IsoHunt Launches Unofficial KAT Mirror

An anonymous reader writes: Torrent site isoHunt appears to have unofficially resurrected KickassTorrents (also known as Kickass Torrents or just KAT) at kickasstorrents.website. It might look like the original KAT site, which went down yesterday after alleged founder Artem Vaulin was arrested, but upon closer inspection it's simply a basic mirror. The isoHunt team tells me the KAT mirror is hosting files from the last year to year-and-a-half. So no, not everything is available. Furthermore, there is no forum, no community, and no support. And, you shouldn't get too attached, the administrators warn. Disclaimer: Slashdot doesn't necessarily condone piracy -- at least, in most cases.

Comments

Slashdot should condone piracy

[jdavidb]

Disclaimer: Slashdot doesn't condone piracy.

Why not? Everyone should condone "piracy." Piracy enriches our lives and our culture. Copying brings us more of the things we love. The only thing that shouldn't be condoned is using smear words like "piracy" to refer to a basic decent act of human behavior.

Re:Slashdot should condone piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

DRM is also economic warfare. Piracy and DRM balance each other out. The more aggressive one got, so did the other. The concept of IP is imaginary, and as a result, often abused. Nowadays, SaaS is the result and is something we're all going to regret in the long run

Re:Slashdot should condone piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

This line of reasoning is based on the false notion that the only way for people to be paid for creative works is through copyright. This is absolutely not the case and there are many examples of alternative business models that don't rely on copyright. MMORPG's can earn money because pirating the client game code doesn't get you an account or a server to play on. Almost anything that was made through crowd funding doesn't need copyright because all of the compensation is provided upfront before the work is even created. Downloading songs is no substitute for going to a live concert.
Not to mention there are likely thousands of un-thought-of models, products, and creative services which have yet to be tried that would not require copyright.

Re:Slashdot should condone piracy

[SuricouRaven]

Not all 'high quality cultural work' is created to sell as a source of income. There are some forms of media that cost too much to be produced any other way, like movies or TV series. But the cost of producing music is so low that many amateurs now produce material just as good as any professional purely as a hobby or for the recognition. Open-source software also thrives, and most of the developers for that are either enthusiasts, or working on behalf of corporate users of the software that need to improve it for their own purposes.

It could even be argued that for-profit does not produce very good cultural works, because it leads to compromising artistic values in the interests of mass appeal. Hollywood might be taking in the money, but their films are all starting to look very similar now - and how many pop songs are love odes to an unnamed person?

Re:Slashdot should condone piracy

[tlhIngan]

Why not? Everyone should condone "piracy." Piracy enriches our lives and our culture. Copying brings us more of the things we love. The only thing that shouldn't be condoned is using smear words like "piracy" to refer to a basic decent act of human behavior.

So why not encourage GPL violators ("pirates" too)? Instead we seem to cheer whenever we find a GPL violator.

Yes, violating the GPL is copyright infringement, aka piracy. (You don't have to agree to the GPL, but if you don't, it falls back to the "All Rights Reserved" copyright. So if you're distributing binaries without source you're violating basic copyright law).

You really cannot have it both ways - if you want to encourage piracy, then you encourage people (and companies) to violate the GPL by extension.

You can't ban the idea

[Trachman]

I have never heard of Kickass Torrent in the past. Ever. Now I will be very curious just to see on what have they got.

Now, this attempt to arrest an individual who is hosting a server which has url information reminds me very much of recent LEO work in Orlando Disney park, after a 2 year old was snatched by the alligators.

It was surprising to see when two days after the accident the local police reported that they, the police officers, have "identified" the "guilty" alligator and "put him down". http://www.people.com/article/...

You can't make this shit up.

At some point then it dawns that all this fuss was about PD overtime.

Same principles apply in KickAssTorrent website: police force imitate investigative work, they convince the judge that "data is in the computer" (remember the scene from Zoolander - The files is in the computer https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ),they imitate the value delivered, eventually they identify the guilty server (alligator) and take him down.

The winners: police force getting a lot of overtime pay on a work which is not really dangerous nor this is a law enforcement.

Re:You can't ban the idea

[Anonymous Coward]

"just hosting url information" *AND* having ~20 million euro in accounts with his name on them.

See also the TVShack guy. It was ignorable gray area until someone figured out how much money he was making, then he was public enemy number 1.

Disclaimer: Slashdot doesn't condone piracy.

[trojjan]

It is indeed a sad day when a site has to declare their affiliation before posting a story.
What's next?
This election is being contested by the most unpopular candidates ever. Disclaimer: We are pro democracy
Current petroleum usage is leading us to a point of no return wrt climate change. Disclaimer: We do not condone pro nuclear groups.
Malware rampant across all major operating systems. Disclaimer: We do not condemn any particular operating system.
Black people are more likely to get killed in altercations with police. Disclaimer: We do not believe in race disparity.

The sad thing is I can continue this for thousands of lines. Slashdot after proving you had been sold out, you really need to say you will be "politically correct" according to your overlords?

Maybe Slashdot should change the category/icon.

[BitterOak]

If Slashdot doesn't condone piracy, maybe Slashdot shouldn't categorize stories involving Torrent sites (which host both legal as well as infringing material) under the "piracy" category and show the skull and crossbones icon. It made sense for the original story since copyright charges were filed by the U.S. government and so there was a connection to copyright infringement, but simply alerting users to the availability of torrent sites should not be tagged under piracy, at least if Slashdot doesn't want to give the appearance of condoning piracy.

You want to really score against The Man?

[SuricouRaven]

Don't host a mirror.

Host a mirror with the entire database available as a torrent.

Let everyone who wants to take the legal risk launch their own copycat site, with the KAT database as a launchpad so that they can go on to achieve even more. It took a few years to arrest one man in Poland - lets see them arrest twenty, spread over China, Russia, a server in a dorm room that no-one will claim ownership for, and wherever that Tor tunnel terminates.

/. should encourage sharing

[jbn-o]

So why not encourage GPL violators ("pirates" too)? Instead we seem to cheer whenever we find a GPL violator.

First, we should understand what the propagandistic term "piracy" really means and understand that meaning as separate from sharing—a friendly, neighborly thing to do. As the GNU Project points out in it's list of terms to avoid on "theft": "In general, laws don't define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice. If the laws (the implementation) don't fit our ideas of right and wrong (the spec), the laws are what should change. A US judge, presiding over a trial for copyright infringement, recognized that "piracy" and "theft" are smear-words.". This difference gets to the heart of the problem in your point—you're conflating the legal with the ethical and then trying to get others to view all sharing as copyright infringement and all copyright infringement as equivalent because the law frames things in that way.

We should recognize that the terms of the licenses involved between, say, the GNU General Public License (GPL) and a typical Hollywood movie, are radically different when it comes to doing what friends do: share. One can and should share copies of GPL'd programs. It's easy to do, the GPL is easy to comply with simply by also sharing a copy of the complete corresponding source code of the program at the same time as one shares the binary. By contrast, other famously shared copyrighted items (such as most Hollywood movies) aren't legal to share even if done non-commercially and verbatim. So doing the thing that comes naturally with friends, non-commercial and verbatim sharing, is likely not allowed by that movie's license.

Since you mention the GPL, a free software license written by Richard Stallman, this is somewhat akin to what Stallman describes in his talks about the freedoms of free software specifically freedom #2: the freedom to help your neighbour. That's the freedom to make copies and distribute them to others, when you wish. This comes from a 2006-03-09 talk and you can see how the consideration here is akin to the dilemma one faces should a friend ask for a copy of a Hollywood movie:

Freedom two is essential on fundamental ethical grounds, so that you can live an upright, ethical life as a member of your community. If you use a program that does not give you freedom number two, you're in danger of falling at any moment into a moral dilemma. When your friend says "that's a nice program, could I have a copy?" At that moment, you will have to choose between two evils. One evil is: give your friend a copy and violate the licence of the program. The other evil is: deny your friend a copy and comply with the licence of the program.

Once you are in that situation, you should choose the lesser evil. The lesser evil is to give your friend a copy and violate the licence of the program.

[laughter]

Now, why is that the lesser evil? The reason is that we can assume that your friend has treated you well and has been a good person and deserves your cooperation. The reason we can assume this is that in the other case, if a nasty person you don't really like asked you for help, of course you can say "Why should I help you?" So that's an easy case. The hard case is the case where that person has been a good person to you and other people and you would want to help him normally.

Whereas, the developer of the program has deliberately attacked the social solidarity of your community. Deliberately tried to separate you from everyone else in the World. So if you can't help doing wrong in some direction or other, better to aim the wrong at somebody who deserves it, who has done something wrong, rather than at somebody who hasn't done anything wrong.

Howe