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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.
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Is that YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT USENET.
The second rule of Usenet is that YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT USENET.
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.
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.
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
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.