Demonoid BitTorrent Tracker Apparently Back Online 134
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."
Re:What can we do to stop this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Is it? Both Demonoid and The Pirate Bay have received direct blessing from music artists and film-makers and featured their work as promos on their front pages. The question is: Why on Earth are you trying to speak for everybody else? You clearly don't hold the only correct opinion.
Re:Great news (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Great news (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Yo-ho, Yo-ho (Score:5, Insightful)
Buddy, if it's not worth watching for free, it sure as hell isn't worth paying for.
Re:Great news (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Great news (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sounds safe (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would the NSA give a fuck about torrenting?
Don't be an idiot.