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

who?

[Osgeld]

n/t

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.

Re:who?

[cffrost]

While I'm disappointed to see btjunkie go, at least they're (seemingly) closing voluntarily; not smashed up by a militarized police squad.

In response to your question...

Torrentz matches btJunkie's characteristics and features better than any other site I could name. Torrentz: Public, non-US, meta-search/aggregator, full HTTPS, tracker validation/display/uTorrent-formatted list d/l, category tags scraped from source sites, configurable "home page," and user-initiated account deletion.

Below are all of the the .torrent sites I use which are both encrypted and public:

• https://eztv.it/
          Prompt and fast English-language TV shows.

• https://isohunt.com/
          Simplistic, low-frills meta-search.

• https://thepiratebay.se/
          A honeypot for IP-profiteers... A pot o' honey for cultural buccaneers.

• https://www.kat.ph/
          KickassTorrents, an aptly named site. Voluminous metadata and effective presentation.

• https://torrentz.eu/
          A good alternative to btjunkie. =)

I hope this is helpful, and I hope that you seed, UL>DL.

Re:who?

[BasilBrush]

Actually, the rejection by the pirates of the analogy of "theft", does pose the question of what other crime is closest to piracy.

The rapist wants pleasure (sex and power) for free.
The victim has what the rapist wants.
The rapist doesn't care about the victim's right to give permission or not.
The victim doesn't lose anything physical.
What the victim loses is virtual (self respect, feeling secure) and potential (future happiness).

(Note: I'm expecting the intellectually challenged not to be able to cope with the concept of an analogy, and to make the mistake of thinking this is saying one thing is as evil as the other. Post a message along those lines and you're just being a predictable fool.)

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?

[Totenglocke]

We also know that in the absence of said torrents, people won't start fishing out thousands and thousands of dollars for that software / movie / music - they'll simply not use it at all.

Re:Your right to what?

[Elbereth]

Sharing copyrighted material is not illegal or immoral. Linux and Wikipedia are both copyrighted. If something is not copyrighted, it's public domain. Just because you have permission to distribute something doesn't mean that the author has renounced copyright.

Re:Your right to what?

[king neckbeard]

It's a very high price compared to cost of distribution, and copyright has gone far beyond the scope required for it's nominal purpose of promoting literary progress. Also, there are lots of things that are out of print, but copyright still covers that.

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?

[Curunir_wolf]

It's a very high price compared to cost of distribution, and copyright has gone far beyond the scope required for it's nominal purpose of promoting literary progress. Also, there are lots of things that are out of print, but copyright still covers that.

I don't know about cost - if you have a monopoly on a unique work (regardless of how that monopoly is secured), then you have a right to charge whatever you want. I agree with you that copyright has gone too far in favor of corporate rights with excessively long time periods and too unbalanced in policy. But I also think you would have difficulty defending BTJunkie as a place to find "out of print" copyrighted works.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bittorrent is fine, sharing files with your friends is fine, but I'm somehow saddened that slashdot will defend those who profit from it. It's no longer an altruistic activity when someone is making 6-figures a month in banner ads. Honestly.

These jokers just got out before they got busted, something Megaupload should have likely done with their 8-figure revenue some time ago...

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?

[TheInternetGuy]

Patent Violation is not copyright violation. Patent FUD, even less so.

Re:Your right to what?

[Ihmhi]

NES? Heh, try stuff even as recent as the Playstation. Good luck finding one of the (seemingly) dozen copies of Suikoden II they seemed to press for the entire North American continent...

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?

[multiben]

So I don't get your point. Is that artificial constructs are bad and everything natural is good? Clothes are also an artifical construct. Do you wear clothes? Laws, language, money, social mores and on an on are all artificial constructs. The computer you used to post your comment is built on all sorts of artifical constructs. There are very few people who would consider downloading movies from a giant server to be a good example of human communication. I feel sorry for you if you feel that doing so satisfies your needs for human communication.

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?

[cheekyjohnson]

Well, if it's illegal in their country, and they think it's legal, then they would indeed be wrong about that. But whether it's "immoral" or not is a completely different matter.

Re:Your right to what?

[sjames]

I don't know about cost - if you have a monopoly on a unique work (regardless of how that monopoly is secured), then you have a right to charge whatever you want.

Given that it flies in the face of the intended purpose of copyright, it's an issue that should be addressed. The people aren't obligated to offer copyright at all, the Constitution merely permits it, and then only for the promotion of science and useful arts.

Re:Your right to what?

[sjames]

Yes. It is also human nature to invent things to facilitate our nature. Thus, as a communicative species we invented the telegraph, radio, television, the telephone, and the internet to facilitate our communicative nature.

Re:Your right to what?

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Yes, it is. And you're confusing the message with the medium.

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?

[tftp]

The government may unleash ridiculous laws upon the citizen. It can force the citizen to obey those laws (or be jailed.) However it cannot make the citizen believe that those laws are fair (short of a massive brainwashing.) People are guided by moral norms far more than by laws. People don't even know about most laws; even lawyers can't claim to know them all.

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?

[muuh-gnu]

> Copyright is an artificial construct whereas communication is human nature.

According to the copyright creation myth, copyright came into existence when free men, who could freely talk and exchange every information freely with each other, agreed that it is better for everyone to allow creators to censor free information exchange of their works in exchange for creating those works and making those works available. That wide and far agreement between free men, that we have to tolerate a bit of culturally beneficial for-profit censorship then allegedly became a law. We (our ancestors) _agreed_ (and if you didnt get it by now, the emphasis is on the fucking agreement) to give up a part of out natural, god given right to freely communicate with each other (even if the content of this free communication is an Avatar Blue-ray) to encourage creators to create more works than they would do otherwise.

Our ancestors agreed to give up those rights, but maybe we today do not agree any more? What if we today think otherwise and want out god-given natural right back, that our ancestors sold for more books? I personally do not see that kind of far and wide agreement existing any more between free men. Today, only a tiny minority of influential stake-holders violently pushes it, and the majority of free men is merely subject to enforcement, without having a bloody chance in hell to be allowed to re-evaluate that 300 yr old agreement any more. (What do we learn from this btw: Never sell your fucking rights, moron, 300 yrs later you might regret it.)

Re:Your right to what?

[Samantha Wright]

Confucius say: man made of straw should not bait flame.

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?

[Plunky]

Perhaps if copyright length was judged by promotion and sales figures.

No, because that is vague and open to interpretation. For simplicity, copyright should be a fixed term. Then, when you buy something, and see it says right on the package that "This item is Copyright 2006" and you know that after X years you are free to copy it and distribute all you like. You can keep that original work as reference and if somebody comes to you with a lawsuit saying that you are copying their derivative work (with a later copyright) then you show it in court and the judge tells them to leave you alone.

Vague laws with loopholes are bad

(I favour 10 years, its a nice round number and most people can count that much on their fingers)

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?

[Runaway1956]

"he knows whose paying his salary and it AIN'T you."

That merits a minor correction. Yes, it is still us, the little people, who pay all their wages. The problem is, we've overpaid the entertainment industries for so long, that they have amassed some of the biggest fortunes in the world. That money permitted them to draw up laws, which effectively allow them to tax us, so that they can pay those salaries in our place.

If people would just wake up to the fact that they don't need what Hollywood and the other entertainment cartels have to offer, they could be brought to heel in a few years.

Black March would be a good start, if enough people get on board. If Black March doesn't get their attention, then maybe we could have a Black Summer, then a Black Autumn, and a Black Winter.

How many seasons of no sales could those cartels survive?

Re:Your right to what?

[jamstar7]

The people aren't obligated to offer copyright at all, the Constitution merely permits it, and then only for the promotion of science and useful arts.

And the creator isn't obligated to create at all

And you're not obligated to sing 'Happy Birthday(C)' at birthday parties. Now that copyright needed to expire 40 years ago, but somebody's going to make money off that til the Sun dies.

Re:Your right to what?

[Runaway1956]

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/opinions/the-mpaa-must-die-and-how-you-can-help-make-that-happen.php

Re:Your right to what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I also think you would have difficulty defending BTJunkie as a place to find "out of print" copyrighted works.

Actually Bittorrent sites are a great place to find scans of all kinds of out of print gaming books.

The old Battletech stuff, Rolemaster, previous editions of D&D, previous editions of Warhammer/40k, Paranoia, and other lesser known settings, campaigns and source books, scenarios and what not that appeared in magazines...

All out of print. All under copyright. Some of it notoriously difficult to find due to limited print runs.

Re:Your right to what?

[ciderbrew]

A lot of piracy on mp3s and films wasn't about price. It was about distribution, DRM and convenience in the modern age. People wanted to hear tracks there and then and services like napster grew to meet that demand. The software was easy and worked well. If a music company invested in a digital distribution system in the 90s and monetised it, then they would be the biggest player today. BUT Instead of helping the consumer spend money they punished them. Adding layers of DRM inconvenience-ware, giving a worse experience to those who paid.
Still, it is stupid for a company to expect the same amount for a CD with packaging and a downloaded file. I know servers cost money too.. but come on!

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?

[EvilIdler]

I favour 10 years, its a nice round number and most people can count that much on their fingers

For similar reasons, I'm in favour of 1 year :)

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.

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?

[Dekker3D]

Just to back up your argument: a little while ago I wanted to play Mechwarrior 3 again. I have no working CD of it. Guess what my only option was? ... Hell, when I bought Dungeon Keeper 2, the original CD started getting all weird on me after maybe a year. So, what... am I supposed to stop playing the games I love when they're past their expiration date, maybe buy some new shitty shovelware to amuse myself until the next Skyrim-minus-DRM thing comes out?

Oh wait. Wait. That is EXACTLY what they want me to do. Bluh.

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?

[nebular]

What's interesting is that no one here has the same argument for books. I have paperbacks that are falling apart. My only option is to buy another copy.

Just because you bought it before doesn't mean you have it in perpetuity. If you don't maintain your copy you lose it. What is bad is restrictive DRM keeping you from backing up

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?

[shaitand]

"No, now you're just being ridiculous (or trying to justify infringement just because you don't like the publishers). There are no editions of D&D that cannot be had from the copyright owner directly [wizards.com]."

I see a memorial first edition of a couple core books but hardly all of them. Elsewhere I see 4th edition. Where is the 3.5 ed books that the copyright owner recalled from bookstores before releasing 4th ed.

Re:Your right to what?

[Hatta]

No amount of reduction in copyright will cause piracy to cease either.

Re:Your right to what?

[alexo]

The people aren't obligated to offer copyright at all, the Constitution merely permits it, and then only for the promotion of science and useful arts.

And the creator isn't obligated to create at all

That post was moderated flamebait but it isn't. It is a valid point that should be addressed.

Here's my take on it.

True, the creator isn't obligated to create. However, it is society's choice whether to offer the creator incentives to create and the decision should be based on cost/benefit considerations. In the 21st century, the life+70 copyright terms can provide absolutely no benefit to society over the original 14+14, or even a flat decade. The cost (to the public domain), on the other hand, has skyrocketed.

So I say let the creators that depend on absurd copyright terms stop creating, we will all be better off.

Re:Your right to what?

[pD-brane]

No one has more rights than a citizen of the United States.

WTF? I am from another country than the United States of America and I am offended by this statement. What about using the phrase world citizen or human being? You watch too much 24.

Re:Your right to what?

[alexo]

No amount of reduction in copyright will cause piracy to cease either.

Cease, as in "completely disappear", no.
But it will be significantly reduced if the public domain becomes rich enough to provide people alternative content form their generation .

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?

[CohibaVancouver]

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.

Sure, but the majority were either impoverished (Van Gogh) or had a mentor (Salieri). ...and if you were someone like Charles Dickens you didn't have to worry about mass free distribution of your works. For most it was cheaper to buy a copy of his books than to attempt to duplicate it.

Re:Your right to what?

[Runaway1956]

WTF is 24? Forget that, I don't give a crap. Did I suggest that a citizen of another nation should, could, or would have fewer rights than a citizen of the United States? No, I didn't. I stated that no one has MORE rights than a citizen of the United States. Most certainly not some self-proclaimed "rights holders". That shit is for the old world aristocracy, for whom I have nothing but contempt.

Re:Your right to what?

[brianerst]

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.

King's "I Have a Dream" speech has rather famously been the source of numerous copyright lawsuits by the King Estate. See here for example.

The PBS special the OP was speaking of was "Eyes on the Prize", which was out of print for years until the producers got nearly $1 million in grants in order to pay off copyright holders after their original five-year rebroadcast rights had expired.

I would think that most everyone here knows that just because something can be found on YouTube doesn't mean that it's there legally. The vast majority of music on that site violates US copyright law.

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.

Re:Your right to what?

[BasilBrush]

Lets take Shakespeare as an example. He predated copyright laws. He wrote his works as a work for hire. He was paid a lump sum, and then the theatre company owned the play, and Shakespeare would get no royalties. The theatre company may in turn have sold the play to a printers for a lump sum. However that would be a dangerous thing to do, as once published, the theatre company and the printers had no further control over it. Other printers could print it, other theatre companies could perform it.

People who wanted to copy the play, for publication or performance could not get a copy of the script. The scripts were never given in full to the actors. They only got their own lines and cue-lines.

And the ability to record a performance hadn't been invented then. No tape recorders, and not even any shorthand. Someone could try and write down what was said, but with a quill, ink-pot and parchment he'd be spotted pretty easily. And could never have kept up anyway.

Nevertheless people did try to copy. From memory. And so an early bootleg printed script of Hamlet had the most famous speech starting:

"To be. or not to be, I there's the point,
To die, to sleep, is that all? I all.
No, to sleep, to dream, I marry there is goes."

Few of Shakespeare's plays were published in his lifetime. Were it not for the 2 actors from Shakespeare's company taking it on themselves to assemble the first folio, some years after Shakespeare's death, we could have lost some of the greatest works written in the English Language.

As it is, at least one of his plays was lost. "Love's Labours Won".

I imagine if copyright existed back then, Shakespeare would have seen the value of publishing his own works in his own lifetime. Which would have made their survival less of a matter of good fortune.

Re:Your right to what?

[shaitand]

4th ed wasn't even D&D anymore its a new game. There is a reason 3.5 was forked and called Pathfinder. Scanned book pdf's can be taken to staples and printed. Thus recreating the actual book. Some people don't just want something that allows you to figure out how to play, they want the books.

There are dozens of out of print game modules and books that you can only get via P2P sharing like torrents. It's a fact and not open to debate. People want them, nobody cares if you think what wotc makes available should be good enough.

Re:Your right to what?

[westlake]

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 matter how thin you slice it....

Search IMDb for any familiar fairy tale, legend, story or character in the public domain and you most likely discover hundreds of motion picture and video productions from the silent era onward.

The quintessential Rags to Royalty story, the best known versions in the western world are based on the one written by Charles Perrault in the 17th century. If, on hearing the name Cinderella, you think of fairy godmothers, glass slippers, and a pumpkin turned into a coach, you're thinking of Perrault. In 1950, Disney adapted Perrault's story into a movie, cementing it in people's minds as the story of Cinderella.

Seven years later Rodgers And Hammerstein adapted [Perrault's tale] into a musical for a television broadcast, starring Broadway royalty Howard Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney, Edie Adams, Kaye Ballard and Alice Ghostley (as the King and Queen, Fairy Godmother, and stepsisters, respectively) and Jon Cypher (of Hill Street Blues fame) as the Prince. One particular young lady took a week off from her starring role in the most popular play on Broadway at the time to play Cinderella - Julie Andrews in her on-camera debut.

Cinderella

The Jim Henson version aired in 1969.

Nooooooo!!!!

[scottbomb]

WTF? FBI breathing down their neck?

Re:Nooooooo!!!!

[jginspace]

Not really, but [the Feds] did put on a big PR stunt where a big, popular file-sharing site, seemingly out-of-reach on the other side of the world, were shut down and the operators arrested. I'm not convinced that is was anything but a scripted reality show, but it seemed to have convinced the operators of BTJunkie that they should quit while they're ahead.

Yes indeed, just after the Megaupload circus Btjunkie removed all the latest torrents from their home page - it became Google style, with basically just a search box. This was before Rapidshare restricted their functionality. Btjunkie were obviously being very cautious.

Source code and database?

[Smirker]

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

Re:Source code and database?

[cheekyjohnson]

Making money off of advertisements is just awful! No one should be allowed to do that. After all, what if someone uses your website to... infringe someone's copyright?

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.

Crickets

[RobinEggs]

I sincerely don't mean to be a dick, but was btjunkie ever that good? Or that relevant? I tried to make serious use of it around 2009, and I don't remember being impressed. Nor was I disgusted. It was just another site. I moved on pretty quickly

The comment features and such were better than average, I suppose, but the time for public search engines passed years ago. There are so many private trackers with open signups. So many wonderlands where all of the comments are in comprehensible English and your download takes off immediately instead of slooowwwly ramping up.

So I guess I don't miss it, and don't recall that it was ever a big deal. But maybe I'm wrong?

Re:Crickets

[Zouden]

Yes, it was that good - BTJunkie had a much larger index than any other site because it indexed private trackers (they appeared with a lock icon, and a portal page let you log in and get the torrent from those sites). Even excluding the private torrents it had a bigger selection than other sites such as Mininova or TPB.

Re:Crickets

[jamstar7]

Well, it was my experience that if you couldn't find a link on BTJunkie, you couldn't find that torrent anywhere.

Suprnova 4 lyfe bitches

[RobinEggs]

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.

I can respect your opinion, but nothing will ever match suprnova in my eyes. It didn't necessarily have the best features, but it had that glorious time when it seemed like the entire freaking pirate world (you know, outside of the pirates who actually originate the content and only use private ftp servers) used the same site. I don't think I ever looked for something on suprnova that I didn't find, and I can still remember the amazement of leaving kazaa and seeing a dozen torrents with tens of thousands of people a piece the week Doom 3 came out. No scrounging around in some shitty internal search engine or anything; just out there, on a regular searchable website like God intended.

Man, I'm getting all misty eyed.

Re:Just once...

[bug1]

"Just once I would like to hear from genuine copyright holders on slashdot who both make a living from their creative works *AND* support un-regulated torrenting and file sharing"

Im sure there are lots of programmers here that make a living from creating software (a creative work) and support file sharing.

Or are you only interested in hearing from copyright holders that dont write Free software ?

Re:Just once...

[wizeman]

Check out Paulo Coelho, a brazilian writer who has sold more than 100 million books in more than 150 countries:

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2012/01/28/promo-bay/

Something needs to give

[EmperorOfCanada]

Copyright does need to change somewhat. A key to human success is where one person invents something cool and others build on that in an endless chain. I think we do need copyright to prevent a publishing company from stealing a book from an author and printing away or a Chinese company taking that same book and flooding the market with knockoffs. But it has gone too far where a modern musician can't play with some distinctive riffs from a 40 year old Beatles song without being in the center of a lawyer pile-up.

Many of Gutenberg's first bibles were burned as work of the devil. I suspect that this was the Church not liking their loss of bible creation control. I doubt that any of the upset priests thought the devil had anything to do with their printing.

Re:Record companies said radio was piracy too

[SethJohnson]

Nobody much says this, but when moving pictures came out, it literally crushed the livelihoods of thousands of live vaudeville performers. Instead of traveling their acts all over the country, one act would get filmed and then that would travel the country being projected for screens set up on stages in the same theaters that used to host the live performers.

Seth

Re:Just once...

[unity100]

you have been challenged properly by the guy you responded to, dude. now reply to him.

Re:Just once...

[guitardood]

Just once I would like to hear from genuine copyright holders on slashdot who both make a living from their creative works *AND* support un-regulated torrenting and file sharing

Sir or Madam,

I apologize for the length and I know some will feel this is irrelevant, but I feel the background is important to the point.

I am a professional software engineer of 25 years ( AST-Cons @ http://www.sco.com/support/docs/openserver/506/rnotes/ipxrnC.install_configure.html & many other non-published works) and a semi-professional musician of 30 years ( http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=7&ti=1,7&SAB1=Chuck%20Fletcher&BOOL1=all%20of%20these&FLD1=Keyword%20Anywhere%20(GKEY)%20(GKEY)&GRP1=OR%20with%20next%20set&SAB2=&BOOL2=as%20a%20phrase&FLD2=Keyword%20Anywhere%20(GKEY)%20(GKEY)&CNT=25&PID=wKzqQlM4-haqA4MgAO7ElXsllTO36&SEQ=20120206023617&SID=1 , http://www.soundclick.com/ChuckFletcher & http://www.musicpreview.com/ )

I am 100% behind the free sharing of all content and for searching out alternative methods of payment.

The most blatant and egregious circumstance that has helped form my opinions are my own experience with copyrighted works and infringement of said works.

In 2006 my company did extensive work for a law firm. The firm had a service agreement in place (since 1996) with my company, under which they purchased time at an hourly rate & licensed our proprietary technologies for which they paid a monthly fee. They purchased a new server for about $15,000.00 and requested our expertise to configure the new server, and their network of about 80 workstations, in order to replace their current 5 or 6 varied-platform servers with this huge AIX-based server. What they forgot is that $15,000.00 was the price of the server & Informix software. When they received a bill for $65,000.00 for time, they proceeded in typical lawyer fashion to sue my company and myself personally for incompetence and a slew of other trumped charges (which were eventually dismissed) in order to avoid payment. For 10 years we provided outstanding performance and overnight became incompetent?

After installation, my company maintained the 'admin' passwords and continued to provide support for the new configurations. During this time there were a few issues which were resolved and their systems were otherwise working flawlessly with 100% access to their data. After three months of non-payment from them, their workstations began displaying a simple non-repeating license non-compliance message upon reboot. They perpetrated a fraud on the courts and acted like their data was inaccessible due to our maintaining the admin passwords. I could really go on, but the main point that I wanted to make is in regards to the proprietary email/firewall extensions, custom Samba Active-Directory extensions & custom tools which were all protected by the admin passwords and the subsequent handing over of said works. The lawyers proceeded to bring us into court under a mandatory restraining order and the judge compelled my company to turn over the admin passwords and in turn all of our protected works. They then proceeded to give that admin password to one of our competitors, in turn giving that competitor access to all of our protected configuration & administration tools including sources & binaries.

My next move was to hire a copyright attorney in pu

I found it on the commons.

[TapeCutter]

For a community which seems so passionate and open about free communication, it certainly seems to shut down people who don't agree with the majority pretty quickly.

Depends on the veracity of your point and how you word it. At worst you will get modded down, which is very different to shut down, and the complete opposite of the insightful tag your post is currently displaying. Sure there are plenty of immature black/white posts on slashdot, my guess is most of them are from people (say) under 25 who still have not outgrown the belief in silver bullets.

However, I disagree with your entire premise, in fact I would go so far as to say that most slashdotters who earn a living in IT do not want to throw the copyright baby out with the bath scum. And this goes doubly so for developers like me who have made a comfortable living writing copyrighted software and building corporate systems from other peoples copyrighted software. I would consider any developer (independent or corporate) to be under-qualified if they couldn't tell the difference between a proprietary license and a OSS licence. As a developer you may often have the responsibility to advise your boss/client of the costs/benefits of competing third party software providers, the type of license can (and often does) have a large impact on that analysis. Of course both the boss and the developer know that IP law is a complete dog's breakfast so they also get their interpretation ratified by the lawyers to armour plate their arses.

Just to round it out, I'd say there is a third major category of copyright posts on slashdot; the complainer. Like the government complainer, or the AGW psuedo-skeptic, they believe any fault (real or imagined, titanic or trivial) is reason enough to nuke the whole thing from orbit

But I suspect at a much deeper "social order" level, people in general subconsciously see the internet as a public space, and by extension downloading becomes - "I found it on the commons". And to a very large degree that is how the law works in most places. If not by letter then at least in practice, since everything is copyright by default and there is no authoritative 'evil bit' that allows the down-loader to discern if he is forbidden to download it before he has downloaded it. I'm sure someone will post a link to contradict the following claim but - I'm not aware of anyone who has been prosecuted anywhere for downloading alone, (re)distribution is always the rope they hang you with.

Having said that, the nuking of megaupload has sent a political chill across the net like a cruise missile hitting Al-Jazzera, they've demonstrated they don't need SOPA or the ISP's to start a 'war on pirates', I expect more sites will have received that message via more explicit private channels and will 'voluntarily' close down in the near future. OTOH, the whole thing is yet to be tested in court and I can't see how the search giants will lay down and let the MAFIAA and Murdoch steam-roll them with a "linking is theft" precedent set against a weak competitor.

Re:I found it on the commons.

[Taco Cowboy]

Having said that, the nuking of megaupload has sent a political chill across the net like a cruise missile hitting Al-Jazzera, they've demonstrated they don't need SOPA or the ISP's to start a 'war on pirates', I expect more sites will have received that message via more explicit private channels and will 'voluntarily' close down in the near future. OTOH, the whole thing is yet to be tested in court and I can't see how the search giants will lay down and let the MAFIAA and Murdoch steam-roll them with a "linking is theft" precedent set against a weak competitor.

What you've described, and what we're all witnessing, is the online version of Darwinism

The principle of "Survival of the fittest" does apply, and we will see who will be the ultimate winner.

If the media/MAFIAA/murdock camp wins, it'd signify the begin of the end of the Western civilization - for valuable knowledge that might benefit younger generations will be locked up behind security vaults

Re:They made their money and they're running.

[jamstar7]

That's two songs you owe RIAA royalties on now.

Re:Just once...

[LaRainette]

Slashdot is about free speech.
Free Speech is about letting people talk, not acknowledging any retard opinion backed by counterfactual, flawed, aging arguments who feel like a repost of a repost just because you posted it.
You can voice your opinion as much as you like here, just don't expect people to agree with you just because you're saying something, and don't expect either that people will let you say something and not respond if they think you're wrong.
Or to make this shorter : You're entitled to your own opinion, and the right to voice it, not your own facts and the priviledge to be praised whether you're right or wrong.

Re:Just once...

[Kjella]

Sad story, but it sounds like most of this is from dealing with the lawyers, law firms and the court system, with probably a far greater dose of contract law than copyright law. And "trumped up charges", "perpetraded a fraud on the courts" and a lawyer that wasn't actually filing a counter suit doesn't sound like a problem with the laws on the books. Here's the short, brutal facts of it:

The worst possible opponent you can have in a court of law is a law firm.

It doesn't have anything to do with what law you're dealing with. You are up against an opponent that has absolutely no incentive not to take it to courts, because they're experts at it and it'll cost you money but not them. I bet if you got experts to look at them, they'd find the charge were not ridiculous enough to make them illegal, the claims in court not so incorrect they'd amount to perjury, just distant enough from the truth to exhaust your resources. If you finally found a lawyer to counter sue, he'd be drowned in motions and depositions and counterclaims at every turn and they'd ride it to the very end of appeals.

A former employer of mine had one such dealing with a law firm. In the end, it came down to one sentence in the relatively huge contract that turned out to be a Pandora's box. They had shown us a component, the functionality they showed had been planned and estimated but instead of listing all the functional requirements of that component the contract said it would replace it. Guess what, it also had a lot of functionality they didn't show us, most likely because they didn't realize it was there but they did later, and rather than make an expensive change order they read the contract with a lawyer's eye and insisted we'd implement everything. And AFAIK we eventually did, even though it was a fixed price bid and we got exactly $0 for the job.

That lead to some new contract rules, we would specify the functionality you will get and the client will sign this will cover his needs but we would never promise to replace anything ever again. But it also has a lot to do with law firms, I don't think one company with a corporate lawyer would ride it that way against another company lawyer. But when you're dealing with a company full of them, I'd grow eyes in the back of my neck. They say when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You should apply that to lawyers...

Re:Just once...

[guitardood]

I agree with most of your post but I would hate for folks to lose sight of the point of my post which was not so much about the law firm nonsense, though they did perjure themselves when they claimed they could not access their data.

The point was about the same government who traveled to the other side of the world to capture someone who was "hurting" Hollywood ( though I haven't seen any Hollywood exec needing foodstamps) and yet literally laughed at me about the exact same type of theft with a perpetrator who was within walking distance of their downtown Chicago computer crime division.

What I hate....more than any other injustice is the double standard. We're all supposed to be afforded equal protection under the law. I could have even understood had there been an investigation and a "sorry, not enough evidence to prosecute" response. However, my complaint was held in the same regard as if I walked into their offices wearing an aluminum hat and complained of being followed by aliens. Adding insult to injury, it was specifically a 5th amendment issue:

nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Had the headlines read: HOLLYWOOD TRIES TO TRACK DOWN OWNERS OF MEGAUPLOAD TO SERVE THEM A SUBPOENA, US GOVT SILENT, I would at least have the comfort that the Constitution is protecting us all the same.

Anyway, I could rant on and on. All I would really like to see is a change to copyright law saying that if you publish your works, you have exclusivity for 5,10 or 20 years or maybe only days-to-weeks for more volatile material and then said works enter the public domain with no residuals for platform changes.

I hate to pick on Aerosmith as they're one of my favorite bands (and one of the first to release music digitally for those old enough to remember), but: In 1972 I bought a copy of "Toys in the Attic" on vinyl. When I got my first car with a cassette player, I bought "Toys in the Attic" to have a quality version for the car. When CD's came out I bought "Toys in the Attic" to have a crystal clear version. I've already paid my licensing fees twice more than I should have, however the RIAA wants me to buy "Toys in the Attic" again in MP3 format so I can listen on my iPod/iPhone. When is enough....enough? I even have a Foreigner CD that has a disclaimer about the sound quality not being what one would expect on a CD because it was made from the original unclean-able studio masters. So basically they ripped the album and charged me again for the same quality I could have gotten if I ripped my vinyl copy myself.

Re:But they require email

[IonOtter]

10minutemail.com

1. Go to 10minutemail.
2. Get email address.
3. Sign up with torrent site and give them the email address.
4. Check 10minutemail in 30 seconds.
5. Complete registration on torrent site.

Done.

Note: don't lose your password, or you'll have to make another account.