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Warez Moving From BitTorrent to Conventional Hosting Services
ericatcw writes "Driven by increased crackdowns on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, software pirates are fast moving their warez to file-hosting Web sites like RapidShare, reports Computerworld. According to anti-piracy vendor V.I. Labs, 100% of the warez in its survey were available on RapidShare, which, according to Alexa, is already one of the 20 largest sites in the world. V.I. Labs' CEO predicts file-hosting sites such as RapidShare will supplant BitTorrent, as the former appear better protected legally."
this one needs a "no sh*t sherlock" tag...
obviously, when u stamp out one source....and not the demand, a new source will come to existence to fill in that demand.
Rapidshare, Megaupload, netload, etc. have been around for a while and do have legitimate uses (some times, trying to send to a 20MB PDF or Illustrator (.ai) advertising file can wreak havoc on email, especially with some of the free email ones or if your client is a small business).
Some opensource apps also use the services to host mirrors to their downloads to lighten the load on their own servers.
with things moving away from p2p and back to the client-server model, the number of people open to lawsuits drops dramatically. downloaders are no longer forced to upload, so they're no longer "making available", the the most they can be realistically charged with is making one copy.
TIAEAE!
You mean RapidShare has something else besides porn on it? I'm going to have to grab my other joystick!
A lot of warez stuff has been hosted on such services for a while now, it's only more noticeable because other services are being used less.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
They'll continue to make more and more draconian laws. In twenty years, they'll be threatening people with fifty years in the electric chair with a gerbil up their arse, and it will have done nothing to solve the problem. And between websites, new protocols, new control methods, demands to the ISPs, and all of that, the community will survive on shifting sands, always staying one step ahead of their pursuers because it takes time to legislate and administrate a response to what is inherently a social movement without any defined leaders or organizational structure. They cannot beat the economics of the situation, no matter how much technology or social control, or legal action they take: Which is that the cost of reproduction is effectively zero.
They will do everything they can to make distribution as expensive as possible, enforcing ludicrous bandwidth caps and trying to control the internet as much as they can. Eventually, it'll reach a critical point where the cost of forming a new decentralized network will become cheaper than continuing to use the old methods of communication, and the community will give birth to the successor to the internet. It's something of an irony that the internet was created on the ideas of free information exchange and ensuring that an open line of communication would always be possible between its participants turning into a profit-orientated tool by greedy corporations. But while they may someday succeed in control of the network, they will have done nothing to attack the ideals upon which it was originally built, and so long as those ideals live, it will continue to rematerialize like the goddamned phoenix, generation after generation, even as society claims to have no use for it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
RS et al is more than happy to take down anything determined to be a violation of copyright. PirateBay et al stood up and said "fuck off". This doesn't jive with the workflow IP capital demands under the DMCA. Yes, the DMCA is a parochial piece of shit that is only enforceable in the states, but given the size and power of the USA system and its networks, it only makes sense to appease the DMCA as it is the more restrictive of the nationalist bullshit rules re: IP copyright.
RS, mediafire, and others will take down stuff when someone complains. Hence, by "killing its own" it becomes much more resilient, as one gets the whack-a-mole effect, but with this major structural difference: with pirate Bay / napster etc. when the system is brought down, resurrecting or building a new network is very time consuming and difficult. with the RS/megaupload/mediafire/etc. model, they own they field on which whack-a-mole is played. So by letting the rights holders chase the pirates, RS et al get to profit on the churn.
The next thing will be blogs dedicated to software with links to DLs of the stuff in RS et al, similar to music blogs now, and then a master system to search it all, similar to chewbone.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I wish that TV Shows were available on Rapidshare legit. The download speeds are great, and I would definitely pay $1 per episode.
General information on accessing these sites:
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
To preempt any discussion about newsgroups please read the following before posting:
Do not talk about fucking newsgroups, we have a good thing going here, don't fuck it up.
JDownloader has really come into its own over the last few months. Older versions were prone to errors, dropped links and excessive CPU usage, but the current version does very well. As the program has grown, it also keeps up much better with changes in hoster page layout (which can break downloads).
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Is that YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT USENET.
The second rule of Usenet is that YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT USENET.
Rapidshare will not go down because they remove the copyrighted files promptly - as soon as they are notified.
Frankly, I prefer hearing myself called a "pirate," versus a "copyright-infringing content replicator."
Not as cool as being called a ninja, but I'll take what I can get.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
sorry to be rude, but not all countries adhere to the crazy copyright laws that the USA does. according to my interpretation of current Canadian law (which could very well be incorrect) the levies i pay on blank media go to the riaa/mpaa/canadian equivalents and i am allowed to download as much as i want. this doesn't mean i'm allowed to distribute as much as i want, but with a centralized server which is download only, that's not the problem that it would be with bittorrent, in which you're required to both send and receive.
not too mention that rapidshare et. al have an air of legitimacy, as they take down any files which are reported to contain content they aren't legally allowed to distribute. of course, "they don't have the resources to check every single file that is uploaded to their servers," only the ones that are reported. And the only reason rapidshare does that is because they are a German-owned company (if i recall correctly). some countries, like Colombia and Egypt don't adhere to any copyright law. presumably a company owned and operated in a place like that would be virtually immune to any information requests from the MAFIAA and their ilk.
it surprises me, given the invention and popularity of the internet, how many americans still struggle to think globally, and still assume that the rest of the world on their terms. this is not intended to be a troll or flamebait or personal insult, it's merely my own stated opinion.
Wrong. For electronic and audio-visual media, unauthorized reproduction and distribution is also commonly referred to as piracy (an early reference was made by Daniel Defoe in 1703 when he said of his novel True-born Englishman : "Its being Printed again and again, by Pyrates"[2]). The practice of labeling the act of infringement as "piracy" actually predates copyright itself. Even prior to the 1709 enactment of the Statute of Anne, generally recognized as the first copyright law, the Stationers' Company of London in 1557 received a Royal Charter giving the company a monopoly on publication and tasking it with enforcing the charter. Those who violated the charter were labeled pirates as early as 1603 From wikipedia
http://icefilms.info/ Uses some javascript hack to start a divx player in your browser and stream the content directly on the megaupload site. No download limit.
We can only accept so much "protection" before we delve into "revolution" once the people realize they are being "protected" right out of their ability to participate in society. Gift cards might be a "loophole" for them mean and evil "terrists" but the fact is those folks are gonna get money no matter what - but without the ability for POOR PEOPLE who have zero credit and no bank accounts to participate in society the folks on Pennsylvania Ave would end up with way more to worry about than a handful of radical nutcases.
We have become a culture of plastic money. Financially deprived people need access to that plastic as well.
In the post, the major information is sorely missing: the new link for pr0n and gamez; the link to RapidShare.
Once this short and partial relapse to centralized commercial services will unevitably be sued to pieces (I mean, duh...), the next evolutionary step _will_ be anonymized P2P. The excellent OneSwarm protocol (implemented and working today!) has a very good change of becoming "the sh*t" when it comes to this I think, and I'm very surprised by the low buzz concerning it: http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu/ And for more general use, something like the (not equally yet implemented) Phantom protocol will probably have a place in the market too: http://code.google.com/p/phantom/wiki/MainPage
(Please mod this post down so that the RIAA/MPAA/CoS doesn't see it and get it taken down)
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Oh, and if you want to talk about what "most of the stuff" is, the bigger picture is that, even according to the UK Government's own documents (which if anything is going to be biased on the anti-filesharing side, as it is supporting a new law to disconnect suspected filesharers), the alleged damages from commercial software piracy by businesses is 144 times greater than the alleged damages from filesharing.
Source: http://www.berr.gov.uk/consultations/page51696.html
So if you want to talk about most of the stuff, why aren't we bringing in draconian laws to target where the vast majority of the problem is, instead of worrying about less than 1% caused by people downloading something using bittorrent?
Now, who should be surprised that they don't exactly have their finger on the pulse of the "warez" scene?
More likely than not, VI Labs slipped them a little cash to run this story so that they can pimp some new b.s. product designed to "fight piracy" on direct download sites.
As others have pointed out, this is just about data being copied. Data is going to be copied using whatever means are available, depending on the tastes and technical abilities of the users doing the copying. Since installing a single standalone helper app still exceeds the technical capabilities of a large segment of the user population, there is always going to be some market for direct downloads, but that is a long way from saying that direct downloads will replace BT.
What is more important than where users happen to be copying data, is where data is initially being distributed. BT has now become a major network for initial distribution, at least for movies, tv, and music, which has nothing to do with the technology but with the people who are using the network.
As long as new content is being distributed on BT, it will be the preeminent P2P network. FTP networks are still major sources of original content, and as long as they are, they will continue to be a major factor in file sharing.
Direct download sites are still very much downstream, because they are only copying data from FTP or BT. They are also unlikely to attract people who distribute original content for a variety of reasons, including their commercial nature, lack of security, availability of superior technological alternatives, etc.
If RS captures a large segment of the "sucker" market by reselling what other people give away for free, good for them, but that doesn't mean they are going to replace the people who actually distribute the content in the first place.
BitTorrent, IRC and Usenet have been shut down for years. I dare you to try to get anything from them! It's impossible. They have been literally shut down by the MPAA and RIAA.
We are left with one alternative: Rapidshare. Sure, it's not perfect but that's all we have after the effective campaigns of the RIAA and MPAA. Now it looks like they'll have to focus all their attention on Rapidshare. Darn. Then we will be left with nothing.
But to reiterate, no need to focus on BitTorrent, IRC or Usenet - those are already dead. Yup. Dead and buried. Nothing to see there.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Pft. Who uses a BBS? I'm still trading floppy disks on a non-viable format. Speaking of which I need to get going, and take these 38,000 5.25" disks to the next person.
Om, nomnomnom...
How can there be a rule about something that was destroyed years ago by the legitimate and merciful actions of the RIAA and MPAA?
I'm a big tall mofo.