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.<p>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.<p>Edit: it's interesting to see this get downvoted. I'm curious what peoples reasonings for downvoting it is.
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?
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.<p><a href="http://www.opennicproject.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.opennicproject.org/</a><p><i>EDIT</i> Anyone that thinks the U.S. Government didn't pressure the various governments involved to do the actual takedowns is naive.
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)<p>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.
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.
Maybe, eventually, someday, the copyright police will get it through their heads that these actions are ultimately fruitless, if not entirely self-defeating.
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.