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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.'"
This is why decentralized file-sharing is the only way to go.... maybe now stuff like Waste or the more traditional Gnutella will gain a big rise in popularity?
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
...because it was the biggest and best ed2k server but there are lots of others left. Also, there is KAD (kademlia - a decentralized search) which has pretty much replaced the ed2k servers for me (you get *FAR* more and way better results using KAD instead). The worst problem I see is more people will rely on KAD, increasing the server load...
Here's the address of a bank down the street that you can rob if you want:
334 South Main
Now come arrest me.
Ironically, it is reported that prior to the raid, Swiss authorities had called Razorback2 and requested certain information. The raid was prompted only when they received a response in the form of:
Information requested. You are number 563432 in the queue. Please wait...
>
>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!
I'm not an international lawyer or anything, but it occurs to me that the law might be different outside the U.S.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
The servers were not in the US. This has nothing to do with the 'current administration'.
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.
I personally find anonymous Internet usage (regardless of protocol) a very good thing. http://tor.eff.org/ is very nice for the World Wide Web. However, it is very slow - but worth it if you want to be anonymous. The same applies to file-sharing if you like "that" kind of files. Tor can be used with _any_ P2P programs protocol and is thus highly recommended. I urge anyone who makes p2p software to immediately implement support for it. I agree decentralized file-sharing is good. Back in the 90s a lot of folks were doing centralized, they met in schools or other places and copied files. Those were called "copy-parties". The police, in their glory, rided some of those on behalf of the glorious Record and Movie Industry (RIAA/MPAA). Hmm. Now that sounds familiar. Wonder who oh who ordered the raid on the Razorback2 Servers? On a last point, please beware of this: There are information on the Internet that are very important but ignored and/or blacked out by governments and the corporate media. These video files are generally free and freely available on p2p services (like on my bittorrent TV site) but governments are willing to go to great length, even covert torture here in Norway, to shut such sites down. This is something one should consider seriously when reading about sites being shut down.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I don't want to live in a 1984-style society. But comments like this are not fair. Yes it's legal to link to illegal content, sort of. But when the _only_ purpose of a server is to link to illegal content, you have to be retarded to think it's just for research, or study or for the sake that it's not illegal.
This intent of this server's owners is clear: they wanted to exploit a legal loop to provide copyrighted content. They played, they lost. They knew the rules, otherwise they wouldn't have tried to exploit them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for free, legal downloads for a private use. But these people can't say they didn't see this coming, unless they are liars.
Now, now, conjugating verbs should be done only between consenting grammatical forms in the privacy of their own paragraph.
Remember: people have sex, and words have gender!
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."
Is this how the new administration uses it's "terrorist" powers to do what they like when they like to do it?
You missed part of history. Please (re-)read the Patriot Act. Jaywalking is now a "terrorist" offense in the USA.
As for Norway, Norwegian "Police intelligence" chief Jørn Holme publicly stated that "If it is not against the law, and can not be prosecuted, then we will take the measures we feel is appropriate". That basically Means that if you do absolutely nothing wrong and you criticize the Norwegian regime then they will torture you and in any way possible try to destroy you. This is relevant because the "Police intelligence" department (PST) started a surveillance, torture and sabotage operation on me after I made documentaries about 911 available on the Internet and posted a lot of information with links to it in Norwegian forums. Here they do not even use the terrorist excuse, they simply say "We do not like you, so we torture you".
Getting my servers shut down like Razorback2 is one thing the Norwegian Gestapo Police can't do that sine they are hosted abroad. So instead they torture with microwave weapons, voice-to-scull mind-control weapons, steal my mail, harass my neighbors and on and on BECAUSE OF RUNNING A DAMN WEBSITE with information that goes against everything the criminal regime would have people believe.
Take my word for it, getting your server(s) shut down is nothing compared to what some governments are willing to do to stop video documentaries to be accessible to the public.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
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
Making crazy, half cocked, analogies is like driving a cart full of dachsunds through a marshmallow factory.
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.
First impulse: Troll (-1)
Second Thought: Paranoid Schizophrenia (-1)
Conclusion: High Comedy! (+5 Funny)
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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.
While you have a valid point, your language is sloppy, and I'm going to pull you up on it, because using sloppy language on subjects like this plays into the hands of those who seek to restrict legitimate fair use as well as illegal copyright infringement.
But when the _only_ purpose of a server is to link to illegal content, you have to be retarded to think it's just for research, or study or for the sake that it's not illegal.
Illegal content wasn't the only purpose of Razorback 2. They linked to some legal content too.
Now, I don't deny that illegal content was the primary purpose. And it's perfectly legitimate to argue about where the cut-off should be, how much illegal use there needs to be before the technology should be banned; in the case of Razorback 2, you might even find that the vast majority of people agree that the illegal use so overwhelmed the legal use that the takedown was justified. But you should not just ignore the legal users - you should acknowledge them and present an argument that the authorities are acting in the common good when they act in a way that restricts those legal activities.
This intent of this server's owners is clear: they wanted to exploit a legal loop to provide copyrighted content.
This is the big mistake. You must not say "copyrighted" when you mean "unlicensed".
This post is copyrighted content. I own the copyright to it. But you are not infringing my copyright if you read this post, and you could email this post to everyone in the world if you like without infringing my copyright, because you have my permission to do that.
Similarly, if I compose a song, and record myself singing it, and give you a copy under a suitable Creative Commons license, you can upload that onto any P2P network you like - you will then be sharing copyrighted music that you don't own over a P2P network, and you will not be breaking any laws or infringing any copyright.
When you use "copyrighted" to mean "unlicensed", you strengthen the dangerous myth that copyright is a special thing that only protects commercial works, and that it's illegal to share copyrighted materials with your friends. The record companies want you to believe that, because they damn well don't want you to find out that there's free music out there that it's legal to copy and share, because that threatens their business.
It may sound like I'm nitpicking, but we live in a world where words have power. Words shape the world we live in. And if you let someone else define your words, you can only talk about the world they want to live in. You mentioned 1984 yourself: if you're familiar with the book, you're presumably familiar with Orwell's concept of the Party redefining words to make concepts like "freedom" and "democracy" literally inexpressible. We might not be heading quite that way yet, but we soon will be if we don't use words carefully rather than lazily.