Demonoid Tracker Is Back Online 211
Crymson4 writes "We discussed the shutdown of the Demonoid torrent tracker last fall. For those who don't already know, Demonoid is back up. Looks like they found a new host for the Web site and the tracker is functioning properly as well. For those with old accounts, all the old data has been saved. It's almost as if they never left."
Wha? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:no catch? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just wary, and paranoid.
hehe paranoid of demoniod.
Re:Wha? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wha? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:All file shareres are leechers (Score:4, Insightful)
... and who then post the music, the movies, the shows and the software freely on torrents.
No longer quite so honest in your book, huh?
Anyway, ethics is relative and subject to change, and so are business models.
As far as I'm concerned, it is better to let everyone adapt to new conditions in the world than to try to reverse them.
Besides, it has been proved that torrents don't hurt music sales in the least; quite the contrary, in fact. Software companies have also profited from the increased mindshare (private users may pirate the software, but when they use it for business, they buy the software they are familiar with instead of something else).
Aside from all that, the ratio requirement is there so that information would continue to flow — it only happens when everyone gives at least as much as they get. And that's why it is called sharing.
Re:Wha? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:All file shareres are leechers (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:yup, and don't forget your exact info is in tac (Score:1, Insightful)
but trivial for law enforcement and this type of thing happens all of the time where big sites go down and mysteriously reappear but with a puppet master pulling the strings and logging everything.
I'd avoid demonoid and any such new resurging site like the plauge
Re:Wha? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All file shareres are leechers (Score:3, Insightful)
What about CDs that are no longer in print (and impossible to find second-hand), or hard-to-find DVDs that are encoded for a region other than yours?
Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
The Pirate Bay is okay but didn't have the range of Demonoid. I used to have a Torrentleech account with 20gb worth of positive ratio but was a victim of their new "regular login" rule, so it's great to have a comparable site back from the dead.
Re:All file shareres are leechers (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not. Ever heard of TV shows getting cancelled because of bad ratings, movie sequels being made because the original sold well, artists being dumped by a label when their latest album bombs, et cetera? It's not hard to see that the creation of media is influenced by people going out and paying for it. That also means that people going out and buying stuff contribute significantly to the diversity of media available for downloading. If you only download and never buy, you are profiting from the availability of materials that is paid for by paying customers.
That has nothing to do with "every pirated copy is a lost sale" (or "without IP no art would be produced"). It's just pointing out that when person A buys albums and person B downloads them, A contributes more to the production of future albums than B. How you can miss the point so completely and still be modded "4: insightful" is beyond me.
Re:All file shareres are leechers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:canada back online (Score:3, Insightful)
Not if the site operator resides in a country that's a signatory to the Berne Convention and is providing access to folks in those countries.
I'm aware that it's a popular myth that hosting your site in some other country will exempt you from the laws of the country in which you live. And, sure enough, lots of folks have tried it. But it's generally not the case.
If this is boggling anybody, conduct a thought experiment by substituting "information freedom fighter sticking it to the rich and greedy copyright owners" with, say, "child pornography distributor." If I were to sit in my house in California and launch a child pornography site on a host in the Ukraine and registered in Brazil, the law'd be all over me -- and rightly so.
Copyright law and child pornography laws are different, of course, but in the case of the relevance of where the business operator resides, they're close enough.
Re:One rule for houses, another for creation (Score:2, Insightful)
One obvious reason is that they are different kinds of things. A piece of physical property, like a house, cannot be given to someone else without depriving the creator of it. A creative work, rendered in digital form, can be copied and distributed to others without depriving the creator of it.
Another difference is that physical property can only be sold once, while digital works can be sold any number of times. For these reasons, it is clear that physical property is fundamentally different from digital property, and therefore need to be treated differently.
Some people create digital works as a way to make a living. Does society owe them a living? How much money is a creator entitled to earn from a digital work? What is a fair price for a digital work? Is there a fair way to determine pricing?
Re:canada back online (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course not. But it makes it a lot harder to pursue. Dealing with your own government is numbingly frustrating as it is. Now consider having to deal with governments that are not your own, and that may not have the same priorities. So, let's see. You need to jump through the hoops of Brazil's government to compel a "privacy guard" type registrar to give the name of the domain holder. That turns out to be a mail drop in Vanuatu. Call around and try to find someone who speaks Bislama, because while you're pretty sure that whoever answers the government phone in Vanuatu understands English, they're being pricks about it. Give up on that approach, which is just as well because even if you had found someone who spoke Bislama and filed the necessary paperwork in that language with the Vanuatu Justice Ministry, it would have turned out that the mailing address is vacant lot in Amsterdam, and the email address is a free account in South Africa.
So, go after the server in the Ukraine (even though you're pretty sure the operator is backing everything up by FTP to somewhere else, and can start up at a new location on 24 hours notice). Call around to find someone who speaks Ukranian, and someone else who has a petty cash fund big enough to pay the bribe that's going to be required. On second thought, say "what the hell" and give up, you joined the force to catch bank robbers, not to play bureaucratic games in languages you don't understand, for the benefit of some company that isn't even in your country.
Besides, what makes you think the site operator is Canadian?