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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."
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?
Care about privacy? Read this!
... 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.
Ignore this signature. By order.
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.
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?