Kyrgyzstan’s Biggest Torrent Site Shutdown By Police
Written by enigmax on August 06, 2009Torrent.kg, the biggest torrent site in the Asian country of Kyrgyzstan, has been shut down on allegations of copyright infringement. The police seized the site’s servers pending an investigation, but in the meantime the country now has its own version of OpenBitTorrent to keep the torrents flowing.
Sandwiched between China and Kazakhstan, the landlocked Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan isn’t particularly well known for its BitTorrent heritage. However, its population of 5.5 million does include a thriving torrent community, mostly centered around smaller sites, but many of which use the country’s largest tracker, Torrent.kg.
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.
Previously: EliteTorrents Admin Finally Free After Dark Four Years
Next: Torrage: World’s First Torrent Storage Service
50 Responses
never heard of the place
Good one TF some stories that are worth reading. On another note there was a piracy ring just busted here in Florida million dollar industry they called it. Sucky times. All though anyone who profits from piracy deserves punishment.
yeah i think nobody must profit from file-sharing!
but i think it must become legal to share files WITHOUT PROFIT!
and that maybe the government asks 2 euro for having a internet connection because with it you can and MAY download copyrighted content! and that money must go to the entertainment industry! and ofcourse the admins from torrentsite’s and similar site’s/services may not make profit the money that they get from advertising may only be used to keep the servers up and pay some people that run it but they may not give that people ALL the money that revise that will make them rich people! not that that is bad but then you do profit!
and ofcourse the min 40% that is left of the money goes to the entertainment industry!
and the people may download for free(except the 2 euro)
share-
it’s faire
Non-commercial file sharing should be something like speeding 0-20 km/h (depends on the country) over the speed limit – although not encouraged, but not punishable.
Hey, Let’s make a OpenBittorrent version for every country :-)
Why not?
@3 Aug 06, 2009 at 17:14 by jasper100:
Jasper the industry would like nothing else than to get institutionalized so they don’t have to do anything anymore just get paid, and that money goes all out of the country that would be a dream come true because not only they would not have to work as hard but they would get more money they could have ever dreamed off.
I don’t know about you but I really don’t want these people that comfortable.
How dare anti companies mess with Kyrgzstan. Borat put Kyrgzstan on the map and now anti companies want to take us off.
One day the movie companies will thank the bittorrent community for teaching them how to make more money.
Keep it up homies
All the torrent sites that make money with advertising, donations and T-shirts are easy to take down.
Greed is your weakness
Your ego is blinding you
Umh, great, another open tracker :)
one thing is clear now, all that holy copywars againts bittorrent is just another good idea which differs not much from any holy war idea ever.
it’s clear because not a single person in Kyrgyzstan will buy licensed media, for years, it’s too expensive for people their.
Wow, they are really getting things under their own control..
@7 Borat live Kazakhstan not Kyrgyzstan.
ugh cant spell
“Hey, Let’s make a OpenBittorrent version for every country :-)
Why not?”
That should happen.
“Borat put Kyrgzstan on the map and now anti companies want to take us off.”
Close. That’s Kazakhstan.
“One day the movie companies will thank the bittorrent community for teaching them how to make more money.”
We won’t go over to their way of thinking, they won’t come over to ours.
stupid maffia take your digital rights and stick them up your ass. stay out of canada too we dont want your dumb restrictions.
piracy wil stop only wen prices wl b normal to common man.after al how many does pose austin martin.
lesser price wl indirectly increase there profit
oh thats ” common man “
The thing is all though torrents are a decent way of sharing files there are still other ways of downloading your movies and such without as much worry as using a public tracker. I know a couple of people that have intergrated torrents with xdcc.
Don’t forget the asshole Uzbekistan
@7: Wrong country dude, you’re thinking of Kazakhstan.
@20: Haha, nice one, you Borat fan you =P
In countries such as Kyrgyzstan (and other former Soviet Union and former communist countries) piracy has been rampant for years because of the MAFIAA’s jacked up prices. Hell, if I had lived in one of those countries, I would have probably made a quid or two selling pirated music and films (I hate commercial piracy with a vengeance but I would have probably thought differently if I lived there). People now have the means to do this for free. The MAFIAA doesn’t have a hope in hell in places like this. I don’t know why they bother.
Technically speaking, ever pirate profits from piracy in someway. The people who run trackers, like isohunt, earn a ton of money from ad revenue (if your site gets millions of hits per day, there is no way that it couldn’t be pulling in massive amounts of cash). The individual pirates also profit from it because they get almost anything they want at absolutely no cost to themselves.
Who does piracy damage?
Copyright holders and the econamy. When people just take things without giving back anything, the econamy suffers.
@neostyles
How much damage? How much does the economy suffer? Please cite your response using links to your sources.
Cite this, too. You will need the following information:
-The average number of visits per day to isoHunt
-The average amount of advertisements per page
-The average amount paid to the site per advertisement
-Whether that money is paid if the ad is clicked on, or merely downloaded
-And finally: You must make a distinction between income and profit by showing us how much isoHunt spends per month (or any suitable time period, so long as all other statistics adhere to it) in maintaining the site.
That’s not profit. The copies that sharers download are effectively worthless because they can be replicated endlessly. I’d only profit if I acquired something with some real value.
Someone just got owned above. :)
4nd well said
I hate using “piracy” as a term to describe downloading “copyrighted” content via p2p; “unauthorised copying” is a much better term. As the end user, I am not profiting from having a copy of whatever.
As I am studing at university and living on a dirt cheap budget, at the end of the week I could not afford to buy anything anyway. Where is this “lost profit” they talk about when the majority of the world is in a similar position to me?
I agree that people that are making money off counterfeiting software/DVDs is messed up but the line needs to be drawn somewhere.
WTF is a Kyrgyzstan?
STOP GIVING ME BAD NEWS! >:((((((((((((((((((((((((((
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4nd : If you told someone that drug traffing was a huge issue, do you think they would ask you to list exactly how many dollars worth of each drug were sold, the names of the people who handled the transactions, etc? No. You don’t need specifics to ascertain that the something is a huge issue.
I dont need to do the math for you, but it’s a lot. Im only sad because you are trying to hard to legitimize theft.
Please go learn what GDP is
Here is one such article
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/68413/movie_piracy_hurts_entire_us_economy.html
Evidently, the notion that your little “hobby” was contributing to a problem that affects millions of people was too much for you too take. If only they knew.
So, instead of actually logically countering my post, your demanding pointless exact figures? Has it ever occured to you that those exact figures aren’t available to the general public, because they would be decisively incriminating?
Whoops, I guess you lose this one again.
According to wikipedia, there are 7.4 million unique visitors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isohunt
Do you have a job, 4nd? If somone was stealing all your hard work, would be going to such extensive lengths to rationalize it?
Those copies are not worthless, because they are someone else’s hard work (something which you will probabaly never understand.) DVDs can also be replicated. Does that make them useless? What a ridiculous claim. IT’S THEIR WORK, AND THEY DESERVE TO BE PAID FOR IT. GET IT?
You don’t understand what freeloading is doing to the industry. You don’t understand what hardwork is. You just sit there and smugly try and rationalize theft.
Just a signal to wait the same in Kazakhstan. Thanks for a story, TorrentFreak.
@29 neostyles
[citation needed]
@neo.styles
Truncated for tl;dr purposes.
If I told you “Every year, millions of seamstresses are costing the fashion industry billions of dollars by making their own clothes at home,” what would you do? You would say “BS, prove it” because the idea is completely ludicrous.
When you say “Every year, millions of computer users cost the entertainment industries billions of dollars by sharing their files between them,” I say “BS, prove it” because the idea is completely ludicrous.
(The point is that you can’t make anyone believe what you say simply because you say so. You have to cite your sources for disputed claims.)
Ah, you’ve provided a link! Let’s have a look at the article…
Could this study fail any harder? It seems like this study is based on the “one download is one lost sale” idea (difficult to prove considering that to my knowledge the source numbers behind this study are not public, but that’s the only way I think they could arrive at those numbers) which is not only crap, but impossible to prove since it isn’t true.
Also:
No. No, it does not. This could be said if everyone who downloaded something saved forever the money that they “would” have spent on it, rather than spending it on someone else. I’m guessing that most people do not do this; therefore, the economy as a whole is not nearly so affected by filesharing as the IPI believes.
Anyway, back to you.
How is asking you to cite your statements anything but logical? Those figures are nowhere near pointless- providing them would mean that there may be truth to what you say. Otherwise, I think you’re just dodging the question.
Then how do you know that what you’re saying is true? Because the industry, with its commercial interest in abolishing unauthorized sharing, says so?
Despite the fact that your source is a Wikipedia article and that particular statement doesn’t seem to be sourced, I’ll let you have it. So one down; only five more to go. Keep it up!
No, I volunteer at the local library. Wait… this means that all of my points, however logical, are immediately invalid because of this one completely irrelevant factor, right?
CAPS LOCK IS INEFFECTIVE IN A DEBATE, AND IT MAKES WHOEVER USES IT LOOK A FOOL. GET IT?
Based on this information, demonstrate that filesharing is selfish.
[quote]The people who run trackers, like isohunt, earn a ton of money from ad revenue [/quote]
Uhm… How can that be? Smart people use ad-block programs right? On sites like Isohunt I see zero ads, zero commercials, zero…
I started using FireFox with AdBlock ages ago, simply cause I got tired of all those flashing ads in every website, so didn’t even notice that sites like Iso even have ads :| (almost get scared when turning adblock off for 5 minutes :P)
Piracy(of products real ones), counterfeiting causes industry losses?
How china can grow in the double digits then?
Copyright is a monopoly and should be scrutinized by the congress for antitrust issues.
The only ones that internet piracy hurts is not the artist that can still have revenue(see madonna) but super corporate america, piracy creates millions off small jobs for people who otherwise would starve, piracy open markets to new products, piracy is free advertisement, piracy creates derivative works and weed out the bad and leave only the jewels of the time, piracy redirect funds inside society and give real value to something market value not artificial values based on artificial barriers, piracy promotes competition(you have to work harder to earn your space), piracy counter monopolies by dividing the market into smaller players, holly cow when you stop to think about piracy is not that bad is just people who think they own it all get upset about it. The money that do not go to the MAFIAA goes to other entertaiment elements like restaurants, bar, nightclubs, better curtains for the house and etc the country doesn’t loose money pirating music the is owned by foreigner labels that take the money away that really reduce the GDP of many countries.
Hmpz… Seems I don’t have that “quote” thing goin’ right, thought it was the standard BBcode?
File-sharing is actually a form of wealth creation. Through it, millions (perhaps billions) of new copies of music, videos, software and documents are created every day.
To crack down on something so productive is simply anti-human. Indeed, the defenders of intellectual property – by thwarting wealth creation – are effectively enemies of the entire human race.
@Annoyed
To quote, use the blockquote HTML tag.
You run Firefox? Look at the page source for a quote to see how it’s done.
@32 Ads for torrentsites are not working anymore and on some sites not even allowed.
You have to think harder to finance your site nowadays.
regards http://www.gtguard.com
@31
neo.styles is completely right to puncture this endless, uninformed self-affirmation by BT users. The copyright industries need to know whether file-sharing hurts them, because they incur huge expense in anti-piracy enforcement and public education. The statistics unequivocally show a substantial loss to the industry – look at those approved by the UK Film Council, a public body. For a powerful academic study showing the damage, see Hennig-Thurau, Henning and Sattler in 71 Journal of Marketing (Oct 2007). For once and all, know that the industry statistics do not assume one-for-one losses. Repeat: the industry statistics do not assume one-for-one losses.
The counter-instance of the seamstresses is lame: you need to add in that they are taking their materials from retailers for free and without permission.
@1
No wonder you’re american.
who?
@38 – Great assumption, really. (and no im not american, but making assumptions based on tit heads on tv does not mean the whole nation is geographicly challenged.) Im sure you managed to know exactly where that place is as soon as you saw the name. *rolls eyes*
To Kyrgystan (and other countries’) gov./reps.:
“Stop treating the scarce as if it were non-scarce, but also stop treating the non-scarce as if it were scarce… Knowledge, unlike throughput, is not divided in the sharing, but multiplied. Once knowledge exists, the opportunity cost of sharing it is zero and its allocative price should be zero… Sharing knowledge costs little, does not create un-repayable debts, and it increases the productivity of the truly rival and scarce factors of production. Existing knowledge is the most important input to the production of new knowledge, and keeping it artificially scarce and expensive is perverse. Patent monopolies (aka ‘intellectual property rights’) should be given for fewer ‘inventions’, and for fewer years. Costs of production of new knowledge should, more and more, be publicly financed and then the knowledge freely shared.
The following is a link to the full text of his speech From a Failed Growth Economy to a Steady-State Economy. It is brimming with scientific and pragmatic insights that extend well beyond open source.”
–http://opensource.org/node/441
See also Steady State Economics. Cool stuff.
Clearly, government representatives are often the least informed when they should be the most.
OUR CHINA COUNTERPARTS ARE SUCCEEDING.
MUAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAAAHAHHAHA
NEW WORLD ORDER
NEW WORLD ORDER
NEW WORLD ORDER
Krygyburgyhurdygurdystan o.O
@ neostyles um what?
Just because we download something that doesn’t mean that we would of bought it in the first place. Second the bigstudios of hollywood steal ideas all the time. Why is it ok for them to steal according to you, but not us even though it could be argued that what we are doing is not theft? Anyway this is the 21st century, look at hulu it doing great, thats what companies should be doing with movies.
For God’s sake you taking something for nothing, it’s not that complicated. Is it grand larceny or the end of the world? No. I see it on par with shoplifting stuff you wouldn’t buy in the first place.
‘For God’s sake you taking something for nothing,’
We do that all the time. We take sunlight for nothing. We take oxygen for nothing. We take the sights and sounds of the open field for nothing. We take the roads for nothing.
Sigh… I can only suggest that you get a grip and realize that not everything in this world needs to have a price tag. But as you’re probably an American, you worship money anyway, so my advice is wasted on you.
4nd ownz .neo.styles – common sense will always overcome the dying dinosaur that is the RIAA. Of course, we don’t have to modify the laws or create meaning for words that don’t exist, unlike those out of touch idiots running the major industries.
I still fail to see how I stole anything when I copied a file. I haven’t seen a single valid argument from the MAFIAA shills, just the same old recycled propaganda their worshippers (.neo.nostyles for one) continue to peddle… Kinda reminds me of those Jesus camps they have in the US, only this brainwashing tactic won’t work on us.
My boss peddled my anal hole out to 5 RIAA bosses tonight… I was so pleased i let them bukkake.. On my face ofcourse..
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