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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!
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.
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.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
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.
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.
"While you're watching the quiet ones, a noisy one will fucking kill you!" - George Carlin
LONG LIVE RAPIDSHARE!
... 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.
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.
~ Admiral Ackbar.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
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!
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
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.
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?
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?
In Soviet Russia, trouble invites You..
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.