TorrentFreak Email Update |
- BitTorrent Giant BTjunkie Shuts Down For Good
- The Target Isn’t Hollywood, MPAA, RIAA, Or MAFIAA: It’s The Policymakers
- First Downloaded and 3D Printed Pirate Bay Ship Arrives
| BitTorrent Giant BTjunkie Shuts Down For Good Posted: 05 Feb 2012 10:54 PM PST
The site was never involved in any legal action, and to keep it this way the site’s operators decided to shut the site down for good today. The following message was posted on the BTjunkie homepage a few minutes ago: “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!” Talking to TorrentFreak, BTjunkie’s founder said that the legal actions against other file-sharing sites such as MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay played an important role in making the difficult decision. Witnessing all the trouble colleagues got into was cause for a lot of worry and stress, and those will now belong to the past. That said, BTjunkie’s owner still thinks there might be a future for other BitTorrent sites. “I really do hope so, the war is far from over for sure,” he told TorrentFreak. While BTjunkie was never targeted directly by copyright holders, the site was reported to the US Trade Representative (USTR) November last year. Both the RIAA and MPAA listed the torrent index as a ‘rogue’ site that facilitated mass copyright infringement. BTjunkie is also one of the search terms censored by Google because it’s piracy related, alongside The Pirate Bay, RapidShare, uTorrent and others. As a result of the decision to shut down BTjunkie, one of the top 5 torrent sites with dozens of millions of users a month is no more. Judging from previous shutdowns like that of TorrentSpy and Mininova, users will quickly find a new home at one of the many alternatives. Nonetheless, it’s the end of an era. RIP BTjunkie
Source: BitTorrent Giant BTjunkie Shuts Down For Good
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| The Target Isn’t Hollywood, MPAA, RIAA, Or MAFIAA: It’s The Policymakers Posted: 05 Feb 2012 12:50 PM PST Big Monopoly has learned in the past century that when they look like a little spoiled brat having a tantrum, politicians will throw taxpayer money their way to shut them up. Therefore, this is a behavior they emulate as soon they are given a good enough excuse. It’s simply a reinforced, learned behavior. A boycott against Big Monopoly will not work. Any noticeable drop in profits will cause them to throw a tantrum at policymakers and complain how their profits are dropping due to piracy, and request harder enforcement of their copyright monopolies at the expense of our civil liberties and the freedom of the net. Buying more of their products (yeah, right) will not work. Any noticeable raise in profits will cause them to commission reports to policymakers illustrating their grandiose importance to the economy as a whole, suggesting that they are the direct reason for at least several hundred per cent of the gross national product. Therefore, they will argue, they need additional protection as a national interest. Doing nothing will not work either, as we are constantly on the retreat in civil liberties. There is no course of action or nonaction that the net or its individuals can take that would cause Big Monopoly to behave differently from today. Attacking Big Monopoly is simply barking up the wrong tree. It’s a complete waste of effort. Also, I’m quite concerned at the overall attitude. I see many on the net somehow trying to please the copyright industries – if they weren’t as obnoxious, would the copyright industry perhaps show a more lenient attitude…? As if! This attitude, I fear, is one of the most dangerous of all, for it puts the individual in a subservient position to the corporations. Reality is quite different, but we are only as powerful as we believe ourselves to be. Those who see themselves in shackles will behave with restraint. On the other side of that coin, those who refuse to accept any limitation placed upon them will find that most, if not all, limitations can be broken. Obviously, the copyright industry’s dream is having us – the people – seek its consent for everything we do, just like they have trained politicians to do for over a century. When you discuss boycotts, you are playing straight into their game of thinking that it is the copyright industry’s desires that matter for the task of building a sustainable society. They don’t. Their desires are irrelevant. As are they. They are just one entrepreneur among many. The role of any entrepreneur is to construct a use case and a business case that allow them to make money, given the current constraints of technology and society. They don’t get to dismantle civil liberties, even if they can’t make money otherwise. The target for any action isn’t the copyright industry. That’s just playing into their hands as imagined kings of the hill. Rather, the target is – and must be – the policymakers. They are the ones who are actually cutting down on our civil liberties, not Big Monopoly. Normally, they see issues like the copyright monopoly and freedom of the net as totally peripheral to policymaking; the topics du jour are the same as they’ve been in the past 50 years: healthcare, schools, energy and defense. This is both a problem and a blessing. It is a problem, as they don’t realize the gravity of the situation. Most governments in the West would be completely baffled to realize that people are actually holding rallies for freedom of speech: they would not understand why. As in, “we have that already”. In their minds, we do. In ours, however, it’s being cut away. But it is also a blessing, as they’re not politically entrenched on the issue, thinking it is peripheral. As most political parties haven’t identified themselves with one side or the other, thinking everybody were in agreement already, the policymakers can be made to turn quickly at little internal cost of prestige. At the end of the day, there’s just one single thing that politicians care about, and that is their job. Their job must be put on the line over our freedoms of speech, or change will not happen. This was the (very successful) formula behind founding the Pirate Party in 2006. This is also what we saw with the SOPA/PIPA battle in the United States, as politicians realized that there were a serious amount of votes to be lost or harnessed over freedoms of speech on the net. As that realization sunk in, the copyright industry’s efforts were dead in the water. In Europe, 250 million people preserving and sharing contemporary culture in disrespect of an immoral and overreaching copyright monopoly is not “a business problem that you can put an end to”. It is a power base of 250 million voters. This is the message that policymakers must be sent in the loud and clear. Once the policymakers get that message, the copyright industry can make their money any legal way they can or go bankrupt in the process, and nobody will care whichever way they go, not any more than you would care about the tire industry or the glass blowing industry.  About The Author Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy. Book Falkvinge as speaker? Source: The Target Isn’t Hollywood, MPAA, RIAA, Or MAFIAA: It’s The Policymakers
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| First Downloaded and 3D Printed Pirate Bay Ship Arrives Posted: 05 Feb 2012 06:03 AM PST A decade ago people were truly amazed to find out that they could download entire movies using BitTorrent. At the time substantial online video simply didn’t exist, and BitTorrent was an eye opener which has since become the movie industry’s biggest worry. As one of the older torrent sites around, The Pirate Bay has been at the forefront of this copy revolution. But according to the people behind the torrent site, copying bits is just the beginning. The next step is to download stuff you can hold in your hands. "We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles," said The Pirate Bay last month when they announced a new 3D printing section of their site. To give people something to work with, a 3D model of The Pirate Bay ship designed by Todd Blatt was one of the first items put up for download. Since then several people have printed it out and have now become the proud owner of a cute 3D printed ship. A downloaded copy of The Pirate Bay ship
The copy above belongs to Canadian Charles Randall. After he read the announcement on TorrentFreak he downloaded the torrent and went straight to Shapeways.com to print a copy for personal use. “I was entertained by telling shapeways.com that I owned the copyright on the design though, something they force you to accept in order to have the model printed. But I guess, in a way, we all do,” Randall told TorrentFreak. “I debated just putting it up for sale on the site, but despite the Pirate Bay sensibilities, I didn’t want to entangle myself in any weird controversy for trying to sell it.” Unlike regular downloads on BitTorrent, 3D objects come with a hefty price tag. Using the cheapest materials available, 3D pirates have to invest roughly $100 to get their new toy made. “The raw price was about $80 for the material, $6.50 for the shipping, and then I had to pay $15 in Canadian duties,” Randall said What this process has in common with copying bytes, is that it can be quite addictive. “As for doing more 3D printing, I am tempted to learn Blender in order to start making interesting little things,” Randall told us. “The build quality is super detailed and fairly solid. You can see the patterns from where it was printed, but if I were to build small model pieces it would probably be easy enough to sand them down.” “The whole thing is an amazing process and just knowing it’s possible has opened the floodgates of my imagination.” The above response of one of the first 3D ‘pirates’ is just what The Pirate Bay were looking for when they launched their new category. Since the announcement the 3D printing category has grown to 26 torrents, ranging from a 3D printable MPAA Boss Chris Dodd to a Teddy Bear. These are the first steps in discovering a new future that will one day allow people to print a perfect set of sneakers and spare car parts for a few dollars. The auto industry should be very worried. Source: First Downloaded and 3D Printed Pirate Bay Ship Arrives
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