IsoHunt Shut Down?

psic writes "One of the most popular torrent search sites, IsoHunt, was taken down on tuesday. The owners of the site say that the move came from their ISP without prior notice, though it is probably linked with the MPAA's lawsuit against various torrent search sites earlier this year. They plan on moving ISPs from the US to Canada, and say that moving the servers so someplace like Sweden or Sealand is not an option, as they put it: "BitTorrent was created for legitimate distribution of large media files, and we stand by that philosophy as a search engine and aggregator."" This is a story we've heard before with other sites, only serving to further demonstrate that playing wack a mole with torrent aggregators isn't the solution to anything.

Comments

the obligatory...

[apodyopsis]

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers

Re:a Rose by any other name is still full of crap

[SamSim]

Copyright is an arbitrary ARTIFICIAL law-- whose time has come and past [...] it's an archaic hold-over when information was a scarce commodity.

Clearly you have never created anything you hold valuable.

I'm going to have to stand up and give my unpopular opinion here. Copyright does have its place. People SHOULD have the right to retain ownership of things they worked hard to create. They SHOULD be allowed to choose what happens to what they have created. If that means letting a limited number of people seeing it, if that means only allowing it to be seen in certain galleries or theaters or sold in certain stores, if that means charging what they feel is a fair price for each reproduction of that work, if that means not allowing other people to distribute their work freely then they have the right to that - for a finite, and fair, amount of time. I create stuff. I write stories. One day, I hope to publish and make money from what I write, which is why not everything I write is freely available online. I don't want people to randomly copy and paste my stories elsewhere without asking me. I'm lenient, but I draw the line at people who profit themselves from it, or don't give me due credit. Is that so bad? Don't I have the right to draw that line?

The argument is this: the movie studios and recording companies believe that they are losing staggering amounts of money from piracy. They believe - or have convinced themselves - that EVERY downloaded song or movie is a lost physical sale and therefore they SUE indiscriminately, for appallingly disproportionate sums and prison terms (decades in some cases), to make it so that the general public FEARS piracy.

But the fact of the matter is: when you copy me, I may lose sales - or, I may not. But I also gain a wider audience for my work. And through that wider audience I may gain sales - more than I originally lost (whatever that number is). If I am an artist and I created solely so that people could see my work, then I lose NOTHING. If I am a businessman and created solely for profit, I MAY lose something, or I may gain something.

The pro-piracy argument here is surely not that "all information should be free, everything you ever created should be available to everybody for no cost and they shouldn't have to pay you". That's insane. The argument is that choice should be with the creator - something the internet has facilitated, to the **AA's chagrin.

I'm beginning to ramble so I'll stop here.