Friday, February 11, 2005

LokiTorrent Bites The Dust

The LokiTorrent site is no more - and the front page has been replaced by an MPAA notice.
There are websites that provide legal downloads. This is not one of them.

This website has been permanently shut down by court order because it facilitates the illegal downloading of copyrighted motion pictures. The illegal downloading of motion pictures robs thousands of honest, hard-working people of their livelihood, and stifles creativity. Illegally downloading movies from sites such as these without proper authorization violates the law, is theft, and is not anonymous. Stealing movies leaves a trail. The only way not to get caught is to stop.
Even worse - the courts have ordered the LokiTorrent guys to hand over access logs. Expect an avalanche of writs any time now.

via linkfilter

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Lokitorrent was a good place to get television.. things that you would have seen if you'd been home OR had a TiVO. I can't view that as illegal. It was also a good place to get anime.. and I find no problem in downloading unlicensed anime, or indeed in downloading fansubbed anime. Since most of the anime is available to cable subscribers in Japan, and I pay a large sum each month for Cable, but *I* don't get it.. I'm forced to buy DVDS that contain edited dubs.. with poor subtitles that americanized and anglicized -- I don't think anime fans should have to put up with that as their only recourse.

Let me put it this way.. there are so called "man made laws" (malum prohibitum) and "laws from God -- good and evil (Malum in se). If you break a "man made law" -- that's a far lesser offense since man made laws change with the tides.

It's illegal to walk your donkey on the street of town X, it's illegal to have sex before marriage, it's illegal to do certain sexual acts EVEN IF YOUR MARRIED.. planting such and thus and a vegetable is illegal in the springtime.. weird and odd laws exist all over the place, there are books of them, compendiums.

And yes, I do think intellectual property should have some protection -- but the laws as THEY STAND NOW are not effective and when a majority of OTHERWISE LAW ABIDING CITIZENS (i.e., folks who wouldn't commit an act of Malum in se) don't obey a set of Man made laws... that means the LAWS NEED TO BE CHANGED, not the citizens need to be punished.

Think about the social compact and the agreement between the people and their governments.. we will do this and you, the government, will do that. When that agreement is breached, you have trouble...and in the case of enforcing some of the laws relating to intellectual property, the laws are unenforceable because too many people disagree with then. Given that fact, there is only one course of action: REDRAFT THE LAWS TO MAKE THEM MORE SENSIBLE.. not to cater to the greed of a few people who stand to make tremendous amounts of money. The public simply won't (and doesn't) stand for it.