Poll : Bittorrent invites yes or no?

could you please flesh out what exactly they had in mind? the description is a bit vague if one is to consider the balance of legality.

 

Do you mean where you send a PM with a torrent link like before, or just a thread where you post torrent links from other websites or hosted by this site?

 

No. I think a lot of recent activity on these forums have been borderline when it comes what should or should not be allowed here (the Sonic romset for example). Even if it is limited to just the hidden area, it can still send the wrong message about the community. Yes, I understand that things of archival or never released nature could be passed back and forth this way, but I still think that too many people simply see this place as a way of finding obscure games for free.

 

Sure thing

Honestly I really am in favor of this.

The sort of topics are the standards

"Invites to Torrent Sites offered" Where users of the board in this topic offer invite they have availible then a member can PM him/her if he wants it.

E.g. Say I have a invite to Underground Gamer and I'd be willing to share it. I'd post a message in that topic

"Invites to Torrent Sites (requests)": A topic where users make requests about invites they desire.

E.g. say I want a invite to waffles.fm

Torrent Sites as a general thing are not all dedicated to gaming.
They are private communities that share what they own some of the hosted things maybe in the legal grey area. But, plently of things are perfectly legal like BitMe.Org's stock photo sets.

I don't think this community having this would send a bad message at all...
We're using this fourm to release unreleased games, most of the time through torrent sites. Sonic Xtreme was done through the pirate bay irrc as well as underground gamer. So we really already are associated with torrent sites. Think about it. Those Sonic Xtreme files has spread accoss hundreds of trackers and to millions of people not associated with the community. So whats so bad about associating with torrent sites to the tune of a couple hundred people

So having a small topic sharing membership of torrent sites in a controlled fashion doesn't make it seem all that bad.

I think by sharing invites to torrent sites, it gives members a safe environment to share there're extended community "families" apart from ASSEMbler's fourms. Not to mention it provides a safe heaven for users to offer invites to members who they know will be respectable and caring with their membership.

Even though have more invites then I need at some torrent sites. I honestly don't feel comfortable sharing them with a really public huge community, because who knows how that member will treat it. To me a closed community offers a safe heaven to find a good well of users who will follow protocol and hopefully go a bit beyond.

 

As long as it just stays within the 0th Bit, I don't have a problem with this.

If it were to leak onto other sections of the site... definitely not.

 

On balance I would also say no. Collecting dev material is a rocky patch of ground legality wise and the temptation to start downloading tonnes of material illegally could become too great. Should we really be encouraging people to do so? Anyone wanting to obtain material elsewhere should surely use their own initiative and not be encouraged to do so as it would look like AG was basically becoming one of those sites where any activity goes!

I think that a few people expressed anxieties prior to Sonic X being made available and although it now is in the past, the stress for Kev et al was greater than most think!

On the other hand, a few members have been offering material for download recently and I too have taken part so I would be a hipocrite to say it wasn't of some use. I just think it should be monitored and controlled a bit more. It's one thing downloading Sega artwork and a few documents, perhaps an unreleased, incomplete debug and suddenly finding that piles of retail titles have been ripped and shared. It happens and nobody is going to halt it, but the use of a torrent invite really does just open that flood barrier on AG doesn't it?

That last comment about 0th bit is a valid point, but then again the membership of those within 0th bit has already given cause for concern on 1 release.

Just my 2p worth!

 

I agree.

 

In theory a "yes" would be desirable.

In theory I say, because containing this feature-to-possibly-be in the forums cannot be kept secret.

Just as leaks have happenned time and time again from inside, it would only take a few hits to alert interested parties.

Besides, who is to decide what materials should be allowed to be published, even privately in the 0th bit?

An example is:

Are torrents for movies ok?

What about anime/cartoons that are out of circulation?

Old PC games?

New console game images?

Pornography?


There's no direct need to answer the above questions, but what is evident is that the provider of such service and all who support it would find themselves in a bigger puddle than they expect if things decide to go wrong.

What is "grey" and semi-legal has varying degrees to different people. Why? Because somethings are either Legal or they re not, and this can differ from country to country and from one cultural background and opinion to the next.

In conclusion, I believe that we should stick to what we signed up for:

Obscure and [rare AND unreleased games (to mean unreleased games that can't be found elsewhere to download, hence rare)] games dev hardware and other materials that are not quite legal but relate to the core purpose of this board.

There's nothing stopping individual members discussing with each-other on specific matters, including torrents of course, through PM or other means.

 

Mixing my metaphors, I think Barc0dio has it in a nutshell, hit my concerns directly on the head. :thumbsup:

 

I hope my future employers will pay good money for allowing me to express their concerns :lol:

 

I am in for the invites.

 

I think that this is too much of a risky ideal - there have been quite a lot of servers shut down just by giving out links.

And on that basis, I'm out.

However, if someone can persuade me that 'the fuzz' won't find out about it and it's heavily moderated... I may be persuaded.

 

As a safety rule, then always use peerguardian. And maybe even encrypt the P2P part.

 

I don't think we could do this because for the 1st release people talked about it outside of the 0th Bit.

It feels like the 0th Bit forum is very limiting for me, I just don't know what we can do/not do here accept wait for a release of a game or something. I don't know how to contribute to the forum by myself at all, I just feel this idea might be like this too (not knowing what to post and stuff).

 

no!

except if there are some super-duper rare trackers with dev/beta stuff on it. But I doubt that, most torrent trackers just have the 'regular' warez. So why share invite's of that kind of websites?

 

You can't arrest someone for linking to something or google would be banned from listing torrent sites. As all you have to do to find these torrent sites is type in a few keywords. Not only this but they've got bigger fish to fry. As they really aren't looking to arrest the users of torrent sites (not on a wide scale operation at least) Believe me they'd wouldn't go after sites simply linking to torrent sites. If there was any worry at all from being associated with torrent sites, by linking to them or exchanging info I think we've already crossed that line.

 

well they did.

the guy who ran www.tv-links.co.uk got busted for this exact reason, and so did napster.

 

I think this is fine and dont see any problems of legality because lets face it we're not responsible for whats on the other sites.

 

But this site is constantly walking on a fine line between piracy and gray area. If we were to have torrents it would have to be to games that are fit for this website's purpose. I think the admin, Assembler, would have to approve the link before posting though. Just to weed out the bad ones or not. We shouldn't turn this place into a free game haven.