Spontaneous Monotony

A bit of almost-breaking news for you folks. After EliteTorrents.org was hacked by the FBI, and Bit-ance.net voluntarily shut down, the BitTorrent community has lost another site, this time ShareLive. After login, a page entitled ‘News from ShareLive Admins’ displays the following:

Due to the lack of funds to keep the sharelive.com servers running we are faced with a dilemma. Rather than beg and plead for money from the community we have decided to shutdown ShareLive until further notice. We apologize for this but we see no other option. ShareLive will shutdown on June 4th 2005. We will continue to update you as more information becomes available.

Now the community is left with just a few indexing sites (save the bigger organisations such as Mozilla that distribute their own hashlinks) to download legal files using each other’s bandwidth rather than a company website’s. Will this make any of us buy more cartel product? Anyone with any ethical objection to hacking would say no.

Update: Apparently the software that powers ShareLive went open source the other day, so there is already a project group on SourceForge dedicated to continuing its development. One of their aims it to optimise the code so that it doesn’t need such powerful servers to run (which the project leader says could enable ShareLive to reopen eventually, which apparently it has done several times before). Here’s hoping.

The copywrong industry’s various executives spat enough collective bile to fill the world’s oceans recently when it emerged that Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith had appeared on BitTorrent. Tens of thousands of people at a time were downloading the film without lining the studio shareholders’ palms with gold. The MPAA President and CEO, Dan Glick, said ‘there is no better example of how theft dims the magic of the movies for everyone than this report today regarding BitTorrent providing users with illegal copies of Revenge of the Sith’.

First of all, the fact that he talks about BitTorrent as if it were a single organisation committing immoral acts (much like his own in fact) betrays how little he actually knows about it.

But the most telling revelation of all is the fact that ROTS has broken sales records worldwide- in the US it made $50 million in a single day. So, if BitTorrent is ‘killing the film industry’ and ‘replacing legitimate purchase with theft‘ (not actual quotes but its the gist of what they try to get us to believe) then how come the most popular BitTorrent download in a long while has made more money than any other film in history?

Either file-sharers are an obscure, marginalised bunch (bear in mind that 60 million people in the United States alone engage in filesharing) or all this propaganda about filesharing killing the copywrong industries is complete bullshit.

No prizes for guessing the answer folks!

See Also

• Billboard PostPlay: Star Wars a hit with BitTorrent
• Darknet: $50 million for Star Wars, piracy aside
• Slyck News: Record weekend for Star Wars despite widespread BitTorrent distribution

At the bottom of each post (whether you’re viewing it on the homepage, in an archive or on its own) you should now see a ‘Printable Version’ link. This gives you the post itself, stripped of all the (ink-consuming) decoration on the pages you normally see. It will work with any post on the blog (and permanent Pages, if I put any up). Enjoy!

Yes, there has been yet another pointless upgrade to Wordpress. It corrects two (yes, count them) basic functionality flaws that would have been detected by any decent testing strategy before 1.5.1 was released. Perhaps in future I’ll wait a few weeks before I install any new Wordpress upgrade to make sure that there aren’t going to be any minuscule, irritating mini-upgrades like this to do afterwards.

As you might have noticed, the text links on the sidebar have been replaced with nice shiny 80×15s! I would have done it for the whole sidebar, but there aren’t really any relevant ones for my blogroll, and the Archives/Categories links are handled internally by Wordpress (I tried to find the code that does it, I failed :P). Also, they are all PNG files, so you are not going to be sued by UniSys for the privilege of viewing them. Enjoy!

EDIT: OK, the sidebar looked a bit tacky with zillions of brightly-coloured buttons on it. I’ve removed all of them except for the pretty much standard orange-and-grey feed buttons

Subsequent edit: I’ve also found that the LZW Compression Algorithm patent (the one that caused patent problems with GIF) has expired