IsoHunt Launches Unofficial KAT Mirror 66
An anonymous reader writes: Torrent site isoHunt appears to have unofficially resurrected KickassTorrents (also known as Kickass Torrents or just KAT) at kickasstorrents.website. It might look like the original KAT site, which went down yesterday after alleged founder Artem Vaulin was arrested, but upon closer inspection it's simply a basic mirror. The isoHunt team tells me the KAT mirror is hosting files from the last year to year-and-a-half. So no, not everything is available. Furthermore, there is no forum, no community, and no support. And, you shouldn't get too attached, the administrators warn. Disclaimer: Slashdot doesn't necessarily condone piracy -- at least, in most cases.
I will soon mirror rnd 30 year old GeoCities sites (Score:1)
So, someone mirrors an out of date torrent site (out of date by a year and a half??? and this is Slashdot frontpage news?
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No, you misread the summary. They are offering content FROM the last year and a half.
Slashdot should condone piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer: Slashdot doesn't condone piracy.
Why not? Everyone should condone "piracy." Piracy enriches our lives and our culture. Copying brings us more of the things we love. [youtube.com] The only thing that shouldn't be condoned is using smear words like "piracy" [gnu.org] to refer to a basic decent act of human behavior.
Re:Slashdot should condone piracy (Score:4, Insightful)
DRM is also economic warfare. Piracy and DRM balance each other out. The more aggressive one got, so did the other. The concept of IP is imaginary, and as a result, often abused. Nowadays, SaaS is the result and is something we're all going to regret in the long run
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You know what enriches our lives even more? High quality cultural work, which only gets created when people can live from it. If you take away copyright law, you take away the ability for content creators to live from their creations. Yes, maybe there will be some famous hyped youtube stars who can afford thanks to lots of patreon donors. But for most artists, a world without copyright would be totally disastrous. It is already now very easy for artists to fall into poverty, with copyright gone, it will be
Re:Slashdot should condone piracy (Score:4, Interesting)
This line of reasoning is based on the false notion that the only way for people to be paid for creative works is through copyright. This is absolutely not the case and there are many examples of alternative business models that don't rely on copyright. MMORPG's can earn money because pirating the client game code doesn't get you an account or a server to play on. Almost anything that was made through crowd funding doesn't need copyright because all of the compensation is provided upfront before the work is even created. Downloading songs is no substitute for going to a live concert.
Not to mention there are likely thousands of un-thought-of models, products, and creative services which have yet to be tried that would not require copyright.
Re:Slashdot should condone piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
Not all 'high quality cultural work' is created to sell as a source of income. There are some forms of media that cost too much to be produced any other way, like movies or TV series. But the cost of producing music is so low that many amateurs now produce material just as good as any professional purely as a hobby or for the recognition. Open-source software also thrives, and most of the developers for that are either enthusiasts, or working on behalf of corporate users of the software that need to improve it for their own purposes.
It could even be argued that for-profit does not produce very good cultural works, because it leads to compromising artistic values in the interests of mass appeal. Hollywood might be taking in the money, but their films are all starting to look very similar now - and how many pop songs are love odes to an unnamed person?
Re: Slashdot should condone piracy (Score:1)
Yeah! Elvis and all his other dead culture producing friends need to protect that steady revenue stream... Especially since that money flow go people who deserve it.
It is also beautiful that some people (culture producers) dont have to work in order to survive. Write one song, release it, never ever work again. On top of that, some other dudes in suits will also benefit from it without adding value. Its magic!
But the absolutely best thing must be software patents like one-click-shop. It is a gift of protect
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Bring up that argument again when Star Wars starts making a profit. Do you realize that including all the movies, toys, books, tv shows, DVDs, etc... they haven't made a single penny in profits yet? Oh, and look into why Hollywood exists. They started on the east cost then moved to the west cost to avoid copyright laws. The entire media industry is built on copyright infringement. There was no such thing as copyright in Shakespeare's time. Do you really believe a single story should be able to support
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Is there a model of copyright similar to kickstarter where I can produce something and charge for it, and when I make X amount of dollars for it it gets released as open source or creative commons.
As the content author, it would cover costs and maybe give me some reward if it is worthy, it would give people willing to pay more a first crack at my content. Eventually it will get pirated anyway but if it ends up in creative commons or similar anyone can get it.
The theory is that if my work is recognized as g
Re:Slashdot should condone piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
So why not encourage GPL violators ("pirates" too)? Instead we seem to cheer whenever we find a GPL violator.
Yes, violating the GPL is copyright infringement, aka piracy. (You don't have to agree to the GPL, but if you don't, it falls back to the "All Rights Reserved" copyright. So if you're distributing binaries without source you're violating basic copyright law).
You really cannot have it both ways - if you want to encourage piracy, then you encourage people (and companies) to violate the GPL by extension.
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Yes they can.
Their whole position is based on whatever benefits them at the moment. Nothing more.
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The GPL encourages copying.
The only people who "pirate" GPL'ed works are people who dont want to share.
/. should encourage sharing (Score:5, Insightful)
First, we should understand what the propagandistic term "piracy" really means [gnu.org] and understand that meaning as separate from sharing—a friendly, neighborly thing to do. As the GNU Project points out in it's list of terms to avoid on "theft [gnu.org]": "In general, laws don't define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice. If the laws (the implementation) don't fit our ideas of right and wrong (the spec), the laws are what should change. A US judge, presiding over a trial for copyright infringement, recognized that "piracy" and "theft" are smear-words.". This difference gets to the heart of the problem in your point—you're conflating the legal with the ethical and then trying to get others to view all sharing as copyright infringement and all copyright infringement as equivalent because the law frames things in that way.
We should recognize that the terms of the licenses involved between, say, the GNU General Public License (GPL) and a typical Hollywood movie, are radically different when it comes to doing what friends do: share. One can and should share copies of GPL'd programs. It's easy to do, the GPL is easy to comply with simply by also sharing a copy of the complete corresponding source code of the program at the same time as one shares the binary. By contrast, other famously shared copyrighted items (such as most Hollywood movies) aren't legal to share even if done non-commercially and verbatim. So doing the thing that comes naturally with friends, non-commercial and verbatim sharing, is likely not allowed by that movie's license.
Since you mention the GPL, a free software license written by Richard Stallman, this is somewhat akin to what Stallman describes in his talks about the freedoms of free software specifically freedom #2: the freedom to help your neighbour. That's the freedom to make copies and distribute them to others, when you wish. This comes from a 2006-03-09 talk [fsfe.org] and you can see how the consideration here is akin to the dilemma one faces should a friend ask for a copy of a Hollywood movie:
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Did you even read the link? Apparently not, so I'll post it here for you, save you a click:
"Publishers often refer to copying they don't approve of as âoepiracy.â In this way, they imply that it is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them. Based on such propaganda, they have procured laws in most of the world to forbid copying in most (or sometimes all) circumstances. (They are still pressuring to make these prohibitions more complete.)
I
Sure (Score:1)
"Slashdot doesn't condone piracy."
Sure..wink, wink, msg rcvd
Disclaimer: Slashdot doesn't condone piracy. (Score:1)
How one sentence can illustrate the sad state of affairs.
Don't forget to report you do not condone terrorist attacks at the next bombing, or racism when the next white cop shoots a black man.
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You forgot the next time a black man shoots a kid.
Slashdot doesn't condone piracy (Score:1)
Disclaimer: Slashdot doesn't condone piracy.
But we clearly facilitate and encourage it.
You can't ban the idea (Score:2, Interesting)
I have never heard of Kickass Torrent in the past. Ever. Now I will be very curious just to see on what have they got.
Now, this attempt to arrest an individual who is hosting a server which has url information reminds me very much of recent LEO work in Orlando Disney park, after a 2 year old was snatched by the alligators.
It was surprising to see when two days after the accident the local police reported that they, the police officers, have "identified" the "guilty" alligator and "put him down". http://www [people.com]
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"just hosting url information" *AND* having ~20 million euro in accounts with his name on them.
See also the TVShack guy. It was ignorable gray area until someone figured out how much money he was making, then he was public enemy number 1.
We need a better solution. (Score:1)
However mild the inconvenience, Government lead shutting down torrent sites and IPS blocking of torrent sites is becoming more prevalent. We need a genuine dark net where nothing is centralised and everything is distributed to work around this Government interference. It is our duty to leave our children a network without borders, with the resilience to withstand censorship and snooping.
Disclaimer: Slashdot doesn't condone piracy. (Score:2, Insightful)
What's next?
This election is being contested by the most unpopular candidates ever. Disclaimer: We are pro democracy
Current petroleum usage is leading us to a point of no return wrt climate change. Disclaimer: We do not condone pro nuclear groups.
Malware rampant across all major operating systems. Disclaimer: We do not condemn any particular operating system.
Black people are more likely to get killed in altercati
Maybe Slashdot should change the category/icon. (Score:3)
Why not setup a distributed block chain system? (Score:1)
You want to really score against The Man? (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't host a mirror.
Host a mirror with the entire database available as a torrent.
Let everyone who wants to take the legal risk launch their own copycat site, with the KAT database as a launchpad so that they can go on to achieve even more. It took a few years to arrest one man in Poland - lets see them arrest twenty, spread over China, Russia, a server in a dorm room that no-one will claim ownership for, and wherever that Tor tunnel terminates.
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They want to replace KAT as the biggest, most popular torrent site by attracting ex-KAT users. That's their motivation.
Aaaghhh, my eyes! (Score:1)
"Necessarily", "in most cases". Choose one and leave it at that.
I'm not necessarily an old pregnant black Kenyan woman most of the time.
In fact, today I'm a young, white, male, New Zealander.
not with your Tor browser (Score:2)
Like many other torrent sites, your Tor browser will hit you with a Captcha. In most cases, every page will open with a new Captcha until you are really angry. But even then the torture will continue until you give up or are willing to share your identity with a non-Tor browser. You'd think that torrent sites would expect users to be on Tor -- so why antagonize them?
Checkout http://kat.am - fast & working proxy. (Score:1)
Checkout http://kat.am - fast & working proxy with all latest torrents. Long live Kickass Torrents
Torrent sites need RSS (Score:2)
KAT's big advantage was its ability to turn any page into an RSS feed. Any combination of search terms and categories you want, you could get an RSS feed of it, including the number of seeders/leechers, the magnet link. torcache.net link (that site seems to be down as well), user votes up/down, comments, etc.
I can't emphasize enough just how substantially time-saving that can be. With a small script you can subscribe to ANYTHING and all the new stuff just magically shows up as soon as it is available. Ev
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