Mininova has gone legal!

[Salmon Trout]

The Software - Windows - Other section has 170 torrents which fit on one page, the top one is dated today and the bottom one is dated December 2007!

[Zylstra]

Good for them. 

[Salmon Trout]

It's a good job there aren't any alternatives.

[computeruler]

ya i saw about this yesterday.  I used to love that site..

[Zylstra]

Make a program and you will suddenly understand what those developers feel like whenever someone takes their programs.

[Salmon Trout]

Make a program and you will suddenly understand what those developers feel like whenever someone takes their programs.

 

Oh yes and I hear that Mick Jagger and Bono and Nicole Kidman and all the staff at Microsoft are eating dry crusts and living in cardboard boxes because of file sharing.

 

You raise a straw man. How many solo programmers make a living from selling software, and how many are deprived of that living by filesharers, and how many pirate downloaders would have bought the product?

[Geek-9pm]

Here is the story from PC World.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/183278/torrent_giant_mininova_forced_to_go_legit.html

[JJ 3000]

Taking one site down will not make any difference. People will just go somewhere else for their torrents.

For every one that they shut down two new ones will pop up to fill the void. This is a losing battle on the side of the copyright holders. (kind of like drug prohibition in America).

Besides, these sites are providing links to torrents, not the actual files themselves. I don't see how they could be held liable. After all, the links are already out there, they just put them together in a large database that's easily accessible. The bottom line is that the information is already out there in cyberspace and there is no way to reel it back in. The internet has become way too massive to even attempt something like that.

[Salmon Trout]

People will just go somewhere else for their torrents. [...] The internet has become way too massive to even attempt something like that

I was reading an article in a respectable UK newspaper (The Guardian) about the "dark net" which is said to be 500 times larger than the net everybody thinks of as "the Internet". It gave details of software tools such as Freenet.

[JJ 3000]

So are we communicating over this "dark net" now... err how does that work? Were they just alluding to the immense size of the internet and how it is pervasive in almost all communications? Or is this "dark net" something more sinister?

It certainly sounds cool. (way better than telnet)

[Salmon Trout]

Also called "Deep Net"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/26/dark-side-internet-freenet

"The darkweb"; "the deep web"; beneath "the surface web" – the metaphors alone make the internet feel suddenly more unfathomable and mysterious. Other terms circulate among those in the know: "darknet", "invisible web", "dark address space", "murky address space", "dirty address space". Not all these phrases mean the same thing. While a "darknet" is an online network such as Freenet that is concealed from non-users, with all the potential for transgressive behaviour that implies, much of "the deep web", spooky as it sounds, consists of unremarkable consumer and research data that is beyond the reach of search engines. "Dark address space" often refers to internet addresses that, for purely technical reasons, have simply stopped working.

And yet, in a sense, they are all part of the same picture: beyond the confines of most people's online lives, there is a vast other internet out there, used by millions but largely ignored by the media and properly understood by only a few computer scientists. How was it created? What exactly happens in it? And does it represent the future of life online or the past?

Michael K Bergman, an American academic and entrepreneur, is one of the foremost authorities on this other internet. In the late 90s he undertook research to try to gauge its scale. "I remember saying to my staff, 'It's probably two or three times bigger than the regular web,"' he remembers. "But the vastness of the deep web . . . completely took my breath away. We kept turning over rocks and discovering things."

In 2001 he published a paper on the deep web that is still regularly cited today. "The deep web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined world wide web," he wrote. "The deep web is the fastest growing category of new information on the internet … The value of deep web content is immeasurable … internet searches are searching only 0.03% … of the [total web] pages available."

[Salmon Trout]

Make a program and you will suddenly understand what those developers feel like whenever someone takes their programs.

The most effective anti-piracy software development strategy is the simplest one of all:

   1. Have a great freaking product.
   2. Charge a fair price for it.

[Geek-9pm]

If there is that must dark, evil, nasty, ugly things out there. what will the future bring? It is possible to stop it using technology that already exists..
A few dyers ago, there was no internet. 
The day may come when the entire internet will die.

[Helpmeh]

But in its place shall be HIVEMIND.

[Google]

Zysltra, heard of Cory Doctorow?

As Woody Guthrie wrote:
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of
Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and
anybody caught singin’ it without our permission,
will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we
don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it.
Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we
wanted to do.”

Why am I doing this? Because my problem isn’t
piracy, it’s obscurity (thanks, @timoreilly for this
awesome aphorism). Because free ebooks sell
print books. Because I copied my *censored* off when I
was 17 and grew up to spend practically every
discretionary cent I have on books when I became
an adult. Because I can’t stop you from sharing it
(zeroes and ones aren’t ever going to get harder to
copy); and because readers have shared the books
they loved forever; so I might as well enlist you to
the cause.
I have always dreamt of writing sf novels, since I
was six years old. Now I do it. It is a goddamned
dream come true, like growing up to be a cowboy
or an astronaut, except that you don’t get
oppressed by ranchers or stuck on the launchpad in
an adult diaper for 28 hours at a stretch. The idea
that I’d get dyspeptic over people—readers
celebrating what I write is goddamned bizarre
So, download this book.

You are free:
to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the
work
to Remix — to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
Attribution — You must attribute the work in the
manner specified by the author or licensor (but not
in any way that suggests that they endorse you or
your use of the work).
Noncommercial — You may not use this work for
commercial purposes.
Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build
upon this work, you may distribute the resulting
work only under the same or similar license to this
one.
With the understanding that:
Waiver — Any of the above conditions can be
waived if you get permission from the copyright
holder. Other Rights — In no way are any of the
following rights affected by the license: Your fair
dealing or fair use rights; The author’s moral
rights; Rights other persons may have either in the
work itself or in how the work is used, such as
publicity or privacy rights. Notice — For any
reuse or distribution, you must make clear to
others the license terms of this work.

Should be the same with anything.. software too. +movies...