ImageShack Starts Free BitTorrent Download Service
Written by Ernesto on April 05, 2008The popular media hosting website ImageShack just launched a new service that lets you download torrent files onto their servers. When the download is complete, you can download the files from ImageShack via an http link.
ImageShack’s torrent download service is still in Beta, but it works just fine. The only thing you need to do is point ImageShack to the torrent file and press start. The download will start immediately, and once it’s finished you can download the files via http onto your computer.
Services like this are not new, but up until now I haven’t seen one that doesn’t charge money. There are some limitations though. Per month you can download a maximum of 15GB to your computer, and the storage on ImageShack’s servers is also limited to 15GB.
Jack Levin, the founder of ImageShack told TorrentFreak: “We think its going to be a great service for users, especially in the light of ISPs ratelimiting torrent traffic.There is a lot of free and legal torrents out there, that people should have easy access too
to. We have the capacity to do it, and the world needs it.”
For those people who are concerned about the anonymity of the service (or think it’s a honeypot), Levin said: “We will not look at what you download and simply provide you, an account, with bandwidth and space. What you do with it is up to you. The DMCA applies, so, if we get reports from copyright owners to take down content, we will comply.”
The service comes with some great features. It supports selective downloading, which means that you can deselect files from the torrent if you don’t want to download them all. This can be quite useful if you only need one album from a complete discography for example.
ImageShack also provides some basic details about the progress of the downloads. Under the “status” link they list information about the download progress, connected seeds and leechers, share ratio and more.
The status reports are not yet working perfectly, as it keeps reporting that a torrent has stopped, while it was downloading just fine. However, the torrents I have tested were downloaded very fast, and I had no problem downloading the files from ImageShack onto my computer.
A more serious point of critique is that the torrent seems to disconnect as soon as the download has finished. This basically means that you will be sharing less than you should. I hope that ImageShack will add a sharing friendly feature in the future, and will at least continue seeding until the share ratio is 100%.
Levin told us, however, that there are no plans to include such a feature. They will offer (paid) premium accounts, but this will be only for bandwidth and storage upgrades.
Overall I must say that Imageshack’s new torrent download service looks very promising, especially for a free service. Decide for yourself, we think it’s worth a try.
This article was updated to include Jack Levin’s answers
Previously: Lawyer Who Threatened File-Sharers is Banned For 6 months
Next: BitTorrent Tracker Sends Takedown Request to Torrent Indexers
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There is peerharbor.com for doing this, they let uploading as far as i know.
this explain all
http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=088F2ivaSaU
[quote comment="334581"]There is peerharbor.com for doing this, they let uploading as far as i know.[/quote]
Peerharbor can suck it. They limit you to only 20kb/s upload.
[quote comment="334581"]There is peerharbor.com for doing this, they let uploading as far as i know.[/quote]
They cost money. This service doesn’t. Thats the difference.
no - they upload, this “service” doesn’t. *That* is the difference.
This is a cancer on P2P. It is MovieX (or whatever those charlatans were called) taken to the next level and anyone who uses it deserves to be ratted out by the oh-so-reliable Imageshack (seriously, do a bit of digging there folks ) cos they certainly don’t contribute to the P2P world. They take and don’t give. Screw ‘em.
[quote comment="332939"]
Well I guess everyone was wondering that but what is precedent in court for only downloading a copyrighted work not distributing?[/quote]
I don’t think there has ever been a court case where a person was charged with only downloading. There’s really no way for a third party to monitor pure downloads, only you and the person you’re downloading from know what you’re downloading. So to catch you, they would have to offer the files themselves. Since they own the rights to them, I don’t see how you could be charged with downloading illegally, since the rights holder is sending the file to you.
Other than that, they would have to go to court and get a subpoena to go through the logs of a hosting company like Rapidshare. Even then, I don’t think most servers log what you download, just how much so that it can keep track of your quota.
[quote comment="335167"]
This is a cancer on P2P. It is MovieX (or whatever those charlatans were called) taken to the next level [/quote]
For what it’s worth; I’ve read all about MovieX and I’ve seen it show up in torrents too, but refuse to let me download from it. A while back, I read a post from someone at MovieX who said that the tracker DOES allow public connections, just that they have a limited number of slots available and once those are filled, you get the “You’re only allowed to seed” message. After reading this, I started paying more attention when MovieX’s tracker showed up in a torrent. He was right, a few times it DID let me connect and download.
Post #75. Post #75. Post#75. Post #75.
(Sigh.) I swear, sometimes you have to beat idiots over the head before they get it.
Hey, to all the tards who can’t be bothered to read the comments and think Imageshack is your filesharing friend, why don’t you just skip the middleman and send your personal info direct to the MPAA, RIAA, Media Sentry, your ISP, etc.
[quote comment="335622"][quote comment="332939"]
Well I guess everyone was wondering that but what is precedent in court for only downloading a copyrighted work not distributing?[/quote]
I don’t think there has ever been a court case where a person was charged with only downloading. There’s really no way for a third party to monitor pure downloads, only you and the person you’re downloading from know what you’re downloading. So to catch you, they would have to offer the files themselves. Since they own the rights to them, I don’t see how you could be charged with downloading illegally, since the rights holder is sending the file to you.
Other than that, they would have to go to court and get a subpoena to go through the logs of a hosting company like Rapidshare. Even then, I don’t think most servers log what you download, just how much so that it can keep track of your quota.[/quote]
Thanks mate, been waiting for that, thought it got lost in all the spam. :)
So, in regard to ImageShack wouldn’t they be the offending party for hosting the file and distributing it? Even if they logged your IP address, you only downloaded from their servers and only provided the torrent, which currently isn’t considered illegal.
[quote comment="335763"]Post #75. Post #75. Post#75. Post #75.
(Sigh.) I swear, sometimes you have to beat idiots over the head before they get it.[/quote]
I think he only posted that response, to advertise his site. (Have a look at his name.)
[quote comment="335763"]Hey, to all the tards who can’t be bothered to read the comments and think Imageshack is your filesharing friend, why don’t you just skip the middleman and send your personal info direct to the MPAA, RIAA, Media Sentry, your ISP, etc.[/quote]
If this is the case and someone has a lawsuit filed against them for using this service it is going to a very sad day. All that should happen is your account gets terminated for breaking their ToS but you are right in the sense that, when dealing with the MAFIAA, you don’t know what to expect.
Still need some clear evidence that ImageShack are in bed with the MAFIAA, the only breech of user privacy, that I know of is when they gave information to the SA admin about SASS users but this could been because the admins knew each other, I am not excusing them but the trading of account details always happens on the internet, this case was just made public.
All of this features works in µTorrent
app. What do you get as new except a total supervisor control on downloads? And, by the way, imageshack have a great opportunity to collect a material for themselves.
Damn it…Why does it keep saying that I’m a new member? (member since 2007-07-08)..
Still…I guess it’s a pretty neat service..Sorta like a free seed box…And frankly, I can’t care less about my IP address being known…
BETA is opened to new users again. Jump in before it closes.
[quote comment="332845"]
If you want to do this for free, there’s other free services look up TorrentFlux (free php script), get some cheap or free hosting that supports fopen (tons out there) and put this script on it, and it works exactly the same but 100% more safe. Dreamhost allows TorrentFlux, so get Dreamhost account and run that script.
[/quote]
Further reading of Dreamhost’s website reveals they do not like bittorrent and discourage it’s use on its servers. And here I was getting all excited by the thought of setting up a torrentflux box for 5 bucks a month.
[quote comment="337787"]BETA is opened to new users again. Jump in before it closes.[/quote]
You should read comments … http download really sucks!, it’s so freaking slow dude!
im getting 300kbs download http
pay back what you take. 1:1 Ratio or GTFO.
As simple as that.
The last thing torrent community need is more leechers.
I can see several ways how this could be used to hurt pirates:
- solicitation to a crime: yes, Imageshack is the one breaking the law if they seed back, but you are the one who commits them to do that, so you *too* can be procecuted
- collecting IP’s and sharing them with MPAA&friends, who will look out for pirates with large amounts of downloads and sue the minute they catch one of them sharing back. Are you really going to court if besides that one upload they can prove that you’ve downloaded tons of other stuff? It might not be illegal, but it’s certainly amoral and won’t help your case.
- a clever idea to weaken the massive BT culture. Turn people back to using simple HTTP downloads and being ignorant about BT, Imageshack’s is seeding for only limited amount of time and thus contributing to the fast death of .torrents, users might get banned from trackers if they use IS’s services, users are the ones who’ll go through the trouble of finding the torrents to newest movies’n'warez. Why spend time digging out the newest leaks and trackers whose takedown would make most damage if you can let the pirates do it for you? ;)
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