
Torrent site Kickass.so has domain banned - codesuela
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-02/09/kickass-torrents-down
======
aestetix
I put this entirely at the fault of the movie industry. I'm happy to pay a
subscription fee for a reliable service that lets me stream movies/shows. The
issue is, none exist. For example, Netflix used to have an amazing selection
before (I imagine) various licensing issues effectively crippled them.

With torrents, I'm able to find a vast selection of movies and shows that
really aren't available anywhere else. Obscure cult classics, pre-Code movies,
and so on. This really seems to be a power play by Hollywood executives that
is more based in making profit for them than supporting creative artists.

Edit: it's interesting to see this get downvoted. I'm curious what peoples
reasonings for downvoting it is.

~~~
watty
Making profit does support creative artists as some of that money goes to
them. As a business they want to maximize profits. Why shouldn't they go after
sites that cause them to lose profit?

~~~
onion2k
_Why shouldn 't they go after sites that cause them to lose profit?_

You'll need to provide evidence that downloading actually leads to lower
profits before anyone can tackle that question.

The hypothesis that "People who download content buy less because they're
getting TV shows for free. If they couldn't download they'd buy instead."
might sound fine, there are some problems with it.

* People might be spending 100% of their entertainment budget on TV shows already, so they couldn't buy any more if they stopped downloading. Stopping those downloads would lead to zero additional profit.

* People might be downloading _everything_ regardless of what it is, including a hell of a lot of things they'd never buy (hoarding mentality). Stopping those downloads would lead to zero additional profit.

* People who download might be fanatical about the TV show, downloading shows to watch as early as possible. Stopping those downloads would lead have a _negative impact_ on profit because those are the people who do the grass-roots evangelism that drives hype.

* People download because they believe the content has zero value. Without downloads they'd just watch something else. Stopping those downloads would lead to zero additional profit.

The question of whether downloading actually harms industry or not had not
been answered.

~~~
SnacksOnAPlane
> The question of whether downloading actually harms industry or not had not
> been answered.

This is kind of ridiculous. I think we all know that it hurts the industry.
Only in your third scenario does downloading actually help the content
producers. And you're leaving off two groups that hurt your case:

* people who would watch the show on TV but instead download

* people who would buy DVDs but instead download

Based on people I know who torrent, the second group is actually fairly large.

Your argument is like "people who go into a store and steal a DVD shouldn't
get in trouble because they probably wouldn't have bought that DVD anyway."
Which is clearly a ridiculous argument.

~~~
philbarr
> Your argument is like "people who go into a store and steal a DVD shouldn't
> get in trouble because they probably wouldn't have bought that DVD anyway."

It's not quite the same as saying that. It's more like, "people who go into a
store and steal a DVD shouldn't get in trouble because they probably wouldn't
have bought that DVD anyway and the way they're stealing it means the store
has exactly the same number of DVDs as it did before the theft."

~~~
SnacksOnAPlane
The cost of producing the DVD is close to nothing. It's not like stealing a
physically hard-to-produce object. You're paying for the IP.

DVDs don't operate in a scarcity model. Stealing a DVD really is almost
equivalent to pirating a movie. The fact that the store is deprived of a
physical item is pretty much irrelevant to the argument; they probably would
have disposed of many unsold copies of the DVD anyway.

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malux85
Big deal, as soon as their domain was seized (kickass.so), they switched back
to their old domain, kickass.to

~~~
ikeboy
According to [http://torrentfreak.com/kickasstorrents-taken-domain-name-
se...](http://torrentfreak.com/kickasstorrents-taken-domain-name-
seizure-150209/) the switch took some time, and kickass.to didn't resolve
right away.

They usually redirect all their old domain names to the current one, so they
would need to change that, it didn't happen by itself.

~~~
wut42
I've been using kickass.to since ages without any issues.

~~~
pyre
So, kickass.to _didn 't_ forward you to kickass.so prior to this incident?

~~~
wut42
Yes. I remember back when they switched from kat.ph — they said both domains
would be available for use

~~~
ikeboy
kat.ph redirects to kickass.to now, and before both kat.ph and kickass.to
redirected to kickass.so.

They are both owned, but they all redirect to whatever is the main one at the
time.

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lbotos
As someone who 1) works in the web/software industry and 2) actually paid for
Photoshop, how do you (the collective you) see this playing out? Will we have
this cat and mouse game ad infinium?

~~~
qeorge
I think for some segment of the population it will continue forever. But I
think most people grow out of piracy eventually.

In my experience, adults generally don't steal things, even if no one is going
to catch them and even if they _really want it_. And consequently most people
grow out of piracy. Not everyone of course, but enough for me to believe
there's still a future in selling IP.

~~~
the_af
I think stealing is only part of it. A lot of it is actually _availability_ :
the mainstream industry simply can't or won't compete on availability and
convenience, which explains why piracy is rampant.

If you could pay a fee and get whatever show/movie you wanted, whenever you
wanted, without region restrictions, and in the original language, I think we
would see a drastic reduction of piracy. Some people will download pirated
movies just because, of course, but I think we would see a drastic reduction
of piracy if paid content was just more _convenient_.

In other word, distributors need to shape up. Of course, it's easier to blame
consumers and try to enforce stricter DRM instead of improving the quality of
service...

~~~
emsy
Unfortunately, this argument doesn't get the attention it deserves. A
clickhoster account can cost more than a Netflix account, yet people are
willing to pay for it, even though they might not end up using it to its
extent. In Europe many people would gladly pay to watch GoT when it's
released. Customers don't care for marketing rights, they just want to watch
the show when it's released.

------
300bps
The U.S. Government has to walk a tightrope of taking down enough sites via
DNS seizures to appease their RIAA and MPAA masters while not taking down so
many sites that people wise up and switch to an alternate DNS scheme like
OpenNIC.

[http://www.opennicproject.org/](http://www.opennicproject.org/)

 _EDIT_ Anyone that thinks the U.S. Government didn't pressure the various
governments involved to do the actual takedowns is naive.

~~~
icebraining
DNS is not exactly hard to censor; mandating the ISPs to drop requests for
those "banned" domains doesn't seem particularly far-fetched.

~~~
radisb
What does this have to do with ISPs? You mean mess with my dns query packets
to my own DNS server that is NOT hosted by them?

~~~
icebraining
Yes, that's what I mean.

~~~
radisb
Well in that case i ll tunnel my requests.

~~~
icebraining
Sure, you can even put the IPs on your hosts file. But 300bps was talking
about the "people" in general switching to OpenNIC - and I think that it's
unlikely enough that they'll do that, much less that they'll start tunneling
their requests.

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ccvannorman
I used kickass torrents to download Microsoft Windows 8 ISO (after legally
buying it from Microsoft, MS did not have the ISO anywhere for me to download,
and I needed it for a VM)

Then yesterday I used kickass torrents to download Mac OS Mavericks, because
Yosemite is a piece of shit but Apple doesn't make Mavericks available any
more, and torrenting was the only way to downgrade my OS.

~~~
ufo
If you want the ISO just to make a VM, you might be able to get a fully legal
one from the modern.ie website:

[https://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools](https://www.modern.ie/en-
us/virtualization-tools)

The VMs you get from there "self destruct" after a month or so but thats good
enough for most testing purposes.

~~~
larard
Just create the VM and clone it before you login for the first time, and use
the clone. Never expires that way.

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cooper12
Why don't we just pass around the IP address for cases like these? All it
would take is a pastebin link with simple instructions to copy and paste the
IP in. While yeah, most people will be scared by a big string of numbers at
first, it shouldn't be too hard to explain that domain names are just
shortcuts. Alternatively, the pastebin could include instructions for adding a
rule in your hosts file for whatever domain you want to resolve to kickass.

------
mike-cardwell
Would be nice if they got a .bit domain which couldn't be siezed. Or just set
up a Tor hidden service.

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Karunamon
Maybe, eventually, someday, the copyright police will get it through their
heads that these actions are ultimately fruitless, if not entirely self-
defeating.

~~~
wlesieutre
> the copyright police

The people whose salaries are generated by not admitting their jobs are
pointless?

~~~
undersuit
No, the copyright police are paid for by our taxes. The RIAA/MPAA doesn't do
much more than lawyer work, for the real shit they make the FBI do it.

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dshacker
Hey everyone, apparently they only seized kickass.so, not kickass.to so you
can browse torrents there anyway.

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martinko
So what is current the most viable alternative?

~~~
__xtrimsky
TPB is actually back

~~~
walru
I think many people (rightly) believe TPB is a honeypot.

~~~
tunula
As a leecher, whether TPB is a honeypot is irrelevant to you. Any adversary
can get the same magnets somewhere else and monitor the swarm for all of your
IPs anyway.

If TPB being a honeypot scares you about using it to find content, you
shouldn't be using public torrents period.

~~~
lowmagnet
Or private ones for that matter, since they collect _some_ information from
you to allow access.

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ryanlol
What a terribly worded and inaccurate title. The size was not seized, only the
domain "kickass.so". The site has multiple (tens) of domains (that are still
accessible) such as kat.ph.

~~~
StavrosK
They all redirect to kickass.so for me, sadly.

~~~
ctrl_freak
Your DNS is probably cached and hasn't updated yet.

~~~
StavrosK
I don't think I ever looked up kat.ph, though, this is the first time I've
heard of it. Not to mention that I rarely use torrent sites anyway...

EDIT: Never mind, looks like there was a cached 301 redirect on kickass.to,
which kat.ph points to. Clearing the cache worked.

