Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Anyway, Demonoid is dead. It's never coming back.
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(I know that it must throw a strange light at me, this being my first post, so bear with me
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How do you know? Have they taken down the people behind demonoid? Communities like this have so many members because of a few reasons:
People want stuff they otherwise would have to pay for handed to them as a freebie. They want something that they either couldn't get because the original is to expensive to buy or because they are too scroogy to purchase it for it's set price.
This being the main reason there are, however, other not so obvious reasons: Have you ever tried getting a really old or really rare movie in retail? I know that I have combed my local retailers and ebay for all they were worth and couldn't find it (meaning they couldn't order it either).
Now if you fire up any of the bigger torrent sites there is a real chance you might get your hands on the item you are looking for, and that's without the hassle of driving around for hours and talking to a great deal of people just to find out that you're running against a brick wall.
(I see a great chance for distributing these things legally if only the industry would adapt to the current situation and digitalize all these things to offer them on a legal platform for a sensible price.)
I don't want to go into the whole copy protection thing because it all has been said in above posts.
There are many more "arbitrary" not-so-obvious reasons that make people use the p2p tools . As long as these reasons exist there will always be an underground satisfying these needs and no matter how often a site gets beaten down, either it will reincarnate (like demonoid has done 4 times) or another one will grow into it's place (because a community so huge has to go somewhere else for their free fix).
To make my point: You can't keep down these sites without offering a serious alternative and the industry is a long way from that yet. iTunes is a first step into the right direction but it only covers a small portion of it's true potential. If there are offers good enough to make the hassle and the legal prosecution because of illegal downloads not worthwhile anymore the illegal torrents sites will diminish by a great factor (I don't think you ever can shut them down completely because there's always somebody scroogy or brave/dumb enough to continue when there are good alternatives). The one way not to go is to introduce stricter laws though (some people get more years in prison for filesharing than a rapist. I know that's an extreme case but I still think the whole copyright thing is blown out of proportion). Guess which way we are heading and what consequences will arise for your personal freedom out of that.