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Piracy

BTJunkie No More? 328

First time accepted submitter AWESOM-O 4k writes "It seems like the popular file sharing site BTJunkie.org is gone. On btjunkie.org you are greeted with the following: '2005 — 2012 This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we've decided to voluntarily shut down. We've been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it's time to move on. It's been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best! '"
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BTJunkie No More?

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  • who? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Osgeld ( 1900440 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:20AM (#38938929)

    n/t

  • by multiben ( 1916126 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:20AM (#38938931)
    Communicate. Yes. That's what it was used for.
    • by spikestabber ( 644578 ) <spike@spykes. n e t> on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:23AM (#38938943) Homepage
      Unlocking of our excessively locked up culture perhaps?
      • by DAldredge ( 2353 ) <SlashdotEmail@GMail.Com> on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:38AM (#38939015) Journal
        Something you can buy for little money from many different stores doesn't exactly count as being locked up.
        • by king neckbeard ( 1801738 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:45AM (#38939051)
          It's a very high price compared to cost of distribution, and copyright has gone far beyond the scope required for it's nominal purpose of promoting literary progress. Also, there are lots of things that are out of print, but copyright still covers that.
          • by Curunir_wolf ( 588405 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:57AM (#38939097) Homepage Journal

            It's a very high price compared to cost of distribution, and copyright has gone far beyond the scope required for it's nominal purpose of promoting literary progress. Also, there are lots of things that are out of print, but copyright still covers that.

            I don't know about cost - if you have a monopoly on a unique work (regardless of how that monopoly is secured), then you have a right to charge whatever you want. I agree with you that copyright has gone too far in favor of corporate rights with excessively long time periods and too unbalanced in policy. But I also think you would have difficulty defending BTJunkie as a place to find "out of print" copyrighted works.

            • by sjames ( 1099 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @02:06AM (#38939425) Homepage Journal

              I don't know about cost - if you have a monopoly on a unique work (regardless of how that monopoly is secured), then you have a right to charge whatever you want.

              Given that it flies in the face of the intended purpose of copyright, it's an issue that should be addressed. The people aren't obligated to offer copyright at all, the Constitution merely permits it, and then only for the promotion of science and useful arts.

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by Anonymous Coward

              I also think you would have difficulty defending BTJunkie as a place to find "out of print" copyrighted works.

              Actually Bittorrent sites are a great place to find scans of all kinds of out of print gaming books.

              The old Battletech stuff, Rolemaster, previous editions of D&D, previous editions of Warhammer/40k, Paranoia, and other lesser known settings, campaigns and source books, scenarios and what not that appeared in magazines...

              All out of print. All under copyright. Some of it notoriously difficult to

              • Just to back up your argument: a little while ago I wanted to play Mechwarrior 3 again. I have no working CD of it. Guess what my only option was? ... Hell, when I bought Dungeon Keeper 2, the original CD started getting all weird on me after maybe a year. So, what... am I supposed to stop playing the games I love when they're past their expiration date, maybe buy some new shitty shovelware to amuse myself until the next Skyrim-minus-DRM thing comes out?

                Oh wait. Wait. That is EXACTLY what they want me to do

                • by nebular ( 76369 )

                  What's interesting is that no one here has the same argument for books. I have paperbacks that are falling apart. My only option is to buy another copy.

                  Just because you bought it before doesn't mean you have it in perpetuity. If you don't maintain your copy you lose it. What is bad is restrictive DRM keeping you from backing up

          • by spikestabber ( 644578 ) <spike@spykes. n e t> on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:58AM (#38939109) Homepage
            Theres way too much out of print stuff that you cannot find legally unless you're lucky enough to track it down used....
            I would say at least HALF of the original NES library of games are like this as a quick example....
            And for arcade game PCB's, then that number is off the charts....
            Most of our past culture would be inaccessible if it weren't for the internet.
          • by bmo ( 77928 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @01:50AM (#38939347)

            >Also, there are lots of things that are out of print, but copyright still covers that.

            This is what the real problem is with current copyright law. Stuff that would go to the public domain is simply locked up, never to be seen again.

            There is no balance anymore between the right to culture and the right to earn a living. The right to culture has been obliterated. Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that yes, Congress *can* pass copyright laws that rip culture out of the public domain.

            The powers that be are now stealing from the public, far more so than they are losing to "piracy."

            --
            BMO

            • by Jane Q. Public ( 1010737 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @04:26AM (#38939869)

              "Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that yes, Congress *can* pass copyright laws that rip culture out of the public domain."

              Bravo.

              I propose that we limit not just the Executive and Legislative branches back to their original Constitutional limits, but also the Judicial, so they can't keep ruling themselves more and more power.

              And yes, they were supposed to have limits. As historical evidence, see Madison's Report of 1800.

        • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @01:05AM (#38939131)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • by thomst ( 1640045 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @05:32AM (#38940059) Homepage

            hairyfeet blathered:

            Except you can't use "I have a dream" or "Ask not what your country can do for you" in a video without cutting a big fat check. PBS had a great special years ago on the civil rights movement...yet you can't see it, why? because its all behind paywalls now. This isn't just about the latest titney spears pop song you know, this is about media cartels locking the entire history of modern society behind paywalls. Nearly every spoken word of any note is now behind a paywall and all for Walt Disney, a man whose been dead longer than many of us have been alive, so that his first works which were made when planes were made from cloth and antibiotics were but a dream, all so his works can stay behind a paywall.

            This drivel was rated Insightful +5? You have got to be kidding me. Kennedy's inaugural address is available on Youtube [youtube.com]. So is MLK's "I have a dream [youtube.com]" speech. And Kennedy's address to the nation cannot be copyrighted. It's public domain by law.

            You want something to have one of those petitions for on the White House website? demand an end to the sonny Bono act, and demand that copyrights take sane terms again. watch how quickly our media shill of a POTUS tells you to go fuck yourself, he knows whose paying his salary and it AIN'T you. It is time we really start voting third parties across the board, its obvious to anyone with eyes that the two party system is simply no longer functional. We frankly need four five and six parties but lets start with three and work from there. I urge everyone to vote green across the board, they have already made gains in many states, lets give the shills a reason to fear for their jobs again!

            Yep, waste your time petitioning the President to do something he has no power to do. Congress passed the Sonny Bonehead Act, and only Congress has the Constitutional power to repeal it.

            And simply voting Green is an equal waste of time - and your vote. Want to do something that will actually make a difference? Contact your local Green party headquarters, and volunteer to campaign. Then, put your time and effort where your mouth is and actually DO that. Bone up on the talking points for your local Green Party candidates, then go canvass for votes the old-fashioned way: door-to-door. It's not sexy and it's definitely NOT easy, but it wins hearts and minds in a way that posting drivel to /. simply doesn't. That's how the wingnut right took over the Repugnican party back in the Reagan administration, and those inmates have been in charge of that asylum ever since. (Ever wonder why obvious loonballs like Santorum and Gingrinch seem to have such appeal to the Repubs? It's because EVERY state-level Republican central committee is absolutely dominated by "social conservatives" and evangelicals. Reagan got them fired up to do the grass-roots organizing necessary to, for instance, actually field a slate of candidates for local and state Republican central committees - and that gave them control over the party's MONEY and its endorsements at a state level. That's why Schwartzenegger had to run without their endorsement in California's gubernatorial races - because he's a moderate, pro-choice Republican, and the California Republican Central Committee HATED him for it. It's also why Romney is pretending to be a super-conservative right now - because Nixon's advice to Reagan still holds: "Run as hard to the right as you can, until you get the nomination. Then run as hard to the center as you can until the election.")

            But NONE of that will help in the upcoming Presidential election. It's far too little, and far too late. Vote Green, and the Republican party will take over all three branches of government again. Look at how well THAT worked out in 2000 and 2004. Nader voters in Florida handed the 2000 election to Bush - and that got us th

          • by Runaway1956 ( 1322357 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @06:16AM (#38940175) Homepage Journal

            "he knows whose paying his salary and it AIN'T you."

            That merits a minor correction. Yes, it is still us, the little people, who pay all their wages. The problem is, we've overpaid the entertainment industries for so long, that they have amassed some of the biggest fortunes in the world. That money permitted them to draw up laws, which effectively allow them to tax us, so that they can pay those salaries in our place.

            If people would just wake up to the fact that they don't need what Hollywood and the other entertainment cartels have to offer, they could be brought to heel in a few years.

            Black March would be a good start, if enough people get on board. If Black March doesn't get their attention, then maybe we could have a Black Summer, then a Black Autumn, and a Black Winter.

            How many seasons of no sales could those cartels survive?

        • by sjames ( 1099 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @01:48AM (#38939335) Homepage Journal

          Actually, you can't buy it if it's in "the Disney vault" where they use copyright to accomplish nearly the opposite of it's intended function. Especially for works now out of corporate favor.

          Many other works are similarly locked up where they're out of print but still under copyright. In some cases nobody is really sure who to contact even if interested.

        • by jmcvetta ( 153563 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @03:02AM (#38939581)

          for little money

          What are you thinking? The average college kid today has cultural data stored on their computer that would cost tens, in some cases hundreds, of thousands of dollars if licensed (you can't really purchase copyrighted data) at current retail prices.

          In the age of the Free Internet, a backward nobody in any insignificant town has cultural horizons orders of magnitude broader than than those enjoyed in the Bad Old Days by the most privileged record store geeks in the biggest cities. Do you really want to undo that historically unparalleled cultural advance just so a handful of greedy media execs and has-been ex-popstars can continue to cash fat checks?

        • by symbolset ( 646467 ) * on Monday February 06, 2012 @03:27AM (#38939669) Journal

          The right of the common man to appropriate and adapt stories goes back perhaps to the second campfire, if not earlier. The notion that this is something that should be prevented is a rather recent invention. It is also quite absurd since a modern work that isn't derivative of Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy in 420BCE is ridiculously rare and it's well known (and obvious) that Sophocles' work was a fusion of all the trends of popular art of the time - that he condensed everything into three plays is his signal contribution.

          We don't even think about these things much any more, and we should because it has become absurd. That lie your sister told you in an email about her one-night stand gone bad with megafail dweeb photo attached? That email is a creative work of fiction, her own work protected by copyright - and though she owns the rights to the photo megafail dweeb owns the rights to his likeness. Your repost to Facebook or Twitter or Reddit of the attached image (even photoshopped) is a derivative work proscribed by law without permission, and a violation of the law. In reality she's an attention whore and she's hoping you'll leak the megafail dweeb story to get her Facebook friends - but Megafail dweeb still has rights to sue you under the current ridiculous system.

          Modern copyright is saying "here, I have stood on the shoulders of giants as have the 200 generations before me, but my addition to this work is special above all works that came before, and none who come after may stand on my shoulders ever until my work is lost to time. No more art shall pass." It is also saying that all other authors from ages past must be included in the enforced forgettery, whether or not it was their wish. It also means that something as simple as a textbook on mathematics, physics or chemistry published 80 years ago - long since the authors are dead cannot be reproduced to teach our children now even though so little has changed in those arts and sciences that they would still be far more useful works than the crap that passes for primary education today. My own son's high school world history texts omits the inventions of gunpowder, firearms and cannon as forces for social change. His chemistry texts omit so much they may as well be "Alice in Wonderland" - and that's for fear he might use them to discover how to manufacture explosives or drugs. Civics? That's not meaningfully taught at all, as the responsibility of the citizen to correct his government is entirely omitted.

          That's what this is: an establishment of enforced forgettery for the purpose of selling us new lamps as old. The whole thing is a fraud and a theft of our intellectual property. The Commons is a property owned by all and removal of a work from the Commons is a theft of each work from each citizen whether it's sanctioned by the US Supreme Court or not. The extension of copyright is the theft from each citizen the right to read each of the works so stolen from the public domain, whether he would have read the work or not. If an incidence of a work is worth a mere $1, and we are 300 millions, then every single work so stolen is $300 million. For the theft to be a mere Trillion dollars fewer than 4,000 texts must be so stolen. In the aggregate this theft must be many $quadrillion at least and growing every day, and this very post is included in the theft because the presumption it's my property until 80 years after I die (until copyright is extended yet again to forever less one day) prevents others from using it. It beggars belief. The extension of copyright beyond the reasonable 14 year term is a taking from each of us of the millions of works that are rightly our culture. It is wholesale IP theft on the grandest imaginable scale, Piracy institutionalized in law for a privileged few who had the money to buy the law. It's also a way to prevent our children from learning things our great-grandparents knew before they finished primary school. That scares me because it by necessity creates a dead-end know-nothing consumer cultu

        • by Samantha Wright ( 1324923 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @03:51AM (#38939715) Homepage Journal
          Confucius say: man made of straw should not bait flame.
      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Bittorrent is fine, sharing files with your friends is fine, but I'm somehow saddened that slashdot will defend those who profit from it. It's no longer an altruistic activity when someone is making 6-figures a month in banner ads. Honestly.

        These jokers just got out before they got busted, something Megaupload should have likely done with their 8-figure revenue some time ago...

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      Sending information to other people isn't communication?
      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by multiben ( 1916126 )
        A typically pedantic response from a typical pedant with no coherent argument for why copyright material should be shared to millions of other people without the copyright holder's consent.
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          A typical strawman respone from someone with no actual argument. Copyright is an artificial construct whereas communication is human nature.
          • Communication (which is to say, unidirectional data transfer from a non-human entity via a billion-dollar computer network) is human nature!

          • So I don't get your point. Is that artificial constructs are bad and everything natural is good? Clothes are also an artifical construct. Do you wear clothes? Laws, language, money, social mores and on an on are all artificial constructs. The computer you used to post your comment is built on all sorts of artifical constructs. There are very few people who would consider downloading movies from a giant server to be a good example of human communication. I feel sorry for you if you feel that doing so satisfi
          • > Copyright is an artificial construct whereas communication is human nature.

            According to the copyright creation myth, copyright came into existence when free men, who could freely talk and exchange every information freely with each other, agreed that it is better for everyone to allow creators to censor free information exchange of their works in exchange for creating those works and making those works available. That wide and far agreement between free men, that we have to tolerate a bit of culturally

    • by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:33AM (#38938987) Journal

      Communicate. Yes. That's what it was used for.

      When what you're doing is illegal, people are often tempted to cloak it in idealistic terms, i.e. "music wants to be free".

      Note: yes, I know that torrents in and of themselves are useful and not illegal. But come on. We know what the vast majority of stuff that places like BT Junkie link to, and it's not Linux ISO's. It's mainly copyright material.

      • by Totenglocke ( 1291680 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:39AM (#38939025)
        We also know that in the absence of said torrents, people won't start fishing out thousands and thousands of dollars for that software / movie / music - they'll simply not use it at all.
        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by buddyglass ( 925859 )
          Yeah. I think this is wrong. Imagine a magical world where it is literally impossible to get a digital copy of a song or movie without paying for it. You think all these kids with ginormous music collections would go without all their tunes? No. They'd purchase some of it. Now it's certainly reasonable to argue that such a world will never exist, but that's not the same as saying, "If people couldn't get it for free they'd just go without."
          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            You seem to think they don't already purchase some of it.

            I guess they don't, and that means Justin Bieber and the music industry must be robbing banks - where else would they get all their money since nobody's paying them?

            • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

              by buddyglass ( 925859 )
              Where did I say nobody was purchasing content? That's idiotic. My experience with heavy torrent users, though, is that they legitimately purchase very little of the media they consume. They might buy a few songs on iTunes, but you won't catch them buying DVDs or CDs (or renting them, or streaming them).
      • by Elbereth ( 58257 )

        Sharing copyrighted material is not illegal or immoral. Linux and Wikipedia are both copyrighted. If something is not copyrighted, it's public domain. Just because you have permission to distribute something doesn't mean that the author has renounced copyright.

      • by X.25 ( 255792 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:45AM (#38939053)

        When what you're doing is illegal, people are often tempted to cloak it in idealistic terms, i.e. "music wants to be free".

        Yet, 99% of people will see murder as illegal.

        And file sharing of copyrighted material (unlimited good, basically) as legal.

        Do you think people will change their opinion on what is legal/illegal, just because some corrupted cronies pushed the law through?

        • Well, if it's illegal in their country, and they think it's legal, then they would indeed be wrong about that. But whether it's "immoral" or not is a completely different matter.

          • by tftp ( 111690 )

            The government may unleash ridiculous laws upon the citizen. It can force the citizen to obey those laws (or be jailed.) However it cannot make the citizen believe that those laws are fair (short of a massive brainwashing [wikipedia.org].) People are guided by moral norms far more than by laws. People don't even know about most laws; even lawyers can't claim to know them all.

      • by nabsltd ( 1313397 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:58AM (#38939105)

        We know what the vast majority of stuff that places like BT Junkie link to, and it's not Linux ISO's. It's mainly copyright material.

        Same for Google.

        BTJunkie was nothing more than a search engine with a comment and results rating system (not unlike ./). It hosted no torrent files and was not a torrent tracker. You could get almost the same results by entering your query into Google and appending "torrent".

        So, what, exactly, makes a site like BTJunkie "illegal" while Google doing the same thing is OK?

      • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

        damn I knew I shouldnt have downloaded that freebsd iso from torrent =)

    • Before starting up a website, your first question to yourself should be this: "Will my website enable someone to... copy something?"

      If the answer to that question is yes, cease all operations immediately. Copying will bring about the apocalypse.

  • by scottbomb ( 1290580 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:27AM (#38938957) Journal

    WTF? FBI breathing down their neck?

    • Not really, but they did put on a big PR stunt where a big, popular file-sharing site, seemingly out-of-reach on the other side of the world, were shut down and the operators arrested. I'm not convinced that is was anything but a scripted reality show, but it seemed to have convinced the operators of BTJunkie that they should quit while they're ahead.
      • Not really, but [the Feds] did put on a big PR stunt where a big, popular file-sharing site, seemingly out-of-reach on the other side of the world, were shut down and the operators arrested. I'm not convinced that is was anything but a scripted reality show, but it seemed to have convinced the operators of BTJunkie that they should quit while they're ahead.

        Yes indeed, just after the Megaupload circus Btjunkie removed all the latest torrents [yahoo.com] from their home page - it became Google style, with basically just a search box. This was before Rapidshare restricted their functionality. Btjunkie were obviously being very cautious.

  • by Smirker ( 695167 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:27AM (#38938959)
    Publish one last torrent please? I'm sure someone would love to bring it back to life.
  • Not a huge loss (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    To be honest, most of the time, when I was linked to btjunkie, I ended up having to log in to their site only to be sent to a closed tracker where I couldn't log in and get to the torrent. I'm sorry they've had to close, but with DHT and magnet links, I hope that sites like btjunkie will become less and less necessary.
    • ??? you don't have to log into BTJ for anything other then profile management.

  • Best (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wisnoskij ( 1206448 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:36AM (#38939003) Homepage

    Best torrent site ever.
    I don't know if anything new one has come up in the last few years but it is the best torrent site I have ever used.
    Pirate Bay and Demonoid got nothing on btjunkie.
    Or at least they didn't.

    R.I.P old friend, or better yet go all zombie and come back to life.

    • by RobinEggs ( 1453925 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:55AM (#38939089)

      Best torrent site ever. I don't know if anything new one has come up in the last few years but it is the best torrent site I have ever used.

      I can respect your opinion, but nothing will ever match suprnova in my eyes. It didn't necessarily have the best features, but it had that glorious time when it seemed like the entire freaking pirate world (you know, outside of the pirates who actually originate the content and only use private ftp servers) used the same site. I don't think I ever looked for something on suprnova that I didn't find, and I can still remember the amazement of leaving kazaa and seeing a dozen torrents with tens of thousands of people a piece the week Doom 3 came out. No scrounging around in some shitty internal search engine or anything; just out there, on a regular searchable website like God intended.

      Man, I'm getting all misty eyed.

  • Crickets (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RobinEggs ( 1453925 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:47AM (#38939061)
    I sincerely don't mean to be a dick, but was btjunkie ever that good? Or that relevant? I tried to make serious use of it around 2009, and I don't remember being impressed. Nor was I disgusted. It was just another site. I moved on pretty quickly

    The comment features and such were better than average, I suppose, but the time for public search engines passed years ago. There are so many private trackers with open signups. So many wonderlands where all of the comments are in comprehensible English and your download takes off immediately instead of slooowwwly ramping up.

    So I guess I don't miss it, and don't recall that it was ever a big deal. But maybe I'm wrong?
    • by Zouden ( 232738 )

      Yes, it was that good - BTJunkie had a much larger index than any other site because it indexed private trackers (they appeared with a lock icon, and a portal page let you log in and get the torrent from those sites). Even excluding the private torrents it had a bigger selection than other sites such as Mininova or TPB.

    • Well, it was my experience that if you couldn't find a link on BTJunkie, you couldn't find that torrent anywhere.
  • by EmperorOfCanada ( 1332175 ) on Monday February 06, 2012 @01:30AM (#38939247)
    Copyright does need to change somewhat. A key to human success is where one person invents something cool and others build on that in an endless chain. I think we do need copyright to prevent a publishing company from stealing a book from an author and printing away or a Chinese company taking that same book and flooding the market with knockoffs. But it has gone too far where a modern musician can't play with some distinctive riffs from a 40 year old Beatles song without being in the center of a lawyer pile-up.

    Many of Gutenberg's first bibles were burned as work of the devil. I suspect that this was the Church not liking their loss of bible creation control. I doubt that any of the upset priests thought the devil had anything to do with their printing.

...though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end. -- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War"

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