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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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?

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...

[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: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: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...

[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

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.