Another tracker bites the dust. This time it’s Demonoid. Demonoid was big, popular, and I’d bet Demonoid’s not going anywhere. The name might change, the server will absolutely change, but, as Wired says, "According to some reports, while the site is gone, the tracker appears to still be functioning and the downloading continues." And so the eternal struggle continues. How do you stop something that, for the most part, doesn’t tangibly exist? Whoever’s behind Demonoid has had their server shut down. All they need to do is find another server and continue where they left off. It’s not like raiding a warehouse down by the docks, arresting all the employees, and repossessing all the forklifts and office furniture. These shutdowns merely involve the displacement of code from one server to another. For authorities, it must seem like a frustrating game which has no end. Demonoid Torrent Tracker Gone For Good [Wired] → Read More
After a two-year investigation the torrent directory site Oink has been taken down in a series of raids and arrests in both The Netherlands and England. OiNK was an invitation-only private tracker that mostly dealt with members trading new release or pre-release albums, and primarily in FLAC (lossless) format. The administrator of the site was a 24-year old from the UK employed in the IT field, and it seems that finding and arresting the man was achieved by simply looking up the whois records from the site’s domain, and from information found on the confiscated servers. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) along with INTERPOL were responsible for the investigation and subsequent raids and arrests. A spokesperson for the authorities claimed that “OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music online”, and that OiNK was very profitable for the administrators: “This extremely lucrative and creative scheme consisted of a private file-sharing website being set up.” The only source of revenue for OiNK were donations from members, and this may now compound problems for administrators of the site as charges in addition to the copyright infringement charges have been filed as the site is being portrayed as a for-profit criminal enterprise. While links to pre-release albums and other releases certainly appeared on OiNK early, the authorities have claimed that the site and its members were actually responsible for these releases, showing that they still don’t understand how the scene works. While OiNK may have been popular (180,000 members), it certainly was not a central hub of online music releases. No such central hub exists, which is why the release groups are all still alive and no matter how many sites are taken down, online file trading will continue. The members of OiNK mainly consisted of music fans yearning for high-quality releases of albums, and each one of them would certainly have access to other sources for the same releases. There is much disinformation amongst much of the media about this case, with claims that the administrators posted the music to the site directly, that they were selling music illegally, and much more. This representation of what OiNK was/is couldn’t be further from the truth and will only further alienate online file traders from the anti-piracy movement. In related news, a few days ago the online video site Tv-Links.co.uk (archive) was also taken down and the administrator was → Read More
Our favorite torrent site is no more, at least for today and tomorrow. Demonoid, the previously fully-private torrent catalog and tracker is down, according to reports at TorrentFreak. Trackers have not been responding for over 24 hours, and the site is completely down. Demonoid was the second largest tracker online, after ThePirateBay, and has seen its fair share of legal threats and takedown notices from copyright holders and associated groups. Demonoid shifted operations from The Netherlands to Canada back in June after their previous ISP balked at legal threats, but it appears that Canada is no safer as the likely cause of the downtime now is the Canadian ISP blocking the website. Demonoid was our favorite torrent site, because membership and ratio tracking meant that it provided both a large catalog and much better speeds than alternate trackers. Recently they opened up the last 14 days worth of torrent listings to public access, making the site a quasi-private tracker. Demonoid accounts are also amongst the most requested in inviteshare, and its popularity has blossomed recently as it overtook other previously more popular public trackers which were beginning to fill up with fakes and spam. Copyright groups have had recent successes against tracker sites and catalogs, no less than a few days ago TorrentBox was also taken down. But at the same time, the recent MediaDefender leaks showed that their effort to plant fakes in popular torrent sites had no impact on the most popular torrent sites including Demonoid – a credit to the communities at these sites who would flag fakes. Takedown efforts seem to be in vain, as even the once much-loved Suprnova has recently made a come-back. The most that a takedown can accomplish is the intermediate interruption of service to that particular community, but as most BitTorrent users access and use more than one site, and the release groups continue unimpeded, the end results of these efforts from copyright groups are very under-whelming. Shutting down Demonoid for a few days will have no impact on the volume of BitTorrent traffic, and Demonoid will be back shortly and with more interest and new users than ever before. → Read More
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