit there to begin with. People who make 'real music' in my opinion, would be doing it even if they couldn't make a cent.
They do it because they want to do it, not out of any expectation of profit. I'd even argue that the opportunity for profit is what attracts people to the field to create crap 'corporate' music.
Blar.
The biggest incentive to me for purchasing new music in digital format would be that I never have to pay for that song or album again. Why should I pay every time a new medium comes along? When I bought albums in the 70's, it wasn't because I liked round pieces of vinyl. I was paying for the content.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.