Bad news for those expecting the BitTorrent site Demonoid to somehow spring up from the ashes after last week’s alleged bust. The Demonoid domain names are now officially for sale via Sedo, the final nail in the coffin for the popular site that was taken down via a combined assault from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry and Interpol.
Inquiries and investigations spanned both the Ukraine and Mexico, arriving in the wake of a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack that kept Demonoid offline for a week or so prior to authorities going after Demonoid’s hosting and leadership.
“The operation to close Demonoid was a great example of international cooperation to tackle a service that was facilitating the illegal distribution of music on a vast scale. I would like to thank all those officers involved in this operation to close a business that was built on the abuse of other people’s rights,” said IFPI anti-piracy director Jeremy Banks in a statement.
While the site’s only tech admin was hopeful that Demonoid would return in some capacity following the DDOS attack, reports TorrentFreak, it appears that the towel has finally been thrown in on the popular torrent community.
There’s no listed price for just how much the three Demonoid domains are going for: demonoid.me, demonoid.com, and demonoid.ph. The Sedo sale is of the “make an offer” variety, and eight such offers have been submitted as of this article’s writing. Unfortunately, Sedo doesn’t list exactly what these offers are, or even give a ballpark as to what interested buyers are bidding for the domain.
“Selling the domains now while traffic to Demonoid remains high should ensure a good price for the vendor, but it seems unlikely that any buyer would look to relaunch as a torrent site,” writes TorrentFreak’s “enigmax.”
It remains to be seen whether individual Demonoid users will be ultimately targeted as a result of the seizures and shutdown. Ukrainian authorities are allegedly in possession of all Demonoid data as a result of their Demonoid investigation, although Demonoid’s ISP, Colocall, claims that no information was ever seized by authorities and that the ISP voluntarily terminated its relationship with Demonoid following an inquiry by Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs.
First off, GOOD NEWS! The brand new ATD BADGE PACKS arrived! And they are BEAUTIFUL! I will thus be doing a major post run today and getting them out to the four corners of The Earth. Get your orders in here!
So my plan for Easter, before I got all ill and bedrid, was to watch Blade Runner then make loads of music with that fresh Ridley-Scott-At-His-Prime inspiration fresh in my consciousness. Now, I could easily download Blade Runner, but it’s ana amazing movie that, unlike most movies, i know I will want to watch over and over again, along with whatever extra, related shit I can find. It was Thursday afternoon, and I’d been in central London with my wife and the in laws. I figured I’d pop by the Westfield on the way home, pick up the Final Edition DVD, with all the extra documentaries and art work and commentaries and behind the scenes sweet shit, then go home and watch it on the projector with burgers. HEAVENLY SHIT.
So Charlotte went to the supermarket and I went to Westfield. Westfield is supposedly the biggest shopping centre in London. If you were American I guess you’d call it a “mall”. It opened here in Nu Olympia last September on Charlotte’s birthday to terrifying and tremendous fanfare, and is a pretty gross monument to our contemporary values, but, you know, big fuck off shopping centre. I should be able to get a DVD.
It takes about ten minutes to walk from one end of Westfield to the other, and there are three floors. I walked each one carefully, yet saw not a single place that sold DVDs. I knew there was a HMV in there somewhere though, so I retraced my steps. Nothing. Eventually I happened upon a large electronic touch screen map of the place, so I tried poking at that, but it was broken, and unresponsive. Round the back, however, was a good old fashioned paper map which lead me to the HMV, tucked away round a corner behind an ice cream stand.
The HMV was like one of the ones they have in airports – small, mostly dedicated to games and DVDs, negligible music section. The music section is basically one shelf with the top twenty CDs on it. The mobile phone section takes up more space. But I wasn’t there for music. I was there for Blade Runner.
I found the B section, but no Blade Runner. They had Blue Crush, but no Blade Runner. I was shocked and appaled. I found a member of staff – one of three in the whole place – and asked where Blade Runner was. “In the Bs,” he said flatly, without meeting my eyes. I explained that I’d already looked in B and couldn’t see it (but I DID see Blue Crush). He said in which case they didn’t have it. I said this was ridiculous, that Bade Runner is one of the greatest movies of all time, and what kind of a shop that sells movies doesn’t stock Blade Runner? He replied angrily that they must have run out, in which case when it was time to restock they’d order more. I replied that in this digital day and age that was insane and backward, that digital tracking systems should alert them to when important titles were running low, and automatically reorder, and that their prehistoric business practices were going to force me into piracy, to which he replied, “whatever, do what you have to.”
Not to be defeated by a man evidently tired if his job and day, I asked the man at the counter if he could check if they had Blade Runner in stock on the computer. And, sure enough, they had one copy left, apparently in the 2 for £10 section. So I had a look, but it was not in the 2 for £10 section (Blue Crush was). So the counter guy called over the angry dead-eyed guy who’d already told me if it wasn’t in the B section they didn’t have it, and he looked at me with as much languid loathing as he could muster, then shuffled off saying he was going to look in the stockroom.
Ten minutes later he returned and said it was not there, and thus “probably got nicked.” “Is there anywhere else round here that sells DVDs?” I asked the counter man. He shook his head, sadly. “Wow,” I explained. “It really is all over, huh?” “It’s over,” the counter man agreed, grimy.
So I left London’s biggest shopping centre empty handed, and returned home. With all these newfangled streaming and downloading services there’s got to be a place I can get a Blade Runner Final Cut bundle, I thought. We are after all, Living In The Future.
But it wasn’t on Love Film, and it wasn’t on Netflix, and it wasn’t on Amazon in any way that didn’t involve a physical copy turning up days later.
Stephen Hague tells me he’s been getting movies off of iTunes so I tried that, but no luck.
I then realised I’d not inserted a space between “Blade” and “Runner”, so I tried it without the space, and BINGO! Blade Runner!
But just Blade Runner. No extras, no documentary, and at a whopping £7.99 for a digital file, it was £3 more than the DVD. Hell, the 2 disc DVD’s £4.45 on Play, as someone on twitter let me know. I was shocked. You’re going to charge me almost double the price of a DVD for a digital download of just the movie? No commentary, no documentary, no art, no bock, no stock rooms, no vans, nothing… What kind of an idiot do you take me for?
I thought, “fuck you mane, I’m going to Demonoid.”
So I did. After four hours of trying to legally purchase a classic movie I was being forced into “piracy”. Half an hour later, I had torrented a beautiful digital copy of the Blue Ray, with all the extras (and I’d bought a copy of the DVD from Play, for The Future). I dragged the files onto a USB stick, plugged it into my Xbox, and laid back on my bed to watch Blade Runner on my wall. It was even better than I remembered. When it finished I got up, went into the studio, and made some beautiful Blade Runner inspired music.
Wow. After a nightmare 3 years in and out of court, Allan Ellis, creator of the sadly deceased Oink.cd, the greatest music resource the world ever saw, has been found NOT GUILTY!
A jury at Teeside Crown Court on Friday cleared former Oink admin Allan Ellis of conspiracy to defraud the music industry for running one of the world’s strangest music file-sharing services.
Operators of the so-called Pink Palace banned low-quality sound files, enforced strict usage rules and mandated that all 200,000 of the site’s users’ avatars be “cute” — even taking pains to define exactly what made an avatar appropriately cuddly. All that came to an end in 2007, when the authorities arrested admin Alan Ellis, who created and ran the operation from his Middleborough flat between 2004 and 2007.
After a seven-day trial, 26-year-old Ellis walked from court a free man on Friday, the BBC reports.
Ellis, who said he crafted the site to brush up on his computer skills, testified the $18,000 (£11,000) a month he earned in PayPal “donations” was for rack space rental and servers.
Oink’s invitation-only policy kept it below the radar of most file traders, and the site’s operators apparently nixed repeated attempts to create a Wikipedia entry, so as not to draw attention.
The site prohibited games, videos (aside from tutorials), porn, nudity and the selling of invitations.
The always-clued-in TorrentFreak has been following the story.
Well, that is brilliant news. It’s only 12:17 pm here in the UK< but I am going to have a glass of wine in his honour. Cheers!
Yes, we’s in a recession, and yes, Demonoid is down, and yes, Mininova just fell on its sword, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still download Dexter on a Monday (Sunday, if you;re source-culture Americana.) No, the hydra is real. Here (thanks to Lifehacker) are ten alternatives to Mininova.
BONUS: There’s a great place on the interwebs where you can stream movies and TV shows in flash, DIVx and now HD. That place is Ninjavideo.net, and it is awesome. Throw that TV away right now.
— By Akira The Don on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
By Akira The Don on Monday, August 13th, 2012
OMG THIS IS SO MY JAM 
