MetaFilter posts tagged with filesharing

Need Firefox 0.8?

netbros — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 06:37:15 -0800

Remember when your computer just worked? Did you click 'OK' to that recommended update on programs like iTunes, Adobe Reader, or Yahoo Messenger, only to realize that the older version ran faster or had better features? Then Version Download may be your solution. Includes back-level versions of browsers, audio and video, security and anti-virus, FTP, file-sharing and communications software.

She Don't Want To Change The World

motty — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:07:53 -0800

British pop star Lily Allen recently posted a Myspace blog entry explaining her view that file sharing is a disaster as it is making it harder and harder for new acts to emerge. Now the BBC is reporting that she has started an anti-filesharing campaign blog called 'It's Not Alright'. Messages of support have been received there from other major label artists including Mark Ronson and James Blunt. Other messages entirely are appearing in the blog comments. Meanwhile, the UK Government is actively consulting on explicit anti-filesharing legislation including proposals to force ISPs to disconnect persistent offenders.

JetBytes

swift — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:18:30 -0800

JetBytes is a free, no-signup, one-off file-sharing service.

a.k.a. the "Spectrial"

tybeet — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:21:53 -0800

Today was Da y 1 of The Pirate Bay trial.

The aXXo files

fearfulsymmetry — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 03:16:27 -0800

"If you already know his name, chances are you've been doing something illegal." The Independent on aXXo, the movie pirate king.

Music industry to abandon Mass Lawsuits

Afroblanco — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 08:29:30 -0800

Music industry to abandon Mass Lawsuits. After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy. via /.

Canada, the final frontier of file-sharing?

tybeet — Wed, 07 May 2008 05:52:21 -0800

FileSharingFilter: With the possible exception of Sweden, Canada is today's frontier upon which the war of file-sharing legality is waged, with the greatest number of file-sharers per capita, and a steady increase in the number of persons who partake (according to the OECD). Historically, the CRIA's own piracy campaign (2004) was given birth only one year after the RIAA began suing individuals (2003) for participating in peer-to-peer file distribution. Unlike the RIAA, the CRIA was shot down by the courts, establishing a sort of precedent in favour of the end-user which has been upheld ever since, and indeed even reinforced. However, we may be seeing the beginning of the end as QuebecTorrent now fights the good fight to prevent a legal precedent outlawing Canadian BitTorrent trackers.

Apparently, you can now download music on the internet.

Item — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:16:02 -0800

Shareminer is a clownsuit engine that searches for files upped to Rapidshare, Megaupload, SendSpace, ZShare, and other similar one click hosts. A great tool for locating full, rare, and out of print albums. Good for other, non-music files as well. The site is as bare bones as can be at the moment but was just relaunched in the last day or so.

Illegal downloaders 'face UK ban'

electricinca — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:03:58 -0800

British internet users face ban for illegal downloads. A draft copy of a Green Paper produced by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport was leaked to The Times newspaper which detailed how the government was considering introducing legislation that would require ISPs to take action against users who access pirated material. The Government's resolve on the issue has apparently been stiffened following similar proposals made by the governments of the US and France. The proposal is designed to bolster the UK's creative industries but it is questionable how much impact it will have on piracy and how willing Internet Service Providers will be to cut off their revenue by banning their own customers.

War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on Leaks

Coherence Panda — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 08:55:09 -0800

Steal this album. "In the dying days of the music business as we once knew it, record labels are waging war on leaks—only to discover that many of the saboteurs come from within the industry itself." It's easy to arrest a geek or lay draconian fines on a single mom; what happens when their witchhunt leads to their own offices? Animal Collective won't always be around to get the culprits off the hook.

ARTISTdirect MediaDefender

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 09:16:35 -0800

Anti-Piracy agents MediaDefender have 700MiB of juicy internal emails leaked on BitTorrent; are in trouble.

Putting their bandwidth where their mouth is

jbickers — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 10:09:10 -0800

Good Copy Bad Copy is "a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture," featuring Danger Mouse, Lawrence Lessig, Dan Glickman of the MPAA and others. The film's creators are releasing it free of charge, via Bittorrent.

The problem with music, redux.

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 14:16:20 -0800

While Courtney pulled an Albini, Jeff handed out the bread. Are the peasants acting like emperors, or do they still want something shiny, aluminum, plastic, and digital? Debacle or cage, something's got to give (pdf). Alternatively, you can just roll your own.

They just want to go home.

goodnewsfortheinsane — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 13:39:17 -0800

I know you're all lining up to buy Sealand, but The Pirate Bay wants to beat you to the punch.

Eyeballs in the Sky

elr — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 03:43:07 -0800

What are The Residents up to these days? The avant garde band (if you can legitimately call them avant garde or a band) made an odd choice with their last/ongoing release, The River of Crime. If you like physical objects, you can purchase a package with cover art, a blank cd-r and codes to a website where you can download them; if you don't, you can purchase the episodes, which are styled after old radio noirs, as podcasts or as a double album through itunes. Concurrently, they have been putting out a series of short films via youtube. The Timmy series, based on a character created for the 1995 cd-ROM "A Day at The Midway", uses a mix of found footage, animation, music and voiceover to tell a series of short unrelated stories. As much as the band has done to keep up with technology over the last thirty-five years, they vehemently ">oppose file sharing of their work, including the sharing of mp3s that they have put out for free on their own website. With that in mind, I wonder how the band feels about the amazing collection of concerts, videos, interviews and assorted other weirdness you get when you type their name into YouTube. [more inside]

Google to peer file sharing from i-hacked

jasper411 — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 11:10:34 -0800

Locate open mp3s with Google! From I-Hacked, where the author describes this as "p2p file sharing, but Google is one of those people." At this point, the interface allows you to specify an artist or song name and it returns a google search of files with that name and an mp3 suffix. The peer to peer weblog says that the trick relies on a default behavior of the Apache webserver.

Is it legal? Since the files in question were "left open in a public place" and since the application isn't necessarily limited to copyrighted materials, at least one blogger thinks it could pass the key legal test of having "substantial non-infringing uses." What do you think?

WinMX is back!!!

augustweed — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 01:12:56 -0800

WinMX is back (kind of). It was such an unbelievably awesome file sharing program that its makers had to pull their peer caches after being served a cease and desist order in September 2005. Now it has been reincarnated as MXpie. Even better . . . it's not spyware or adware.

Files are not for sharing

soplerfo — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 07:26:44 -0800

Files are not for sharing
An illustrated primer for everyone still unclear on the rights and wrongs of intellectual property by Matthew Baldwin and Goopymart at The Morning News

"Suing our fans is destructive and hypocritical"

Johnny Assay — Fri, 05 May 2006 12:00:44 -0800

Canadian musicians protest file-sharing lawsuits. The Barenaked Ladies, Broken Social Scene, Sloan, Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, and many other Canadian artists have formed a coalition to protest the hard line taken by the recording industry against file-sharers, and call for copyright reform. Is there a better way to protect intellectual property rights than suing file-sharers?

Napster wakes up and the world has changed so much.

Effigy2000 — Mon, 01 May 2006 18:17:49 -0800

Remember Napster? Well, it's returned to its roots and is once again offering free music via a revamped ad based web-site. But according to their FAQ, you can only listen to any given song up to 5 times before you'll be asked to pay for it. Even though this equates to roughly 10 million free plays, in an age where BitTorrent is king, will this pay off for the company? Some say no, as the catches that come with this new system are just too many. But (for the moment at least) the share market is saying yes.

Give us your pot smokers, your marriage-seeking gays, your wretched ... file sharers?

maudlin — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 19:03:51 -0800

Give us your pot smokers, your marriage-seeking gays, your wretched ... file sharers? "A major Canadian record company has taken the unusual step of hiring a defense lawyer for a man accused by the U.S. record industry of downloading hundreds of songs illegally. ... 'Suing music fans is not the solution; it's the problem,' Terry McBride, chief executive of Nettwork, said in a statement this week."

A deterrent?

plenty — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 06:23:29 -0800

Hong Kong court jails man for creating and posting torrents.

Welcome to the scene

jcruelty — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 15:24:08 -0800

Welcome to the scene is an interesting low budget soap opera that tells the story of a movie piracy group's workings via IMs and simultaneous video. If you're interested in the logistics of movie piracy (how do these groups work? what's their motivation? where do they get the movies? how do they avoid getting caught?) then this is for you. The story gets more engrossing as you go through the episodes, and the latest gives some insight into how script kiddies do their business. I'd never heard of tools like Metasploit and fragroute till I saw it. There are those who think the whole thing's a setup... I personally doubt it, but one thing this series demonstrates is that for pirates, paranoia is key to survival.

Stop. Stop hurting America.

Mephistopheles — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 21:55:04 -0800

Jon Stewart in Wired

Double Post! Don't you remember?

If I Had An Anus — Tue, 24 May 2005 08:24:22 -0800

Bob Mould has got folks talking sanely about music piracy and artists' livelihoods, again. After discovering his unreleased album was already available for illegal download, Bob and his fans exchange thoughts on the temptation of filesharing. Try to do the right thing, whatever that is these days. (legal free tune)