We could use Nyaa or some other website? Or upload it to mega.nz and use that.

The situation with Pirate Bay is really interesting to me.  It reflects a contest between two appealing philosophies about the future of the Internet.  The first one, which Anthiena alludes to, is the idea that -- like most frontiers -- the Internet will be tamed and civilized, and the sheriffs will beat the IP rustlers, and illegal file sharing will mostly become a quaint artifact of the Internet's adolescence.  The second one, which Cory Doctorow likes to write about, is the idea that the rustlers are bound to win in the end, because copying zeroes and ones will only ever get easier.  You can take down individual services, whether that's a central server like Napster's or just a BitTorrent index like The Pirate Bay, but you can't shut down or even halt the progress of the copying technologies that enabled those services.  New services, perhaps using different technologies, will just spring up to replace them.  And that's always been true so far, as nutty as a perpetual outlaw Internet sounds.

In some ways, I think the most interesting thing about The Pirate Bay is why it was so unpopular.  Lots of people used it, sure.  I may or may not have downloaded some tracks there myself.  But way more of the tracks on my computer are legal than pirated, and I suspect that's true of most people's music collections.  Why do I buy songs on iTunes when I can download them for free on TPB?  Not because I'm worried about prosecution; charges have very rarely been brought against file sharers, and even more rarely pressed.  And not because I love Apple, heaven knows.  It's because iTunes is pretty easy to use, doesn't rely on seeds, has good metadata, indexes my music for me, and keeps track of my purchased music in the cloud.  Those are great qualities for music software to have, and they're worth paying for.  And if you don't think the nature of iTunes's competition -- pirate sites giving music away for free -- is a critical reason why iTunes has those features, you're crazier than Cory Doctorow.  iTunes is good because it has to compete with free.  I think that TPB has been very good for consumers of music, even the ones who have never used TPB.

You can't explain that to IP owners, of course.  But I really hope The Pirate Bay, or a site like it, comes back up, if only to keep Apple and Netflix and HBO honest.

satyreyes wrote:

-- like most frontiers -- the Internet will be tamed and civilized

I don't disagree with this, but civilization doesn't bring the end of crime, just the development of it. It doesn't go away, it just gets smarter. There will always be ways to download stuff we aren't supposed to. But piracy has existed since the beginning of anything worth copying.

I like the idea that it keeps companies honest, on their toes. iTunes absolutely wouldn't be what it is without needing to compete with entities like TPB. Things like Netflix exist and progress because something had to compete with downloading free in ten minutes*. Piracy killing the movie theater industry? Good. It needs to rethink its business model, because its business model is geriatric. Piracy sucking ass for Gamestop? Good. Let's not even get into video games themselves.

* That's five hours for anyone using the internet in the US.

Yasha wrote:

Of course, an addition to that theory is that people (including myself) like to believe they're supporting things that are worthwhile, so often times they go back and pay for the things they've illegally acquired. Multiple times, in some cases. *coughhannibalcough*

I'm sad about TPB mainly because in some cases it was the only place I could find a copy-- not even a free copy, I mean any copy-- of certain information and/or entertainment. Maybe I'm wrong, but I have a feeling that the less piracy we have, the less information we can preserve, and that's something to consider too.

This. I too relied on TPB for media that was simply not available anywhere else. And there are plenty of things I would never have even heard of, let alone bought, if not for piracy. I almost always end up buying something that truly inspires me so that I can support the industry but it may take a while until it becomes at all available if ever.

That is a very interesting point, how piracy becomes something of a collective archive of media information.

Yasha wrote:

Nocturnalux wrote:

That is a very interesting point, how piracy becomes something of a collective archive of media information.

Somewhat countered by the fact that most of the media/information that dies out is probably not very good, or is of interest to a very limited audience. Still, I think it's a point that deserves some thought.

But all of us are a limited audience sometimes.  You've used the Wayback Machine, or clicked the cached version of a dead or outdated Google hit, and so have I.  And either you or Gio has had the sad experience of pruning a lot of dead outgoing links from Empty Movement.  Librarians who deal with digital archiving face questions about what to preserve a lot, and solutions range from "avoid ephemera and curate your digital collection with the same selectivity as your physical shelves" to "archive all of Twitter because maybe someday it will be important that user @McBumberSnazzle retweeted something Nicki Minaj said, how the fuck should we know?"  The Library of Congress takes the latter approach.  If a future researcher wants to examine how information spreads through social networks, there will always be a petabyte of archived tweets to comb.

The better objection to piracy as an archival method speaks to a different librarianship issue.  BitTorrent is an attractive way of distributing information to guard against its irrecoverable loss.  But how do you catalog information in a system without a central authority?  If you can't catalog it, then no one can find it, which means no one can use it, which means that it has been lost after all.  You can't Google stuff on people's private hard drives.  One approach is to hope that users establish their own central catalog.  I'm optimistic that this would happen, since that's basically what The Pirate Bay was, but plenty of obscure stuff was never on TPB.  And lots more obscure stuff was on TPB, but no one was seeding: information cataloged but missing from the shelf.  Someone may have it, but it's not me, and I'm the one with a thesis to write.  (Or an episode of Oniisama e to watch, or whatever.)

Still, I'm not sure there's a better solution.  The ideal solution, I guess, would be for all media to live in a single The Cloud, and for that The Cloud to be indexed and searchable, but between IP law and the question of who wants to host all the media in the world, I don't see that happening.  For now, I just have to hope that someone will still care about old DOS abandonware enough to distribute it when I'm seventy and decide I want to marathon the entire Leisure Suit Larry series.

Yay someone reseeded! So now I get to reseed! Yay!

If anyone else wants to do the same, just copy this into your client.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:8430a1a218c2ca51ffa8c270a2cb05276158a882&dn=SKU+Gallery&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A

Did the magnet link not work? If your client doesn't load from links, use qbittorrent. Then again, another site that mirrors this torrent says that there are 3 leeches even though I'm not currently uploading. So maybe the system doesn't work as well as we'd like.

Last edited by zevrem (12-25-2014 09:32:47 PM)

I use a laptop whose cooling system isn't the best, so I turn it off at night. But I went to bed around 1am EST so that couldn't be it... Did you use the magnet link? If you used the actual torrent it might not work without a central tracker, I don't know if the client automatically generates and uses a magnet link if the tracker's down.

Last edited by zevrem (12-26-2014 06:11:28 PM)

Frak.

So I'm working on uploading the gallery as a download and the games as well. Ideally, these would become seeded torrents after a couple people get them. I'd seed them from all my computers; one at least is usually on.

Haha, excellent. I'm surprised it took this long, to be honest.

As for gallery, now that it's back I'll work on that.

I found this image http://i.imgur.com/d5dSsI3.png of Juri online, and it isn't in the gallery. Is it official?
Also: If you ever rehost it, you should include a fanart section! With all the wallpapers and screensavers that have been made for this series.

Last edited by Yutah (06-27-2015 01:12:49 PM)