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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! '"
Unlocking of our excessively locked up culture perhaps?
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.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
>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
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.
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.
It's like your right to equate assisting in copyright infringement to rape, yet not be sued and banned from the internet.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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?
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
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Confucius say: man made of straw should not bait flame.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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
-- L8R, guitardood
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.
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:
Prompt and fast English-language TV shows.
Simplistic, low-frills meta-search.
A honeypot for IP-profiteers... A pot o' honey for cultural buccaneers.
KickassTorrents, an aptly named site. Voluminous metadata and effective presentation.
A good alternative to btjunkie. =)
I hope this is helpful, and I hope that you seed, UL>DL.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan