[quote="Lysander"]The other one i've got two invites for though but I know you people have this whole anti-ratio crusade thing going on so I won't bother asking Robb if he wants one.[/quote]

I was going to write you an e-mail about this, but honestly, the last few days without Demonoid has opened my eyes.

I mean, yeah, I've paid a "piracy tax" in the past on blank discs, discs where I have been sending out one of my text adventures for free all over the globe. I've gone to concerts where, at the box office, I've been told that there is a "credit card fee" of four bucks for two tickets, which goes completely againt the terms and conditions of Visa and Mastercard.

I've purchased legitimate compact audio discs that have tried to put rootkits on my system.

I've given money for a corporation that has attempted to sponsor legislation that simply fuels their bottom line, and makes criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens (and corporations passing laws by worthless proxies in Washington is the top thing I absolutely fucking despise about this country.)

I've supported record stores like the House of Guitars that have essentially stolen money from me and tried to make me feel beneath contempt while doing so.

I've [i]had my reasons[/i] for getting music for free. But no longer.

Shutting down Demonoid has opened my eyes. I'm discovering many more musicians than I otherwise would have. I went to the local record store - hah, well, local record store [i]franchise[/i] - and purchased discs from a few bands that I was completely unfamiliar with. At $!7.99 plus tax, I then took them home and listened to them. Two or three good songs per disc, and now I am getting ready to sell these CDs on the second-hand market, where I'll get a return on investment of whatever $2 from $21 is.

It's a better way.

It's how they'd like us to do things. These record publishers - they're certainly not playing new acts on the radio stations they've purchased and turned into gray, samey goo. They want us to go in and purchased discs for the sheer fucking hell of it and frankly, I'm delighted to be a good citizen.

...

... [i]Nah[/i], actually, I've been coding my new game in silence, with just a lava lamp and occassional beeping Vectrex shining in an otherwise dark room. And it's been awesome. I think I'm growing out of needing music, and it's not all that terrible.

[quote="Jack Straw"]er, what?[/quote]

Commies suck.

er, what?

There's two more invite-only private trackers that have opened up; I have memberships at both of them. Because: I am awesome. Really, though, it cracks me up that these worthless IRC nothings are just giving away invites to anyone that asks. Way to ask for a police infestation. Of course on teh other end of the scale you've got an equally worthless maggot on the forums saying "Hey you konoooow, all this invite-begging, man, it's getting really annoying 'cause we've decided not to let people in except for 2 minutes a day just to be assholes so y'know what fuck 'em, maaan, we odnt' *need* anymore people, 10,000's totally enough, fuck those worthless commie prolls who have the audacity to be more interested in real life than illegally downloading music over the intern--i mean uh sharing the groooove!" They're both blatantly ripping off each other, too, which is great--even the torrent content is the bloody same. Anyway, i'd invite you to one of them but htey require you to download and upload 5 GB (so that's 10 GB throughput) before they give you invites to hand out. And since this connectino has a6 GB bandwidth cap *that* aint happenin' for anytime soon. The other one i've got two invites for though but I know you people have this whole anti-ratio crusade thing going on so I won't bother asking Robb if he wants one.

:(
:(
:(

Or, you know, Soulseek. Which I never stopped using.

Demonoid got shut down. Well, well, this is serious, then. They finally attacked someone, McClane, that I [i]do[/i] care about.

So I guess it's back to Internet Radio for the forseeable future.

Yes, aannd the admin of oink was released from custody yesterday. Hah hah. Hah-hah-ahahaha, I say. They take two years coordinating a huge big bad zomfg takedown all to throw the guy into prison for one day. Fantastic work you scatterbrained fucks. I have to think that there's a lot of pressident for a countersuit here since they basically lied blatantly to Dutch police and then put up a terribly unthreatening threat message on the website--not the police, the IFPI. I mean, isn't that basically hacking somebody's webserver? Why are the IFPI even involved so heavily anyway? It's not as though you have the guy who had his house burned down go spy on the arsonist for a year.

:(
:(

:(

That probably is why, but, guess what: playing covers is free. As long as you aren't making money off it (IE putting it in a live album or whatever) you can't charge anyone a fee for playing your tune. They musta just forgot. I'm sure. The RIAA knows what they're doing is legally indefensible but they do it anyway because they know guitarmasta doesn't have money for lawyers. A side note, by the way: guitarmasta got shut down like... at least three months before bassmasta did. I assume it's because nobody cares about bass players.

I always thought that the tab shutdowns were because the working local bands would learn the songs and play them at the bars without paying for the play rights,or whatever they are called.

Either way it's a stupid move, as there are ways and ways.


THE
OVERFLOW
AARDVARK

Any sympathy I might have had for the record industry (which was already at a dangerous low) was completely iraticated when they shut down tab sites. I mean I get wanting to remove the tabs if the band has an official tab book out in stores, but first of all most don't, and second half the time they're not even fucking right anyway. I mean of course neither are most tabs but at least you don't waste your money on it.

It's hilarious enough that the official industry doofuses can't even publish a tab book of their own shitty bands' music and get it correct but to then tell other people that you can't correct their NOOB mistakes is just shitty.

And, again, most bands don't even release tablature. Who, I ask you, is transcribing tabs of a song that has no official tabs released hurting? No one. Not even the label gets hurt by that,, but we should still give them money anyway. Because, like, they're so poor, right.

Completely asshole move, utterly indefensible from any standpoint... and yet these are the people with friends in congress. Shameful.

Then there's the hilarity of the RIAA wanting millions for internet radio. Causing most internet radio stations to go "Whelp, ok, guess we can't afford to give you free publicity after all!" Complete fucking cretins in every respect.

Yeah, at the very least a band forming today can get popular through the Internet and have more power at the negotiating table before signing themselves to a label. The labels have also destroyed anything cool about being a signed act. If I were 19 years old and getting ten thousand hits to MyShittyBandsSite.com, why the fuck would I care of the AOR guy says he can get me on the radio? The radio, the same radio that is going to play homogenized shit throughout the entire country? Great.

And in exchange for being on FM, a dead medium, they get to essentially take out a million dollar loan for production and promotion that they'll pay back through their first five CDs if they even get that far.

My awareness of the same thing happened in indie video games within the space of a year. I've gone from wanting to partner up with a publisher for my next game, to thinking it would be great to be on one of those portals, to wondering why the hell I don't just set it all up through Paypal and sell the thing off JC.com and, to go BioShock for a moment, harvest all the sweat off my brow. A publisher gives you one thing: [i]a box.[/i] Not a case, cases are cheap, but a box. I can live without the box.

(Although I'd make an exception for Steam, natch.)

(Not that Steam will be interested in my wares, natch.)

(I'm just saying.)

[quote="IceCreamJonsey"]We somehow live in a world where every blank CD has a piracy tax figured in, but we're still getting sued by the RIAA for piracy.[/quote]

I love how Canada delt with that: "if we're paying for it, it must be legit!" and legalized pracy for everyone. That terrible, worthless and completely indefensible idea utterly backfired on them as well it should have. Look, this is the 21st century. It's easier to be indie now than it ever was before. Everyone knows record companies are parasitic leeches. Most people probably wouldn't listen to nearly as much music as they would without P2P and that helps the bands get their name out and convince people to go to concerts, which is where they really get their money.

[quote="Lysander"]Not if, as soon as they get the files they want, they close the torrent application. [/quote]

Yeah, but that doesn't happen, because there are a certain percentage of people that love seeding. They fuckin' LUUUURVE it.


[quote]It doesn't cost the person who's seeding anything to be a seed, unless he's using some bandwidth-intensive application[/quote]

Well, there is the possibility that a corporation will decide to commandeer the local police and round you up.

Back when America started, people were sick of religion and kings interfering with their lives. We're just out of dry land, presently, otherwise I would see people doing the same because they are sick to death of corporations. They have all the rights of an individual with none of the consequences. That's why I can't agree with Ben when he says, "Pay for your shit." Not when it comes to music. We somehow live in a world where every blank CD has a piracy tax figured in, but we're still getting sued by the RIAA for piracy.


[quote]It's just meant to keep the riffraff out; why even bother giving the stuff to people who are too stupid to realize that if you don't share the stuff you download no one can get it? [/quote]

Who is riff raff? I mean, the leechers still help and I'd be against any bit torrent format that tried to exclude people.

What Oink should have done is allow the torrents to be open to everyone, and then give the registered users something (like access to a forum, or whatever) if their ratios were a certain number. So there is no need to seed, but you get a small bonus an-hahaha, sorry, they'd still be worthless pricks on their forum, so it doesn't matter. They were incompetent.


[quote]I agree here. I had to deal with living on a 128Kbps connection for several months, and then I had a hard drive crash; now I'm on ADSL and yet it's acting like a 64Kbps ISDN line.[/quote]

We're probably headed that way, as I've seen stories show up on Digg (I know, I know) saying that Comcast is network shaping and censoring e-mails and who knows what else. Even though Qwest is a hilariously poor corporation that does illegal things, they just might be a better option than Comcast. I don't care if Comcast is going to kill off packets, but they'd better lower their fucking prices. Which they haven't / won't.

And my Internet connection dies once an hour with Comcast. So yeah, when I'm off for Christmas I'll probably switch us to DSL.

[quote="Lysander"]
I rip all my albums at V4 MP3, which is below their quality cutoff, despite the evidence of this being indistinguishable from a lossless source in a blind test[/quote]

how many lysanders does it take to distinguish between a V4 MP3 and a CD?

[quote="Ice Cream Jonsey"]Which is fine, because they are all seeding each other while they are there.[/quote]

Not if, as soon as they get the files they want, they close the torrent application. Then they would be leeching from one another, and only one dude ends up seeding, so that guy gets his bandwidth hammered by everybody even though there's plenty of people who have the thing but just aren't sharing because they can't stand to have someone else using their bandwidth.

Which is what makes this so annoying. It's FREE MUSIC. It doesn't cost the person who's seeding anything to be a seed, unless he's using some bandwidth-intensive application--in which case I usually just turn it off and then back on when I'm done. And yet people will find excuses not to help their fellow man out regardless. How typical of humans these days.

[quote="Ice Cream Jonsey"]In that case, everyone learns to keep their torrents up. Everyone has incentive, then.[/quote]

Everyone... except yoouu! It's just meant to keep the riffraff out; why even bother giving the stuff to people who are too stupid to realize that if you don't share the stuff you download no one can get it? These are the same people I see on email lists saying how awesome limewire and Azeurius are. Fuck 'em.

[quote="IceCreamJonsey"]Some guy would go get Nickelback or Maroon 5 or whatever, just to get a meaningless, worthless ratio up. Does that make any sense? That being said, it would be hilarious to see them get prosecuted for sharing shitty music they didn't even want.[/quote]

I agree here. I had to deal with living on a 128Kbps connection for several months, and then I had a hard drive crash; now I'm on ADSL and yet it's acting like a 64Kbps ISDN line. My upload pool is so terrible I really can't afford to seed much of anything, and even if I did--I have nothing, because most of the original files got lost and even though I have other copies that are the exact same albums and songs with the exact same data I can't share 'em because the hash is different, and I can't add mine 'cause that's a duplicate. So I'm basically fucked.

I rip all my albums at V4 MP3, which is below their quality cutoff, despite the evidence of this being indistinguishable from a lossless source in a blind test being staggering and overwhelming. Sure it didn't used to be the case but it is now with the new version of LAME, same with Vorbis and Nero AAC; 128Kbps has reached audio transparency. GG guys. Oink however refused to see reason and kept the cutoff at 192 for some stupid fucking reason. Also meaning that you couldn't share the In Rainbows album, which--actually, there's two things about this that amuse me.

First of all Oink actually expressly forbade you from sharing anything that was available freely anywhere else that wasn't also a torrent. I mean, Jesus fuck. Way to ask for litigation, there, you stupid lunchbuckets.

But second--the album is being traded wildly on P2P networks. How much fucking sense does that make? Yes, ladies and gentlemen: we live in a society where people would rather illegally download an album for free on limewire than legally download that album--in the same audio format--for free directly from the artists, no label involved. There are no worthless asshole shills to "stick it" to, in this case, that's pure profit loss to Radiohead. And they're offering it for FREE! What the fuck, seriously? Someone explain this to me, I'm completely stumped.

[quote="IceCreamJonsey"]Enough people share. And if enough people want it, they will all share with one another.[/quote]

Joseph Stalin died for your sins.

[quote="Lysander"]The ratio thing isn't about people "tying up the system", it's about people going "Oo! Why yes, I will take that, and that, and that and that and that and that, thank you!" And then closing it immediately.[/quote]

Which is fine, because they are all seeding each other while they are there.


[quote]Which is fine for a couple of people to do but the natural propensity is for people to just do that because people are by and large greedy,... you'll get a system where your window for actually downloading torrents at any appreciable speeds lasts like the 5 seconds it takes for those first 10 leechers to close their clients after the torrent finishes. [/quote]

In that case, everyone learns to keep their torrents up. Everyone has incentive, then. And not because some dumb shit is making them grovel for it, either.

You had people on Oink downloading what other people wanted. Some guy would go get Nickelback or Maroon 5 or whatever, just to get a meaningless, worthless ratio up. Does that make any sense? That being said, it would be hilarious to see them get prosecuted for sharing shitty music they didn't even want.



[quote]they put me on warning because I didn't name the filenames of my tracks, okay[/quote]

Jesus Christ. Yeah, they really were neat about stealing music. You have to give them credit. Them and the Nazis. Both just generally impeccable.


[quote]They had a captcha on the login page. I mean really. How fucking incredibly annoying and pointless is that? [/quote]

I wouldn't let the administrators of Oink organize a Gatorade shower.


[quote]I'm not gonna say that their way of dealing with the ratio thing wasn't retarded as well but the concept, in general, of kicking people off because they can't be bothered to just keep the torrent window open while they're not using the 'net for anything else is one i can understand. [/quote]

I can't / don't. Enough people share. And if enough people want it, they will all share with one another. People every day risk uploading things to Usenet, they work on cracks for games, they distribute XP serials, etc. There is a certain number of people who get off sticking it to the man. I don't see any evidence of torrents going unseeded.

I seeded the IF Comp games this year, and I have not even cracked them open. It was important (and easy) for me to do so. Likewise, music for a lot of people. Well, enough people.


[quote]It was just incredibly nice to not have to worry about that stuff.[/quote]

Sure. If Oink were completely worthless, nobody would have used it. But they had a complete and total misunderstanding about what torrents solve. They really were too stupid (at the top) to understand the technology they were given. It's extremely noteworthy to me, and I was fascinated by the whole thing. I was just surprised that they even got this dial-up BBS sense of paranoia, but I suspect it had less to do with that than it did their ability to hold something over somebody else.

In the end, and not that they cared, but they were just as big dinosaurs as the record label guys they were irritating. (I wouldn't use the phrase "stealing from," because it's not stealing, it's infringement. I guess I could use "infringement.)

The ratio thing isn't about people "tying up the system", it's about people going "Oo! Why yes, I will take that, and that, and that and that and that and that, thank you!" And then closing it immediately. Which is fine for a couple of people to do but the natural propencity is for people to just do that because peopel are by and large greedy, and if you get the majority of the people taking without any interest in keeping the torrent open for the rest of them then you'll get a system where your window for actually downloading torrents at any appreciable speeds lasts like the 5 seconds it takes for those first 10 leechers to close their clients after the torrent finishes. I'm not gonna say they weren't retarded, they put me on warning because I didn't name the filenames of my tracks, okay, let's slow-clap for the 3 fucking losers who have so little lives that them taking at most five whole minutes to rename 15 files no longer have to worry about malicious assholes like me from completely ruining their fucking week. Glad they stopped that problem cold! They had a captcha on the login page. I mean really. How fucking incredibly annoying and pointless is that? I'm not gonna say that their way of dealing with the ratio thing wasn't retarded as well but the concept, in general, of kicking people off because they can't be bothered to just keep the torrent window open while they're not using the 'net for anything else is one i can understand. It's called peer to peer fora reason, the system only works if everyone contributes and if you don't actually have anything to contribute than you can at least add your own bandwidth to the pool.

Annnyyway, the thing I had most difficulty finding was bootlegs and zomb suits me perfectly well for that so that's not really a concern, but you get a lot of annoying shit on public trackers like someone putting the entire goddamn album in a .rar (utterly pointless) or it's a transcode and I don't find that out for two months or they don't mark what bitrate the files are at or it downloads at the blisterhot speed of 3 KB/S or whatever. IT was just incredibly nice to not have to worry about that stuff.