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Mininova Starts Filtering Torrents
Dreen writes with this snippet from TorrentFreak: "Just a few days before their court appearance, Mininova, the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, has started to filter content. The site is using a third-party content recognition system that will detect and remove torrent files that link to copyright-infringing files."
Let us know how that works out for you.
Mininova collapses. How Mininova went from being the largest BitTorrent site to being the smallest.
They're still going to end up in court.
Sounds like they don't want any hits anymore. Meanwhile, alternatives like the Piratebay, isohunt & torrentreator are likely beefing up their infrastructure to accomodate the increase in traffic. There has been speculation on dutch tech sites that they only did this to appease the dutch copyright vigilantes, so they are making a half-assed effort to filter some stuff out. Let's face it, a torrent site without any "illegal" (under dutch law, downloading music & movies is LEGAL!) content is about as useful as a 3-legged, dead dog. With a nasty case of fleas.
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
so that's why my tvrss links ain't working no more
... hiding the body after you've been accused of murder, hoping that you'll then not be convicted?
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
Mininova can not technically be an alternative to a Bittorrent tracker (like TPB etc.), since Mininova is not a tracker - it's just an indexed repository for .torrent files.
For TV shows I don't understand why anyone wastes time torrenting - use Usenet. Your ISP probably already provides a news feed, just set up SABNZBD with MyTVNZB and TV shows will be downloaded automatically as soon as they're available and you don't have to waste your bandwidth seeding unneccesarily.
And it only took the RIAA + friends what? 4 years to kill Mininova? It must be frustrating to know there are literally hundreds of other torrent sites, all of which will be happy to take the 'refugees' from this minor inconvenience.
In any event being able to bully torrent sites into submission through legal means isn't what I'm worried about. I'm much more worried about them coercing ISP's into their little self-regulation schemes, as if it's somehow an ISP's responsibility to protect Sony BMG's copyrights. It strikes me as being just as misguided as expecting the people who maintain our roads to be responsible for people smuggling drugs across the border. Sorry guys, if you want to cling to the old IP system in the information age you should be prepared to do all the hard work yourself. If you don't like it I'm sure we can come up with some new, fairer systems to try.
Or, you know, just bribe politicians until you get your way. I guess that works too...
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
After Mininova implements this fully, how much content will be left?
I guess the open source stuff will still be there, and any software that is in the public domain. How about those e-books that are nowhere else to be found, except on torrents?
A picture is worth exactly 1024 words.
If I say that Google shouldn't have to actively search out and filter content (which they don't, nor do they have to by US law), does that mean Google is predominantly used for copyright infringement? I don't think so.
Your argument is a straw man anyway. I don't think anyone would deny that bittorrent is mainly used for copyright infringement, but the issues are whether search engines should be liable. Also consider that even though something is copyright infringement by law doesn't mean it is unethical - e.g., someone downloading something they already bought in another format, or a BBC licence payer in the UK downloading BBC produced content, and another example would be using it as a form of timeshifting, downloading a show you just missed on TV you pay for. Consider, in the UK it's copyright infringement to copy a CD you've bought onto your own mp3 player. So it would be accurate to say that "MP3 players are used almost entirely for copyright infringement" - however that's not really a fair statement, and doesn't mean people are downloading things they haven't paid for.
That will prove to be 99.9% of their traffic, and revenue... .....have you seen any ISOs around here lately?
well it was fun while it lasted, now on to the next one!
(crouches down as if on a hunt)
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be trolling. It's just that, unlike everybody else here (I'm sure), I've installed uTorrent not to download the latest OpenBSD iso, but to illegaly download movies and music that I wouldn't purchase, because my opinion is that there's nothing morally wrong with that.
So that move makes mininova useless for me (and presumably a lot of their users), because they plan to start removing the very content that I'm looking for. I realise they might still have their place, but I wanted to point out that when a torrent site starts filtering and removing, it doesn't slow down piracy, it just makes people use other sites instead...
BxAxTxMxAxN.mpg
"His name was James Damore."
In the United States, yes. The Robed Nine wanted a way around a few irritating constitutional restrictions, so they reasoned that by brewing beer and drinking beer at home, you were impacting the market for commercially-produced beer and therefore were subject to regulation as a commercial beer producer.
(Really? No. The real case was about growing wheat, not brewing beer, and the subject was "interstate commerce", not "commercial". But the reasoning was the same.)
Whether the Dutch have followed that sort of tortured reasoning is another question, but I'm sure the US doesn't have a monopoly on it.
That would be as effective as the FTP sites during the 1990s that had 'The FBI or any other law enforcement agency is forbidden from accessing this server' banners.
There's bt.etree.org, which shares live concert recordings of taper-friendly bands, and which tracks the shifting of petabytes each year. (It is, IMO, a much more useful site if you click on the "hide Grateful Dead and Phish" button at the bottom of the page, but opinions may vary.) There's also legaltorrents.com which specializes in creative-commons media. Neither one is going to have as much mainstream material as the illegal sites (that should go without saying), but etree, at least, has some fairly big names, e.g. Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, Buckethead, JJ Cale, Los Lobos, Primus.