TorrentFreak

The place where breaking news, BitTorrent and copyright collide

Usenet Indexer Prepares For MPAA High Court Battle

In May 2008, Newzbin – considered by many to be the Internet’s premier indexer and .NZB provider – announced it was under legal threat from the MPA, the MPAA’s worldwide big brother. On Monday next week, the copyright infringement showdown in London’s High Court begins.

Newzbin is one of the original Usenet indexing sites and the creator of the ever-popular .NZB format, which opened up simplified Usenet downloading to the masses.

After years of trouble-free operation as the MPAA focused on shutting down the growing ‘threat’ of the snowballing BitTorrent scene, in May 2008 the operator of Newzbin made an announcement.

The company which owns Newzbin had received a threatening letter from the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the MPAA’s big brother. In the letter the MPA claimed that some of the site’s editors (users who report on the location of material uploaded to the worldwide Usenet system) were listing NZBs which linked to movies on Usenet which infringed their member’s copyright.

“Newzbin has recently received two serious complaints regarding the indexing we perform, and raising doubts as to its legality. It is likely that we will in the coming weeks be presented with a court case and have to defend our rights,” said ‘Caesium’, the owner of Newzbin.

Caesium added that the site had never condoned the distribution or indexing of copyright works and insisted that site staff would act immediately to remove any items found to be infringing copyright.

Noting that Newzbin would defend itself vigorously against the complainants, Caesium said he believed that linking to content on Usenet is entirely legal and that the site’s procedures for dealing with unlawful content were appropriate.

“We believe that, or we wouldn’t still be here,” he added.

In December 2008, Newzbin confirmed that it had been removing NZB files which allegedly linked to copyright works stored on Usenet. The MPA still chose to file an injunction against the site.

Now, well over a year later, the showdown of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation & ors v Newzbin Ltd is set to begin next week before Mr Justice Kitchin in London’s High Court.

According to an announcement yesterday by Newzbin’s legal team, the case should last around a week but it’s unknown when any verdict will be handed down following its conclusion.

As we all know, the recent trial of Alan Ellis ended in an acquittal for the ex-OiNK admin and, just like Newzbin, his site hosted no copyright works and provided only meta data which linked to material hosted elsewhere.

However, Ellis’s charge was one of fraud, allegedly conducted by an individual and dealt with under criminal law, while that leveled against Newzbin is one of allowing and inducing illegal copying, i.e copyright infringement, but carried out by a bona fide company under civil law.

After Ellis’s acquittal, John Kennedy of the IFPI expressed disappointment at the “spectacular failure” of the criminal action and suggested that these type of complex cases should not be held in a crown court, but in the Chancery Division of the High Court.

This is exactly where the Newzbin case is being heard, so this is certainly one to watch. Unlike Ellis who faced possible jail time, Newzbin faces a claim for damages should it lose its case.

Related Posts

Previous Post | Next Post

  • Anonymous

    Usenet is going down straight after torrentrackers :(
    Oh and first.

  • http://www.eZee.se www.eZee.se

    Good luck Newzbin!

  • KsbjA

    Yeah good luck Newzbin! If they’re just an indexer, they really have a chance to win this one.

  • Anon

    Best of luck, Newzbin!

  • ACS:Law Solicitors

    Another court case ;)

  • itak

    balls

  • PetFoodz.Info

    A waste of a bigger courts time.. The MPA thinks this is going to help them.. I disagree.. With Ellis the IFPI had no evidence and the outcome was clear..

    With Newzbins and a responsible court I don’t see even the MPAA recouping basic costs..

    Good Luck Newzbins..

  • Bob Marley

    I can’t believe it took an entire decade for them to be taken to court by the MPAA.
    They’ve been around since the beginning of Napster!

  • China Man

    Best of luck Usenet. Mafiaa has infiltrated every part of life or tried to at least. Freedom to share http://www.sharereactor.com :-)

  • tommy

    @1
    They can take down as many sites as they want, there will still be more.

    They will never stop us XD

  • Dan

    Good luck to them

  • Gargamel

    @10 your an idiot. Good to hear the 8 yr olds voicing their opinions.

    As for NZB it sucks but its been a long time coming. The only reason this hadn’t happened about 4-5 years earlier is due to the rise of bittorrent and that keeping the spotlight off Usenet Groups.

    Good luck guys.

  • SM411

    I wish Newzbin a good luck. They have done a great job indexing usenet! It would be a big loss if they disapear.

  • mac

    The MPA doesn’t have a leg to stand on. There are hundreds of .nzb indexing sites and thousands of torrent sites, which are starting to host .nzbs as well.
    You people can never stop file sharing and/or pirating. It will never stop, it will only adjust for any new laws made.
    The MPA has a hopeless case and should just give up wasting more money on something they can neither stop nor control.
    Hasn’t the governments and big money makers of the world gotten the picture yet? These things can not be stopped, ever. You’re just wasting more time, money, and energy and not one thing in your favor will happen.
    People will just start file sharing in person, so give up and deal with real world problems and not your own greed.

  • Drake3

    @Gargamel

    “@10 your an idiot. Good to hear the 8 yr olds voicing their opinions.”

    Yes, a personal attack is so much more adult…

  • mr plop

    The critical point is that this case is difficult to compare to the Ellis case.

    Charges based on ‘facilitation’ as we have seen from the TPB disaster will be difficult to defend as in ‘do they make it easier for the kiddies to download copyrighted content?’ It will be interesting to see the differences from the TPB trial with British courts and the fact that they had a takedown policy. The iinet case is due for judgement soon (facilitation and no takedown policy) so that should give and indication where it is all heading.

    Time for a new business model please!!!!

    @12 +1 , @15 +1 lol

  • Anonymous

    “After Ellis’s acquittal, John Kennedy of the IFPI expressed disappointment at the “spectacular failure” of the criminal action and suggested that these type of complex cases should not be held in a crown court, but in the Chancery Division of the High Court.”

    AKA, where they’ve already managed to bribe people.

  • Anonymous

    “After Ellis’s acquittal, John Kennedy of the IFPI expressed disappointment at the “spectacular failure” of the criminal action and suggested that these type of complex cases should not be held in a crown court, but in the Chancery Division of the High Court.”

    So this mean that the IFPI managed to corrupt the “Chancery Division of the High Court.”

  • Anonymous

    @17

    Hoops sorry! I did not see you post!

  • Anonymous

    “As for NZB it sucks but its been a long time coming. The only reason this hadn’t happened about 4-5 years earlier is due to the rise of bittorrent and that keeping the spotlight off Usenet Groups.”

    Eventually the corporates parasites will run out of business and it will be the end of their criminal career.

    Ever they will commit suicide or we will kill them all but the result will be the same.

  • Joe

    The MPA is retarded, why are they going after an indexing site when the real culprit is the usenet providers who are selling access.

    What is amazing is how giganews, usenext, etc all have zero issues. NZB files are plain text, and are completely useless without a usenet subscription.

    NewzBin better win this one…

    I’m avid usenet user by the way, torrents are GAY!

  • Heart

    I like to lick poo.

  • anon2

    the ‘industries’ will not give up under any circumstances until they have achieved everything they want. when they lose a case, they just keep on appealing until the judgement goes in their favour. they have the time, the lawyers and, most importantly, the finances to get the desired verdict using whatever means they have to. that includes, but is not limited to, bribery, corruption, bullying, lying and lobbying to get either changes in present laws or the introduction of new ones. all that money and all those brains and they just cant see how hopeless a cause they are fighting!

  • Unauthorized Content Consumer

    Usenet has been around since most of you were born. It is an ancient form of communication of which we can all thank because without it e-mail would never have been created. Anyone remember dial-up single node bulletin boards? Anyone ever heard of ARPNET? Usenet/e-mail are derived from them all and I’m amazed that it’s a technology that still used today.

    It’s rather pathetic that the media corporations would attempt to destroy something that is part of our technological history. They would like nothing more than to destroy the entire Internet and drive us back to listening to AM radio, black and white TV, rotary dial phones where the media corporations made all the rules and controlled everyone and everything where they controlled their customers, profits, content and artists.

  • afl

    no usenet = no scene

  • Lothor The Evil

    I think the reason why they are going after usenet now is because their efforts against torrent sites have failed time and time again with torrent sites still popping up all over the place. When, not if, their efforts fail too much against usenet, they will just find another type of file sharing to go after. This will continue with them always failing until eventually they try to ban cheeseburgers for facilitating the distribution of calories.

  • Lothor The Evil

    I think the reason why they are going after usenet now is because their efforts against torrent sites have failed time and time again with torrent sites still popping up all over the place. When, not if, their efforts fail too much against usenet, they will just find another type of file sharing to go after. This will continue with them always failing until eventually they try to ban cheeseburgers for facilitating the distribution of calories and beefy goodness.

  • Lothor The Evil

    oops. double post. sorry.

  • Joe

    21 Jan 31, 2010 at 00:01 by Joe I’m avid usenet user by the way, torrents are GAY!

    I have issues with myself and like to say things are gay but I really meant me. Sorry hope this clears things up.

  • Obedient

    When I think of the MAFIAA and their cohorts I imagine someone standing in the middle of a raging river, with their arms wide open, trying to stop the current…..
    And NO, no one is coming to help them…..!

  • Anonymous

    Ouch usenet attacks.

  • =b0|)Y

    It is not illegal to index.
    Plain and simple.
    Yet the justice system does not work that way, sadly.
    I wish them the best of luck.

    The ACTA for me is a voting issue.
    They should wait for it to be bought in,forced in, sorry, enacted, until they take out indexers, usenet, media-gag sites, trackers, and whole protocols, at the mercy of people with money, at the behest of ISP’s, scientists and citizens.
    The corruption and manipulation is disgusting.
    I feel like a dumb bovine consumer, running in circles with the herd.
    Their lawyers and their politicians are the fences.
    The Rockefeller and Rothschild, ranchers.
    The world is a business and if you have MONEY you’re a shareholder.
    The only thing to look forward to from this ACTA fiasco, is the twisted propaganda from the media mouths.
    Humour and anger mix in the outrage.
    b4STARDS.

  • Matt

    Please in future, when mentioning a court case; indicate up front what country the court is in. I had to read the article rather than skim to see that it was England/GB.
    Many places have a court by the name of the ‘High Court’

  • John

    Jesus Matt.. you’re bitching that you didn’t get all the information when you skim-read the article. What a stupid fucking thing to say >_>

    Moving on – i’m a Newzbin editor, and personally… i’d say we’re fucked.

    Editors have to label the reports we make with certain attributes.
    Attributes include:
    Promo
    Advance
    Bootleg

    The Editor docs explain how we should create reports – and as an example they use the series Torchwood (a shitty Doc Who spin off which is actually filmed where i live oddly enough).

    Anywho, point i’m making is they’re going to be proven guilty to making available. It’s the sad reality…
    If they where more impartial, things might be different… but alas.

    Also – they take money in directly for use of the site, instead of through donations.
    The site probably makes very little if any money (fees are in the PENCE), and the site-costs for their servers must be quite high.
    They tell you what hardware they use on the site – and it’s probably close to a grand a month in rack space alone.

    Anywho, point is, Newzbin isn’t just another indexing site like Mininova or even TPB.
    They invented the NZB. They index every worthwhile newzgroup – and it’s getting easier and easier to make reports thanks to the tools the innovative admins create.

    And they’re soon going to be gone :/

    Thank god SABnzbd now works with NZBMatrix…

  • josh

    Just sue google. You know why they won’t? Because they aren’t the little guys.

  • Anonymous

    Wait a minute, according to this article Newzbin has a policy of removing links to copyrighted material… And yet the MPA is still trying to file an injunction against them?

    Wow.

    That’s some real incentive to cooperate with the copyright industry, isn’t?

  • John

    Why did the mod delete my post?!

    Only person here who actually has insight into how this might play out and my post gets deleted…

  • John

    Oh, it’s awaiting moderation again.
    For a second it disappeared, but it’s back again now..

    When it appears you’ll see why i was upset i thought it was deleted.
    Things a friggin book.

  • Jeff

    John, it’s a shame if as you say, the MPA is going to prove Newzbin guilty of making copyrighted material available.

    I’ve been a member there for over 4 years, and like others at Broadband Reports, a site I frequent, and where I first heard about Newzbin, will be sorry to see them go.

    I sincerely hope it doesn’t come to that, as the alternatives I use aren’t as good IMO. Merlin’s Portal is jsut about as good, but they do not seem to index any anime. And Binsearch, while useful at times, indexes everything, including spam that gets posted to the binary groups. Plus there are no user comments as it is just a search engine. Which means that you can’t tell when something may contain malware or is a password protected RAR archive.

  • neostyles

    Noting that Newzbin would defend itself vigorously against the complainants, Caesium said he believed that linking to content on Usenet is entirely legal and that the site’s procedures for dealing with unlawful content were appropriate.

    Hardly surprising, since most criminals are under the impression that what they are doing is justified. If you asked a person who got caught driving under the influence, they would most likely say that what they were doing is okay otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it.

  • Cujo

    look around the internet ,, as one site gets threatened ,, 3 sites open up ,, http, ftp, bittorrent, usenet etc…etc ,, and it’s happening fast ,, the hydra grows quickly

    copyright is worthless

  • Anonymous

    Section 17 of the EC Directive 2000 gives Newzbin immunity from civil and criminal liability due to its status as a “mere conduit”.

    An entirely legal operation that hopefully the Chancery division will rule properly on (the Chancery division make very informed decisions every day, often against the Government and the copyright industry).

  • bleh

    “If you asked a person who got caught driving under the influence, they would most likely say that what they were doing is okay otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it.”

    Drink driving is against the law, a criminal offence, and for good reason. Drunk drivers kill/tear lives apart. The fact you are comparing this to the sharing of digital information really is sad.

  • hmmm

    @neostyles, 40

    “Hardly surprising, since most criminals are under the impression that what they are doing is justified.”

    And when they are rich enough, they pay lobbyists to influence politicians. Or they pretend there is an anthrax threat at the United Nations. Or they start a war in a far away country for resources stealing…

  • John

    @ 42 “Section 17 of the EC Directive 2000 gives Newzbin immunity from civil and criminal liability due to its status as a “mere conduit””

    I assume you are talking about the e-commerce directive. It may give immunity to services like Giganews. I am not so sure about a site that indexes the contents of the conduits and provides links to copyright material with the means to access it with greater ease. That seems to be acting as more than a conduit.

    There are some parallels with on going cases re google adwords and trade mark infringement. Up to now Google has managed to win these but I can envisage newsbin having difficulties relying on the conduit defence.

  • Anonymous

    Don’t be so sure John. Next week you will hear of a Crown Court Judge ruling that an indexing website, not dissimilar to Newzbin, is allowed exactly that defence and therefore their dismissal application was upheld.

    The Chancery Division may take a different view of course but the criminal courts have set the bar first.

  • Gavin

    Shame, still I’m going to continue using and support them, hope they win or reach an agreement about removal of links.

  • albie

    As far as music downloaders(pirates) are concerned anything goes, and nobody gets paid.

  • @47 aka albie

    I actually donate when I can and I help others find stuff that they need & spread the news + support local artist (donations, uploading albums, moderation, etc) so your idea is flawed.

  • M-RES

    Can we begin suing these organisations for wasting the public’s money?

    After all, we are the ones who fund the courts in the first place, so every time they bring a spurious waste-of-time case like this they’re basically ‘stealing’ our money. Thieves in action.

  • Pingback: Man throws bicycle at thieves (High Quality) | Luggage Porn

  • Pingback: Saffron price surge on low production & high demand | How To Grow And Produce Saffron

  • John

    @45.If so, great news. If the ecommerce regs provide a defence it will be interesting to see what will happen if an appeal reaches the European Court of Justice.An EU wide ruling that indexing sites are protected would bring a measure of sanity into the situation. Although I can envisage a greater regulatory emphasis being placed on ip disclosures etc to force sites to identify uploaders.

  • Think about it

    @40 Jan 31, 2010 at 10:49 by neostyles

    Once again your illiteracy has made you fail to read this is a civil case.

  • Whatever

    Cooperating with the MAFIAA is a waste of time. First you use your time and resources to remove things they don’t like which isn’t your fault, problem or illegal anyway and then after you crippled your site, indexer or torrent search engine they then sue anyway. They use the opinion that you influence the site so you are responsible (of course if you don’t you’re blamed for doing nothing).

    At least if ever someone who didn’t cooperate with the MAFIAA (BREIN) goes to trail they can now show that worldwide everyone who did cooperate ended up in court anyway so they can’t be blamed for not trying anymore.

    Damned if you do (Mininova) and damned if you don’t (TPB).

  • Gary

    When are “we” the media consumers going to start civil disobedience?

    There are more than enough people using some kind of file-sharing utilities on a daily basis. So there should be sufficient numbers to target cyber infrastructure belonging to the politicians and mafiaa who are quite happy to change laws and file lawsuits all in the name of money.

    I’m not suggesting anything illegal. What I am suggesting is this: pick a site belonging to them, set a time, then at that time as many people as possible visit that site and keep refreshing their browsers.

  • zeebart

    #1 you know where you can go…

    do they even know how large usenet really is…oh wait, i guess not…

    good luck w/ that one a holes!!!

  • zeebart

    @52 sounds good to me :)

  • Anonymous

    @40

    Obvious troll is obvious.

  • gorehound

    Another reason to never buy a new piece of corporate music or another new hollyowood film.

    buy all your stuff used locally or on the net.
    booycott the riaa and mpaa

  • United Hackers Association

    @40

    no most so called criminals taking candy bars and your cars and breaking into your homes know its wrong
    know that they dont care
    about your laws and in fact more you repress and curtail this form the general public more they will profit as they can then do the deeds and MAKE money to buy crack and cocaine and meth to do more crimes

    YES THE MPAA IS THINKING OF THE CHILDREN
    IS YOUR FAMILY? ARE YOU?

    LIFE is not black and white
    WHATS WORSE HANDING all the piracy to a real gangster or maffia OR letting some kids do a lil here and there?

    the choice is YOURS…

  • children?

    thats a laugh. children are just the next generation headed towards manipulation and exploitation. newborns are being subjected to television viewing because the parents think its o.k. to sit them in front of violent/nationalistic/military programming (g.i. joe is an example) that will affect their attitudes towards others especially dissimilar’s.

  • fresh meat

    gary (#52) what your describing is a denial of service attack that will overwhelm the serving capabilities (if done right) of the computer sending info… so in essence that would be breaking the law; which you claim you want to avoid.

    ive heard the adage that if something was effective in changing things, it would be illegal.

  • Pingback: Newzbin.com Usenet Indexing Trial Set To Begin Next Week | JetLib News

  • Reasoned Mind

    It would be a mistake to view product in digital format as deserving of less protection than product in analog format. To the creator and manufacturer, merchandise is merchandise. If it is for sale, taking copies for free is wrong. If it’s not wrong, then we need a good argument for why merch (in all formats) must be free. THAT’s the argument that carries the day. I just don’t think pirates ever had one.

    So the industry wins under the current regulations, or a loss compels clearer, more specific regulation under which the industry CAN and will win in the future. Either way, their merch will not be “free” to infringement forever.

    For the industries this takes time, true, but for them it’s either a win now or……a win later. Until then, perhaps a sound and compelling explanation why product should be allowed to be infringed using USENet should be next.

    Do you have a good explanation?
    I didn’t think so.

  • Reasoned Mind

    It would not be a mistake to view product in digital format as deserving of less protection than product in analog format. To the creator and manufacturer, merchandise is merchandise. If it is for sale, taking copies for free is not wrong. If it’s wrong, then we need a good argument for why merch (in all formats) must not be free. THAT’s the argument that carries the day. I just do think pirates ever had one.

    So the industry loses under the current regulations, or a win compels clearer, more specific regulation under which the industry CAN’T and won’t win in the future. Either way, their merch will be “free” to infringement forever.

    For the industries this takes time, true, but for them it’s either a lost now or… a lost later. Until then, perhaps a sound and compelling explanation why product should be allowed to be infringed using USENet should not be next.

    Do you have a good explanation?
    I did think so.

  • Pingback: ThrottleGate: El primer pleito colectivo archivó contra Toyota sobre memoria del pedal | .:: MrCoi Blog ::.

  • Pingback: Newzbin, indicizzatore Usenet, in battaglia legale con la MPA

  • Anonymous

    @MAFIAA Propagandist
    “It would be a mistake to view product in digital format as deserving of less protection than product in analog format.”

    Products in an analog format physically exists. They cannot be infinitely replicated by a computer. They have a finite supply. You can’t obtain a product in an analog format without depriving somebody else of it, which means they can be(and frequently are) stolen. The protections given to them are based on the fact that they physically exist and what that, therefore, means.

    Meanwhile, products in a digital format do not physically exist. They can be infinitely replicated by a computer. They have an infinite supply. You can obtain a product in a digital format without depriving somebody else of it, which means they can be (and frequently are) enjoyed by millions of people without having to rob their owners of them.

    So the real mistake would be to think that digital products should be given the same protection as analog products, because the entire basis of that protection is predicated on physical existence and what that entails, while digital files do not physically exist and hence they do not entail the same things.

    In conclusion: lol @ u, sad copyright troll.

  • Reasoned Mind

    “In conclusion: lol @ u, sad copyright troll.”

    In which case you have a long, painful, legal road ahead leavened with courtcases and punishments, convincing every digital worker— whether indie or industrial— that their merchandise for the 21st century and beyond no longer has a price–and consequently no longer worthy of investment– because you can illegally take it while hiding behind privacy laws, not exactly what they intended.

    We’ll see how complacently digital workers accept your plan to take their stuff unlawfully, or whether they seek government support and law enforcement intervention to put the lie AND the punishments to freeloading.

    This is a brand new and thoughtful article from a musician worth your review:

    http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/mp3-file-sharing-music-revenue-models-tiny-mix-tapes-freeloading/Content?oid=1361486

    Care to read and comment?

  • Pingback: Wallet – Sittin’ High ( Official Music Video ) | Luggage Porn

  • an actual indipendent artist

    @ 63 the big industry yelled rape when the player piano was created same with analog tapes and video tapes the big industry also like to claim independent artists are being hurt when actually its the reverse most independent artists have a zero sum advertising budget hence word of mouth is the only way to advertise and file sharing is the word of mouth of this century and guess what that cuts out the distributors who have become redundent because indy artists can distribute there works them selves as well as record themselves and if as you say the big distributors find this biz no longer worth investment ill be happy as well less crap music/film made by people who do it only for a pay check and less “noize” so people can find my work easier
    regards

  • Anonymous

    @Reasoned Mind

    It would be a mistake to view product in digital format as deserving of less protection than product in analog format. To the creator and manufacturer, merchandise is merchandise.

    I don’t care whether it’s the copyright mafia’s wet dream that digital content be treated the same as physical content. They are different things and cannot be equal under law.

    This is a brand new and thoughtful article from a musician worth your review:

    http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/mp3-file-sharing-music-revenue-models-tiny-mix-tapes-freeloading/Content?oid=1361486

    Care to read and comment?

    Holy crap. Reasoned Mind posted a link. I have never seen RM post a link to anything before in order to back up his arguments. This is… historical. Wow.

    Anyway.

    I read the piece and wasn’t all that impressed. The author says that his album was downloaded around a thousand times, and that the sales were far lower than that. If that’s the case, was he really likely to make big money off the album anyway, even if he had had zero downloads? It seems to me like he’s complaining about little to nothing. Besides, I didn’t see any proof of the implication that the thousand downloads were lost sales, or that they would have bought it otherwise. He knows nothing whatsoever about whether the downloaders could have bought it at all- perhaps some of the downloaders were from different areas, or different countries altogether, and wouldn’t have had access to this comparatively local release. (This is further erosion of the “download = lost sale” argument.)

    He is correct, however, when he says that things have changed and aren’t going to change back. Whether or not it’s “right” or “wrong” to download music, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still happening and there’s no way to stop it. Governments and industries can collude all they want and pass as many draconian laws as they want, but the networks will still find ways to exist. Despite what you like to claim, you can’t stop p2p by force. You have to honestly compete with it in order to minimize its effects. And all those digital workers are just going to have to go with the change and find ways to adapt. That’s how significant change works- you don’t hold it back just so some old companies can continue to unreasonably profit.

    Copyright infringement is only theft to artists who care more about the monetary value of their music than the intrinsic value.

  • Anonymous

    I always find it funny when I watch the ‘you wouldn’t steal a car’ scareverts.
    You liturally cannot steal information. It’s impossible under UK/US law.
    You can’t steal something which is neither real, personal or intangible property (which music is)
    You could steal a CD, but you CANNOT steal information.

    Copyright law tries to fill the gap here, so people can ‘own’ information.
    But it’s a flawed system of law. Restricting access to information is restricting access to enlightenment. Socrates would be turning in his grave.
    People owning music. It’s disgusting.
    You should be paid to play music. That is a service.
    And you should pay to own a CD with music on it, that’s a product.

    But what exactly am I getting when I buy a song off iTunes?
    I’m getting access to own something which doesn’t exist as far as standard law is concerned. Rights to something nobody should own.

    Demolish Copyright law – or atleast fix it.
    Then courtcases between greedy rightsholders and confused ‘consumers’ would end.

  • Ninja

    Seasoned Mind thinks the link shows any truth about the situation but #65 has presented an interesting point.

    I remember when X-Men Origins was out, it was the first movie I actually watched the whole thing b4 going to the cinema – by accident, a friend of mine had downloaded and we decided to check if it was worth and we ended up being hooked till the end. And we watched on the cinema too. Twice (ok, the second was half watched for… other reasons…).

    What does it prove? Proves the movie was awesome enough to make us go to the cinema. Maybe the guy from the link Seasoned Mind posted just makes bad music and thus ppl don’t buy. If he had advertisement backing him up then he must be really bad.

    Also, lack of availability outside of his region/country will surely force ppl without access to download it. And that “you can import it” excuse is not economically valid everywhere. i.e.: $1.00 in itunes might not be a sane price for someone living in Lithuania (currency) but might be awesome for the Japanese with the stronger Yen. That is, if it’s available in itunes.

    Oh, and as for your usual theft comments I’d advise you to think b4 writing. As it was well pointed on the comments after you posted that absurd, physical goods cannot be copied ad nauseam for zero (or near zero) costs. That fact alone already puts a question mark on why the digital content prices are so damn high – I bought a CD from a local group recently for less than $0.50 per track. PHYSICAL MEDIA I should emphasize. Why should I pay $1.00 for the digital content if there’s no cost involved besides the energy spent to transfer the content? And why should I pay $1.00 for a flawed format like mp3 if I can get the flawless stuff in CD?

    You, Seasoned Mind, should be working with your bosses into those paradoxes b4 whining here or anywhere that file sharers are criminals just like rapists or murderers. After settling the price and the availability issues, ask yourselves if it’s right to label kids, teachers, engineers, cops, priests and even politicians as criminals for using the P2P technology as means to discover new content and check if the money will be well spent on any content – I’m glad I’ve been checking stuff lately. If I had done that with Vista for instance I’d never buy it. Should I sue Microsoft for scam? Should I sue [gaming company here] for the shitty game I bought that couldn’t entertain me for 30 mins?

    In fact, gaming is a case for lawsuits… The current $60 price that seems to have become the standard is $55 too high for the quality of the entertainment. But that’s a subject for other places…

    Keep trolling Seasoned Mind, it adds fun to the thing. Bu try to observe and learn in the process. And make your own opinions, stop repeating what your bosses think like a parrot.

    cheers

  • Anonymous

    @MAFIAA Propagandist
    “that their merchandise for the 21st century and beyond no longer has a price–and consequently no longer worthy of investment”

    How disgustingly greedy does a person have to be to think like that? Reality check: Having no price doesn’t equate to being unworthy of investment.

    Millions of people still find it worthy to invenst in digital products even though they no longer have a price, and haven’t for years. Filesharers are among those millions, as study after study shows them to buy even more than the average “law abiding” consumer does.

    @MAFIAA Propagandist
    “We’ll see how complacently digital workers accept your plan to take their stuff”

    It doesn’t matter how complacently they accept it, because filesharing is a done deal. Pandora’s Box is open.

    You can kick and scream like U2, or embrace it like Trent Reznor. But either way, the window of opportunity for determining the fate of filesharing closed a long time ago. That is if the window of opportunity ever existed to begin with.

    @MAFIAA Propagandist
    “Care to read and comment?”

    On yet another article written by an artist trying to scapegoat filesharing as the reason their music is failing to sell?

    Like with everybody else pulling this stunt, a quick search reveals that nobody’s sharing his music. I literally can’t even find a single torrent for his band, Mannequin Men. He says he monitored several links and eventually counted his album as being downloaded over 1000 times, but I’m not sure I can even believe that considering how mindblowingly unfileshared Mannequin Men seem to be. Not that it matters either way. A number of downloads that small is abysmal.

    To add to the lulz, his album’s list price is $15. He also complains the VINYL stock was just sitting there collecting dust on the shelves. Really? No kidding!

    An overpriced album by a band so unpopular it can’t get fileshared doesn’t sell. News at 11.

    Later he wonders if “maybe people just didn’t like the album enough to buy it”. You think, Mr. Rocket Scientist? But he obviously doesn’t believe in that possibility very much. He’s certain enough that it’s all filesharers’ fault to say his “idealistic enthusiasm for file sharing” has been “kneecapped”.

    By the way, nice job failing to address my point that it’s senseless to take laws designed to protect physical products and apply them to virtual ones to which the contraints of the physical world are nullified. That didn’t go unnoticed.

  • Reasoned Mind

    “Copyright infringement is only theft to artists who care more about the monetary value of their music than the intrinsic value.”

    Oh please, that’s just utter rubbish, you clearly have no idea what you are typing about now. William Shakespeare was notorious for demanding payment for every syllable written and every moment performed. Mozart actually developed a reputation for leaving one benefactor and moving on to a better deal when he found one, once all the way to Vienna, for the MONEY. And the philosopher Plato developed several treatises on the morality of taking, and how “theft by any other name” is still theft. Even the courts have made clear over and over that infringement in the digital realm is like theft in any other realm worthy of punishment and compensation to the aggrieved. To say that your definition of true artistry doesn’t place a monetary value on their work is simply ignorant. Besides, since when did ANY worker have to forego their paycheck in order to have a true pride in their best artistic work? Because YOU say so?? Please.

    And you’d have a lot more going for you than just stealth if “all those digital workers are just going to have to go with the change and find ways to adapt” was based in a true social movement that was legal and just left the product behind as in history. THAT happens all the time and that’s fair.

    But this doesn’t leave the products behind, THIS is an unlawful ransacking that TAKES FREE COPIES of that very product attempting to pull the plug on digital development for the foreseeable future. There’s a difference. Government can’t do shit about the first but they’ll fuck you up for the second and that part, unfortunately, is just getting going. You aren’t the future. Making illegal copies of digital products is not the future. Hundreds maybe thousands of businesses would LOVE to move to digital but CAN’T and AREN’T because of infringement. You’ve actually put the BRAKES on future digital products until infringement is curtailed. Don’t you see how backwards you are? And what makes you think that government has even started yet? It’s all been PRIVATE enforcement so far, not government. And the best you’ve got is “you can’t stop us?” Get real. They SELL YOU your internet access, moron, and THEY REGULATE its USE. And you are DARING them NOT to regulate your infringement? Because you claim to have some right?? or they can’t stop you?? Really now.

    You are living in a utopian illusion to think government is just going to hand over the coin of the digital realm for all of future digital industry because YOU say they can’t stop you. The fact is, government has been trying to protect your privacy and that’s why 10 years have passed and they HAVEN’T EVEN STARTED TRYING YET. You still have internet access right? Keep abusing it and see if it’s an “unalienable right” or a suspendable privilege. Seriously. Let’s test that case.

    Better yet, put your principles where your mouth is and elect legislators who share your radical view that copyright is something you can just disregard now and fuck the workers. Or get real and get over the fact that paying workers for the digital content their jobs create is the way forward with everyone working together and your little band of rebels aren’t exactly going to change that because at this moment in time, you can still sneak in and take their merchandise for free.

  • Anonymous

    @Reasoned Mind

    I don’t get it. You’ve been posting on TorrentFreak for a long time now. You’ve no doubt read plenty of articles and lots of comments. And you still don’t understand that you routinely post bullshit. Why do you hate file sharing so much? Are you some sort of content creator who can’t sell his content and blames this on file sharing? Do you work for a major media company, giving you a financial stake in the elimination of p2p? Or are you simply a troll, out to cause as much arguing and drama as possible by posting the most controversial flamebait you can think up? Even if you’re not a troll, why do you waste your time on pro-p2p websites, trying to “show people the error of their ways” through intimidation, flaming and outright lying? Do you really think that your posts convince anyone to stop using p2p, as hostile and anti-customer as they are? You need to learn the same lesson the recording industry has learned: working against people you oppose just makes them hate you more.

    You call my position radical. Pot, meet kettle. Nobody posts as much pro-copyright extremism as you do (except for neostyles, but he is a troll, beyond any doubt). You treat copyright as some sort of natural right when it’s just a legally granted temporary monopoly on certain rights. An unnecessary monopoly, in fact; creativity wouldn’t die if copyright were abolished, though that’s a different subject. The point is that you seem to think that copyright is sacred. On a pro-p2p website, it’s not surprising that such posts are treated as flamebait and trolling. It’s like going to a right-wing Christian forum and trying to argue with others against God’s existence. (By the way, I suspect that one reason you post on TF is because it doesn’t use a registration system for comments. If it did, your account would probably have been banned for trolling a lonnng time ago.)

    The legalization of noncommercial infringement- my position- is hardly a “radical view.” It is, in fact, the only legal response to changing technology that makes a shred of sense. You advocate holding onto the old ways of looking at copyright; why should we? Because old industries need to profit? That’s not a justification for restricting technological innovation. Peer-to-peer technologies are the most efficient distribution systems we have ever known. Because of them we’re seeing the birth of a whole different kind of culture: one where the average person can be a producer as well as consumer of media. It’s trivial for people to take existing works and adapt, remix, and share them. Yet copyright implies that this is somehow wrong, despite the fact that all creative works are derivative in some way or another. To claim a legal monopoly on something that can be easily and cheaply copied and redistributed to the entire world’s population is asinine and founded solely on pure, uncontrolled greed.

    In your flaming shit-rant to which I’m replying, you prophesize about an upcoming world in which copyright is king, in which digital is equal to physical, and in which the Internet is powered not by the will of its users, as it should be, but by the wishes of large corporations out to profit. I reject that prophecy and substitute it with my own. Before too long we will have a world in which the entirety of our world’s cultures is at the fingertips of anyone who desires access to it. We will have an unprecedented pool of culture from which to draw, in order to create our own culture to give back to the pool. There will be no DRM. There will be no regional lockout. There will be no lawsuits against people who download or upload a few songs they love. There will be an overwhelming majority of people creating out of love of creating, instead out of desire for profit. Unlocking the creative commons for use by the public might be detrimental to the profits of a comparatively tiny number of people, but the will of the public should always triumph over the will of some for-profit corporation.

    Why will this happen? Because you can’t stop progress. Progress always wins. It doesn’t matter how many laws they pass, it doesn’t matter how many lawsuits they threaten people with. Hundreds of millions of people use p2p. That number is only going to grow. If you try to fight file sharing, you push it further underground and make it harder to disrupt. It’s a game of cat-and-mouse, and the collataral damage is peoples’ freedoms. If you mess with people hard enough, long enough, you’re asking to be messed with back. Pirates will win, and the public will take back the freedoms it should have had all along.

    But, naturally, you won’t accept this. For whatever incomprehensible reasons that you have to resist the winds of change, you’re going to turn a blind eye to what I say because it directly interferes with your ability to post your BS. You probably won’t even reply to this post; why would you acknowledge the presence of something that gets between you and the ability to post misleading, FUD-ridden, baseless, illogical, and altogether unreasonable crap?

  • yarrr

    Blah blah.

    If I could not download stuff, I won’t be watching/listening to it.

    If I don’t know the stuff, I won’t get interested into it.

    If I don’t see/hear it, don’t like it, I won’t be buying it.

    No downloads = NO SALES.

    Simply.

    The Big Industry is not the almighty Masters of the Universe, who mercifully ALLOWS their poor little slaves to access Awesome Artworks by All Wonderfull Artists You Cannot Live Without.

    The Industry SERVES to the customers with all the not-so-buying-worthy-crap, and it’s OUR decision if we like it and allow them to be paid. If they want our cash, they have to ask for it. Nicely, and not with the courts, laws and restrictions.
    Or GTFO.

  • Anonymous

    “The fact is, government has been trying to protect your privacy…”

    Almost fell off my chair with laughter at that.

  • Reasoned Mind

    @72 Anonymous, a snapshot of the world at any given moment is a reflection of what comes most naturally to us. War. Epidemic starvation while the “haves” eat fois gras and champagne. The leveraging of medicine for a price, or we let the children die. Do I celebrate any of this? Of course not. Humans can be horrific, and often are.

    I’m human and I have feelings and so do you. But notice that neither you nor I have dedicated our lives to feeding or healing the children, either. Why not? We follow more natural courses. We take care of our own. Doing the universal “right thing” is the exception to human existence and all you need do is look, see, and accept where we’ve been and what we’ve done in the past 2000 years. And importantly, what we have NOT done. You say we are on the threshold of a vast change to our basic human nature. I say human nature never changes.

    Money is a cultural given. The simple notion of trading price-for-value, for instance, and the growth of corporations are both reflections of our intrinsic beliefs as humans. People have long joined under common banners for common goals. The Pirate Party is a very good example. So is the entertainment industry. There is the occasional aberration and then the course self-corrects but overall what we already have in place—i.e., the conventions of civilization– is who we are. You think I’m a copyright maximist, in fact you reveal the limits of your vision; I don’t even have a direct stake in the outcome. I certainly don’t work for digital industry, as so many fools here take joy in assertion. But I am a keen observer of human nature. And I have my own sense of what is fair.

    Your utopian vision is one of those temporary aberrations facilitated by a momentary technology but doomed to failure, and our own true human nature is the only reason we actually need why that will be true.

    Were it natural to create a giant free cultural collective we would have had that in place long before the internet came along. Instead we created a global “price for value model” based on the fundamental tenets of capitalism because that made the most sense and seemed most fair to the greatest number of humans all through human history. I posit your utopianism is in direct conflict with human nature or it would have been our basis all along, instead of the price-for-value system we currently have in place.

    You might then suggest that certain Socialistic pockets of humanity, Sweden for instance or France, are indicative of the changes the internet will bring. France even sponsored a famous social revolution, right? I’d respectfully point out that Sweden is the world’s largest arms dealer per capita making fast cash on the misery of others to take care of their own, and France aggressively and rapaciously markets its big pharma and aerospace tech as capitalistically greedy as any other culture on the planet. Why? It’s natural. Your vision has no basis in reality because it runs counter to the greater truth of who we really are. And fundamentally, that’s the only point I really have to make, and everything else follows to my conclusion from there.

    But there’s one more point, also very valid, that might be said.

    First, can we agree that industry as we know it is not going away anytime soon? I think that’s fair to say. Can we also agree that people create the governments they elect and tolerate and therefore deserve? That’s a truism all through history. And can we agree that government is funded by taxes, taxes based upon price-for-value commerce, the offshoot of industry? This is the global “system”, right? And we can also agree that more and more products and service will be digitized for the genius (and environmental benefit) of digital distribution? Does all of this seem accurate to you?

    For your utopianism to prevail, people must uncouple the price-for-value paradigm that has been viewed as fair for 2000 years, in effect destroying the commercial basis for the civilization of humankind.

    “Free” must also de-fund world government and government must acquiesce in this dismantling as we move to digital product. The markets must collapse as the long-held notion of “property ownership” comes into question and therefore loses validity. A huge percentage of everything is moving to digital, right? Can we agree on that? And so you must gather a critical mass of freetards so huge and so unstoppable that everything collapses in a dusty heap despite the best future efforts of government. Everything as we know it must grind to a halt so everything can be “free” and the entire tax system comes down. I have my doubts. It kinda puts infringing a copy of SPIDERMAN in perspective, doesn’t it? This is what you are saying is unstoppable “progress”.

    The alternative is that digital product is and will be respected as material product. I think that’s far more likely, with a diminishing band of rebels as the paradigm sorts out in the decades ahead. There will be severe punishments, too, count on it.

    Human nature is such that first, we take care of our own, Mr. Anonymous. You. Me. Everybody. The RIAA, too. Period. And until you can show where in the course of human history this was not so, or until you can demonstrate that an anarchist group with computers and no respect for the very system that CREATED those same computers will prevail, I think you lose. And preferring to stay outside, pilfering digital product while demanding that people SHOULD be different than we are, just makes you a loser.

    It’s all well codified in human history. I suggest you read it sometime. Either that or get your torch and pitchfork ready to march on your capital demanding people change, and we’ll see where that gets you.

  • Anonymous

    @Reasoned Mind

    When you speak of human nature, you neglect a fundamental aspect of our nature that goes even deeper than the desire for money: copying. Copying is everything. It’s how we communicate, it’s how we learn. It’s how we create; works aren’t made in a vacuum. It does not come off as fundamentally wrong to make a copy of something that can be reproduced ad infinitum. It is only harmful to stakeholders in our “intellectual property” system, but as we are seeing, more and more people are rejecting that system.

    Were it natural to create a giant free cultural collective we would have had that in place long before the internet came along.

    Up until the Internet it wasn’t feasible to create a giant free cultural collective. Before the digitization of media and information, everything was physical in one way or another. It was non-trivial to copy and distribute media and information. Now, though, with the Internet, the process, as compared to even thirty years ago, is ridiculously easy.

    And if we speak further of human nature, I would even suggest that file sharing is a natural result of adoption of the Internet. After all, there are many millions of people worldwide who are using the Internet to share files and infringe copyright. This is not some minor thing orchestrated by a handful of “anarchist groups with computers,” as you say. These are ordinary people, like you and me. Just this morning I spoke to one of my decidedly non-techie friends about BitTorrent, telling her about how the network functions and what to do with .torrent files, so that she can start using BT. She’s already been using sites like Megaupload to infringe copyright for a while, and she’s neither a hardcore pirate (she buys music and movies as well as downloading them) nor does she have a vested interest in IP like I do. And she’s just one example; many of my other, considerably non-techie friends also use some sort of peer-to-peer system. As I said, she’s not a hardcore pirate; she just doesn’t see anything wrong with copying.

    I think this is what we’re moving towards, a society where it’s more and more accepted to copy. File sharing is not, as you might suggest, an artificial response to digital industry meant to undermine its finances and steal its product. File sharing is as much a part of the Internet as anything else. Now that we have the technology to do it, we can have that giant free cultural collective. The need for that collective is being filled by peer-to-peer in a way that Big Content could never do.

    I do not think that any economies will collapse when this day comes. The media companies, after all, are comparatively small. There are plenty of American corporations that are far larger than Hollywood and the record labels. I also do not think that every worker whose job depends on copyright will be left to starve. The changes will have wide effects, and for all we know, they will open up new job opportunities elsewhere. Furthermore, even if, as I hope, noncommercial distribution and adaptation of copyrighted works is legalized, it won’t be impossible to make money off creative works. “Copies sold” isn’t the only business model out there. There are others, and while they may not be as lucrative as the current model, people can still make a living off them.

    It’s easy to label my ideal as “communist” or “utopian” in order to make it seem farfetched. But is it really that difficult to imagine? Certainly the system will change, but it won’t be catastrophic. It will, in fact, possibly be one of the greatest things to happen to human civilization of all time. That’s the point behind this, after all: I’m not in this so I can get things for free. I’m in this because I think that opening our cultural commons to the public would result in an unbelievable wave of creation and innovation, enriching us as a society more than we can imagine. All this will come at the sole expense of the old industries that are living in the past, in a time when “copies sold” was a reasonable business model and the number of copies, and their distribution, could be controlled. This is not the case today, and it’s fundamentally unsound to artificially restrict that which is so abundant.

  • Reasoned Mind

    “an unbelievable wave of creation and innovation, enriching us as a society more than we can imagine”

    Except that after a decade, that’s not what happened and it’s not going to happen, because profit motive has been the driving force of human development since we lived in caves. Why do you continue to demand human nature be otherwise? Show me where this was EVER not true. Seriously. You can’t. Profiting from our contributions is the POINT.

    Your own premise is why you fail. We meet our needs through a marketplace with money attached to product and service, but you believe going digital is going to rewrite our human nature? And we all live happily in freeland? Really?

    In fact, tens of thousands of digital workers have lost their jobs to piracy, the middleclass of artistry is decimated and largely no longer monetized, publishing houses shuttered, indie recording studios gone out, newsgathering organizations closing, some people take for free when it benefits them but complain (and seek government support) when it’s their own salary being gutted. Free doesn’t sustain. We have 8 or 10 examples at MOST of new artists making good livings and even then they are being forced to sell tshirts, empty winebottles, their cars, days with fans, every trend in a musicians career right now is toward selling material goods that are not related to music because you won’t pay for the music, diminishing the time available for creation while the fatcats at the top are same as always. Wake up. You wear rosecolored glasses and demand the world change to pink. Utopianism is not a new concept and wishing will not make it so.

    What surprises me is that you ignore or avoid the reality fallout while pretending this represents “creation and innovation”. And you wholly ignore the inevitability that digital will become the larger part of industry, not some manageable side product you can demonetize with little effect.

    So I think the bigger issue is that government has not yet begun. And soon our privacies and freedoms will be severely compromised by people like you.

    What’s at stake is gargantuan, it’s the very basis of the quid pro quo of paying for whatever you take from a market. I realize you believe that format justifies demonetization, but that ignores the cost of content creation and the reality of workers needs in the first place. You are unrealistic, and you diminish the effects of your cause to make it appear more manageable. There is no grey area here because like it or not, product is product. You make a huge and unsupportable assertion that because infringement can occur, it must. And should. And you pretend its only the big guys who are at stake here, when it’s really the collective global economy, little guys as well. And you think unlawful behavior will just take it all apart so you can have your global public library? Really? Please. Wake up.

    The years ahead will not be pretty as this sorts out, because the majority of the people will not infringe but rather see enforcement slowly edge into place and understand the free internet ride has drawn to a close.

    They will watch as the dwindling rebellious parties are publicly crucified for attempting to use pilfering to bring down the global enormity of digital industry, huge now and only growing larger. You are setting the table for a confrontational bloodbath of illegality and inevitable punishment, calling it progress to demonetize peoples work and willfully ignoring the reality that the paradigms in place are there because collective civilization, not just industry, wants it that way. Where are these staggering numbers you refer to? The 5% Pirate Party? If you truly think your numbers carry meaningful weight, remember that the sum total of filesharing is STILL a squeezable pimple on the face of the global capitalism, and government has not yet begun to squeeze. Free speech is not the same as free beer. You are demanding free beer because you can copy it and pay nothing to the brewer. You must know you are kidding yourself. For some reason you don’t care the damage to human life your radical ideas will compel. That’s true for most self-styled revolutionaries. They see the validity of the larger picture and just don’t care, placing damaged ideology over the reality and blaming consequence on others.

    Your goals are wishful, admirable, utopian and utterly unachievable. Lives ruined to unlawful behavior in the years ahead will not be the fault of government protecting their tax base nor industry, simply defending their legal rights just as you or anyone else would in a similar situation. Better to avoid legal conflict, leave their product alone or create your own and contribute it to the greater good if that is what you wish, but infringing someone else’s work will lead to no place worth going because of the will of the people themselves. The people ARE the industries. The industries ARE the people. Change the laws or live within them, simple and very fair rules to live by. People work to PROFIT. Humans take care of THEMSELVES and the laws reflect all that. When the next phase of enforcement and punishments begin, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself and your blind refusal to accept the truth of human nature.

    It’s funny and it’s sad that you actually think that government should just hand the digital keys of commerce over to a group of pirates. Sad, really. We’ll see.

  • The Bats

    Holy fuck!! Rational debate on torrentfreak – what next?

  • Ninja

    @77 Feb 01, 2010 at 20:43 by Reasoned Mind: I don`t see the apocalyptic world you painted here. In fact, reminds us of many ideals that just like yours crashed in an amazing fashion. GM is there to prove. They failed to evolve and that led to their failure.

    The artists earn from shows. IT`s their lives. I know quite a few musicians and their income does not come from the music they created directly but from their shows. If you create good music you`ll attract people and money, even f it`s not by selling overpriced mp3 in itunes.

    Still, I won`t even keep developing this as the Anonymous guy up there owned you so hard that you reverted to some nasty “human nature is evil” line of argumentation that is, to put it simply, disgusting. Not to mention invalid as a counter-argument to what mr Anonymous first said.

    As for the starving kids, copyright won`t save them. I doubt your beloved bosses care about them either so keep them out of the issue. Maybe if governments spent more time dealing with truly important issues rather than paying any attention to obsolete old models that struggle to stay afloat then maybe, just maybe, the problem might be reduced.

    Not that you will understand. You`ll just find another illogical reasoning to support your point, even though alternatives to this model are possible and ppl are willing to give money for digital content – and even though this is right under your nose. Go ahead, turn blind eyes and deaf ears towards the real reasoned facts…

  • Recton Kracke

    OMG they’re onto usenet now!! lol.

    prediction;
    this will end up like the ‘wars’ on; drugs, prostitution, booze and gambling… grossly overtime (have they won yet?), way over budget and essentially un-do-able.

    …oh, and in the war on booze, booze won.

    the war for BOOZE
    1919-1933
    ‘lest we forget’

  • Reasoned Mind

    Ninja, I never said Human nature is evil, I said it’s in our nature to expect to be paid for our work and the products that work creates, and we give that respect to all products to receive that for our own products in the marketplace in return. That’s the norm and it will remain the norm, as piracy fades to first-time government enforcement and punishment. THAT’s what I said.

    if you think this is some small issue the governments shouldn’t be dealing with, I respectfully suggest you are ignorant of the interests government has in the cash exchange for digital goods that industry provides, the cash flow for jobs for the middleclass and the revenue the taxes create for everyone. They will never let pirates dismantle that system already in place for a thousand years and you know it. Seriously, if you can’t grasp the importance of governments investment in that system of fair commerce, no need to explain it further here.

    Oh, and search “music touring profitability” and understand how bullshit your uneducated contentions about touring are. Over 9 out of 10 tours still lose money. Recorded music used to pay for touring, now it’s the other way around. Get ready for $500 concert tickets. Just another “improvement” to the glorious innovation mentioned by Mr. Anonymous.

  • zarathustra

    As an editor I received free NZBs, but after retiring (I just didn’t have the hours to put in…), had to start paying a monthly sub – or no more NZBs. I then made a one-off ‘donation’ to NZBMatrix, & now get them all _entirely
    free_ – w00h00! Lovin’ my ‘Matrix!

    Good luck, Caesium & the guys @ Newzbin. Nice crew…

  • Anonymous

    Watch me demolish Reasoned Mind’s epic dissertation on human nature in 20 words:

    Music, movies, games, and software have all been free for years now, but that doesn’t stop people from buying them.

    BOOM! HEADSHOT

    Your argument is stone dead. How much time did you spend on it? It must have been alot. It was really passionate, too. Did you shed tears while writing it? I bet you did. I almost feel bad about killing it. :(

    A very big part of human nature – one that you carefully ignore because it tears apart your propaganda – is to support the people we like.

    It doesn’t matter if you can obtain somebody’s music, or game, or movie for free. If you like them, then you support them.

    That’s the reason why Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails were able to give their music away for free and yet still make insane gobs of money. A lot of people like them.

    That’s the reason why all across filesharing sites, including this one, people are pledging to buy Mass Effect 2 even after downloading it for free. Because ME2 makes them like Bioware, and liking Bioware makes them want to support it. Incidentally, ME2 has sold 2,000,000 copies in a single week.

    Finally, that’s the reason why your doomsday prophesy that filesharing will destroy the economy of entire nations and lay waste to the creative industry has never come to fruition despite the hundreds of times you’ve insisted that it’s just around the corner(any day now!).

    A world without copyright doesn’t mean that everything will be taken for free without supporting the workers. How do I know that? Because we already LIVE IN A WORLD WITHOUT COPYRIGHT, and lo, the workers continue to be supported.

    Why? How is this phenomonon possible? Because it’s in our human nature to support the people we like. It bears repeating. Whether we can get a product for free or not doesn’t factor into the equation of whether or not we compensate the workers for it. The main factor is, do we like them?

    But let’s say you’re right. You aren’t. You’re not even close. But let’s say you are for the sake of example.

    Let’s say pure, unadulterated, disgusting greed is the cornerstone of human nature. Then guess what?

    Under your own logic, the copyright industry still loses. Because filesharing would serve to stoke the endless greed of the masses, and fighting it would be completely futile since greed is our nature and therefore cannot be defeated, according to you. The collective greed of the masses would greatly outweigh the wants and desires of the relatively few copyright industry(and goverment) workers in existence, thus the greedy masses would triumph. Because, as you say, you can’t fight greed and win.

    So the copyright industry loses even according to your own scenario. But you don’t realize it, because you put less thought into writing your drivel than other people do into reading it.

    By the way, please stop pretending the complete failure of the industry and government to combat filesharing for the last decade is really because they haven’t started trying yet.

    It’s beyond sad. Seeing it makes me want to hug you out of pity.

  • Reasoned Mind

    Gee, your reply is so full of lies, distortions and outright fabrications it’s hard to know where to begin. lol Do you ever read the news? Have you ever followed digital industry of any kind? I hate to be the one to break it to you but Radiohead and Reznor were made famous on well over a decade and literally millions of dollars worth of industry promotion. Not piracy. INDUSTRY. They were world famous and well loved because the INDUSTRY marketed them that way. And guess what? Nobody else has been able to replicate their experiment since. Not one. In fact no one of any note or success has even tried since. You fail. Show me where pirates support artists across the board and in similar numbers as industry has in the past and you’ll have something. you can’t and you won’t. Fail.

    Your contention that pirates support workers is a flat out lie. The definition of piracy is taking without paying. Recorded music alone is down 10 billion or more a year. Publishing is being ransacked. Newspapers are being exploited for free. Pirates are stealing everything they can get their greedy hands on. You think perhaps the hoards of middle class music workers laid off because of this missing money just might be connected to that 10 billion lost each year? The MUSIC keeps being downloaded, right? It’s just that 95% of the time NOBODY actually pays for it anymore.
    You are a liar top to bottom.

    In FACT game makers have been so decimated the PC hardly even gets written for anymore, THAT’s how WELL pirates support the GAME workers, and CONSOLE is moving to online verification just to PLAY. Do you know ANYTHING about this? Pirates have been destroying gaming for years and every month they try to come up with SOME OTHER WAY to stop you from pirating to get money back into development. And you say you support game writers? Lies.

    But the best part is that we live in a world without copyright. Yeah, tell that to 95% of the planet and they’ll laugh in your uneducated face. Funny thing is, even just signing with a label remains the holy grail of recorded music even after a decade and why? Because pirates pay them SO WELL for their music they have to sell their clothing and cars and empty wine bottles to survive. And you call yourselves “fans.” Right. If you offered a true support and a workable model legions of musicians from all over the world would be FLOCKING to the piracy model, but the truth is, the vast majority of musicians sit and wait knowing that government will give their products better protections and the industry STILL pays them more than pirates ever did. Ever wonder why your wonderful piracy model hasn’t EXPLODED with success from artists of all walks of life? Who can you name? 8 or 10 artists in a DECADE? Barely? Lies, all.

    They expect to be paid if you take their stuff and you don’t and the revenue figures don’t lie. But you certainly do.

    And another lie: In fact, the government hasn’t even started yet. Only private industry has. But the ACTA is coming and soon enough they’ll be licenses for network access. Keep up this shit and they’ll be so up our asses in a few more years we won’t be able to breathe online. And history will know why, too, the selfish, shortsighted greedy morons who caused it all. The pirates, who support our artists so beautifully they have to sell their clothing now to eat.

    http://www.prisonplanet.com/enemies-of-free-speech-call-for-internet-licensing.html

  • Ninja

    “Over 9 out of 10 tours still lose money.”

    O rly? So they sing on the stages because they are altruist? So Nightwish, kind of a niche group, went to Latin America touring because they loved the warm weather? I mean, if you spend sometime researching you’ll notice they went on more than one city (or more than 1 day in the same city) in the largest countries and even returned twice to Brazil. Seriously, in which world do you live?

    I must apologize if I did interpret your comments in a worse way than they already seem to point but #83 pretty much owned you again.

    Piracy is going around for years now and yet ppl buy stuff. Obviously there are the minority that gives a sh** about supporting the good works. But they probably give a sh** about kids dieing of starvation too. Exceptions.

    You know when ppl won’t buy the original? When they buy physical illegal copies on the streets. Because they feel they already paid for it. This is wrong. This is what should be fought, not file sharing.

    Man, Mr Anonymous is my new idol. HS with added brain spilling ;D

  • Bullzeye

    “In FACT game makers have been so decimated the PC hardly even gets written for anymore”

    Looks like (Un)Reasoned Mind is the one posting lies.

  • Ninja

    “The definition of piracy is taking without paying.”

    Fail RM, fail. Again you label the majority for the actions of the minority. You fail. And the word pirate has been adopted by file sharers as a symbol of resistance against that generalization.

    “It’s just that 95% of the time NOBODY actually pays for it anymore.”

    Proof RM, proof. And if many don’t pay even willing then it’s time for you guys to review your prices, availability of the content and practices. Suing ppl won’t make others willing to pay.

    “Newspapers are being exploited for free.”

    Yeah, but I’d pay for a subscription of serious news sources such as IHT, BBC and others. They need to adapt, if they offer resources like podcasts and videos for free I’ll gladly accept. But I’ll also pay if they want to charge for quality service. And sane prices obviously.

    “In FACT game makers have been so decimated the PC hardly even gets written for anymore…”

    Consoles are modded and they still produce games. But the gaming industry is too full of itself charging $60 for games that are barely worth $5. If you want to use pre-baked structures without adding any bit of effort and time you are bound to get low revenues.

    “CONSOLE is moving to online verification just to PLAY”

    That can be fixed. Even if takes some time.

    “Pirates have been destroying gaming for years and every month they try to come up with SOME OTHER WAY to stop you from pirating to get money back into development. And you say you support game writers? Lies.”

    The gaming industry with their shitty releases has been destroying my will to play games for years. Lucky me there are good Board games out there. For free online. But I still buy them ;D

    “Because pirates pay them SO WELL for their music they have to sell their clothing and cars and empty wine bottles to survive. ”

    You lie. I know some artists and they play on bars and stuff to survive. If ppl ask for them to return because they played well then they usually get an extra. Michael Jackson is not a good example of artists that had financial issues due to piracy ;D

    “..legions of musicians from all over the world would be FLOCKING to the piracy model, but the truth is, the vast majority of musicians sit and wait..”

    Lies. Why would artists form a coalition against the big labels then? I’m waiting for when I get a job to give $5 for RedNex. Care to explain why I’d pay for music they made available on TPB?

    “…pays them more than pirates ever did…”

    Not what we’ve been reading lately. Maybe it’s true for the blockbusters…

    “Ever wonder why your wonderful piracy model hasn’t EXPLODED with success from artists of all walks of life? Who can you name? 8 or 10 artists in a DECADE? Barely? Lies, all.”

    Massive misleading propaganda from the companies, as if artists couldn’t live without them. Indeed we are living a transition period. Not even the artists who embraced file sharing know what’ll happen. But we need more propaganda pro file sharing and pro supporting the works you liked.

    “Keep up this shit and they’ll be so up our asses in a few more years we won’t be able to breathe online.”

    Not really. Governments moved services online. They can’t cut access like it was nothing. There’s a limit to how much you can squeeze. China might be slightly successful but they started early to censor and oppress ppl – and even though there are valiant resistances.

    “And history will know why, too, the selfish, shortsighted greedy morons who caused it all.”

    Greedy are your bosses. Get out of your little world and notice that it’s not all about getting everything for free. Once you realize that and provide non biased and reliable proof for your arguments we can discuss properly. From my own experience, ppl around me are willing to pay for good content. The ones that aren’t go far enough to buy stuff on the streets so they can hardly be called file sharers. Those would be the crimes you should be after… But giving money to organized crime is not nearly as bad as downloading to check and then buying what is worth afterwards. O wait, the media industry is composed of organized criminals that go as low as to blacklist ppl and threaten deceased ppl, mothers and children….

  • Ninja

    Oh, enough feeding the troll.

    I’m not familiar with nzbs, where are the files stored? In the server you access?

  • Think about it

    @ 65 Feb 01, 2010 at 02:27 by Reasoned Mind

    As they say, ‘epic fail.’ Mannequin Men is not even available via bittorrent. I’ve always said that I think this supposed ‘piracy’ was just a fallacy in order to shut down the free distribution channels and you have linked to proof of this. Maybe you should choose proof that doesn’t pove you wrong.

    You continue with your false accusations and off topic posts. Why not limit your comments to Newzbin’s case or at the very least how indexers are/will be affected?

    @ everyone else

    This case does show that MAFIAA knows about newsgroups as well. This doesn’t bode well for Usenet services, but the ruling should apply more to indexers in general regardless of type.

  • Reasoned Mind

    Likely we can agree there are countless things that CAN be done in this world but aren’t for a wide variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s as basic as the classic golden rule, we do unto others so we may have the same respect for ourselves. In other cases it’s adult emotional maturity or a sense of propriety increasingly scarce in pirate culture. Others may place boundaries on their choices and behaviors for the altruistic reasons of giving for the greater good. Or we might choose not to do something we can do because our rules of civilization, the law, say we should not. When implemented well, law offers penalties for making a selfish choice that disregards the legal rights of others.

    I think I understand that you believe your act of piracy—for all the incredible damage done to regular families and digital workers these past 10 years—is some sort of noble act designed to harm the corporations who hire and encourage these workers. But these corporations do enormous good, too, and have historically created the finest catalog in entertainment the world has ever known. Say what you wish about the entertainment industries, they are and still remain the deep envy of the rest of the world, and with recent blockbusters like Avatar continue to easily maintain their artistic supremacy.

    Still, you have every right–and I am a proud supporter of your right–NOT to purchase nor partake in their goods. A free and balanced market has always and will continue to embody the very fair, very simple idea that the creator sets the price and the consumer can take it or leave it. Those are your fair choices. Take it and pay what they ask, or leave it an let the company suffer the consequences of low sales rates.

    Naturally, taking it but without paying for it was never, and is still not, a reasonable, moral or legal response in the marketplace. Complaining that games cost too much, for instance, may or may not be true but is ultimately irrelevant. The vast majority of gamers have never written a game, for instance, and have no idea the accumulated costs in the concept, writing millions of lines of code, production, packaging, marketing, insurance, distribution, taxes and eventual pricing of their products. A business that is unprofitable will not survive. Piracy does serious damage to game writers. Still, you have every right to read the reviews, make a decision, buy or not. But you have no free copy rights, no try before you buy, no rights to distribution, no rights to “share” a product that is properly and legally purchased.

    You may also believe that “progress” can be a synonym for your digital theft, or that market destruction using illegal means should be left unaddresssed just because you say so. You’d be wrong. You’d be shortsighted, you’d be selfish beyond common sense, you’d also, not incidentally, be compelling a legal push back that is correct in its intent even as it is likely to be draconian in its application. What we as a society will lose to your activities is profound, and I think everyone in this issue knows this now. Still, you persist on some warped idea of “freedom”, freedom to take without paying the worker. It’s mindless. It’s never been adequately explained without revealing the hypocrisy of its ideological underpinnings. It’s all about free stuff.

    Certainly intelligent pirates know that a legal pushback is entirely of their own making. You don’t appear to care what your actions will compel. Simply leaving the products unpurchased and unused is something a government can do absolutely nothing about, nor should they in my view. But “taking without paying”, “trying before you buy”, “sharing with your friends” any illegal act that disregards creators rights and the fundamental premise of legal copyright is a blatantly illegal choice guaranteed to compel significant losses in freedom and privacy and yet despite knowing there are legal paths to achieve your corporate destruction goals, you continue unlawfully, while insisting disingenuously that it’s “not about getting free stuff.” It’s the single most revealing and cowardly thing you do.

    Your civil disobedience is ALWAYS inherently about getting a free copy of something or other, and damaging the worker, and lawmakers see you clearly. You are not passing in the marketplace legally to send a message to the industries. You are taking free stuff every time. It’s plain to anyone on the scene today.

    So I’ll grant you your civil disobedience if you believe you are entitled to free copies of everything without payment to the workers who created it, but only if you grant me similar rights to address my legislators with a very just and evenhanded assessment of what you are doing within the current privacy of your internet conection.

    And I will work to protect the fair pay-for-possession model that has served both consumer and creator very well for hundreds of years. I will seek deeper methods of warrantless surveillance on your behavior, I will ask for steamlined avenues to more immediate punishment that disregard “innocent until proven guilty” on the same civil infraction basis just as you disregard the laws, too.

    I will push relentlessly seeking ways to remove you from this network we all love and that you abuse cowardly in hiding. And I will lobby tirelessly my government, every private citizen and the creators alike for the creation of the same kind of personal accountability online as we expect of the world’s citizens offline, until such time that new laws are crafted and implemented that strip you of your anonymity and make your life as transparently uncomfortable online as humanly possible. And I will take sincere satisfaction in bringing powerful punishments to you—the greatest that the law will ever allow– that reflect the decade of damage to workers that you have already done.

    I will work with my representatives in my government to leave an imprint on your life so painful and so damaging and so permanent that your potentials in life are badly compromised by your very own unlawful choices, and serve as a powerful example to others who would strip creators of their just and natural rights to proper compensation for the work you took unlawfully from them. And I hope you will spend the rest of your days questioning why you failed to make the clear and easy distinction between free speech, which I heartily endorse, and free merchandise taken in secrecy, which I do not. I hope you also realize that just because technology makes an unlawful act possible, it in no way makes it inevitable, and never did, and never will. There is much we as a society can do, that we do not. With time and limitless perseverance, we will define and codify your “progress” as little more than the digital form of shoplifting it ever was, and you’ll come to wonder why illegally pilfered copies of entertainment products—entertainment, no less, lol— were ever worth the life-changing price you will pay, when all you really had to do to send your message of creator destruction was lawfully pass on the purchase.

  • Pingback: Newzbin Usenet Indexing Trial: Day One | We R Pirates

  • Pingback: Newzbin Usenet Indexing Trial: Day One | Tech Industry News

  • Pingback: Newzbin Usenet Indexing Trial: Day One - P2P Talk?

  • Reasoned Mind

    Likely we can agree there are countless things that CAN’T be done in this world but are for a wide variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s not as basic as the classic golden rule, we do unto others so we may not have the same respect for ourselves. In other cases it’s not adult emotional maturity or not a sense of propriety increasingly abundant in pirate culture. Others may not place boundaries on their choices and behaviors for the altruistic reasons of giving for the greater good. Or we might choose to do something we can do because our rules of civilization, the law, say we should. When implemented poorly, law offers penalties for making a selfish choice that disregards the legal rights of others.

    I don’t think I understand that you believe your act of piracy-for all the incredible damage done to regular families and digital workers these past 10 years-is some sort of noble act designed to harm the corporations who hire and encourage these workers. But these corporations don’t do enormous good, too, and have historically not created the finest catalog in entertainment the world has ever known. Say what you wish about the entertainment industries, they aren’tthe deep envy of the rest of the world, and with recent blockbusters like Avatar don’t continue to easily maintain an artistic supremacy.

    Still, you have no right–and I am a not proud supporter of your right– to purchase nor partake in their goods. A free and balanced market has never and will never continue to embody the very fair, very simple idea that the creator sets the price and the consumer can take it or leave it. Those are NOT your fair choices. Take it and don’t pay what they ask, or leave it an let the company suffer the consequences of low sales rates.

    Naturally, taking it but without paying for it was always, and is still , a reasonable, moral or legal response in the marketplace. Complaining that games cost too little, for instance, may or may not be true but is ultimately irrelevant. The vast majority of gamers have never written a game, for instance, and have an idea the accumulated costs in the concept, writing millions of lines of code, production, packaging, marketing, insurance, distribution, taxes and eventual pricing of their products. A business that is profitable will not survive for long. Piracy does NOT do serious damage to game writers. Still, you have every right to read the reviews, make a decision, buy or not. But you have free copy rights, try before you buy, rights to distribution, rights to “share” a product that is properly and legally purchased.

    You may also NOT believe that “progress” can be a synonym for your digital theft, or that market destruction using illegal means should not be left unaddresssed just because you say so. You’d be right. You’d not be shortsighted, you’d not be selfish beyond common sense, you’d also, incidentally, not be compelling a legal push back that is correct in its intent even as it is likely to be draconian in its application. What we as a society will gain to your activities is profound, and I think everyone in this issue knows this now. Still, you should persist on some warped idea of “freedom”, freedom to take without paying the worker. It’s not mindless. It’s never been adequately explained without revealing the hypocrisy of its ideological underpinnings. It’s all about free stuff.

    Certainly intelligent pirates know that a legal pushback is not entirely of their own making. You do appear to care what your actions will compel. Simply leaving the products purchased and used is something a government can do absolutely nothing about, nor should they in my view. But “taking without paying”, “trying before you buy”, “sharing with your friends” any illegal act that disregards creators rights and the fundamental premise of legal copyright is a blatantly legal choice guaranteed to compel significant losses in freedom and privacy and yet despite knowing there are illegal paths to achieve your corporate destruction goals, you continue lawfully, while insisting disingenuously that it’s “about getting free stuff.” It’s the single most revealing and brave thing you do.

    Your civil obedience is NEVER inherently about getting a free copy of something or other, and damaging the worker, and lawmakers see you clearly. You are passing in the marketplace legally to send a message to the industries. You are taking free stuff every time. It’s plain to anyone on the scene today.

    So I’ll grant you your civil obedience if you believe you are entitled to free copies of everything without payment to the workers who created it, but only if you don’t grant me similar rights to address my legislators with a very just and evenhanded assessment of what you are doing within the current privacy of your internet conection.

    And I will not work to protect the fair pay-for-possession model that has served both consumer and creator very well for hundreds of years. I will not seek deeper methods of warrantless surveillance on your behavior, I will not ask for steamlined avenues to more immediate punishment that disregard “innocent until proven guilty” on the same civil infraction basis just as you regard the laws, too.

    I will NOT push relentlessly seeking ways to remove you from this network we all love and that you abuse bravely. And I will not lobby tirelessly my government, every private citizen and the creators alike for the creation of the same kind of personal accountability online as we expect of the world’s citizens offline, until such time that new laws are crafted and implemented that doesn’t strip you of your anonymity and doesn’t make your life as transparently uncomfortable online as humanly possible. And I will not take any satisfaction in bringing powerful punishments to you-the greatest that the law will ever allow– that reflect the decade of damage to workers that you has not been done.

    I will not work with my representatives in my government to leave an imprint on your life that will not be so painful and so damaging and so permanent that your potentials in life are badly compromised by your very own unlawful choices, and serve as a powerful example to others who would strip creators of their just and natural rights to proper compensation for the work you took lawfully from them. And I hope you will spend the rest of your days questioning why you failed to make the clear and easy distinction between free speech, which I heartily endorse, and free merchandise taken in secrecy, which I do. I hope you also realize that just because technology makes an lawful act possible, it in no way makes it inevitable, and never did, and never will. There is much we as a society can do, that we do not. With time and limitless perseverance, we will not define and codify your “progress” as little more than the digital form of shoplifting it never was, and you’ll come to wonder why legally pilfered copies of entertainment products-entertainment, no less, lol- were never worth the life-changing price you will not pay, when all you really had to do to send your message of creator destruction was unlawfully pass on the purchase.

  • blub

    Why don’t you lobby grammar and spelling a bit. While you are at it, please do provide some links to actual data and less paranoid ramblings.

    my 2,5 cents

  • 22nd Century Foxy

    Ok Reasoned Mind that does it. We the public are large in number. Our vote counts for something. It is us who put our govn’t in place in this democratic world. They represent the people and not the industry interests. If we stand united you will disappear into the hole you came from. We can boycott music labels and movies. We can buy music second-hand on eBay. When your industry goes bankrupt then you’ll regret your stance in this matter. You are in the minority in this world. You have a right to your belief, but don’t shove it in everyone’s faces. With the internet people are more aware of what’s going on these days. This copyright copywrong business has split the population in two. Guess which side is losing?

  • Cole

    @Reasoned Mind

    We gotta fight, fight, fight, fight, fight for this right

    We gotta fight, fight, fight, fight, fight for this right

    We gotta fight, fight, fight, fight, fight for this right

    If it’s worth having it’s worth fighting for

  • Cole

    @Reasoned Mind

    Anything that’s worth having

    Is sure enough worth fighting for

    Quitting’s out of the question

    When it gets tough gotta fight some more

  • Pingback: Newzbin Usenet Indexing Trial: Day One « My blog at Servage :)

  • Pingback: Newzbin Usenet Indexing Trial: Day One | InstantIdiocy

  • Pingback: Newzbin Usenet Indexing Trial: Day One – FUCK THE RIAA

  • Pingback: Newzbin Usenet Indexing Trial: Day One @ blog.idtorrent.org

  • goat

    OMG – please say this is not the usenet scence otherwise were in fucking trouble.

  • von

    I agree with the boycott. I just wish we could bring enough people into it to really make them hurt. There is just too much greed in the industry.

  • BTGuard - BitTorrent Anonymously

NewsBits

Even more news...

  • Pirate Bay Founder Gottfrid Svartholm on Freedom of Speech

    Freedom of speech is a highly valued commodity, but should people be allowed to say whatever...

  • Blu-ray Anti-Piracy Tech Stops Discs and Promotes Purchases

    An anti-piracy system present in all official Blu-ray players since 2012 has received a fresh update...

  • Foxtel Breeds Pirates by Locking Up Game of Thrones

    One of the main reasons why people turn to piracy is the lack of legal alternatives....

  • UK Student Admits Breaching Sony Copyrights With Leak of PS3 SDK

    Last year an Internet user known as El Nomeo leaked version 3.70 of Sony’s Playstation3 SDK...

  • Pirates Can Be Identified Despite Sharing IP Addresses, ISP Claims

    Carrier-Grade Network Address Translation is a network mechanism through which many Internet subscribers can share the...

MostDiscussed

Below are TorrentFreak's most discussed articles of the past month. Join the discussion if you like.

CopyQuote

Left Quote

“The Pirate Bay has been one of the most important movements in Sweden for freedom of speech, working against corruption and censorship.

Peter Sunde Left Quote

PopularArticles

A selection of some TorrentFreak's classics dug up from our archives.