Unfortunately, users of Torrent.kg found their favorite site inaccessible at the end of last week when a message in Russian appeared on its homepage. “For reasons beyond our control the site is temporarily suspended. The administration hopes for a speedy solution to all problems. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

Of course, P2P users in the west would probably be suspicious that an unexplained torrent site shutdown could be linked to copyright issues, but for those from Kyrgyzstan this would be a fairly unusual event. However, those suspicions would prove correct – Torrent.kg had been shut down by the police.

A staff member at the site confirmed that the police had indeed closed down the site by confiscating the servers. The police said that on Monday they were due to conduct an examination of the seized hardware but as of yet the site remains down, even though a temporary forum is now available for concerned users.

The site’s owner seems confident that the site will return fairly soon and is asking the userbase not to remove any torrents they have in their clients so as not to damage the health of the tracker.

TorrentFreak caught up with Tolkun Umaraliev, a blogger from Kyrgyzstan who expressed doubt that the closure of Torrent.kg would make any meaningful impact on availability of pirate material in the country.

“Piracy cannot be stopped in Kyrgyzstan, because people – consumers – do not really know what piracy is, and that it is illegal. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, our market has been filled with underground VHS cassettes of Hollywood movies poorly translated into Russian and underground audio cassettes of western singers. And their prices were reasonable – consumers could afford them,” he told us.

Interestingly, Tolkun explained that Kyrgyzstan was introduced to pirated products long before legal options were available.

“It was several years after the fall of the Iron Curtain that licensed products came to our markets. But they were so expensive that people continued buying illegal copies. And until recently the state has not been taking any firm steps in fighting piracy in Kyrgyzstan.”

But just as in the west, the authorities shut one site down and other, more resilient ones appear. Kyrgyzstan now has its own version of OpenBitTorrent.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Currently in Hong Kong promoting the hit TV show ‘Heroes’, actor Masi Oka who plays Hiro Nakamura in the show, made some pro-BitTorrent comments.

According to the International Herald Tribune, the Emmy nominated actor noted that when they went to France recently, the reaction from the fans was very positive as many of them had already seen the show, even before it aired on TV.

Of course, in order to do this the fans didn’t manipulate the space-time continuum like Hiro does in the show, they simply grabbed a .torrent file and downloaded with their favorite client. There’s nothing quite like a free sample to generate interest in your product and this French situation is a shining example of that.

Despite the great reaction in France, Masi commented with care: “It takes a lot of money to create a really high quality show. We have a lot of support from the advertisers … all the buyers. We just feel like we’re doing a disservice to them if we do BitTorrent”

Although Masi Oka is an intelligent man with an IQ of 180 and a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics under his belt, it doesn’t take a genius to work out what he worked out already about BitTorrent promotion: “if we get a lot of people to watch the show” he said, “it’s only going to be great for the show in the future too.”

Oka seems to recognize that true fans of productions such as ‘Heroes’ not only watch the shows via BitTorrent, TV or both, but will likely go out and buy the DVDs too – if the show is any good of course – which ‘Heroes’ definitely is.

“Hopefully, if they can buy the DVD after they watch it on BitTorrent, that would be great” he said.

Perhaps realizing that his bosses at NBC may not appreciate such an influential guy making pro-file sharing comments, Oka added a disclaimer:

“I am not advocating BitTorrent”

No, of course you’re not Masi, we understand!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.