91–99 of 99 posts
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Java should be illegal. You can write code that downloads torrents with it.
Your comment should be illegal; it gives advice on how to go about this process.
This gets very meta very quickly. If linking to copyrighted data 'should' be illegal (SOPA), then what about descriptions of that data that are sufficient to identify the original, but not reconstruct it (magnet links)? And if those were made illegal, then what about descriptions of those descriptions? You can recurse infinitely on this. Beyond mere amusement, after just one or two recursions, you get to the point wh…
Someone could suggest a system, whereby spelling mistakes are used to encode partial information about a magnet link. One switched pair could give you the position in the magnet-link key, the other switched pair could give you the value. That way, you could never pin down exactly who gave you what information. Or maybe I shouldn't suggest it?
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I think it's a great idea, and a nifty hack. It might be an to release a diff against this once a week, and write a quick script to grab it, keeping the list up-to-date.
I am thinking of releasing new versions once a week and putting the hash of the torrent of the newest version on some public site. (Say, some twitter account.) But it would still be more proof of concept than really anything useful - the comments and descriptions ARE important. edit: More I am thinking about it, the less useful it sounds. First, the information about seeders vary constantly, especially with the new t…
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You're thinking about it the wrong way. From a programmer's POV, the link to the torrent can be abstracted endlessly into new and distinct forms, each of which you believe needs to be legislated away in turn. From a lawyer's point of view, the specifics are really not important, but rather the end result: is the user illegally procuring copyrighted material, or is the distributor providing them with a readily accessi…
Totally true. As someone commented on my own story on this, you can kill someone in war and be a hero, or kill someone at home and get life in prison. Context and the definition provided by the law are very important. And as you say, the law doesn't have to be needlessly ignorant of the reality. It can easily encompass intent, result, context, etc. But! There are still interesting problems to be acknowledged as far a…
This gets very meta very quickly. If linking to copyrighted data 'should' be illegal (SOPA), then what about descriptions of that data that are sufficient to identify the original, but not reconstruct it (magnet links)? And if those were made illegal, then what about descriptions of those descriptions? You can recurse infinitely on this. Beyond mere amusement, after just one or two recursions, you get to the point wh…
Lawmakers can easily avoid this meta situation by writing simpler more encompassing laws.So rather than being specific about how the pirated material is accessed they can write a more open law along the lines of "a site that's main use is assisting the distribution of pirated material".
Hello, I am an author of the scrape. I did it more to try it, but who knows, maybe it will be useful to someone. I went trough the description pages like http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/$i by increasing the $i and saving the magnet if pirate bay didn't return 404 error. I went trough the pages as unlogged user, though, so that might be the reason why I got only 1.5m torrents. I didn't know pirate bay has hidden porn t…
Can't use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference at piratebay_magnet_scrape.pl line 13 (#1) (F) A value used as either a hard reference or a symbolic reference must be a defined value. This helps to delurk some insidious errors.
Uncaught exception from user code: Can't use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference at piratebay_magnet_scrape.pl line 13. at piratebay_magnet_scrape.pl line 13 main::__ANON__(20697, 0, undef, 0, 0) called at /usr/share/perl5/Parallel/ForkManager.pm line 354 Parallel::ForkManager::on_finish('Parallel::ForkManager=HASH(0x9cd7ac8)', 20697, 0, undef, 0, 0) called at /usr/share/perl5/Parallel/ForkManager.pm line 333 Parallel::ForkManager::wait_one_child('Parallel::ForkManager=HASH(0x9cd7ac8)', undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/Parallel/ForkManager.pm line 285 Parallel::ForkManager::start('Parallel::ForkManager=HASH(0x9cd7ac8)') called at piratebay_magnet_scrape.pl line 27
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone could suggest a system, whereby spelling mistakes are used to encode partial information about a magnet link. One switched pair could give you the position in the magnet-link key, the other switched pair could give you the value. That way, you could never pin down exactly who gave you what information. Or maybe I shouldn't suggest it?
That could have interesting unintended consequences - ISPs being pressured to ban users who post blog comments with spelling errors.
Maybe I'm being a bit black-and-white on this, but while the meta and the philosophy is interesting to talk about, no one is mentioning the morality. Stealing is wrong. You're taking someone else's work and not compensating them for it. I think it's sad that we're all so worried about the law when, in reality, you shouldn't pirate music for the same reason you don't steal a candy bar from the grocery store or snag 5…
I'm getting a bit sick of the 'piracy is theft' nonsense. It isn't. Nobody is deprived of their possession. Me copying your song doesn't result in you no longer having a song. Piracy is far closer to plagiarism, but even then only to a point. In plagiarism, one attempts to pass off the work of another as one's own. In piracy, one simply copies another's work for one's own use. They are fundamentally different. This i…
Declaring copies of data to be scarce is a convenient convention (for capitalists), because it allows data itself to be sold exactly like the scarce vessels (records, cassettes, books) which used to be sold as a stand-in for the data itself, and like other scarce things (bread, oil).
Without scarcity, capitalism cannot function. You cannot sell air (yet, but see "Spaceballs") because there is air all around so you can't run out of it. You can't sell "fours" because you can create as many fours as you need with a pen and paper or keyboard. However, the capitalists have successfully legislated that certain sequences of data are scarce. If this fictional scarcity of data collapses many people would be unable to make money selling non-scarce "virtual" things like ideas and data, and would have to fall back to selling real things. And they'd be unable to "allocate" these goods to people because everybody could just have whatever they wanted. Very good for people, very bad for capitalists.
Much like the attempt to legislate Pi (a half-true half-myth btw), this 'fiat scarcity' (just coined that) is doomed to ultimate failure. If not in the law, in practice. Like the War on Drugs.