Demonoid Tracker Is Back Online

Crymson4 writes "We discussed the shutdown of the Demonoid torrent tracker last fall. For those who don't already know, Demonoid is back up. Looks like they found a new host for the Web site and the tracker is functioning properly as well. For those with old accounts, all the old data has been saved. It's almost as if they never left."

Comments

Wha?

[JoshJ]

Okay, seriously, what's the point of invite-only registration? I see right now, it says you have to be an invite, but it also says (on the "got an invite?" page) that they open registration to the public once a month. If they're trying to keep the MAFIAA out via invite-only reg, then why the hell would it ever be open to the public at all?

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a pure traffic problem, once a month the delete all the idle accounts and let new people join, the invite systems means its fairly easier for you to get in if you want anyway.

though off the top of my head i can also see how a 'closed' system could be a legal defence, your not distributing to the public everyone is a member of your 'private' club.

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're elitist snobs, I was happy to see them go, and I'm displeased to see them back. Information wants to be free.

Re:Wha?

[chasingsol]

Demonoid has always been a public tracker, but other features of the site require an account (including uploading). You don't need to be a member to use it, just a member to access other stuff.

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. I went to the site and saw the notice and thought "then who gives a flying fuck?" They might as well not exist for all the use they are to me.

Re:Wha?

[cwgatling]

Elitist? Demonoid is one of the most community-friendly trackers there is. Invites are plentiful and anyone can upload. The information there _is_ free. As a side note, the tracker has been up for months now, but the website was down.

Re:Wha?

[Madalienmonk]

It's private to stop Joe-hit-and-run from just leeching without sharing, people have to share to a ratio on Demonoid (usually 1:1).

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like someone who doesn't have an account.

Want an invite? :)

Re:Wha?

[pandrijeczko]

Information wants to be free.

...says the person posting as an Anonymous Coward.

Re:Wha?

[krod77]

If someone needs an invite, email me, I have a few.

Re:Wha?

[jonaskoelker]

Quick thoughts: by allowing anonymous posting, you make people post something they wouldn't have posted if they couldn't be anonymous, thus making information more free. Also, isn't the public opinion on /. that you should exercise all your rights and powers even though you don't strictly need to?

Re:Wha?

[DavidShor]

Yeah, I second that. I have some too.

Re:Wha?

[RKBA]

So what day of the month do they allow new memberships? How does one get an invitation?

Re:Wha?

[madape]

I could use one of those, Jared, though your e-mail address isn't publicly available (maybe b/c you've been hit up too much already? ;-)

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Information wants to be free.

...says the person posting as an Anonymous Coward.

I was talking about other people's information, not mine. Obviously.

Re:Wha?

[Andtalath]

The point is the avoid leeches, not to avoid legal shitbags.

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is......

Some of US are in.....
and some of YOU are not.....

BWAAAAAA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

But seriously, the point is actually to keep ratios and user habits consistent with the standards of the site. When you are a member, you are responsible to keep your seed ratio at a certain level, as well as your behavior and actions. When you invite someone, you are also responsible for THEIR behavior, actions, and ratios. The thought process is that you will not give an invite to just anyone, if you know that their behavior can potentially get you suspended or expelled.

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, some of us are just ducking the membership id police, yeah?

Re:Wha?

[jesuscyborg]

Okay, seriously, what's the point of invite-only registration?

It's pure marketing. If you have to wait 15 days for your friend to give to an invite to this "exclusive" tracker, chances are you're going to think it's this great thing and you'll talk about it and use it more than you otherwise would.

Re:Wha?

[Chuck Chunder]

Sure, but in a sense it's like saying: "Information wants to be free, except information about me".

Re:Wha?

[p0tat03]

I'm not sure about Demonoid, but my preferred tracker is also invite-only for a good reason: ratios. The tracker stays fast because people are forced to give back. The thing works on a credit system - downloading costs credits, uploading gains credits. To avoid people signing up over and over for free credits, EVERY single account that is opened needs to have credits donated from an existing member, such that credits never magically materialize out of nowhere. It's a good system - and the only tracker I've ever been on where I can always max out my pipe at all times.

Re:Wha?

[Mike89]

One asks :). I'd email you one but you haven't listed it. Perhaps reply to this with it and I can (though I understand if you're unsecure doing so, etc)

Re:Wha?

[badzilla]

Hey I'd like one please if you're giving them out...

Re:Wha?

[SacredByte]

I would be careful to only give them out to people I trust, as it is my understanding that, should someone you invited get banned, you will as well.

Re:Wha?

[PaintyThePirate]

Demonoid is one of the few private trackers that doesn't ban on bad ratio. You can leech all you want, and the only thing that will suffer is your pirate karma.

Re:Wha?

[DavidShor]

They don't allow for the creation of ANY new money?

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=684425

That might pose a problem. There is a reason that the fed expands money supply.

Re:Wha?

[cp.tar]

In that case, I'd like one as well.

Both my name and my e-mail are public, as you can see; my posting history, if nothing else, can help prove I am not a MAFIAA agent.

Re:Wha?

[p0tat03]

There's a bonus credit gain applied to seeders, I'm not intimately familiar with the precise inner workings of their system, but this can provide the growth in "money" that they need.

Re:Wha?

[1arkhaine]

If you're willing to send me one... damianke@gmail.com

I used to be involved with oink, but sadly all that's fallen away now. I haven't found a good torrent site since then, unfortunately.

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I second that. I have some too. DavidShor, i emailed you at your the beach email account.

Re:Wha?

[DavidShor]

That was fast, I'm clean out.

But I challenge some fellow demonoid members to share as well.

Re:Wha?

[eat here_get gas]

and here i thought AC was for people who wanted to talk shit and not lose precious all-important Karma

Re:Wha?

[wvmarle]

Having an account here doesn't necessarily make one much less anonymous, it just allows one to collect karma, and other users to recognise which posts are done by the same individual. Not who that individual really is.

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chasingsol is chasing us all!

Guess who this is...

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks! My email is: investigations@mediasentry.com.

I cannot wait to start torrenting those warez. I'm going to collect hundreds of MP3s! Information wants to be freeeeee!

Re:Wha?

[Ungulate]

Except Demonoid wasn't really private. Torrents less than two weeks old could be downloaded by anybody, but ones older than that required registration. If you got that torrent from a torrent search engine, you never had to register at all, as the tracker itself wasn't private. Third party indexing of their older torrents was kind of spotty, so it helped to have an account, but it was never a real deterrent to leeching.

Re:Wha?

[AiToyonsNostril]

As true as the theory of cognitive dissonance might be in general, Demonoid truly has a lot of rare stuff you don't see on the open sites and, usually, greater percentage of reliable uploads as well. Also, the type of person who'd wait two weeks for registration and remember to sign in within a certain time window tends to be different from the hit-and-run people who congregate around the open sites.

Re:Wha?

[2br02b]

muahahahaha

Re:Wha?

[PopeRatzo]

"Information wants to be free, except information about me".

This is not at all hypocritical. In fact, it's probably the most insightful and practical way to operate in this Age.

Re:Wha?

[PopeRatzo]

There is a reason that the fed expands money supply.

Yes, to keep the bottom from dropping out until November, in the hope that they can get McCain elected.

I thought everybody knew that.

Re:Wha?

[alx5000]

Did you try baking them a cake shaped like the Internet?

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Total rubbish.

MY preferred tracker (http://tasvideos.org) doesn't use things like ratios at all, and - for that matter - doesn't even track who grabs what; there's no user accounts (other than for rating stuff), and anyone can download anything.

And you know what? It works GREAT! I'm seeding over a hundred videos for that site myself that I downloaded, and so do dozens of others each. For all of these videos, I have ratios in the tens, if not the hundreds (my record is 648.047, although you'd really have to add another 1250 or so on top of that, since I was already seeding it with a different client in the past. And yeah, this is a ratio of literally almost two thousand - not percent).

What's more, all the videos on the site are still available. Everyone can get them, and unless they're very old, you'll get great download speeds. There's no need to give back, but many people do, anyway, precisely BECAUSE there is no requirement to do so.

Your elitism is really just hurting you. Compare the Internet today with BBSes of the past, for instance, and ask yourself where it's easier to find software, pictures, or whatever else. BBSes, which had ratios to enforce trading and sharing, or the Internet, where all you get when uploading your pictures on Flickr or putting your FOSS project on SourceForge is a warm fuzzy feeling?

Just think about it for a moment.

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I have a comment, you should judge the comment and not the character behind the comment. A comment posted by an unidentifiable anonymous poster will guarantee that the comment will be judge solely on the merit of the content and not by the celebrity status of the poster.

Re:Wha?

[skaet]

I would appreciate an invite also, been looking around for a while. Incidentally, I have invites available for an aussie-only private tracker.

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Never been a fan of imageboards, I see.

Re:Wha?

[Hoknor]

To me, the best part about the leeching concept is that torrents tend to operate like a pyramid scheme. With the initial seeder always having an infinite ratio, it's not actually possible for everybody to have a 1:1 ratio. Your torrent would require infinite growth in order to be assured that everyone can get to 1:1. Once new downloaders stop joining the tracker, you have a set number of copies transferred that is going to be distributed amongst participants in the torrent. Torrents are already built around the concept of clients with more seeding ability being prioritized to receive new chunks they require before less able to seed clients.

Re:Wha?

[Firehed]

Yes, the tracker is public. However even to browse to many of the older torrents, you need to be a member. So many of their torrents end up on other sites so it barely matters, but it's still not as wide-open as TPB.

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, for a lot of people if it is anonymous it will just be ignored or judged on the lack of celebrity status of the poster. I mostly post under a username because I log in to use my saved settings such as disabling moderation filtering. When I first started reading /. I thought of the AC concept as a tongue in cheek thing, but it seems a lot of people see it as an entirely serious and valid statement about the users.

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Up yours, jackass!

Re:Wha?

[Captain Splendid]

So what day of the month do they allow new memberships? How does one get an invitation?

*Rolls eyes* It's not at all hard to get in. The second time I tried them, they must have just done a purge, because I signed up there and then.

I'm assuming their resurrection will engender a lot of traffic. Give it a couple of weeks and you'll probably be able to register just fine.

Re:Wha?

[p0tat03]

I call BS. What I see is merely a random (and lucky) coalescence of community good will. It can occasionally happen, but for every tracker like yours there's a bajillion out there where NOBODY seeds, and I end up having to wait two days for a 500MB file. It also really depends on what type of content the tracker hosts.

I have a lot of friends who use BT, who are not as attuned to the whole concept of not being a dick and seeding. In fact I am the *only* person I know personally that actually regularly seeds. Why? Because ISPs have bandwidth caps, and people are too cheap to put some of their caps towards contributing back. I've always believed that seeding is the "rule of the game" when it comes to BitTorrent, it's the thing that makes the wheel keep spinning, but the vast majority of people on public trackers do not seem to agree.

Not to mention that the tracker I'm on encourages seeding of old files. I can grab a file that's a couple of YEARS old, not popular at all, and still get insane speeds, because there's always a few fast seeders sitting on it collecting credits.

Re:Wha?

[Sangui]

Not for Demonoid. And to the person a few up, you don't get banned from Demonoid for anything but pissing off a Moderator. Low ratio, they don't check for cheating, inviting cheaters, none of it. Demonoid is pretty much an open tracker with invites and ratios.

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

Zero-Sum Ratio trackers are mathematically idiotic. People must download and then be banned for anyone to be able to download items and keep a decent ratio. If they don't, there will be a scarcity of 'download money' inside the system. The entire system depends on productive people being booted out so enough download currency can be developed for an economy to exist.

You end up not being able to download material when there are plenty of willing seeders, and the entire system GRINDS to a near halt and is not efficiently utilized. People have to start gaming the system, downloading stuff they don't give a single shit about because it happens to have actual LEECHERS that they can build download credit with.

Re:Wha?

[p0tat03]

It's not a zero-sum tracker. Bonuses are offered to merely seeding on an obscure file (keeping old files accessible), there are also small bonuses for seeding a file with few leechers (for the same effect). Also, seeders gain a further bonus (as opposed to uploading while downloading). All of this added together enables the pool of "money" to grow. The system they have set up is rather ingenious, I've never felt credit-starved, nor have I ever felt that I needed to download something merely for the purpose of seeding for credit. All I do is make sure my ratio is 1.0 (or more) for everything I download, and I'm now sitting on nearly 100GB of credit.

Re:Wha?

[RKBA]

Excellent. The problem of course is knowing who to ask. If you are still so inclined, please send my invitation to:

mike89@spamex.com

I will delete that email address as soon as I get the invite. THANK YOU!

Re:Wha?

[petermgreen]

how do they get arround the problem of people modding thier clients to lie to the tracker?

Re:Wha?

[Stormie]

Feel free to send an invite to rjpkhsmz@trashmail.net

You know someone with a three-digit Slashdot ID is the sort of fine character who will be a credit to your torrenting community. :-)

Re:Wha?

[TechwoIf]

Yes. :-)

Re:Wha?

[wish bot]

Give me a mail and I'll trade you invites.

misery.guts@gmail.com

Re:Wha?

[karolgajewski]

Most invite-only trackers run a daemon to auto-magically kill off old users around every ten minutes or so.

Re:Wha?

[gsmraxe]

Unfortunately, demonoid doesn't enforce these ratios. I think the admins have trouble policing the amount of users they have. Maybe under the new ownership this might change.

Demonoid is far better than a 100% public tracker, speeds are far faster, and torrents live a lot longer. Actually, I heard that demonoid came back on line this past weekend and was thrilled. It's been my favorite torrent site since I joined.

Re:Wha?

[Maxo-Texas]

I mainly use it when I've moderated a thread and want to say something on it.

Re:Wha?

[VoodooChimp]

Spoken like someone who doesn't have an account. Want an invite? :) Invites are nice... :-)

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would LOVE an invite

and I am not a leeching shitbag

my email is mreisbach[at]gmail[dot]com

Re:Wha?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking retard for defending a zero-sum tracker. You can't do math and this shit about bonuses is hilarious. Quit posting, faggot. "I... I've never felt credit starved!!!" No shit - you're a goddamn moron, there's a lot to life you're missing.

Sweet

[Saracenus]

Good to have them back. Looking forward to using them again.

Re:Sweet

[Seumas]

Agreed. I can't wait to log back in so I can download all those legal creative commons files and open source linux distro ISOs again!

Amen

[RecursiveLoop]

Its Back!! Can I get an Amen from the Congregation?!!!

Private tracker.

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the things that made/makes Demonoid so great is that the unwashed masses aren't permitted to ransack and abuse the system in the same way that they are at TPB.

You need invite only registration if you really want to be able to enforce ratios. Otherwise people just create disposable accounts, leech to the cap and never seed.

On Demonoid, people seed or their ratio goes to shit and they can't DL.

Anyway, I'm glad it's back. TPB is great, but it doesn't always cover all the bases for me.

Re:Private tracker.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've gotten tons of Demonoid torrents through places like isohunt. Never needed an invite or registration for anything. The only thing that keeps my ratio decent is my own free will.

If there's something on a site I want but need a registration for, I will spend a comparatively ludicrous amount of time and effort on getting around the forced registration on principle alone. Unless you can enforce these things absolutely perfectly, you can't force people to not be dicks. Look at DRM.

Re:Private tracker.

[Stellian]

[quote]If there's something on a site I want but need a registration for, I will spend a comparatively ludicrous amount of time and effort on getting around the forced registration on principle alone.[/quote] ... while the rest of us just register, maintain a good ratio, and get on with our lives. There's no "principle" behind letting every redneck plunder the bandwidth and effort of the community, while giving nothing back. The bottom line is simple: private trackers have much higher speeds because of the fourced seeding.
If you can max out your puny download bandwidth on public trackers, while at the same time enjoy wasting your time in bypassing compulsory registration, then kudos to you. The registration system does not need to be airtight, just hard enough to generate for most people the above described effect: it should make sense to register, and be part of the community, because you get something back for it, and on the other hand, hacking the system should be hard enough not to warrant the rewards.

Re:Private tracker.

[Anonymous Coward]

- demonoid does not punish bad ratio.

- demonoid does not track ratio properly for people with dynamic IP anyway.

- demonoid is not a private tracker. Being a member has some perks but is not required to use the tarcker.

As a result, torrents on demonoid where usually quite lively, wereas most private trackers have lots of torrents with one or two seeders, but noone downloading for fear of not being able to seed to anyone back later and ruining their ratio.
About the only torrents that are alive under these circumstances are ones you absolutely cannot find on a public server.

Re:Private tracker.

[suss]

Yeah... except if it weren't for the fact that demonoid has no safeguards/checks against cheating and even if the cheating is blindingly obvious, cheaters aren't punished...

Nice ratio of 1.5 million there, buddy!

Re:Private tracker.

[tepples]

If there's something on a site I want but need a registration for, I will spend a comparatively ludicrous amount of time and effort on getting around the forced registration on principle alone. ... while the rest of us just register That's a bit difficult if nobody on your IM buddy list has heard of the place, let alone has invite codes to give.

Re:Private tracker.

[nurb432]

Hypocrites.

"Information must be free!" ( but only to my friends that in effect pay for it by being required to do something in return )

Re:Private tracker.

[Bogtha]

I don't see any hypocrisy. The opinion that the law shouldn't be used to restrict people from sharing information does not oblige them to use their resources to distribute it. The opinion is not that they must do so, but merely that they should be able to do so if they want to.

Maybe your confusion is because you got the saying wrong. It's "Information wants to be free", and it's a statement about economics.

Re:Private tracker.

[tepples]

Except the vast, vast majority of sites allow immediate registration without invites. So [...] ...99% of the time, your objection isn't relevant and the rest of us do "just register". This article is about Demonoid. Like Orkut, like Advogato, and like Google Mail when it was in beta, Demonoid is part of the remaining 1%.

Re:Private tracker.

[Reziac]

I've been told that Demonoid's share ratio is pretty low anyway, only 10% (0.1) -- anyone know for sure?

I've found that unless there are no leechers at all, it's hard to AVOID winding up with at least a ratio of 0.3 -- which seems like a reasonable giveback to me. A ratio of 1.0 or greater isn't always practical, nor should it be necessary in a healthy system with many contributors. Everyone giving back a little bit equates to the same as a few giving much and the rest giving nothing, tho the latter situation obviously is less fair.

Re:Private tracker.

[Rudolf]

This article is about Demonoid. Like Orkut, like Advogato, and like Google Mail when it was in beta, Demonoid is part of the remaining 1%

According to http://gmail.com/, Google Mail is still in beta. Did you mean something else?

Re:Private tracker.

[Nephrite]

Sorry, but this works only if two very important conditions are met:

1) You have many, many users.
2) You download popular stuff

And if those are not there, you're stuck. One man have an interesting thing you need, you download it off him, and that's it. Your rating not gonna grow ever. So you can't download new stuff. And i think you don't want to keep your rating up by seeding Britney Spears mp3, do you? And even if you want, you can't because of your already mediocre rating. Sounds much like Dead Sea Effect to me.

Re:Private tracker.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what he meant.

Re:Private tracker.

[tepples]

From Wikipedia: Until early 2007, getting a Gmail account required either 1. getting an invite code from another Gmail user, or 2. buying a mobile phone and a service plan. It was not compatible with the majority of land-line phones because the majority of land-line phones do not support text messaging.

no catch?

[B5_geek]

After all the fuss & muss (with no court-based legal rulings) how are they back up?

They did not goto court (the innocent admins would have shouted it from the roof-tops), they must have had an out-of-court settlement. Considering all the old account are still available, this stinks of a setup.

I am from Canada, and as we are aware there are several laws that 'allow' me to d'load. There is even one that I can think of that allows me to upload. BUT that said, I will not log back into demonoid, I will not create a new account.

I will continue to use the private trackers that I am currently on, and most importantly continue to use Piratebay to search.

Re:no catch?

[chasingsol]

The new server is located in Ukraine, so unless there's a very elaborate international conspiracy here, I doubt it's a setup. The original admin isn't from Canada or the USA (or Europe for that matter). The original servers were located in Amsterdam, then they moved to Canada before being shut down, and now they've moved again. Not at all unusual for torrent sites, even huge ones like The Pirate Bay.

Re:no catch?

[B5_geek]

Don't confuse my tone of pessimism, I _hope_ they are back.

Just wary, and paranoid.

hehe paranoid of demoniod.

Re:no catch?

[Ironix]

I logged into the newly functional demonoid using my old account and it works fine. Now unless they gave away all their users old account data, I doubt it is some kind of honey-pot or such thing.

Re:no catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

I won't make any claims about Demonoid, but it's fairly common for questionable sites to suddenly go down, and following a down time period of any length, they go back up just like nothing happened but now with new government monitoring overlords. I would advise caution.

Re:no catch?

[pipatron]

I won't make any claims about Demonoid, but it's fairly common for questionable sites to suddenly go down, and following a down time period of any length, they go back up just like nothing happened but now with new government monitoring overlords.

Citation needed, or STFU with the FUD, RIAA-troll.

Re:no catch?

[base3]

Or that prosecutors made them an offer they can't refuse. I wouldn't be sure at all that the resurrected Demonoid isn't a honeypot.

Re:no catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a B5 geek, you should know that once the avalanche has started, it's too late for the pebbles to vote. ;P

Re:no catch?

[B5_geek]

Nice reference.

Re:no catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true. I feel safe... I mean... it's not like I use it for downloading illegal stuff anyway, right? Only open-source software, strictly.

Suprnova never came back...

[istewart]

...but Demonoid did. I think this indicates a subtle but meaningful change.

Re:Suprnova never came back...

[DigitalisAkujin]

Actually Suprnova did come back but under new management.

Re:Suprnova never came back...

[chasingsol]

With SuprNova, the domain was given to the stewardship of The Pirate Bay, but there's no other relationship between the original and SuprNova 2.0. The significant difference is that in the case of Demonoid, the admin has handed off the site and database to existing staff. It's "under new management", but it's the same site that was running before it was shut down.

Re:Suprnova never came back...

[soilheart]

A "subtle" difference is also that demonoid never was taken down because of the pressure on the admin (as I've understood it) but because the host didn't want demonoid on their servers anymore. Since then deimos have said that it probably would come back as he never had a problem with having the site.

Re:Suprnova never came back...

[slyn]

...but Demonoid did. I think this indicates a subtle but meaningful change. Though it's possible that the idea behind pirating has evolved from a "free stuff is sweet" idea when it first started to a "free stuff is sweet + stick it to the RIAA/MPAA/similar entities" idea, I think that would probably be looking over a number of much less ideological and much more IRL/priorities/personal reasons not to restart it consequential to whoever was administrating the site.

That being said, on a completely OT side point, though I (mostly) dislike the new skin of /. (I have the beta skin or whatever it's called enabled), this is my first time posting since the change, and the inline posting is pretty sweet. So if anyone large and in charge reads this, go back to the old look but keep the inline posting feature.

ps. And the same page preview for that matter.

Re:Suprnova never came back...

[istewart]

I should've been more precise. Suprnova was never directly re-instantiated, it basically became a brand because people were already familiar with the name.

Re:Suprnova never came back...

[Gabest]

There is no way back once a star turns into a supernova.

canada back online

[acidrain]

I don't know about this 1:1 ratio thing of which you speak, but I am sure glad to be able to resume leaching from Canada. They blocked the country due to legal threats quite a while ago, and now seem to have forgotten to do so again. Will see where that goes.

If you ask me it is the protocols job to get leaches to contribute not the sites. After all the site serves ads regardless...

Re:canada back online

[number11]

I am sure glad to be able to resume leaching from Canada. They blocked the country due to legal threats quite a while ago, and now seem to have forgotten to do so again.

Traceroute shows they're not in Canada anymore. The web server is in the Ukraine, the domain registration is in Brazil. So I'd guess that those legal threats are no longer a problem.

Re:canada back online

[shark72]

Not if the site operator resides in a country that's a signatory to the Berne Convention and is providing access to folks in those countries.

I'm aware that it's a popular myth that hosting your site in some other country will exempt you from the laws of the country in which you live. And, sure enough, lots of folks have tried it. But it's generally not the case.

If this is boggling anybody, conduct a thought experiment by substituting "information freedom fighter sticking it to the rich and greedy copyright owners" with, say, "child pornography distributor." If I were to sit in my house in California and launch a child pornography site on a host in the Ukraine and registered in Brazil, the law'd be all over me -- and rightly so.

Copyright law and child pornography laws are different, of course, but in the case of the relevance of where the business operator resides, they're close enough.

Re:canada back online

[old and new again]

they blocked canadian IP's cause they were hosted in Laval and got a take down notice from the CRIAA (the MAFIAA up here) a proxy solved this problem, and it was just the site itself, not the tracker that was blocked all of that is over now that they are hosted somewhere in europe)

Re:canada back online

[number11]

I'm aware that it's a popular myth that hosting your site in some other country will exempt you from the laws of the country in which you live.

Of course not. But it makes it a lot harder to pursue. Dealing with your own government is numbingly frustrating as it is. Now consider having to deal with governments that are not your own, and that may not have the same priorities. So, let's see. You need to jump through the hoops of Brazil's government to compel a "privacy guard" type registrar to give the name of the domain holder. That turns out to be a mail drop in Vanuatu. Call around and try to find someone who speaks Bislama, because while you're pretty sure that whoever answers the government phone in Vanuatu understands English, they're being pricks about it. Give up on that approach, which is just as well because even if you had found someone who spoke Bislama and filed the necessary paperwork in that language with the Vanuatu Justice Ministry, it would have turned out that the mailing address is vacant lot in Amsterdam, and the email address is a free account in South Africa.

So, go after the server in the Ukraine (even though you're pretty sure the operator is backing everything up by FTP to somewhere else, and can start up at a new location on 24 hours notice). Call around to find someone who speaks Ukranian, and someone else who has a petty cash fund big enough to pay the bribe that's going to be required. On second thought, say "what the hell" and give up, you joined the force to catch bank robbers, not to play bureaucratic games in languages you don't understand, for the benefit of some company that isn't even in your country.

Besides, what makes you think the site operator is Canadian?

Re:canada back online

[shark72]

Excellent points! You're certainly correct that it might make it a lot harder.

Funny that you referenced Vanatu -- of course, that's where the fine folks at Kazaa registered their company, apparently in a similar attempt to throw up some legal barriers. As we know, it ultimately didn't work out, as they were tried in Australia, where the executives live.

I did not state that the kid running Demonoid is a Canadian (the "canada back online" title was from an earlier post, something about being blocked in Canada, I believe). I referenced the Berne Convention, but that cuts a pretty wide swath -- Canada's a member, but so are about 180 other countries. I don't know that he's in a signatory nation, but IMO it's pretty likely.

Re:canada back online

[Siquo]

vacant lot in Amsterdam They do not exist.

Re:canada back online

[lareader]

Of course they do, it's the Museum for Ethical Politics - there's one in every country, and they're always vacant.

Well, either that, or they can take up lodging in some ditzy semi-celebrity's head... might be a bit hard to live with the peroxide and all, but it's going to be roomy, and the rent is cheap. :)

Re:canada back online

[Siquo]

To nit-pick: Both of those are located in The Hague, right next to the also very empty International War-Crime Tribunal's cell block.

Need Invite

[noticedneutrino]

Can I have an invite please?

Re:Need Invite

[Anonymous Coward]

no

Re:Need invite

[nekozid]

No.

Re:Need invite

[one_red_eye]

Invites for sale! $25USD

Need invite

[noticedneutrino]

I need an invite please guys! Sorry for posting twice I had to change my settings for email to be seen thanks :)

One up, one down..

[joshuaes]

Recent news about IndieTorrents.com, an invite-only tracker that is pretty extensive as far as range and number of independent music etc, is shutting down. Planning a comeback, however.

# 2008-04-12 - I have some sad news to announce to all of you. IT will be closing down on Sunday. We hope to rise from the ashes like a fiery phoenix some day in the future but for the time being our run of free hosting has come to an end. It has been a great ride and I have had so much fun doing this. I will miss this and think back with fond memories. Drink a tall glass of cold beer and say goodbye to your good friend drewcifer. -http://www.indietorrents.com/

But they've recently got $2000 in donations, so I think their return should definitely be expected.

I find waffles.fm & what.cd are other good invite-only sites for independent music torrents. I believe waffles is where most OiNK users went. Those invites are hard to come by, however. At least in my searches; which are still fruitless.

Re:One up, one down..

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't tried waffles.fm, but what.cd is trivial to bullshit your way through an irc interview into getting an invite, I wouldn't be surprised if what.cd is a honeypot project.

simple:

go to irc.what.cd /join an #invite named channel
type !queue
wait /join the channel you're invited to
bullshit them with info you can easily learn on the net about transcoding and lossless formats
tell them you only encode with EAC and they'll ejaculate on you for sure

you're in

it's not hard, I bet it's a honeypot

this is nice

[Elsapotk421]

I usually buy most of my music. sometimes I just don't have the cash so I would turn to the pirate bay or demonoid a while back. I'm kind of glad this is back up because I used to get quality torrents and seeds from them.

Great News

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't get much better than this does it folks? When I logged on and saw it was back I almost cried while I screamed for joy!

All file shareres are leechers

[cliffski]

I don't understand this hatred of 'leeching' amongst file sharers. You know that you are ALL leeching right? You are leeching off the honest people who actually BUY the music, BUY the movies and BUY the software. without them, the stuff would not get made, and people like yourselves with overinflated senses of entitlement wouldn't be able to LEECH it off the honest majority.
next time you complain about people leeching, take a good honest look at what you are doing.

No surprise to me to see slashdot triumphing the return of a warez site, the whole place is just a meeting point for pirates these days, ironic to see a copyright notice for sourceforge at the bottom of each page.

Go on, mod me down for pointing out the truth...

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[DavidShor]

I'd like to know what your response is to research that indicates that copyright periods are currently far too long to maximise content production(In a nutshell, artists can coast off of their previous work).

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[cp.tar]

I don't understand this hatred of 'leeching' amongst file sharers. You know that you are ALL leeching right? You are leeching off the honest people who actually BUY the music, BUY the movies and BUY the software.

... and who then post the music, the movies, the shows and the software freely on torrents.

No longer quite so honest in your book, huh?

Anyway, ethics is relative and subject to change, and so are business models.
As far as I'm concerned, it is better to let everyone adapt to new conditions in the world than to try to reverse them.
Besides, it has been proved that torrents don't hurt music sales in the least; quite the contrary, in fact. Software companies have also profited from the increased mindshare (private users may pirate the software, but when they use it for business, they buy the software they are familiar with instead of something else).

Aside from all that, the ratio requirement is there so that information would continue to flow — it only happens when everyone gives at least as much as they get. And that's why it is called sharing.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[mpe]

I don't understand this hatred of 'leeching' amongst file sharers. You know that you are ALL leeching right? You are leeching off the honest people who actually BUY the music, BUY the movies and BUY the software.

Quite a lot of the content here is likely to originate from people who bought the whatever and uploaded it. Another major source is where the content was broadcast to a significent chunk of the planet.

without them, the stuff would not get made,

This is the "every pirated copy is a lost sale" theory. Which has been completly debunked. Quite simply the vast majority of the people involved are not "potential customers" in the first place.It's also very possible that the "pirate" version, which tends to be "Available worldwide and DRM free", will be the only version available to people. Possibly for months/years even forever.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[Anonymous Coward]

don't make me laugh. are you suggesting that all the people who download spiderman 3 and cloverfield in the USA 'could not get it legally'. Defend file sharing all you want, but pretending that its just people who cannot get the stuff legally is pure bullshit and you know it.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[timmarhy]

"? You are leeching off the honest people who actually BUY the music, BUY the movies and BUY the software. without them, the stuff would not get made,"

so your saying if i download enough RIAA label music and hollywood movies i'll send the fuckers broke and they will have to stop making their dribble? excellent!

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[rfunches]

What about CDs that are no longer in print (and impossible to find second-hand), or hard-to-find DVDs that are encoded for a region other than yours?

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[Anonymous Coward]

[In reply to: "without people buying stuff, it would not get made"] This is the "every pirated copy is a lost sale" theory.

No, it's not. Ever heard of TV shows getting cancelled because of bad ratings, movie sequels being made because the original sold well, artists being dumped by a label when their latest album bombs, et cetera? It's not hard to see that the creation of media is influenced by people going out and paying for it. That also means that people going out and buying stuff contribute significantly to the diversity of media available for downloading. If you only download and never buy, you are profiting from the availability of materials that is paid for by paying customers.

That has nothing to do with "every pirated copy is a lost sale" (or "without IP no art would be produced"). It's just pointing out that when person A buys albums and person B downloads them, A contributes more to the production of future albums than B. How you can miss the point so completely and still be modded "4: insightful" is beyond me.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[Joe Jay Bee]

Fine, possible moral exception, if not a legal one.

But the GP's example of a major Hollywood blockbuster is not an exception. It is freely available if you want to pay a few $currencys. That it isn't available under the precise terms you would like also does not count, as it's grossly tilted in your favour ("I'd like it DRM free, and in Ogg Theora, and hosted on a Linux server, and with a penguin on it, and a pony, or else I won't pay a $currency/100").

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[r_jensen11]

The law would say that just because something is out there doesn't mean you have the right to watch it regardless of the circumstances. It says you have the privilege to watch it if it's in your format, but just because you can't buy it doesn't mean that you can get hold of it any which way you see fit. Some would consider it a supply constraint.

I'm just saying....

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[jollyreaper]

"? You are leeching off the honest people who actually BUY the music, BUY the movies and BUY the software. without them, the stuff would not get made,"

so your saying if i download enough RIAA label music and hollywood movies i'll send the fuckers broke and they will have to stop making their dribble? excellent! How many times do I have to pirate Transformers so we'll never see a Transformers 2? I'll do it, for the sake of the children.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[Sir_Lewk]

Maybe if they made media that didn't suck then it wouldn't do poorly. You can't blame a poor public reception on pirating alone.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[Pretzalzz]

[In reply to: "without people buying stuff, it would not get made"] This is the "every pirated copy is a lost sale" theory.

No, it's not. Ever heard of TV shows getting cancelled because of bad ratings, How does whether I download or watch it on tv effect its ratings? I'm not a neilson family. That is of course the dirty open secret of television ratings.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[Jorophose]

(Just a warning, not bashing anybody here. Don't take this to offense, because I'm just an idiot like the rest of us.)

Ever heard of TV shows getting cancelled because of bad ratings,
I don't know about you, but I have yet to meet someone who downloaded entire seasons and hadn't watched the shows anyways. (I don't download TV shows myself, but my friends that do generally download the older seasons and watch the current ones, or have done the opposite)

movie sequels being made because the original sold well,
Most movies these days are crap, or don't stick to their original story. Live theatre is looking more and more attractive.

And nothing's stopping you from making your movie independant. With all these "artists" prostituting themselves for millions of dollars a year, I'm sure releasing one movie by themselves isn't going to kill them.

And even then, what the hell? Why is $director or $producer getting paid so much money, why is $actor so freaking rich for just talking and walking, and why the hell does $CEO get millions too unlike $wrtier who gets paid barely anything?

When they learn to pay everyone properly, I'll buy each and every one of my movies. It's not like the 10$ will kill me. This isn't including the topic of piracy.

artists being dumped by a label when their latest album bombs, et cetera?

Labels are such crooks I'm suprised so few people are actively dumping their labels to go independant. My uncle is independant; he's doing just fine. Most people probably won't make the same as if they joined a studio, but if you wanted to make millions off a synthetic voice loosely based on yours, talking about your sex life, might as well start a cult.

It's not hard to see that the creation of media is influenced by people going out and paying for it.

Good media was never influenced by money. Money was just incentive to make even more. But even then, who was paying Da Vinci, who was paying Mozart, those seven-digit salaries today's artists get? And I still think their music was much better than today's crap.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[caluml]

I wanted to find a copy of something called Lost. No, not the hugely popular recent one. This one. I contacted Channel 4 (praise be upon them - they're excellent!) to ask if it was available as a DVD. But it's not, and there are no plans of it. So I had to try and find it online. Which I can't, due to the "other" Lost. So "pirate" copies are the only way I am likely to be able to get it, but even they don't work.
What's my point. I guess I'm asking on Slashdot to see if anyone can help me find the UK version of it :)

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[proselyte_heretic]

This is the "every pirated copy is a lost sale" theory. Which has been completly debunked. Quite simply the vast majority of the people involved are not "potential customers" in the first place.It's also very possible that the "pirate" version, which tends to be "Available worldwide and DRM free", will be the only version available to people. Possibly for months/years even forever. Actually, that theory is true. I use my linux server running 20 separate bittorrent configurations to pirate. Each one downloads two movies per day (for speed, they seed to each other, and each download two movies per day. By the end of the day, I have $20 per movie * 20 copies * 2 movies = $800 per day. I put the movies on a dvd at the end of the day (20 copies of the same thing have very good compression) and put it under my pillow. The piracy fairy brings me my $800 of disposable income straight from the pockets of the producers and actors and the movie industry.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[shark72]

"What about CDs that are no longer in print (and impossible to find second-hand), or hard-to-find DVDs that are encoded for a region other than yours?"

That's a fine tangental discussion, but not really relevant. Look at the top list of most any tracker, or the list published by BigChampagne, which aggregates this info. It matches closely with the stuff that's popular at the moment.

The BitTorrent protocol can also be used to share Linux distros, and other authorized stuff. But neither these, nor the "no longer in print" content, are the primary traffic on Demonoid.

It's fine to acknowledge that many people use piracy as a substitute for buying. There's nothing wrong with this -- opting to get something off of a tracker vs. purchasing it leaves you with more money in your pocket. Having more money is the same motivation that drives most musicians, artists and filmmakers, so it's nothing to be ashamed of. When you choose to torrent something rather than buying it, you're simply acknowledging that you'd rather have that money in your pocket than in the pocket of some actor, musician, or writer whom you don't know, and whom you'll probably never meet. This is perfectly understandable and requires no rationalization.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[Scratched]

You're making the common mistake of thinking that "every pirated copy is a lost sale."

Spiderman 3 may be available worldwide since it was such a big budget movie, but it was not by any means worth spending the money to buy. I will never spend money on Spiderman 3 because it was just a bad movie. I wouldn't want it for free either, so I wouldn't pirate it, but I'm sure there are enough people out there that might think a movie would be "nice to have" but not worth spending the money on. If someone can get the movie for free, they might be willing to take it, but otherwise they'd never want to bother with it.

You might think that no one would profit from this idea either, but think of all of the on-screen advertising in big budget movies. That's sure to have an impact on people who pirate the movies (either consciously or subconsciously.) Also, if a person who downloaded Spiderman 3 showed it to friends and family, one of those people who watched it may have enjoyed it enough to think it is worth spending money on. Some people may even want to download the movie just to decide whether it is worth owning before they spend the money. Afterward, they may enjoy it enough to legally buy it, or decide it is garbage and delete it.

Every pirated copy is not a lost sale...

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[guamisc]

That would be all fine and dandy if the actual work was in lack of supply. Unfortunately your argument just doesn't hold.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[Anonymous Coward]

I wanted to find a copy of something called Lost. No, not the hugely popular recent one. This one. I contacted Channel 4 (praise be upon them - they're excellent!) to ask if it was available as a DVD. But it's not, and there are no plans of it. So I had to try and find it online. Which I can't, due to the "other" Lost. So "pirate" copies are the only way I am likely to be able to get it, but even they don't work.
What's my point. I guess I'm asking on Slashdot to see if anyone can help me find the UK version of it :) The show you seek can be found on TheBox, a private bittorrent site oriented towards British television. It appears that signups are currently open.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[emjay88]

This seems to be a very common thread in pro-piracy posts:

Most movies these days are crap

When they learn to pay everyone properly, I'll buy each and every one of my movies

And I still think their music was much better than today's crap.

Maybe if they made media that didn't suck...

I will never spend money on Spiderman 3 because it was just a bad movie
Just because you don't think something is worth the retail price does not make it OK to download it for free. How other people run their business is up to them and I personally don't see why that should have any bearing on your decision to buy whatever they're selling and if you don't think that their product/movie/music is worth your money the solution is simple: Don't buy it!
What about media that is grossly overpriced because of $organisation? Do you go down to $store, look for $product, decide that it costs too much and then just steal it? Didn't think so. You have to weigh up the costs vs the value of the product yourself. "Is this movie worth my $xxx? No? Then I'll go without." Being too cheap to pay store prices (either online or brick-and-mortar) doesn't give you a licence to steal.

copying digital media does not deprive the creator Maybe not, but it does make it easier for people to get $media for free, that's how p2p works. This devalues the product simply because supply becomes >= demand.

I don't want to wade in to a discussion about copyright periods being too long or "what about $media that I can't get because of $excuse". Just accept that what you're doing is illegal and that artists who create works are being paid less and less because of it.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[tepples]

When you choose to torrent something rather than buying it, you're simply acknowledging that you'd rather have that money in your pocket than in the pocket of some actor, musician, or writer whom you don't know, and whom you'll probably never meet. I want a copy of Song of the South. By using BitTorrent, I'm acknowledging that I am unable to buy a controlling interest in the company that took the work out of print.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[Ayeffkay]

Way to pick two examples and extrapolate that every download is just people stealing because it's easy. Show me where Walmart and Best Buy keep their DVDs of Howard the Duck please.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[tholomyes]

A contributes more to the production of future albums than B

That depends on the usage. The vast majority of music that I've downloaded has been stuff that I had never heard before, and which has consequently led me to attend shows and buy albums that I otherwise never would have heard. So when this particular person B downloads them, it's more likely to lead to a sale than if they hadn't.

To quote Clutch's drummer, Jean-Paul Gaster:

"The reality is that an artist has to have a record go gold, before they are even going to see a dime. Bands put out 3 or 4 records on a label and never see a dime from record sales. So, it is not like people who are downloading would be putting a dollar in my pocket if they would have bought the record. The industry is set up so that the record company will immediately get paid from record sales."

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[Cardcaptor_RLH85]

I know that when my family was a 'Nielsen family' for a week that whenever I wasn't at home for a show that I normally watch and subsequently downloaded the episode to watch it, I just listed my viewing where it asked about VHS or DVR recording of shows to watch later.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[DamienRBlack]

I agree that it is absolutely hypocritical for file sharers to hate leechers, and it is a shame you got modded down. I'm a file sharer who thinks that every site has an obligation to support as many leeches as it can before the system actually stops working well.

Which is exactly why I like demonoid so much. They don't really enforce ratios, and closed registration is done strictly for logistical reasons. Some people hate demonoid because it isn't elite enough, and because it lets people leech, slowing speeds for everyone. Those people are missing the point and philosophy of file sharing, which is spreading the information as far and wide as it'll go. Lechers or not.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[myrmidon666]

If I don't watch a television show it is because it sucks or I just don't have time. If I download it, I at least get to watch the good ones at my convenience.

If I download an album instead of buying it, it's because I am not paying $15 for one or two songs.

Let's face it, if an album, movie, or television show sucks enough that I am not willing to pay for it, then I am not going to pay for it. It may be download quality but, that's it.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[Anonymous Coward]

Go on, mod me down for pointing out the truth...

I'd mod you back up if I could, because I think it's an honest opinion you're expressing, rather than an attempt to flame (though you put it pretty aggressively).

Alas, I lack mod points today.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[cliffski]

I dislike demonoid because it is a site built on the illegal copying of copyrighted intellectual property, and thus one of the major forces that is pushing PC gaming to collapse, and myself out of business.
Leechers or not, games pirates are wrecking gaming.
Not that anyone on this site gives a fuck about anyone who *shock horror* creates something digital for a living...

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never *ever* seen an advert in *any* of the several dozen TV shows I routinely download - advertisers can, contrary to popular belief, certainly tell if an advert placed in a certain shows breaks generates revenue or not and since they are not present in the content people are downloading, then people are not seeing them.

Neilson ratings are not the only thing content providers go by.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[Maxo-Texas]

First- I agree with you with regard to copyrighted material under 28 years old with the important caveat that creators ONLY deserve a reasonable compensation based on the cost and effort to create that work. No one- executives, creators, etc deserves to make millions of dollars a year just because they got "lucky" and won the jackpot. The current copyright periods reflected that it took 28 years to get a reasonable profit back in the 1700's. Clearly that is no longer the case.

---

Anything over 28 years old is a product of government corruption by disney and other large corporations so I do not respect those- sure it is legal but I view it as so scummy that companies have corrupted a set of laws intended for the public good into "corporate welfare for life- no one can ever use our stuff even tho our stuff is often new versions of public domain stuff (esp disney)".

Also, if I have purchased a product, I get pretty pissed off when I can't make a backup copy to take with me on vacation or use that product on my various devices or stop working because I installed a new hard drive. I disagree with the entire "LISCENSED TO USE" concept as well. I do respect the "Cable" model where you pay a tiny fee and so only reasonably expect to get temporary usage of a large amount of material.

---

The purpose of copyright law is to encourage people to create works. I think now that the world is a bigger place, people would create a lot MORE works with a lot LESS encouragement. Actors used to make 6 movies a year-- songwriters used to write a song a month-- today their productivity has dropped as their compensation has gone up (and the quality of the work has not gotten better either).

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[Jorophose]

Except I don't download movies. I buy the good ones actually.

I don't feel "digital downloads" are worth the dollar per song they ask. Simply because I wouldn't buy the CD in some cases. Other cases, I buy the CD and rip the music off. I can play a CD in my car, can't do that with computer files.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[r_jensen11]

How is it not a supply constraint? If a book publisher deliberately decides to publish 100 books, they deliberately are limiting supply. Likewise, once production of a mass-produced good ends, its supply is also limited.

Let me provide an example that /. may understand:

Your Star Wars figurines/action figures/dolls were mass-produced. However, due to 30 some odd years going by and tons of kids playing with their toys, products existing in good condition are rare today. Because they are rare, they have become collectables. Some (crazy) people are willing to spend thousands of dollars on these formerly abundant goods because they are now rare.

Now, for an appropriate car analogy:
Ford's Model T used to be a very common car. However, due to many decades of time and use, Model T's in good, working order and in prestine condition are rare. What used to be a product that many families could purchase is now a product which very few families can purchase. Supply, which was once abundant, is now limited.

Here's another car analogy:
Citroen produces the C6 for Europe and many parts of the world. However, I, living in the United States, can not purchase the C6 and drive it around because it does not conform to US auto standards. Some may be safety (e.g. emissions, etc), some are not so much (differences in headlight specifications). The C6 is comparable to a DVD that is encoded for a region other than my own. Am I upset that I can't purchase one and drive it around in the States? Hell yes. Did Citroen necessarily have the vehicle not conform to US specifications? No; they just didn't anticipate (and probably rightly so) that there would be enough demand to produce, even if they did a major marketing endeavor.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[mink]

I have the same problem with finding Velvet Soup (the we don't intend to put it out on DVD part).

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[mink]

What do you mean? As someone else here said "Transformers was the best LEGO Bionacle movie ever!"

Demonoid

[spandex_panda]

I used to use demonoid a lot, now I use almost exclusively tpb. Demonoid was great, and although its a bit empty now, it will soon be great again! If anyone wants membership contact me at the not very hard riddle of an gmail address "chronograph(a calendar application)(at)gmail(dot)com" where (a calendar application)=um... you get the picture.

Re:Demonoid

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I don't need an invite (hence my anono posting) but I'm confused. Maybe it's the hour, maybe it's the 4 Whiskey Sours, but what the hell is the calander application? Outlook? GCal? Stonehenge?

The real benefit of Demonoid...

[SacredByte]

Is twofold: Firstly, they have a great search engine (read: it is very easy to find what you are looking for), and Secondly, torrents are generally well seeded.

TORRENTS R DEAD

[noticedneutrino]

LONG LIVE RAPIDSHARE!

yup, and don't forget your exact info is in tact

[Anonymous Coward]

which would be damn hard for imposters to replicate without siezing the servers and re-setting them up, plus having access to the domain name and DNS etc..

on a side note you people who are crying about not being able to sign up without an invite need to just stop bitching. the bad thing about TPB/isohunt is everyone leeches and just leaves. There are a million torrents that no one is seeding at TPB. demonoid needs to preserve its original userbase before it lets you dirty leeches in. free information is worthless if that information cannot be distributed beyond people who hit and run on torrents.

be patient and polite perhaps someone will invite you

I need an invite please. please.

[kms_one]

I have been trying for months to get an invite. I need an account for older torrents on the site. Non-members can only access new torrents. Thanks.

Re:I need an invite please. please.

[spandex_panda]

Here you go. http://www.demonoid.com/register.php?with_invite=1

asgadcwkvja7oupuznr3lywmul2j6ihbsshsgsl7mlzs

Some more codes for other lucky punters:

y6ozfyv7y8xuyu6na0sfswymtun9la9zlue2i4nt6jtj

65iiu46v2zmyuwabe5o0yap1cfk8q5alfu9

tphnv6gixnp6rbdmrmsj5k2kp1h4n7r6j

dnkoc5czcxv15luw0k2wxftn1ent7geyalxv20dz8o

Re:I need an invite please. please.

[cheesethegreat]

It'd be great if we could get some more of these codes. If you could, can you drop one off to me at fire.10.BadgerRevenge@spamgourmet.com ?

Re:I need an invite please. please.

[Anonymous Coward]

hey everyone, here's our chance!!!

Re:I need an invite please. please.

[kms_one]

Thanks a million to spandex_panda, but greedy cowards have stolen your codes before I could use one. :(. Can someone send one to cisengineer2 AT gmail? thanks!

Re:I need an invite please. please.

[indi0144]

Hey would be nice to have an invitation to Demonoid or any other private trackers that give privileges to hardcore seeders?

It sucks when you happily seed in a public tracker but the other peers are dicks. My gmail is ss.rocket thanks.

Re:I need an invite please. please.

[spandex_panda]

sorry I'm fresh out of codes for this 24 hours or so... I will try and remember tomorrow! chronographical at gmail

Oblig. Ackbar quote

[Eudial]

It's a trap!

  ~ Admiral Ackbar.

Re:Oblig. Ackbar quote

[petroskar]

lol maybe all the demonoid users will get caught. But for me it doesn't work that an album which is going to be released on 30th of April can be found on-line in the first of the month.I personally believe that it's a kind of promotion.

Fuck Yeah!!!

[bacchus612]

I'll say it again:
FUCK YEAH!

Re:yup, and don't forget your exact info is in tac

[Anonymous Coward]

"which would be damn hard for imposters to replicate without siezing the servers and re-setting them up, plus having access to the domain name and DNS etc.."

but trivial for law enforcement and this type of thing happens all of the time where big sites go down and mysteriously reappear but with a puppet master pulling the strings and logging everything.

I'd avoid demonoid and any such new resurging site like the plauge

From whom am I leeching?

[tepples]

You are leeching off the honest people who actually BUY the music, BUY the movies and BUY the software. without them, the stuff would not get made I resent that insinuation. If I download a work that was first published 50 years ago, which has since fallen out of print, and whose author has since died, from whom am I leeching and why? If I download free software (such as GNU/Linux distributions) and free text (such as Project Gutenberg collections), from whom am I leeching and why?

Re:From whom am I leeching?

[Anonymous Coward]

surely in that case you can use a legal, hosted in your local country, not run by a bunch of shady criminals website?
Don't try and kid yourself that demonoid exists to share LINUX distributions. you just look like an idiot.

Re:From whom am I leeching?

[tepples]

surely in that case [free content] you can use a legal, hosted in your local country, not run by a bunch of shady criminals website?

My country is allegedly run by a bunch of shady criminals.

But seriously, how does taking a work out of print "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"? What do you recommend for orphan works?

Re:From whom am I leeching?

[larry bagina]

If Microsoft takes GPL Linux code and secretly incorporates it into Windows 7, who's being leeched from and why?

Re:From whom am I leeching?

[tepples]

If Microsoft takes GPL Linux code and secretly incorporates it into Windows 7, who's being leeched from and why?

Microsoft can add Linux as a subsystem inside Windows without leeching anything from anyone. But if Microsoft does this secretly, Linus Torvalds and other authors of Linux are being leeched from. The GPLv2 allows reuse of code by those who preserve "an appropriate copyright notice". Removing these notices is not only copyright infringement but also plagiarism, and it is leeching because a lot of people who write free software do so for name recognition to develop their CVs.

GNU GPL on a work says it is available under some conditions, mostly involving credit and reciprocal sharing of code that runs in the same process. Lack of a license statement on an out-of-print orphan work, on the other hand, says it is not available at all. How does making a work not available at all "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?

A 100% requirement is not achievable

[tepples]

Aside from all that, the ratio requirement is there so that information would continue to flow â" it only happens when everyone gives at least as much as they get. Technically, that's not possible. The total amount of uploads across all users equals the total amount of downloads, making it impossible for everyone to have a share ratio greater than or equal to 100%. But with "at least as much" replaced by "almost as much", I agree with your assessment.

Re:A 100% requirement is not achievable

[Deltaspectre]

What about people that seed almost exclusively?

Their "download" came from out of the system.

Re:A 100% requirement is not achievable

[tepples]

What about people that seed almost exclusively? Their "download" came from out of the system. From what system did their download come? And will they be banned on that system for leeching on that system?

Re:A 100% requirement is not achievable

[Deltaspectre]

Broadcast TV/radio, purchased DVD, purchased games, etc :) Any number of sources outside of the torrent systems in general

Re:A 100% requirement is not achievable

[tepples]

Broadcast TV/radio, purchased DVD, purchased games, etc :)

A torrent can send only one file or one folder, uniquely identified by a hashing algorithm. Multiple rips of one TV or radio broadcast, multiple MP3 recompressions of a CD album, or multiple single layer recompressions of one purchased DVD will come out to different hash values. So if you want to improve your ratio on an existing torrent, you can't just buy a copy and rip it.

Are you talking about the courier layer of warez distribution? I can understand why couriers would have a share ratio advantage in getting the scene's releases seeded. But because couriers are a small minority of seeders, I still can't see a plausible way that the majority of people on a torrent can come out with a ratio above maybe 90 percent. Inevitably, there will be people who leave the client in seed mode for two weeks and next to nobody shows up to download it because other seeders are quickly servicing the majority of requests.

Re:A 100% requirement is not achievable

[Deltaspectre]

Right, I believe the courier layer is what I was talking about. I was referring to 'original seeders', not people that have merely completed downloading the file.

Re:A 100% requirement is not achievable

[Cardcaptor_RLH85]

Those people who upload almost exclusively are the ones who allow the 'hit-and-run' peers to operate. Since the total up to down ratio on any given tracker MUST be 1:1, if you have 5 users three of which are at 1:1 ratios and one at 5:1, then the fifth user can't be any better than .2:1. For each massive uploader, there must be someone who doesn't make it to a 1:1 ratio. My example is quite extreme and on most semi-popular torrents anyone with a respectable upload speed should be able to make it to at least .9:1 but everyone can't be at 1:1 because, at the very least the original seeder with have an infinite ratio for the torrent.

Wow

[Cinnaman]

Demonoid had the best community out of the "public" torrent sites and made for a richer filesharing experience, I've been lamenting it's loss ever since.
The Pirate Bay is okay but didn't have the range of Demonoid. I used to have a Torrentleech account with 20gb worth of positive ratio but was a victim of their new "regular login" rule, so it's great to have a comparable site back from the dead.

Re:Wow

[glidermike]

What a feeling of relief as I went back to Demonoid,logged into my account and found all my info there! Living in Canada and being blocked from entering a site that was hosted in my own hometown-------very frustrating.Up Yours RIAA.

Hosting provided by...

[Anonymous Coward]

the FBI.

One rule for houses, another for creation

[cliffski]

I'd like to know why you are changing the subject to talk about copyright terms when this is not what's being discussed.
But riddle me this..
If I spend 5 years of my life building a house, its mine for my entire life and its passed down to my descendants FOREVER. If I spend the same 5 years creating a movie book or software, apparently I don't enjoy the same rights to what I created.
Why?
Explain to me why there is one rule for property and another for creative works. Is a garden not a creative work? ditto architecture, yet we allow the ownership rights on those to last forever.
or are you in favour of the state seizing your house when you die, or 50 years after you bought it and making it public domain?

Re:One rule for houses, another for creation

[Limerent Oil]

Explain to me why there is one rule for property and another for creative works.
One obvious reason is that they are different kinds of things. A piece of physical property, like a house, cannot be given to someone else without depriving the creator of it. A creative work, rendered in digital form, can be copied and distributed to others without depriving the creator of it.

Another difference is that physical property can only be sold once, while digital works can be sold any number of times. For these reasons, it is clear that physical property is fundamentally different from digital property, and therefore need to be treated differently.

Some people create digital works as a way to make a living. Does society owe them a living? How much money is a creator entitled to earn from a digital work? What is a fair price for a digital work? Is there a fair way to determine pricing?

Re:One rule for houses, another for creation

[cliffski]

how much money is a property owner entitled to earn? do you advocate caps on rental income? AT least the creative individual created something. The property owner just inherited it.
Surely its more important for society that people do NOT hoard physical land as populations rise. Surely thats way more important than luxury good like digital entertainment? Yet you advocate people inheriting property and keeping eternal rights to it.
Why?

Re:One rule for houses, another for creation

[DavidShor]

"Explain to me why there is one rule for property and another for creative works. Is a garden not a creative work? ditto architecture, yet we allow the ownership rights on those to last forever."

Quite simply, because property laws of any kind exist to maximize social welfare.

Even as recently as two hundred years ago, property rights were very rare. In most societies, everything from farms to wells wells considered communally owned. Despite the romantic illusions of comradeship that such policies inspire, these set-ups did not work very well. People do not maintain communal property as much as would be optimal, due to the tragedy of the commons, and worse, communal goods are prone to over-utilization. This problem was particularly bad in the common grazing areas that farmers shared(known as the commons).

Faced with this, a very artificial concept was imposed, land ownership, in order to give people incentives to maintain their property and use it in a sustainable manner. (For a mathematical treatment of this, see Coase's Theorem)

So the commons were fenced, and crop yields soared, and the country was better off as a whole. Over the next century, industrialized societies slowly relegated communal sharing to the history books(Though the same transition is currently occurring in nations such as Morocco).

Since the primary purpose of allowing land ownership(Which is at it's heart, a government promise to shoot anyone who comes on your land without permission), is to give you an incentive to maintain property, it makes sense to make such rights perpetual. Otherwise you would refrain from preventing problems that occur "after your lease runs out".

With intellectual property however, the motive is different. Because it is either impossible or extremely difficult to charge for ideas, ideas will be under-produced in an unfettered capitalist economy. One method of compensating for this is to grant a government enforced monopoly on the idea and it's derivatives to the creator for a period of time, so as to give creators an incentive to create more ideas.

But there is a problem with this. There is decreasing marginal return to money: That is,when you are rich, an additional dollar makes one less happy then when you are poor(This is not a leftist idea, but a rather straightforward result from very basic economic assumptions.). Because of this, extending copyright periods has complicated effects.

On one hand, increasing copyright periods increases the money an artist can expect from work in the future, so the artist has a greater incentive to produce work at the present. On the other hand, artists can now profit more off of their previous works, so they have a decreased incentive to work. These two effects battle each other, and determining the copyright period that maximizes incentives to produce requires a good deal of math. But economists have crunched the numbers, and most estimates are that the optimal copyright period is around 12-14 years.

So, short answer: It's in the social interest for copyrights to expire, but it is not in the social interest for property rights to expire; At least over the time frames you are talking about, Sometimes the presence of absolutely huge land owners(Like the Catholic church owning 90% of the land in Mexico pre-land reform) makes Coase's theorem break down, requiring some sort of redistribution.

Re:One rule for houses, another for creation

[Anonymous Coward]

It's likely because those people haven't considered the eventual outcome. However, far from supporting the idea that copyright should then be made perpetual, the opposite is the true case: If you own substantially more than your "share" of land (that is to say, the total value of all land divided by the population size) then you should be paying substantial property tax on the value in excess of the average. Note that this is separate from structures and other labor requiring operations -- only the value of the land should be considered, because that is what you did not create and that is what no one can create more of if other people desire the use of it. (Obviously the same should logically be applied to all matter and energy, but for most matter the accounting cost would exceed the benefit and I think the oil companies would have something prohibitive to say about applying it to energy.)

Re:One rule for houses, another for creation

[Limerent Oil]

You raise some good questions. I don't think I explicitly advocated for or against inheritance of property, although I believe that in a free society, a person should be allowed to give away their possessions to whomever they choose, before or after death.

But let's try to stay on topic. A property owner is entitled to earn as much or as little from his ownership as the market will bear. If there were a sensible way to define property in the digital sense, then the same would apply to digital property owners. Unfortunately, because copies of digital works can be created at virtually no cost (unlike real property), normal physical markets cannot be applied to them, lest we come to the inevitable conclusion that, by the laws of supply and demand, the price for a digital work will tend rapidly to zero. Who is going to pay for an item that is (potentially) infinitely abundant?

Since you and I both see intrinsic value in many digital works (I like to watch TV and movies as much as the next guy), I think we can agree that such works cannot be treated the same as physical goods. So far, attempts to monetize digital works have mostly revolved around turning them into physical objects (CDs, DVDs), or using encryption to enforce the creator's will over every copy created, or both. These avenues of monetization are forever destined to fail in a free society, because people in such a society are free to communicate with each other, and that includes digital files.

So where does that leave the digital creator who wants to earn a living from his works? I believe that trying to turn digital works into widgets that can be bought and sold is the wrong way to go. Unfortunately, I don't have a satisfactory counter scheme that is fair to all involved, so I'll just leave it at that.

Re:One rule for houses, another for creation

[rmerry72]

If I spend 5 years of my life building a house, its mine for my entire life and its passed down to my descendants FOREVER. If I spend the same 5 years creating a movie book or software, apparently I don't enjoy the same rights to what I created.

Your descendants can continue watching your movie and reading your book forever too. There is no law forbidding this.

Copyrights are different to property rights because only one person / group can use a property at one time, whereas 10 billion can use a copyright at the same time with no impact on all other users. If I'm reading your book then your descendants can be reading your book too with no adverse impact, but I can't live in the same house as them as easily.

Re:One rule for houses, another for creation

[Maxo-Texas]

If I spend 8 hours working for dairy queen- since i provided good service and built good will towards the dairy queen did I not help build the business? Do I not deserve to be paid at least something until the day I die? And perhaps for my heirs for 50 years afterwards?

Or... let's say you are correct.

Should not everything ever created by anyone be tracked and the original owners compensated? Track down the exact person who invented the idea of "Fairy godmother" and give their heirs a cut of anything that uses that concept. Oh wait- it's made of two subparts- "Fairy" and "Godmother"... so the fairy godmother creator is actually poaching on the creator of those two ideas. At least they deserve a percentage- but perhaps they should be able to entirely ban the use of "Fairy Godmother" altogether.

Or we can recognize that ideas become part of our common society after a while and that attempts to lock them up forever for one subgroups financial benefit is absurd.

Re:One rule for houses, another for creation

[Maxo-Texas]

Well for one thing, property taxes on physical properties are so high that you do not really own them.
You just rent them from the government (i.e. the people) for a while.

At the least, these "copyrighted" IP materials should pay a reasonable 5% tax on their annual income.

Best-- only? site for old comics

[Maxo-Texas]

Old out of print comics (Kamandi... Warlord...) which have no graphic novels you can buy... never found another good site and sure missed Demonoid for them.

Re:Best-- only? site for old comics

[Anonymous Coward]

Use h33t.com for comics

looking for trouble?

[newr00tic]

In Soviet Russia, trouble invites You..

as if they were never gone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like hell they werent missed. You kidding? Demonoid is one of the best torrent sites around, and its shutdown caused me and several of my friends untold amounts of pain and grief. When I heard it came back a couple nights ago I was ecstatic. No better place to find quality, reliable, un-tainted software than Demonoid.

Oink! Oink! Oink!

[Per Wigren]

Great to see that Demonoid is up again! I've missed it. But I haven't missed it nearly as much as Oink... I used to have a 1:2 ratio there with over a TB uploaded. Creative Commons stuff only OF COURSE! :D I miss it so much it hurts. If anyone wants to invite me to waffles.fm or what.cd, please send an invitation to tuxie@dekadance.se :)

Slow uplink makes it harder to share evenly

[Chris Pimlott]

I have a lot of friends who use BT, who are not as attuned to the whole concept of not being a dick and seeding. In fact I am the *only* person I know personally that actually regularly seeds. Why? Because ISPs have bandwidth caps, and people are too cheap to put some of their caps towards contributing back. I've always believed that seeding is the "rule of the game" when it comes to BitTorrent, it's the thing that makes the wheel keep spinning, but the vast majority of people on public trackers do not seem to agree.

To be fair, it's hard for many people to get a good upload ratio since home broadband connections tend to be hugely asymmetrical. A typical DSL connection will let you download an episode of Lost in 15 minutes but it over 1.5 hours to upload (assuming max throughput). So even in the ideal case, a user may have to leave the torrent going for hours to reach a 1.0 ratio, which many are not likely to do, simply because they are used to closing a program when it's finished downloading.

What's more, other clients are receiving pieces faster than you can upload them, meaning that you can't supply your in-demand rare pieces to many peers before they become very common in the swarm. Meanwhile, the minority peers with high upload rates are dishing out their rare pieces to dozens of peers as once (thus drinking your milkshake). By the time you hit 100% complete, dozens (if not hundreds) of others are as well. Which means none of your pieces are particularly rare, so you can only expect to upload a few percent (1/seeds) to each new downloader. Since a large portion of the downloads happen when a torrent is first posted, this often means leaving a torrent running for days or even weeks before reaching 1.0.

Re:Slow uplink makes it harder to share evenly

[p0tat03]

"Used to closing a program when finished" is not a valid excuse. If you want to participate in file sharing, you must, well, participate in file SHARING. Unless your ISP blocks or throttles BitTorrent, there is simply no excuse. I cap my uploads to 40KB/s (nowhere near the max of my pipe, which only costs $30/month), and even then I can always leave a torrent on overnight and hit at least 1.0, if not more.

Re:Slow uplink makes it harder to share evenly

[HansF]

"this often means leaving a torrent running for days or even weeks before reaching 1.0"
I don't see the problem. Slow uplink == long time seeding.

Great, if only....

[earthforce_1]

I could find a way around Bell's upstream throttling. (I have a 3rd party ISP)

Anyone manage to find a Bell throttling workaround for deluge? ( or any other Linux P2P) Turning on encryption hasn't helped.

Re:Great, if only....

[karolgajewski]

I'm on Acanac DSL (another Bell reseller) and I put all the traffic through port 1720, and encrypt it, just in case.

I use port 1720 because it was the VoIP port back when I had cable. Apparently they don't throttle that one.

Perpetual copyright is elephant shit

[tepples]

or are you in favour of the state seizing your house when you die, or 50 years after you bought it and making it public domain? Are you in favor of the state seizing your copyright when your heirs fail to pay intellectual property tax on it? Because if copyright in musical works becomes perpetual, then people will eventually own exclusive rights in all possible combinations of notes, just as people presently own exclusive rights in all land. The short story "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson investigates some of the ramifications of overly long copyright terms.

Devil's advocate

[tepples]

<devils-advocate>

What about CDs that are no longer in print (and impossible to find second-hand) Hire a band and record your own version. Pay the songwriter the legally mandated nine cents per track per copy. Now the song is in print again.

or hard-to-find DVDs that are encoded for a region other than yours?

Buy six DVD players, one for each region, and a TV capable of handling both 50 Hz and 60 Hz component video.

</devils-advocate>

Switched video

[tepples]

I'm not a neilson family. With the new switched video set-top boxes, everyone's a neilson family. Even if you just use video on demand, you're a neilson family.

Labels still own lots of exclusive rights

[tepples]

And nothing's stopping you from making your movie independant. Other than the fact that most multiplex cinemas won't show unrated films or films from lesser known distributors, and a consortium of major Hollywood movie distributors manages the U.S. film rating system.

why is $actor so freaking rich for just talking and walking Because $actor has demonstrated that he knows how to talk and walk more effectively than the majority of the population.

Labels are such crooks I'm suprised so few people are actively dumping their labels to go independant. For one thing, if an artist is already signed to a label, the label owns exclusive rights to the artist's voice over the course of multiple albums. For another, until the price of a reliable 64 kbps data stream over the cell phone network goes down, label-controlled FM and XM radio will still dominate streaming music in vehicles.

And I still think [Mozart's] music was much better than today's crap. That's because Mozart's music survived and his contemporaries' crud did not. Ninety percent of everything is crud.

Woo hoo, wb.

[benow]

Welcome back demonoid.

Entitlement

[Sobrique]

I've seen many very good and well thought out reasons, as to why it's ok to pirate stuff. Personally I get really peeved at 'piracy is theft' advertising, and labelling. (It's not. Theft includes depriving the owner of the original.). I can understand how one might object to the marketing behind something, or how pirate software could be seen as an 'extended demo'. How one might not be able to afford the rather ludicrous pricing Microsoft loads on some of their software products, or how actually, paying that much for a CD is a bit of a killer.

But then I remember. These are all luxury items. They're hardly a requirement for life. There's nothing to justify. You're just being a freeloading crook. There's no shame in being greedy and selfish. Most of humanity is that way. But don't try and make up a reason why 'you're allowed'.

I agree entirely, that there's far too much stuff out there that is not worth the price. Quite a few of the recent blockbusters fall into this category, and there's a massive bin of 'really awful computer games' out there.

But you know what? There's a really very easy solution. Don't buy them.

Seriously. If something's worth spending your time watching/playing/listening to, then it's also worth paying money for. And if it isn't, then why the hell are you wasting your life?

Digital media is a luxury item. If you cannot afford it, then don't buy it, and use the time you'd saved not watching something substandard to get a job instead.

WELCOME

[allforcarrie]

I, for one welcome our torrent overloards.