Slashdot Mirror
Demonoid BitTorrent Tracker Apparently Back Online
Freshly Exhumed writes "TorrentFreak has broken the news that after more than a year of downtime the Demonoid tracker is back online. The tracker is linked to nearly 400,000 torrent files and more than a million peers, which makes it one of the largest working BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. There is no word yet on when the site will make a full comeback, but the people behind it say they are working to revive one of the most famous file-sharing communities. As the single largest semi-private BitTorrent tracker that ever existed, Demonoid used to offer a home to millions of file-sharers. Note that this is apparently the original Demonoid and not the d2 site that claims to be using the Demonoid database."
I'll get right to downloading and shop on Silk Road while I wait.
Are you NSA?
GP is a karma whore, not (necessarily) NSA. Very easy to identify as they post "the slashdot line" without saying anything substantial.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Maybe it's a U.S. based copier supply company.
I'm a musician, and make part of my income from my music. All of my music is CC licensed, and some people still buy it. It's certainly not offensive to me that these kinds of site operate with impunity.
Not a sentence!
The question is: what can we do to permanently remove illegal filesharing from the web? It's offensive to everyone who creates digital media for a living that these kinds of sites operate with impunity.
First of all, if you are someone who creates digital content and is starting out, this is an amazing boon since it can get your work out to potentially a large audience without any middlemen.
If you are one of those big corporate digital media creators, then create alternatives where buying digital content is preferable to getting them from filesharing networks!
Movies and music downloaded from "official" sources have lower quality than from filesharing. Software, ebooks and other DRM riddled stuff are less restrictive and easy to use downloaded from filesharing.
Last of all, as a lawmaker, don't make copyright essentially last forever. After time, creations become culture and let people share old stuff. Demonoid was great because it had a large repository of stuff that was mostly of historical, nostalgic or cultural interest. Yes, there is still a few drops of blood to be squeezed from old stuff but let it go free so it adds immensely to cultural wealth.
There are legitimate uses for torrents, but demonoid ... was about pirating movies and music.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Demonoid had a large collection of abandoned works - music, tv shows, movies, magazines, books, etc that were simply not commercially available. Some were orphaned works where the copyright owner was unknown and so could never be legally distributed again, some where works where the copyright owner just didn't think it was worth it to distribute and some were works that were too risky to distribute commercially - like fan edits of movies and other works that the owner could not afford to go to court to prove their right of fair use. Piracy of those sorts of works serves a legitimate public interest.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
How deep does the rabbit hole of government hijacking go? The government could be running a man-in-the-middle attack on all five of your senses to keep you in a honeypot that is the only existence you've known since birth. How can anyone be sure that this isn't the case?
Do you think that's air you're breathing now?
Demonoid also had (legally or not) a great deal of otherwise inaccessible material. Books and music that were out of print and/or out of copyright. TV shows that were never going to get a DVD release even in this day and age. Obscure movies and serials, many of them from the early 20th.
"There are legitimate uses for torrents, but demonoid wasn't about distributing Linux iso's or other open source projects. It was about pirating movies and music."
Actually, no. If you wanted hit movies or music, Demonoid was among the last places you would look. It might have what you were looking for, but probably not.
Demonoid's forte was along the line of more obscure works, like hard-to-find books and such.
Well, it knew my old login and password. So at least part of the database was there.
Still, no way to know any of these things are not an *AA honeypot now.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Buddy, if it's not worth watching for free, it sure as hell isn't worth paying for.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Vigilantism works so well in general that I'm glad to see you applying it to copyright law.
Nobody is claiming that piracy is about punishment.
It isn't even close to vigilantism.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I'd rather work within the system to get it changed rather than just violate it because I disagree with it.
Breaking the law because you disagree with it is part of the system. Pot would never have been legalized if it weren't for all those people smoking it in violation of the law. Same thing with anti-miscegenation laws, sodomy laws, removal of the national 55mph speed limit, repeal of prohibition, etc. There are countless examples.
A typical response to that point is to claim that disobedience doesn't count if you don't do it publicly and get arrested. But practically all of the examples I've given were not done publicly - it took wide-scale private law-breaking for people to become comfortable enough with the concepts in order for the handful of court challenges to be successful.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.