BTJunkie No More?

First time accepted submitter AWESOM-O 4k writes "It seems like the popular file sharing site BTJunkie.org is gone. On btjunkie.org you are greeted with the following: '2005 — 2012 This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we've decided to voluntarily shut down. We've been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it's time to move on. It's been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best! '"

Comments

Your right to what?

[multiben]

Communicate. Yes. That's what it was used for.

Re:Your right to what?

[spikestabber]

Unlocking of our excessively locked up culture perhaps?

Re:Your right to what?

[mattventura]

Sending information to other people isn't communication?

Re:Your right to what?

[DesScorp]

Communicate. Yes. That's what it was used for.

When what you're doing is illegal, people are often tempted to cloak it in idealistic terms, i.e. "music wants to be free".

Note: yes, I know that torrents in and of themselves are useful and not illegal. But come on. We know what the vast majority of stuff that places like BT Junkie link to, and it's not Linux ISO's. It's mainly copyright material.

Re:Your right to what?

[DAldredge]

Something you can buy for little money from many different stores doesn't exactly count as being locked up.

Re:Your right to what?

[X.25]

When what you're doing is illegal, people are often tempted to cloak it in idealistic terms, i.e. "music wants to be free".

Yet, 99% of people will see murder as illegal.

And file sharing of copyrighted material (unlimited good, basically) as legal.

Do you think people will change their opinion on what is legal/illegal, just because some corrupted cronies pushed the law through?

Re:Your right to what?

[multiben]

A typically pedantic response from a typical pedant with no coherent argument for why copyright material should be shared to millions of other people without the copyright holder's consent.

Re:Your right to what?

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to think they don't already purchase some of it.

I guess they don't, and that means Justin Bieber and the music industry must be robbing banks - where else would they get all their money since nobody's paying them?

Re:Your right to what?

[nabsltd]

We know what the vast majority of stuff that places like BT Junkie link to, and it's not Linux ISO's. It's mainly copyright material.

Same for Google.

BTJunkie was nothing more than a search engine with a comment and results rating system (not unlike ./). It hosted no torrent files and was not a torrent tracker. You could get almost the same results by entering your query into Google and appending "torrent".

So, what, exactly, makes a site like BTJunkie "illegal" while Google doing the same thing is OK?

Re:Your right to what?

[spikestabber]

Theres way too much out of print stuff that you cannot find legally unless you're lucky enough to track it down used....
I would say at least HALF of the original NES library of games are like this as a quick example....
And for arcade game PCB's, then that number is off the charts....
Most of our past culture would be inaccessible if it weren't for the internet.

Re:Your right to what?

[hairyfeet]

Except you can't use "I have a dream" or "Ask not what your country can do for you" in a video without cutting a big fat check. PBS had a great special years ago on the civil rights movement...yet you can't see it, why? because its all behind paywalls now. This isn't just about the latest titney spears pop song you know, this is about media cartels locking the entire history of modern society behind paywalls. Nearly every spoken word of any note is now behind a paywall and all for Walt Disney, a man whose been dead longer than many of us have been alive, so that his first works which were made when planes were made from cloth and antibiotics were but a dream, all so his works can stay behind a paywall.

You want something to have one of those petitions for on the White House website? demand an end to the sonny Bono act, and demand that copyrights take sane terms again. watch how quickly our media shill of a POTUS tells you to go fuck yourself, he knows whose paying his salary and it AIN'T you. It is time we really start voting third parties across the board, its obvious to anyone with eyes that the two party system is simply no longer functional. We frankly need four five and six parties but lets start with three and work from there. I urge everyone to vote green across the board, they have already made gains in many states, lets give the shills a reason to fear for their jobs again!

Re:Your right to what?

[mattventura]

A typical strawman respone from someone with no actual argument. Copyright is an artificial construct whereas communication is human nature.

Re:Your right to what?

[NeutronCowboy]

Why do you think Google is in hot water with Congress and the MPAA/RIAA? It's precisely because of this. Make no mistake: RIAA and MPAA will kill any search engine for the sake of the protection of their content

Re:Your right to what?

[MimeticLie]

Your experience doesn't mesh with reality. Heavy P2P users have been found to pay for more legal content than the average person in multiple studies.

Re:Your right to what?

[sjames]

Actually, you can't buy it if it's in "the Disney vault" where they use copyright to accomplish nearly the opposite of it's intended function. Especially for works now out of corporate favor.

Many other works are similarly locked up where they're out of print but still under copyright. In some cases nobody is really sure who to contact even if interested.

Re:Your right to what?

[bmo]

>Also, there are lots of things that are out of print, but copyright still covers that.

This is what the real problem is with current copyright law. Stuff that would go to the public domain is simply locked up, never to be seen again.

There is no balance anymore between the right to culture and the right to earn a living. The right to culture has been obliterated. Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that yes, Congress *can* pass copyright laws that rip culture out of the public domain.

The powers that be are now stealing from the public, far more so than they are losing to "piracy."

--
BMO

Re:Your right to what?

[jmcvetta]

for little money

What are you thinking? The average college kid today has cultural data stored on their computer that would cost tens, in some cases hundreds, of thousands of dollars if licensed (you can't really purchase copyrighted data) at current retail prices.

In the age of the Free Internet, a backward nobody in any insignificant town has cultural horizons orders of magnitude broader than than those enjoyed in the Bad Old Days by the most privileged record store geeks in the biggest cities. Do you really want to undo that historically unparalleled cultural advance just so a handful of greedy media execs and has-been ex-popstars can continue to cash fat checks?

Re:Your right to what?

[symbolset]

The right of the common man to appropriate and adapt stories goes back perhaps to the second campfire, if not earlier. The notion that this is something that should be prevented is a rather recent invention. It is also quite absurd since a modern work that isn't derivative of Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy in 420BCE is ridiculously rare and it's well known (and obvious) that Sophocles' work was a fusion of all the trends of popular art of the time - that he condensed everything into three plays is his signal contribution.

We don't even think about these things much any more, and we should because it has become absurd. That lie your sister told you in an email about her one-night stand gone bad with megafail dweeb photo attached? That email is a creative work of fiction, her own work protected by copyright - and though she owns the rights to the photo megafail dweeb owns the rights to his likeness. Your repost to Facebook or Twitter or Reddit of the attached image (even photoshopped) is a derivative work proscribed by law without permission, and a violation of the law. In reality she's an attention whore and she's hoping you'll leak the megafail dweeb story to get her Facebook friends - but Megafail dweeb still has rights to sue you under the current ridiculous system.

Modern copyright is saying "here, I have stood on the shoulders of giants as have the 200 generations before me, but my addition to this work is special above all works that came before, and none who come after may stand on my shoulders ever until my work is lost to time. No more art shall pass." It is also saying that all other authors from ages past must be included in the enforced forgettery, whether or not it was their wish. It also means that something as simple as a textbook on mathematics, physics or chemistry published 80 years ago - long since the authors are dead cannot be reproduced to teach our children now even though so little has changed in those arts and sciences that they would still be far more useful works than the crap that passes for primary education today. My own son's high school world history texts omits the inventions of gunpowder, firearms and cannon as forces for social change. His chemistry texts omit so much they may as well be "Alice in Wonderland" - and that's for fear he might use them to discover how to manufacture explosives or drugs. Civics? That's not meaningfully taught at all, as the responsibility of the citizen to correct his government is entirely omitted.

That's what this is: an establishment of enforced forgettery for the purpose of selling us new lamps as old. The whole thing is a fraud and a theft of our intellectual property. The Commons is a property owned by all and removal of a work from the Commons is a theft of each work from each citizen whether it's sanctioned by the US Supreme Court or not. The extension of copyright is the theft from each citizen the right to read each of the works so stolen from the public domain, whether he would have read the work or not. If an incidence of a work is worth a mere $1, and we are 300 millions, then every single work so stolen is $300 million. For the theft to be a mere Trillion dollars fewer than 4,000 texts must be so stolen. In the aggregate this theft must be many $quadrillion at least and growing every day, and this very post is included in the theft because the presumption it's my property until 80 years after I die (until copyright is extended yet again to forever less one day) prevents others from using it. It beggars belief. The extension of copyright beyond the reasonable 14 year term is a taking from each of us of the millions of works that are rightly our culture. It is wholesale IP theft on the grandest imaginable scale, Piracy institutionalized in law for a privileged few who had the money to buy the law. It's also a way to prevent our children from learning things our great-grandparents knew before they finished primary school. That scares me because it by necessity creates a dead-end know-nothing consumer cultu

Re:Your right to what?

[Jane Q. Public]

"Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that yes, Congress *can* pass copyright laws that rip culture out of the public domain."

Bravo.

I propose that we limit not just the Executive and Legislative branches back to their original Constitutional limits, but also the Judicial, so they can't keep ruling themselves more and more power.

And yes, they were supposed to have limits. As historical evidence, see Madison's Report of 1800.

Re:Your right to what?

[thomst]

hairyfeet blathered:

Except you can't use "I have a dream" or "Ask not what your country can do for you" in a video without cutting a big fat check. PBS had a great special years ago on the civil rights movement...yet you can't see it, why? because its all behind paywalls now. This isn't just about the latest titney spears pop song you know, this is about media cartels locking the entire history of modern society behind paywalls. Nearly every spoken word of any note is now behind a paywall and all for Walt Disney, a man whose been dead longer than many of us have been alive, so that his first works which were made when planes were made from cloth and antibiotics were but a dream, all so his works can stay behind a paywall.

This drivel was rated Insightful +5? You have got to be kidding me. Kennedy's inaugural address is available on Youtube. So is MLK's "I have a dream" speech. And Kennedy's address to the nation cannot be copyrighted. It's public domain by law.

You want something to have one of those petitions for on the White House website? demand an end to the sonny Bono act, and demand that copyrights take sane terms again. watch how quickly our media shill of a POTUS tells you to go fuck yourself, he knows whose paying his salary and it AIN'T you. It is time we really start voting third parties across the board, its obvious to anyone with eyes that the two party system is simply no longer functional. We frankly need four five and six parties but lets start with three and work from there. I urge everyone to vote green across the board, they have already made gains in many states, lets give the shills a reason to fear for their jobs again!

Yep, waste your time petitioning the President to do something he has no power to do. Congress passed the Sonny Bonehead Act, and only Congress has the Constitutional power to repeal it.

And simply voting Green is an equal waste of time - and your vote. Want to do something that will actually make a difference? Contact your local Green party headquarters, and volunteer to campaign. Then, put your time and effort where your mouth is and actually DO that. Bone up on the talking points for your local Green Party candidates, then go canvass for votes the old-fashioned way: door-to-door. It's not sexy and it's definitely NOT easy, but it wins hearts and minds in a way that posting drivel to /. simply doesn't. That's how the wingnut right took over the Repugnican party back in the Reagan administration, and those inmates have been in charge of that asylum ever since. (Ever wonder why obvious loonballs like Santorum and Gingrinch seem to have such appeal to the Repubs? It's because EVERY state-level Republican central committee is absolutely dominated by "social conservatives" and evangelicals. Reagan got them fired up to do the grass-roots organizing necessary to, for instance, actually field a slate of candidates for local and state Republican central committees - and that gave them control over the party's MONEY and its endorsements at a state level. That's why Schwartzenegger had to run without their endorsement in California's gubernatorial races - because he's a moderate, pro-choice Republican, and the California Republican Central Committee HATED him for it. It's also why Romney is pretending to be a super-conservative right now - because Nixon's advice to Reagan still holds: "Run as hard to the right as you can, until you get the nomination. Then run as hard to the center as you can until the election.")

But NONE of that will help in the upcoming Presidential election. It's far too little, and far too late. Vote Green, and the Republican party will take over all three branches of government again. Look at how well THAT worked out in 2000 and 2004. Nader voters in Florida handed the 2000 election to Bush - and that got us th

Re:Your right to what?

[Runaway1956]

I hate that term, "rights holder". No one has more rights than a citizen of the United States. That term alone is justification for a revolution.

Re:Your right to what?

[sjames]

Sure, but I'll bet they would still do so with a 20 year copyright. For movies, I'll bet they'd do it with a 10 year copyright. They make most of their money in the first year or 2 anyway.

I am absolutely certain that no amount of extension in copyright will cause Walt Disney to rise from the grave and create more.

Re:Your right to what?

[LaRainette]

Megaupload or BTjunky made money offering a service that the industry was incapable of offering for a decade : convenient, instant access to medias.
I for one think their money was well earned.

Re:Your right to what?

[Plunky]

At the very least some sanity is needed in maximum copyright. Not more than a year beyond the lifetime of the creator, and no amount of rights transfers should change that. This could still be abused in a Mickey Mouse-like case, with constant spin-off products being created. Somebody smart finish this train of thought. I'm getting off at this station.

Problem for me with your suggestion, is that anything depending on "lifetime of creator" is vague and open to twisted interpretations. If I have a work that I wish to copy, it would be better to have all the information available in that work as to when its copyright is expired, not have to research if the person is dead or not (which is not always clear, especially if facts have been obscured). Also, it requires a separate law for "works for hire" where an corporate entity who cannot die owns the copyright. It is far better to have a single rule that applies to all copyright than it is to try and cover works depending on who owns the copyright. That way lies confusion and when it is unclear when anybody owns a copyright (cf. "Happy Birthday") then people can be harassed endlessly.

Re:Your right to what?

[Anonymous Coward]

also consider the fact that people in the past have made all kinds of published work before without any kind of copyright protection at all.

Re:Your right to what?

[Moryath]

And I am absolutely certain that MORE people would be creating derivations of classic, public domain works if Disney hadn't started raping the public domain and then trying to sue everyone who used the same public domain works that they'd ripped off.

No amount of extension in copyright will cause Walt Disney to rise from the grave and create more. A de-extension in copyright WOULD cause a host of new creators to start creating works "derivative" of classic Disney movies, of classic novels (think Lord of the Rings, or Animal Farm, or a thousand other novels and characters from the 1920s-50s).

Society is poorer, not richer, for the monster that Copyright has become today.

Re:Your right to what?

[king neckbeard]

That's ridiculous. Zero copyright means zero copyright infringement. And, even if we just reduce it to something less insane, like 10 years, many people might start to respect the institution since it has stopped disrespecting them.

Re:Your right to what?

[sjames]

Van Gogh wasn't impoverished because people were copying his paintings, he was impoverished because like many artists, his work wasn't very well appreciated in his lifetime. Nobody was clamoring for the original, much less copies.

Source code and database?

[Smirker]

Publish one last torrent please? I'm sure someone would love to bring it back to life.

Not a huge loss

[Anonymous Coward]

To be honest, most of the time, when I was linked to btjunkie, I ended up having to log in to their site only to be sent to a closed tracker where I couldn't log in and get to the torrent. I'm sorry they've had to close, but with DHT and magnet links, I hope that sites like btjunkie will become less and less necessary.

Best

[wisnoskij]

Best torrent site ever.
I don't know if anything new one has come up in the last few years but it is the best torrent site I have ever used.
Pirate Bay and Demonoid got nothing on btjunkie.
Or at least they didn't.

R.I.P old friend, or better yet go all zombie and come back to life.

Re:who?

[mwvdlee]

It's like your right to equate assisting in copyright infringement to rape, yet not be sued and banned from the internet.