Posted on 02/06/2012 7:59:09 AM PST by martin_fierro
BTJunkie, the file sharing and torrents index voluntarily decided to shut down after being in existence for 7 years. As a final closing message, they wrote on their site, btjunkie.org, " 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!" According to Torrent Freak, the shutdown has to do with the Megaupload and Pirate Bay cases. The legal action and shutting down of Megaupload by the FBI and the action against Pirate Bay, influenced BTJunkie to shut down before they were taken to court.
The service hadn't gotten into legal hot water, yet, but with the crackdowns on Megaupload and Pirate Bay, chances were good that BTJunkie would have been next. Furthermore, they were reported to the U.S Trade Representative (USTR), last November. RIAA and MPAA listed BTJunkie as a 'rogue' site facilitating mass copyright infringement. U.S officials are looking for any sites that infringe upon copyrights and stream illegally which means BTJunkie would just have had to take a number and stand in line for legal trouble. Other file sharing and streaming sites might shut down before the officials take them down as well. BTJunkie say, though, that this isn't necessarily the end of the road for them. Speaking on the site's future, its founder said, "I really do hope so, the war is far from over for sure."
It is currently not known whether BTJunkie will completely shut shop or if they go the Pirate Bay way, where they provide service using magnetic link technology. BTJunkie is currently on Google's list of censored links, along with the Pirate Bay, uTorrent and RapidShare, because of its association with piracy. What do you think of BTJunkie's shut down?
I love it I love it! Obama once again does wonders for his youth vote this election year. The way this is going, by the time November comes around I would say just about every college kid in existence will be voting Repub. Taking away their torrent sites during an election year? Bravo Obama!
They will probably reappear as a .onion site.
“Obama once again does wonders for his youth vote this election year. The way this is going, by the time November comes around I would say just about every college kid in existence will be voting Repub. Taking away their torrent sites during an election year? Bravo Obama!”
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I highly doubt they’ll make the association.
The more clueless ones will blame it on “corporate greed”, you know, old white guys.
Besides, the idiotic idea of voting for the “cool black guy” is unfortunately still in play. Pop culture still proclaims that Black is hip.
Like ripping off copywritten material is now a constitutional right?
/johnny
This effing sucks!
I found hard to find torrents to btjunkie that you could not find on Pirate Bay or kat, plus you get pieces of a large file on their interface instead of dl’ing the massive file. I may actually agree that they may just change their .com to .eu or .pl like some sites which stream sports live.
Further proof that we don’t need SOPA. The current laws work just fine.
A lot of file sharing sites like Fileserve, Filesonic, Depositfiles, etc., have changed from file sharing to file storage. That means you can only download a file that you originally uploaded to them. Busting Megaupload had a massive ripple effect. It cost people a lot of money because they paid for long-term premium memberships which are now worthless (and created a tremendous headache for PayPal by disputing the changes in format and demanding refunds) but they haven’t slowed down their downloading pace. They just shifted to different formats like torrents. Look for either lawsuits against ISPs or extreme bandwidth limitations for consumers as the next step by the SOPA folks.
It amazes me how easy it is to steal artist’s music on the web, sometimes without knowing you are doing it.
I would have expected that to get music that wasn’t released freely by an artist, you’d have to at least find SOME secret code, or go to some back-door torrent site or something.
But I’ve been looking for album covers for my old albums (I’ve been taking my albums and making mp3’s for my player, and didn’t want to take pictures of the album covers). And most of the time, I find nice links to sites where someone has already created MP3s for the albums.
But clearly, these are all unauthorized. And nobody seems to care that artists aren’t getting paid for their work.
Imagine if some guy was good at woodworking, so he’d find logs, cut them up, and make things, and put them in his front yard.
And then, people would just walk by, and instead of buying them, they’d take the things, and replace them with logs.
I don’t think people would defend that kind of action, but maybe they would — we seem to have lost our sense of right and wrong.
Before the invention of the printing press, if you wanted a copy of a book, or sheet music, you sat down and hand copied it or paid somebody else to do it for you.
Looks like we have come full circle.
One more thing, the studios consider you a pirate for converting your albums to MP3.
A .onion site requires Tor.
But no one would know where the server is located or who is accessing it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.onion
Actually your comparison makes no sense. The artists still have their music while the woodcarver would not. Copyright and stealing are NOT the same no matter how many times people say so.
I am not advocating taking artists work, but a more realistic copyright law instead of the virtually never ending one we have now, and the making of works available would end a lot of this.
There is no reason movies made in 1933 should still be under copyright and no reason Song of the South is still not available in the US. But you can easily get it on torrents, along with many other movies the studios refuse to sell.
So people download it cause it is the only way to get it. Does it make it right? Well, maybe not, but if they don’t want the money, then why are they bitching about downloads.
Actually your comparison makes no sense. The artists still have their music while the woodcarver would not. Copyright and stealing are NOT the same no matter how many times people say so.
I am not advocating taking artists work, but a more realistic copyright law instead of the virtually never ending one we have now, and the making of works available would end a lot of this.
There is no reason movies made in 1933 should still be under copyright and no reason Song of the South is still not available in the US. But you can easily get it on torrents, along with many other movies the studios refuse to sell.
So people download it cause it is the only way to get it. Does it make it right? Well, maybe not, but if they don’t want the money, then why are they bitching about downloads.
Not only that but if you make a backup copy of your cd, they call you a pirate.
I don’t really care what the studios think. Case law is good for me; I’m not putting my mp3 files in an accessable location, so I don’t fall into the trap that some have fallen into, of being called distributers.
This exercise has also given me a chance to fix a longstanding ethical dilemna for me. When I was in college, I made tapes of all my records, so I wouldn’t scratch the records. I also made tapes of my brother’s records, and my roommate’s records, so I could listen to those without risk.
But I don’t have all those records anymore. Some I lost, some were my brother’s and they are in his garage in boxes, and some were my roommate’s. The ones I don’t own, I’ve had “illegal copies” of since I graduated college.
For years, there was nothing I could really do about this. The records are obscure, and even now with e-bay and other internet sites giving global reach, it is hard to find the albums (when I do, they are dirt-cheap, so I could go that route), but back then there was no chance to get copies to make my tape collection “legal”. And I wasn’t going to get rid of my tapes, because I liked the music. I just had no way of becoming “legal”. It’s too bad the record companies didn’t have a way to let people pay for their tape copies.
Anyway, in the past few years, MP3’s have popped up for all sorts of old music. I can download most of it from Amazon cheap. So I’ve been re-buying my stuff. I’ve been able to correct 90% of the problem, I estimate — 10% of my tapes that I don’t have records for, the records simply don’t exist, and nobody has ever cut them to CD or MP3.
But as best I can, I’ve brought myself into what I call ethical legality. I’ve done everything in my power to correct the problem, and to purchase all the music I listen to.
And I’ve had a blast listening to my old tapes, and the old songs. And I’ve bought a lot of new stuff on Amazon in the process (I love their $5 MP3 album sales).
I understand why I was non-compliant. I really couldn’t correct the violations, in any rational way I could find. I can’t imagine there is a record sold today that you can’t download the songs for 99 cents from somewhere.
And in my opinion, if you won’t pay a buck for the song, you don’t really like it that much, and you shouldn’t steal it. We used to pay 25 cents just to LISTEN ONCE to a song.
But no one would know where the server is located or who is accessing it.
*****
I don’t want to know where it is and especially I don’t want my ISP to know what I’m up to. Heck, I’ve been using an IP changer and proxies to get back to the old Isohunt site before they blocked the US Ip’s with the old Lite version which is useless.
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