The Pirate Bay About To Relaunch Suprnova.org

kungfujesus writes "The Pirate Bay crew has been working on this secret project for quite some time now. Back in April they wrote a cryptic post on their blog announcing that something was coming. In a response to this announcement TPB admin Brokep told TorrentFreak: "The past, the present and the future. It's all the same, but one thing's for sure, we will radiate for weeks", today it became clear that he was referring to the resurrection of Suprnova."

But with mininova

who needs suprnova?

Re:But with mininova

It holds a certain nostalgic value. I'm really happy to hear this.

Re:But with mininova

Mininova is nowhere near the traffic that Suprnova once was. I used to be able to find anything and everything on suprnova, almost always. Mininova feels lacking a lot of the time.

Re:But with mininova

Just use Torrents.to [torrents.to] , best torrent site I've ever used.

Re:But with mininova

Just use http://torrentz.com/ [torrentz.com] it searches all the big sites at the same time.

Re:But with mininova

Isohunt is now complying with the MPAA/RIAA. Don't use it.

Re:But with mininova

But is this a "problem" with Mininova or increased P2P site competition? TPB, IsoHunt, TorrentSpy, ...

Isn't TorrentSpy pretty much dead since they now have to turn over their logs to pretty much anyone who wants them?

Who needs it

Mininova aside, why would they relaunch Suprnova, when TPB is already one of the biggest (if not the biggest) BT trackers around?

Is there really a market for that many different tracker/aggregators? I guess I can understanding having different sites tailored to different purposes; a site that's designed expressly for tracking TV-episode .torrents is probably going to be designed differently than one built around general-purpose dvdimage/iso/rar torrents, but it seems like this is something where bigger is better. The more files that are tracked, the more useful a site is.

Why create another one?

Re:Who needs it

Demonoid requires you to register if you want to access older torrents, whereas TPB, Mininova and the old Suprnova didn't. Registration in the world of bit-torrent seems somewhat counter-intuitive.

Re:Who needs it

I tried a popular private torrent site when I managed to get an invite. It was, to paraphrase the Angry Video Game Nerd, fucking horrible!

Private sites tend to enforce a ratio, so if you don't seed enough you're eventually banned, which is what happened to me. No matter how much I tried, I was never able to seed properly (about 800 mb at most, and I must have downloaded about 10 gb). I had my client set up exactly like the site instructed me to, and I've never had any issues seeding on public trackers. I tried seeding big torrents, I tried seeding small torrents, I tried seeding small chunks from a large, popular torrent, and I even downloaded a file just so I could try seeding it... nothing worked. To make things even more difficult, what little I managed to seed wasn't properly registered by the site. Another part of the problem was that new users couldn't access new torrents, so by the time the torrents became available to me there was nobody downloading them anymore, or there was such a ridiculous amount of seeders that I couldn't seed anything myself.

Since then, I've had no desire to go anywhere near private torrent sites. And why would I? Public sites usually have anything you need, and if they don't then it's likely to be so rare that private sites don't have it either.

Re:Who needs it

It's not a tracker. It's an aggregation site. It just stores copies of .torrent files from public trackers, which would include TPB. Most of the special-purpose (TV, movies, games, whatever) torrent sites are aggregation sites as well.

Re:Probably good to explain.

Not everyone knows what PirateBay, Suprnova, Mininova, IsoHunt, and Demonoid do. I think it would be good to explain their purpose and their differences.

They brutally steal the caviar from the mouths of innocent media moguls. Won't someone think of their childrens' trust funds?

Not a bad idea

From the article it sounds like the main technical thing going on here is that the suprnova site will be relaunched as a torrent index, using the same design scheme as the original site. Ho-hum; there is no lack of options for torrent sites at the moment...

... but the symbolic meaning is, IMHO, actually important. From TFA:

We also talked to Brokep, one of The Pirate Bay administrators and asked him why they decided to revive Suprnova. He told us: "We talked it over and decided it was something people would have use for, it would help the torrent community and it would also signal that if you shut one down it will get back up again."

Not to be overly dramatic, but things like this show that injustices to the filesharing community (if you see them that way :) ) will, eventually, be overcome.

A few more details at slyck

Slyck.com has an article up on the topic, with a few more details, and a couple comments from the original Suprnova maintainer.

He (Andrej Preston) comments in the article:

"My deal with [The Pirate Bay] was that the role of SuprNova can't change much. It needs to be community orientated, but I hope they make some updates the SuprNova was sooo missing. But what they will do, it's not my thing to decide anymore. But I know they will do [well] and will try to keep the community spirit running."

http://www.slyck.com/story1561_SuprNovaorg_Transfe rred_to_The_Pirate_Bay [slyck.com]

Yeah, and...

Am i the only person to notice that their big, uncensored image hosting site lasted about 2 days before they started removing images by the thousand with no explanation? Entire categories disappeared. I'd like to see slashdot or somebody ask them what the heck the point of the site is even supposed to be, since it certainly isn't a place to put things to link to, even generic LOL forum-type images. There's no indication on their FAQ or anywhere else why or how or who will just decide to remove stuff on a whim.

isohunt anyone?

I think that's the ideal for a torrent index. index + merge duplicates. How can the idea be improved over that? maybe a better site design, I don't know.

Re:isohunt anyone?

Well, let's see.

* A search engine that actually uses booleans correctly.
* A policy that labels for CD or DVD images match what's on them in some consistent format, such as name, author, publisher, comments, with a matching search engine.
* Published checksums for the images: this could be used to reduce or elimiinate the duplicates.
* Open source or creative commons links: Bittorrent is the fastest way to get Linux CD or DVD images, but they *must* be checksum verified for security reasons.
* A policy of sending 3000 volts to the fingertips of the next idiot who uses yet another format for CD or DVD images, wasting my time with bittorrents for formats that no one but some teenager in Slovenia uses.

scofflaws

Speaking as a BitTorrent client developer, I have to opine that BitTorrent is a terrible way to distribute pirated content. All the things that make it a good tool for distributing LEGITIMATE content work against it when what's being shipped around is against the law; it's too easy to track down the people involved in downloading and uploading it, and any attempt to limit that significantly reduces the network's ability to handle the load.

The only reason BitTorrent is being used is because there are plenty of scofflaws out there who want to share this data, and BitTorrent works great to amplify their efforts. Tracking down the initial sources is a bit difficult but not impossible, but there are a myriad of other sources waiting in the wings.

Scoffing the law is a grand tradition in the United States; from moonshiners, to ignoring the double-nickel speed limit on the roads, we've turned our noses up at laws which, while they may have some social benefit, we feel they restrict us too harshly. Often those laws wind up causing more problems than they solve; ask someone who wound up poisoned by ethylene glycol from an illegal alcohol still made from a car's radiator.

In this case we have people being sued, fined and jailed for trading long strings of ones and zeros. The "intellectual property" owners tell us these strings belong to them, even though those strings can vary enormously (re-encoding video alters the data entirely) they still assert ownership. One innocuous file on one's desktop may spell disaster. But with hundreds of millions of people around the world throwing them around, it's practically impossible to stop.

One website returning to life doesn't really mean that much in terms of what's being traded, but it is indeed a symbol showing how futile the fight to enforce the ownership of ideas is; after all, how can one own an idea [xkcd.com]?

Re:scofflaws

That's great. The Pirate Bay operate in a locale where this material *is* legal to distribute.

If you're saying material = the actual file data: no, it's not. I'm from Sweden and it's all illegal to distribute (download AND upload) actual material without the copyright owner's explicit permission. It is NOT illegal to host torrent files though, it's quite logically considered different from the material, with file hashes and tracker info basically all they contain. This is being supported by an old BBS case of 1996 where it was decided in the BBS site's favor to host indices of warezed material.

Re:scofflaws

America was founded by scoffing the law, remember the Boston Tea Party?

Re:scofflaws

Yeah, we were founded by scoffing at unjust, unfair and immoral laws. The idea that you shouldn't steal copyrighted work doesn't quite seem to fit in those catagories...

It isn't stealing copyrighted work, it's copying copyrighted work. And the penalties for breaking such a law are unjust, unfair, and immoral.

Slashdot:Official message board of the pirate bay

or at least it feels like it. Why is it that everytime someone at the pirate bay sneezes it makes it on to the front page of slashdot? You download torrents from the internet, well good for you, I'm so proud! But there is more to tech than people who spend their lives watching MPAA movies while cursing out the MPAA

Mere Conicidence?

The Featured Article on Wikipedia today is the Supernova: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova [wikipedia.org] Coincidence? Or a sneaky new method of marketing?

*sigh*

I'm always bothered when I read articles like this because I know the Slashdot party line is always "File sharing good, fuck the content creators". I get upset because I think of my little brother, who's basically been screwed by piracy.

My little brother has a band. The music is quite good. The band is quite popular locally. It's so popular, in fact, that people bootleg their music and share it across the internet.

At first they were quite happy about this. They were reaching a much larger audience. Surely these people will come to their concerts and buy their CDs if they like the music (at least, that's what Slashdot always says will happen).

However, it didn't. Turns out (from conversations with their fans on their message board) that no one wants to buy their music. They like it, but hwy buy the music when fans can download every one of their albums for free online? Also, concert attendance has stayed flat. The pirating of their music hasn't suddenly increased attendance like they hoped it would.

So, while the band has a large fanbase (and it's growing), they've had barely enough to scrap by. My brother personally cleans a local diner's grease pit every night for a free dinner. They haven't (yet) gotten a recording contract, and I personally hope they do before my brother is actually eating the grease. :P

Long story short: don't believe everything you read on Slashdot. While I agree that the big content holders don't deserve any sympathy, there are artists out there that actually ARE hurting from piracy. It's mostly the little guys, and I haven't found one comment on Slashdot yet that recognizes this is as a problem.

Re:*sigh*

Man I agree totally with you. This is hurting the little guy worse then its hurting the corporate level. I hate reading the countless comments praising them as heroes or saints at Pirate Bay.

Imagine the little guy putting countless hours and his heart and soul into developing a piece of software and offering it at a reasonable price. Then he hopes onto Pirate Bay and searches for it, and then he sees it being distributed by hundreds of people. Now some would feel happy that their software is being used. Unfortunately, that man is looking to make an income off of the software he sells. That man is now devastated and theres nothing he can do about it.

Pirate Bay is horrible. They know what their doing over there. I don't care if they operate in a country that by their law says they can do what they do. I don't care if they think their sticking it to the man. Those two excuses are getting old. And the worst part is how arrogant Pirate Bay is about all this.

Now most of you wont care of what I said. Thats fine. But I personally know someone who is devastated that his software is being distributed for free and theres not a god damn thing he can do about it. And I bet theres people on Slashdot that are seeing the same thing.

Re:*sigh*

Why is the parent a troll?

I had software I was developing before in my part time and it was ripped off and pirated. It no longer became worth my time to work on it so it died a quick death.

Re:*sigh*

the pirate bay do it to make money:
http://rixstep.com/1/20060708,00.shtml [rixstep.com]
20,000 Euros a day, also estimated at 9 million dollars a year, in advertising.

your friends band may lose out, but a bunch of swedes who take his work and give it away for free are doing just fine. Nice people huh?

Re:*sigh*

Your hypothetical software developer is like the urbanite lost in the desert. If he knew how to take advantage of the situation, then he COULD do something about it. All those people who download and actually use the software - not the 99% who download it, play with it and then delete, but the people for whom it is actually useful - those people are potential customers for version 2.0.

Pretty much A solution to software piracy is software as a service. As a software developer I hate PHP, WebForms, AJAX, etc etc and think that lots of programs are better off the Web (as standalone applications), however I started to deploy all my software as web portals and charge subscription fees for it.

If you look at it, maybe it is one of the reasons why Microsoft and other big companies are planning to do that, no conspiracy or whatever.

Re:*sigh*

If they do get a recording contract they'll really learn what theft is.

Re:*sigh*

While this seems like an obvious troll, I will entertain your scenario with a couple I know of personally.

I used to be in a band, I was never real good but the other members were. We cut a few tracks and all, played a few bars and local joints, even a couple festivals. We never were conceded or stupid enough to think we could do this full time seeing how we got half of the 2 dollar cover charge at most dive bars and they seemed to over charge us for our drinks. I don't know, maybe I could drink 20 beer and 5 or 6 shots in the 3 hours we played? (could explain why I sucked). So long story short, we all kept our jobs and did it as a hobby while at the same time working to get a contract and all. After all, there is probably 200 bands in every mid sized town and how many famous bands with contracts? It isn't likely that being in a band will amount to much mor then just that with all the competition out there.

Well, our band eventually we split up. Work got to involved for me to spend the time necessary and the others were playing around with different bands and all. I had some of our stuff in the shared directory with XoloX which was the popular local file sharing utility. Eventually, I have friends unrelated to this venture asking me if I knew who that band was. I instantly recognized the tunes and told them. Well, he searched the other members out and attempted to form a band with them. I ended up cutting some tracks for them too and shared them.

While they didn't make it rich, they did get a decent following and even though most of the band members moved on, they still have the band together and play more or less for fun but still do gigs like bars and festivals. One of the people was contacted and wrote two songs for someone in Nashville, It wasn't a popular singer rather then a company that sells the songs to them.

I sit back and read your scenario, I think when ever I see non famous musicians in the movies, they all seem dirt poor. I wonder if there is something to this? All my friends in the band continued working and didn't resort to doing something he couldn't do well enough to get paid for just for a meal. All of them have decent paying jobs, while one went on to become a doctor, the others took different paths and became lawyers or started their own companies doing stuff they were good at doing.

So as I see it, your brother doesn't need people to stop sharing music, he need to either get better or find a real job. It would be nice if we could all live in la la land, but when our parents kick us out, we have to think about real life and get on with it. You could probably do your brother a favor by telling him to get a job. It doesn't mean he has to give up his playing or the band, it just means he needs ot take care of himself first.

Re:*sigh*

We cut a few tracks and all, played a few bars

Well there's your problem, your tracks need to be a lot longer than a few bars if you want people to buy them.

Re:*sigh*

I'm always bothered when I read articles like this because I know the Slashdot party line is always "File sharing good, fuck the content creators".

If there is a "slashdot party line" it is "fuck the distribution cartel and their obsolete business model" not the content creators. Right now, the creators are caught in the crossfire. But since your brother isn't even signed, he still has the freedom to think outside the box and step outside of the firefight.

Tell your little brother to start thinking of recorded music the same way he thinks of live music - as a performance that he can sell tickets to.

Record each live performance and then set up a paypal collection plate on his website, when the fans have put enough money into the collection plate, the band puts the MP3's up for FREE download. Promote it as concerts for people who couldn't make it to the concert.

Do the same for studio recordings -- one song, a set of songs, even the entire studio session, outtakes and all.

Sell vanity performances where, for some suitably expensive fee, a guy can have the band record a version of the song that substitutes his girlfriend/wife/kid/enemy's name in the lyrics. For even more money, perform and record THAT version live at a concert

The reason your brother is being hurt by piracy is because he's been brainwashed by the content cartel to ignore the profitable opportunities that the internet makes possible.

Just happened to be browsing firehose...

...and saw this claim:

Pirate Bay earns 20,000 Euros a day [slashdot.org]

controverisal pro-piracy website the piratebay likes to portray itself as an innocent hobby site that provides a free index without censorship, but recent facts show that the site is earning up to 20,000 Euros per day from its advertising. Taking in money on this scale puts a different slant on the motives behind the Swedish filesharing site, and could open up the runners of the site to prosecution for profiting from copyright infringement.

I wonder if that's true? The "from its advertising" part makes it sound like a load of bs fud.

Re:Just happened to be browsing firehose...

it is very heroic to stand up for your ideals and risk your life for what you believe. Just like in US when guys fed up with england fought for independence, etc

I may be jaded and plain cynical, but yes, I do think Pirate Bay and all other sites are in for the money. Risking lives and comparing them to those who really fought in the the US War of Independence is not only an overstatement, it's borderline troll (I'm not even an American).

I somehow fail to see this as a giant resistance and war against an oppressive Big Brother. Fact is, the torrent sites are used to distribute copyrighted materials. I don't agree with RIAA/MPAA/BSA tactics, but we are not ENTITLED to get anything for free - movies, songs or anything else. When you download Bourne Ultimatum, you're doing it because you're too lazy to go to a theater and feel better because you've spared 20 bucks - you're not fighting for freedom.

I've spent my childhood under communism and I'm kinda fed up with this attitude - oh they're so evil we can't get Evanescence for free. Where I come from, people were arrested for listening to Rolling Stones.

As a part-time photographer, I've had my work used without permission and let me tell you - it pisses me off. Making photos costs me money, even if it's only paying the model. I don't agree with copyrights for 70 years - 10 years would be enough for anything - but I have a hard time believing that those who took my photos did that to fight the system - they did that so they don't have to spend a dollar at iStockPhoto.

You can mod me down now.

Re:Just happened to be browsing firehose...

I wonder if that's true? The "from its advertising" part makes it sound like a load of bs fud.

It's hard to impossible to verify the accuracy of this claim - but it's not "bullshit" or "FUD".

I've disabled by AdBlock just to see their pages... they have FIVE ad areas (can't call them banners) as follows:

• Top right - Auction Ads;
• Top center - TargetPoint;
• Left - AdultFriendFinder;
• Right - AdBrite;
• Bottom - Auction Ads.

I don't know about their daily impressions, click-through ratio, but they certainly get more than 1000 EUR/day from ads, and the 20,000 EUR figure doesn't seems far-fetched to me.

I won't get sucked into moral or political discussions, but anyone who thinks that they (and others) are in just for fun, are simply naïve.

Excellent timing...

This news couldn't have come at a better time, what with torrentspy's recent legal woes...

YouTube competitor

A few months back, the PirateBay guys talked about launched a YouTube competitor... a video sharing site. Could that be it?

Attention whores

Seriously, what's the point? Are they actively trying to piss off every media and rights company in the world? Not saying that this isn't a noble goal, but that constant provocation from TPB's side will rear at some point.

If TPB is relaunching it...

why is it for sale?
http://www.sedo.co.uk/search/details.php4?domain=s uprnova.org&partnerid=14460&language=e/ [sedo.co.uk]

Re:Stop the internet!

Next week on Fox 11, a story on the torrent downloading terrorist threat to the Universe; threatening to "SuprNova" vans at sports stadiums in solar systems across the Universe.

Re:Slashdot Users

i would never socialize with you either. sorry guy :(

blame yourself.

Re:Stop the internet!

What industry are you talking about? Software, music, video? Yeah, we'll all be much better off when there are no new commercial songs movies, songs or software. While we're at it, why don't we just run riot around the streets, breaking into a stores and taking our consumer goods for free! They can't stop us if we all do it!!

Sarcasm aside, while I have downloaded software, music and videos in the past, I do actually pay for the stuff I like and want to support.. I don't mind at all if Microsoft or Adobe disappear off the face of the earth however.. they're probably among the 2 companies to have the most software pirated (Windows/Office/Photoshop..?).