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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.
I saw the headline, and just immediately deleted my bookmark. I hardly ever used it anyway, but that makes them completely irrelevant to me.
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.
Biological weapon for a trebuchet.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I use Mininova often, primarily to find torrents for two TV shows I watch regularly.
So the question is - what are the alternatives?
... 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.
Apparently it's not very effective... http://www.mininova.org/search/wolverine/seeds
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Downloading is in fact legal in many jurisdictions. But the problematic thing with Bittorrent is that it makes you an uploader as well, and that decidedly isn't legal in many jurisdictions.
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.
http://www.mininova.org/tor/2569928
This is one of their "featured torrents". It's called "How to bypass mininovas copyright filter". I'm mildly amuzed.
I went to mininova just now, and on the front page I found:
Featured torrents:
"How to bypass mininovas copyright filter"
I would guestimate that 3/4 of the OP comments which don't agree with this course of action are people who are actively using Mininova to search for copyrighted material, against the terms of the applicable license. Apparently BitTorrent is predominantly used for copyright infringement.
Well done for proving the RIAA / MPAA right, boys. You're a true help to the cause.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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.
Apparently BitTorrent is predominantly used for copyright infringement. Well done for proving the RIAA / MPAA right, boys. You're a true help to the cause.
According to the logic of Sony v. Universal, as long as the technology has substantial non-infringing uses, the creators won't be held liable for contributory infringement. That's under US law, of course.
Also, there's this thing called selection bias. Or don't you think people who primarily use Mininova to download infringing material would be more likely to comment on an article that says Mininova is filtering infringing material?
Sheesh.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
What in the hell's a "leach"?
I know it's a wiki, but it's a carbon copy of the real lawbook, it's just the only page I could find that allows me to directly link to the article.
Let me translate something for you:
"Als inbreuk op het auteursrecht op een werk van letterkunde, wetenschap of kunst wordt niet beschouwd de verveelvoudiging welke beperkt blijft tot enkele exemplaren en welke uitsluitend dient tot eigen oefening, studie of gebruik van de natuurlijke persoon die zonder direct of indirect commercieel oogmerk de verveelvoudiging vervaardigt of tot het verveelvoudigen uitsluitend ten behoeve van zichzelf opdracht geeft."
Which you can translate loosly to:
"It is not considered copyright infringement if a copy is made solely for the purpose of own practice or study without direct or indirect commerical gain, and when the copy is only meant for himself".
If you want to read it yourself, here is a shoddy google translation: here
In short, under Dutch law, it's legal to make copy's of copyrighted works (be it a movie, music or a piece of text), only if it's for yourself and does not give you a commercial gain. This rule was originally built to support people making back-up copies for them selves, but applies to the internet too. What you CAN'T do is upload copyrighted files (uploading = distribution), and this whole legal blurb doesn't apply to applications (uploading or downloading of software is both illegal).
Your turn.
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)
Seems like this would be very easy to do. A text filter looking at the torrent names. I'm trying to figure out how this would -not- be effective... and if the host site didn't do this, why would the court not demand it? Seems like such an easy solution, until someone redesigns the actual torrent clients for encrypted filenames or something. I'm not worried about Mini specifically, but what if all sites were required to do this? Just hypothetically...
...that this is yet another opportunity to come up with a way of making a distributed lookup system part of the bit torrent spec. Sure, it wouldn't be as quick, but if your client can listen for other nearby clients and query them for a list of files that they've accessed (not just ones being seeded by them, but ones they've connected to recently or are currently connected to). I'm sure this would greatly limit the number of seeds you find, but with a proper system of distributed "well, I've heard this guy has this" and "I'm seeding this right now and I've transfered it to this guy who might also be seeding" and such would give you a fairly decent list of seeds that you can probably get a good speed to (since they're somewhat 'local'). This would have the benefit of not needing a search site, nor needing any centralized repository.
On the other hand if this worked and was really successful, the RIAA would just try to ban the protocol from ISP's.
-=JML=-
I've often wondered if a list of indexed DHT URI hashes would be any stronger in court.
I figure at some point we will have sites that don't link to or have torrents but just indexed and categorized DHT URI links.
I think all torrent sites should 2-way encrypt all their search results (meaning the titles, descriptions, etc..) and put a statement up that says decrypting is not allowed. Then have "hackers" make a firefox addon that automatically decrypts the text on torrent sites. Everybody (except MIAA/RIAA) starts using the addon. The MIAA/RIAA can't use the addon because that would violate their own laws can be sued for breaking encryption.
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.
Why expose your IP address by using a public tracker found on Mininova? It's just asking for trouble. Plus, the invite-only sites almost always have much better transfer speeds because ratio matters.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
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.