| Obama and Us | Posted by IH on Nov. 20
News about Obama is everywhere, so I'm not going repeat much of them. But of particular importance to file sharing, Obama has always been big on
net
neutrality
(WoW player as FCC co-chair!) and
copyright
policies. Even though I'm not a US citizen, he has my vote on the internet. And best wishes with fixing the US's economy, because it's kinda dragging down Canada too. Not nice.
In particular to this techie president, this picture
from here
takes the cake, among thousands taken of him:
Pacman and Apple, can he get any cooler? Too bad he may still have to
give up his crackberry.
Here's some more
great pictures of his campaign.
And some news on
Creative Commons
related to Obama's central and noble theme for a more transparent and accountable government. The TV and radio show
Democracy Now!
has released all their shows
under CC
licensing. This is a big win for CC and in further fostering legal use of BitTorrent. The show has already released their content
by BitTorrent,
all of which are
indexed here
on isoHunt. Feel free to share this and get involved with politics! It's what Obama and
Michael Moore
would have wanted.
UPDATE:
Forgot about
this video.
One of the most inspiring and well done, independent, political campaign videos I've seen, with original soundtrack.
|
| Join the Copyfight! | Posted by IH on Nov. 9
Since I've been sued by both
the MPAA
(Hollywood)
and threatened by
the CRIA
(Canadian recording industry), I've talked about what's been happening with our cases. Our CRIA case has also recently received mainstream press attention by the
Canadian Press
and
Globe & Mail.
But the question is why? Why do they insist on suing their own customers? Why do they sue search engines like us, who make the internet more useful for everyone?
The problem lies in something fundamentally broken with the copyright system. A choice quote from
Cory Doctorow's article on the "copyfight":
| Quote: |
| So the natural inclination of anyone who is struck by a piece of creative work is to share it. And since "sharing" on the Internet is the same as "copying," this puts you square in copyright's crosshairs. Everyone copies. Dan Glickman, the ex-Congressman who now heads up the Motion Picture Association of America (as pure a copyright maximalist as you could hope to meet) admitted to copying Kirby Dick's documentary
This Film is Not Yet Rated
(a scorching critique of the MPAA's rating system) but excused it because the copy was "in [his] vault." To pretend that you do not copy is to adopt the twisted hypocrisy of the Victorians who swore that they never, ever masturbated. Everyone knows that they themselves are lying, and a large number of us know that everyone else is lying too. |
When the head of the MPAA has to admit to copying the film that criticizes the very industry he represents, an industry group of lobbyists and litigators against such copying, it highlights an important fact beyond the obvious hypocrisy. The internet has completely changed the economics of sharing. When sharing equals copying on the internet and the direct cost of that sharing is effectively $0 (it doesn't cost you anything to share videos on Youtube or BitTorrent), it makes copyright infringement so easy that even Dan Glickman can do it. So easy that a mom like
Stephanie Lenz can do it
when she posted a video of her 13-month-old son dancing to Prince's music. And I mean no disrespect to them.
This is an age of rampant sharing and remixing, and if you can make the connection between sharing and culture as Doctorow has, you will see this war between rightsholders and consumers will never end and the rightsholders will never win. The band
Girl Talk
and
Lessig
and
James Boyle
and
Terry McBride of Nettwerk
and isoHunt all echo a common point:
Remixing and sharing is good for culture, suing consumers and technologists who enable sharing is destructive for everyone.
The internet is a more efficient information machine than the printing press or VCR ever was, and also a whole different animal. It's time the content industries learn to put it to better use as well, by discarding past notions of how business is done based on an economy of scarcity. In Star Trek, currency becomes irrelevant with virtually unlimited "copying" of physical objects with the
Replicator.
The internet is the Replicator of information. When a 13-month-old dances to Prince's music, copyright infringement is nowhere near his consciousness. It's an endorsement that he likes it, pure and simple.
I've said a number of times that
I'm not against copyright,
but copyright does need significant reform in the internet age. If all this rampant copying on BitTorrent and the internet has
not made a dent in Hollywood's record earnings,
why can't we all just get along without rabid lawsuits? Why can't they see that sharing and remixing is a human urge for culture, and when we share and remixes art, it's not a liability but an endorsement for the artist or author or producer?
When the majority of society has no ethical conviction of wrongdoing when they violate copyright law, it's not society that's wrong, it's the law. Because
no one can really own ideas.
Newton once said, "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of Giants." It's how the arts and sciences progresses. We share, we inspire and we remix.
If you want to join the copyfight, simply share your thoughts by replying, share this post with your friends, and join
isoHunt's Facebook group.
With our pending lawsuit against
the CRIA
in our home country, we may need your voice real soon, especially if you are Canadian. For more on Copyfight and where the word came from,
go here.
Update:
Since this post is all about warm fuzzy sharing, I shared this post on
Torrentfreak as a guest columnist.
This post, along with everything I write on isoHunt.com, are published under the
CC BY-SA license.
Share on!
Update 2:
For a book author's perspective, a most
interesting response and discussion
regarding my post on the Copyfight. (
Edit by SecretSquirrel:
Having spoken to Rachel Caine via telephone, she echoed the sentiments on her livejournal. Please do give her posting a read, she makes some good points.)
|
| 1.1 Petabytes of files on BitTorrent, network issues | Posted by IH on Oct. 19
This kind of went unnoticed, but files contained in torrents indexed globally on isoHunt has past the 1 petabyte mark is is currently at about 1.1 PB. I think that says something about how BitTorrent has become a staple of content distribution, and a congratulations to all the seeders. Share on!
As for number of torrents indexed, here's an update to
stats of our torrents index count,
currently at 1.45 million:
Keep in mind again that our search index is not the same as most tracker sites, and a common misconception is that isoHunt.com is a tracker. As a search engine, we continually update our index from
more than 400 other torrent sites we index,
and at the same time, spam/fakes and old, inactive torrents are automatically pruned. That's why in the above graph you see some dips, where new torrents weren't indexed as fast as old torrents were pruned.
Speaking of spam and fakes, it is sad but a fact that with popularity, BitTorrent attracts a new flood of spammers in trying to advertise their websites or get their malware installed by unsuspecting users. It's a problem we take seriously, and since we
added comments, tags and ratings
to our search results (which you have used with great success), we worked on new ways to prune spam out of our index. You can of course help by more commenting, tagging and rating down torrents you find to be not what their filenames suggest or is blatant spam/malware. On your
login page,
if you have turned on the Download History Manager, you would see a list of .torrent files you've downloaded. If you completed downloads on them, I'm sure other users would appreciate your feedback on the authenticity of those torrents, just as you would find feedback by others useful before you download.
And I'm curious as to how bad you think is the torrents spam problem, and how bad is it on isoHunt.com. We can use your feedback on how we may improve quality of our search results.
On the
login page,
you may have already noticed also a new feature:
friend invitations.
In the spirit of peer to peer, invite your friends to join a new world of sharing and discovery with isoHunt and BitTorrent!
Another (temporary) issue we need your feedback on is connectivity issues for the past week. Either there's issue with our upstream router, or internet issues with routes from networks in reaching isoHunt.com. We saw particularly issues with Eastern Europe in reaching us, and our outgoing emails to certain domains were also affected. This may have been fixed now, but if you still can't reach isoHunt.com or after a few hours you still have not received your activation email on site registration, please comment here (if you have a way to obviously) or email admin at isohunt.com. Running traceroute from your command prompt to isohunt.com would be useful, as well as what what country and what ISP you are at.
|
| Canadian Election: lets talk politics | Posted by IH on Oct. 10
Political debates are almost as hopeless as religious ones, so I've avoided them here in the past. But reading about the
Conservatives' platform on copyright legislations,
I'm compelled to speak up. To get my bias clear first: I'm Christian and I've been voting Conservatives for the last 2 elections. But unless they substantially change their platform, I will not vote for them this election and I urge Canadians reading this not to. Here's why.
From the
Conservatives' platform:
| Quote: |
| Dion (Liberals) wants to impose a massive carbon tax that will drive up the cost of everything and hurt families. |
That is a lame and empty attack on a good idea. Living in BC,
we've already implemented the carbon tax
and our economy is doing just fine. Harper either doesn't understand what "revenue neutral" means or is just being conservative for the sake of being Conservative. I drive, and I'd gladly pay more on gas so we have greater incentives for the marketability of viable, mainstream
electric cars
sooner than later. Same goes for more non-carbon power plants. Strike 1 for the Conservatives.
And for the most important and relevant issue, copyright,
the Conservatives show no intent to revise or drop bill C-61, and supports ACTA
which is an
even
worse
idea.
They shown
no support for Geist's copyright pledge,
and have continued to show no interest in soliciting feedback from the Canadian public on C-61, a most important legislation since the internet regarding copyright and how we share and consume information. This is about the freedom of speech in the digital age. Strike 2 and out for the Conservatives.
Right now, it seems
the Conservatives are leading the polls.
But I know about 3.7 million Canadians visited isoHunt last month, which is more than 10% of Canada's population. So I ask all who read this to tell your Canadian friends to
not be a slacker
and vote on Oct. 14. I don't care which party you vote, just
vote any party but the Conservatives.
Here are some more links to more information on election issues:
-
Vote strategically and not just your favorite party.
If there's a way to keep
the Conservatives from having a majority govt,
this is how. This site is an environmentalists' site but they have the exact same goal as we do with a fair copyright agenda. They have great polls data per riding, and recommendation so as to not have the oppositions split their votes. Must visit site.
-
Latest election poll stats
(updated Oct. 13)
-
Election Notebook
blog
-
Liberals,
Conservatives,
NDP
on twitter
- MPs growing support for
Geist's copyright pledge
(all non-Conservatives)
- Book author
Atwood blasts Harper for his treatment of the arts
For the US election, discuss
here instead,
this thread is for Canadian election only. But then there isn't much to talk about is there, the debates are an one sided comedy. 
UPDATE:
Interesting
video message from Jack Layton
of the NDP to
p2pnet.
Quote: "Social networking sites, torrent sites, youtube... the truly interactive websites are... fundamental to making a democracy work." What a nice quote we can use to
argue our case!
He also touched on support for
net neutrality.
Torrentfreak
has a write-up.
Also on issue of
this site's neutrality
and me "campaigning": raising awareness on copyright and cultural issues, which are facing more important changes than most other elections, that's what I'm really after. We are not endorsing any party. You don't have to agree with any of my politics and your freedom of speech is very much the issue I'm raising. This site, its treatment of links it indexes and comments posted on it has and will always remain neutral.
|
| "To promote the Progress of useful Arts" | Posted by IH on Oct. 7
Today I read about some exciting news, on
more independent artists in the USA standing up against traditional labels.
Joining our
Canadian leads,
I believe the music industry is at a point of no return in an age where producing music on computers is now independently affordable, and distributing music has far great reach than was ever possible before the internet. As I
wrote before,
the record labels can either find some common ground in marketing and selling to the internet generation, or be left behind. Artists will continue to make music, it's what they do, and we will always have a demand for new and great music.
To any interested artists, join the
FAC!
Tell them we sent you 
For more independent content, check out a
video production
by guys in Austria which features various indie artists. Here's what they have to say:
| Quote: |
Hello world. This is the first BitTorrent release of 'They Shoot Music - Don't They?'. We shoot music videos featuring artists we like at places we like. On the one hand having a strong cosmopolitic agenda, on the other hand being in love with the city we live in, we combine both: we glance across the borders and observe the microcosmos of a breathing city in the center of Europe. We don't care about the glamorous illusions and technical perfection that coat the typical music video productions these days. 'They Shoot Music - Don't They' is all about sharing those pure and intensive moments that make you feel what the essence of culture really is about.
Asking the folks at isohunt.com (thanks!) who made this spotlight possible had a specific reason. As one can imagine we produce and promote our videos with the approval of the artists. If you want to see it that way then we are a promotion tool of the music industry (we don't get paid though ^^). Every artist involved gave us a clearance for this Isohunt.com release. We strongly believe that there is a peaceful way of sharing and that technology such as search engines shouldn't be doomed for enabling people to share digital content. But ... as we in Austria like to say: There will be a lot of water running down the danube before a proper way is discovered.
Even if you can get free media quite easily these days please remember that the majority of artists are having a hard time paying their bills. We work together with quite a few of them and see most of them struggling. So if you like their work take an effort and spend a few bucks on their media, drop by at their shows and give them constructive feedback somewhere in the social network jungle. They deserve it. |
Their debut video is
posted here on isoHunt.
Check it out, and expect more from
thshmu
in the future.
Another interesting development for video distribution is the
legal dilemma with Moore's Slacker Uprising.
Interesting and real problems many producers are facing. Since Moore's production company don't allow him from distributing his film outside N. America, I won't link to torrents which were originally posted on
Moore's site itself,
and I forbid you from searching for them here if you are not in N. America. The lawyers said so.
PS. title of this post is a paraphrase of part of the
US constitution,
summing up the essential purpose of IP in one sentence. The timelessness and elegance of language used in this document is admirable, and we forget the reason for copyright in the first place and how far it's been twisted.
UPDATE:
thshmu
noted that their videos can be directly previewed on http://theyshootmusic.com/ and his
posted torrent
is an archive of 54 of his videos rather than just one debut video.
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