IsoHunt Shuts Down Early To Stop Archive Team From Recording Important Historical Information
from the that's-unfortunate dept
With last week's announcement that IsoHunt was shutting down, the famed "Archive Team" apparently sprung into action to try to preserve the information on the site. As you hopefully know, the Archive Team works hard to preserve important information that has historical relevance and importance. For example, it preserved much of GeoCities after that site was shut down. If you don't understand, preserving historical information is extremely important in an age where such information can disappear entirely.Unfortunately, perhaps because of legal fears, IsoHunt's Gary Fung apparently decided that this archive effort may be legally problematic and shut down the site days early, stating:
I'm told there was this Internet archival team that wants to make historical copy of our .torrent files, I'm honoured that people thinks our site is worthy of historical preservation, but the truth is about 95% of those .torrent files can be found off Google regardless and mostly have been indexed from other BitTorrent sites in the first place.But, of course, as the Archive Team points out, it was never about saving those .torrent files, but rather all the metadata around them:
I think Gary might have misunderstood the purpose of the archiving project; he basically states that “the .torrent files can be found elsewhere too” – but this completely misses the point, being the archiving of the metadata *around* those torrents, such as user comments. These cannot be replicated from other sources…The team apparently to get about 242 gigs of data, but there was a lot more that they missed. That's too bad.
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Filed Under: archive team, archives, gary fung, history
Companies: isohunt
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Or, to put it bluntly, the MAFIAA achieved absolutely nothing with this 'victory' and while they were busy with a single bigger fish heaps of alternatives sprung including decentralized networks (ie: you can search for torrents via the cloud in bittorrent already). Shall we send a Golden Turd to Mr Dodd as congratulations on his imaginary success?
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metadata?
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Not trying to troll, but what kind of "Important Historical Information" would IsoHunt have anyway? A history of seeds, peers and downloads?
Seems terribly irrelevant to me. If such data was really important, surely someone would've mirrored it.
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How important could someones diary from WWII Germany be? The problem with history is that we don't know what's important until it's passed. So the archive team grabs all the public data it can so that history can decide what's important and what isn't.
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I get your point, but, frankly, preserving the entirety of IsoHunt seems to be a pointless exercise. At some point, you're going to have to decide what to preserve: what has actual historic significance, and what doesn't.
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Much of what we know about Egyptian culture is the stone tablets they wrote on to practice writing then just toss away. Not the crap they wrote on walls.
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GeoCities had clear historical significance, given that it contained a big chunk of the early Internet.
IsoHunt, not so much. It has no value other than the torrents, IMHO, and given that those are already allegedly available somewhere else, nothing of value was really lost.
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Have you ever been to IsoHunt? You don't have any deep philosophical discussions there. 90%* of it "How do I get this to work!" and "Great torrent!" and the occasional troll calling everyone a pirate.
IF there was something worth quoting or worth saving, it is likely that it would've been saved by now, I think.
You are far more likely to get a better picture of how pirates think by reading TorrentFreak and associated comments than the comments on IsoHunt.
* pulled out of my ass, but it was a high percentage
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If you were to go to IsoHunt, would you go there to read eloquent discourses on the merits of various aspects of Intellectual Property legislation, or would you go there to get the torrents?
My point is that, most likely, you would go there for the torrents, meaning that the only thing of value IsoHunt had were the torrents, (and possibly any metadata related to the torrents which would most likely not be publicly available).
Sorry, but I just can't see any historic value here.
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Torrent metadeta, specifically comments and feedback, ratings etc, are the best and often ONLY way of knowing which of the dozens of like-named torrents you get from search results are not malware, fakes..., i.e garbage.
Isohunt had one of , if not the biggest, most reliable database of comments and feedback of any torrent site Ive seen. To my knowledge only Pirate bay even comes close.
How on earth can you equate that with 'of no value'?
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Why do you assume the historical significance would be "what pirates think"?
Perhaps the historical significance isn't even exactly what was said, but the patterns of usage. And perhaps the relevance has nothing to do with piracy, torrents, or intellectual property at all?
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If so, please let me know what the method is that you used for determining which of them are garbage and which aren't.
Downloading and installing 20 garbage torrents before eventually finding the one that actually works?
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I ask again - why does your opinion trump that of others, and why are you dismissing opposing views without having bothered to hear them first?
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Re-read the article. User comments seem to be the most important thing they were trying to get to, along with other information valuable as metadata. While data on the popularity of files might still be important (especially when showing data on non-infringing material), that doesn't seem to be what was important to archive.
"Seems terribly irrelevant to me."
Not to others. Why, specifically does your opinion trump theirs?
"If such data was really important, surely someone would've mirrored it."
This is what was being attempted before the shutdown. While ISOHunt was a going concern, the archive wasn't so important and presumably the only people legally able to copy the site would be ISOHunt themselves - and most people wouldn't bother keeping an archive of such a site for commercial reasons. Now that it's needed for historical record, the value and scope of backups have changed.
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Meta meta
Of course, torrent files are themselves metadata.
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It would have nothing to do with the posts as far as deep philosophical meanings go other than to state the level of technology of the time.
That's not exactly something most would think important to save until it occurred. It could easily be something else. Society and mores change from period to period. That's why you archive data because you never know what will be important.
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Why
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TPB team walked away, and they still kept chasing them claiming they are running it today.
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Easy
http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.isohunt.com
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