Goodbye Torrentspy

Mak 2.0

Mod...WAFFLES!?!?
Staff member
Friends of TorrentSpy,

We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the Torrentspy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.

The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile. We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves.

Ultimately the Court demanded actions that in our view were inconsistent with our privacy policy, traditional court rules, and International law; therefore, we now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users - permanent shutdown.

It was a wild ride,

The TorrentSpy Team

"Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like." - Justice William O. Douglas

Source

In what seems a never ending story of the who's who of going under torrent sites. Torrentspy has closed their doors. Can not say that i am upset about it as i never sued it but i have heard of rumors of them reporting info to get people in trouble. So it could be a good thing.
 
Well heres some other torrent news. Looks like they got a taste of their own medicine:
Anti-piracy oufits have gained access to private BitTorrent trackers before, but the opposite has never happened, until now. Over the past few weeks, Unnar Geir, spokesperson of “The Viking Bay”, successfully infiltrated the Icelandic equivalent of the MPAA (SMÁÍS), and gathered some valuable information that the tracker can use in its defense
 
Great read, thanks for the link Saxxon.
Yet it has been difficult to quantify the damage supposedly wreaked by downloading. In mid-2007, economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee, from Harvard, and Koleman Strumpf, from the University of Kansas, published the results of their study analyzing the effect of file sharing on retail music sales in the U.S. They found no correlation between the two. "While downloads occur on a vast scale," they wrote, "most users are likely individuals who in the absence of file sharing would not have bought the music they downloaded." Another study published around the same time, however, found there was, in fact, a positive impact on retail sales, at least in Canada: University of London researchers Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz reported that the more people downloaded songs from P2P networks, the more CDs they bought. "Roughly half of all P2P tracks were downloaded because individuals wanted to hear songs before buying them or because they wanted to avoid purchasing the whole bundle of songs on the associated CDs, and roughly one-quarter were downloaded because they were not available for purchase."
This part was very interesting.

On the subject of hacking yesterday there was this really old movie on TV called "Hackers".
Its funny how they all go crazy about a computer thats obsolete today. Plus its a big deal when they plan to triple their 16mb ram or something like that. Even bigger than that is that the movie i sonly around 10 years old.
 
Yea that story is funny, an proves that they are for all intense an porposses they are useless. Consider my bissnuss model I am working on a specialized version of BSD for workstations an servers I will only charge £20 or so for the OS install an configuration an give the OS away cost free but charge for support. I plan to release the code for free an allow non commercial distribution for that version till the next one is released ect.

Also if there is a company needing a specialist implementation of the OS or needing code designed to do a job I will charge for the new code an give them the software for free along with the OS, saves money on there end an also allows for more development on my end.

Oh i am not the programmer that my friend doing that for me although i am learning.
 
Saxon, I'm not a lawyer but you might want to check with one with regards to redistribution policies. BSD is licensed under the BSD License, which states that when you sell/give the code to a customer you cannot restrict what he or she does with it, including building upon it or using it for commercial purposes.

You're of course free to charge as much as you like for the initial purchase of the software and/or subsequent support though.
 
I have already asked mak to look at that over at another forum an according to him its fine, also there is the OSX issue that is just a rehash of BSD an its perfectly legal.
 
You're most likely in the green - just need to pay attention the finer points. So long as you re-license it under a different agreement you should be able to distribute it with those limitations, I think.
 
Yea if it comes to it I will re adjust the licence if needed, but i am far away from putting a licence together atm.
 
Thanks, basicly i am still setting up my company but i have a few ideas....

I am doing computer repairs an newbilds network installations now but helpfully in the future i will be able to research new technology ect.
 
Saxon, I'm not a lawyer but you might want to check with one with regards to redistribution policies. BSD is licensed under the BSD License, which states that when you sell/give the code to a customer you cannot restrict what he or she does with it, including building upon it or using it for commercial purposes.

You're of course free to charge as much as you like for the initial purchase of the software and/or subsequent support though.

Yes Guru i read over both the BED and OpenBSD licenses to make sure that accordign to legal terms he would be within his legal right. 4 years of business law finally paid off.:grinning:
 
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