Slyck was a website that produced and aggregated

file sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include ...

news stories, as well as offering a

forum Forum or The Forum may refer to: Common uses *Forum (legal), designated space for public expression in the United States *Forum (Roman), open public space within a Roman city **Roman Forum, most famous example * Internet forum, discussion board ...

for users.

History

Ray Hoffman began operating Slyck.com as Slyway.com in 2000,Slyck 2.0
Slyck forum, April 5, 2006. which initially was an aggregate news site with some original content, and contained guides to the most popular file-sharing resources at the time, whilst providing statistics of P2P file sharing networks, which included

Napster Napster was an American proprietary peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared ...

iMesh iMesh was a media and file sharing client that was available in nine languages. It used a proprietary, centralized, P2P network (IM2Net) operating on ports 80, 443 and 1863. iMesh was owned by American company iMesh, Inc., who maintained dev ...

, Scour,

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

and

IRC IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat ...

. On the 10th of August 2001, Slyway was renamed Slyck.

Impact

Due to the lack of mainstream news coverage on P2P topics, file sharing, and discussion of copyright legislation, Slyck had a significant impact as a news site: ''

New Scientist ''New Scientist'' is a popular science magazine covering all aspects of science and technology. Based in London, it publishes weekly English-language editions in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. An editorially separate organ ...

'' cited Slyck as a "popular file sharing news site", ''Digital Audio Essentials'' (2004) referred to Slyck as "an excellent resource" for news and information on file sharing, and in ''Steal This Computer Book 4.0'' (2006) the site was considered to be "up to date on the latest file sharing technology and news".

Content

The website conducted interviews with file sharing software developers and intellectual property role players, maintaining statistics of P2P file sharing networks, and notably shed light on the developing conflict between file sharing users and intellectual property owners, which covered the legal battle against copyright and intellectual property infringement, such as the takedown of torrent websites like LokiTorrent and Suprnova.org, events that were covered in mainstream media from input by the intellectual property owners, which lacked the views of file sharing users which Slyck coverage aimed to represent. Notably, Slyck extensively covered BitTorrent website

The Pirate Bay The Pirate Bay, commonly abbreviated as TPB, is a free searchable online index of Film, movies, music, video games, Pornographic film, pornography and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank , The Pirate Bay facilitates the connection ...

, and the efforts by Swedish and other national authorities to shut down and prosecute the founders and operators of The Pirate Bay. Slyck covered other news topics such as rollout of

broadband In telecommunications, broadband or high speed is the wide-bandwidth (signal processing), bandwidth data transmission that exploits signals at a wide spread of frequencies or several different simultaneous frequencies, and is used in fast Inter ...

Internet, new and emerging technologies, device hardware, and advances in computer networking. Slyck news writers were able to interview notable individuals such as: * Michael Weiss of

StreamCast StreamCast Networks, Inc., was an American corporation, specializing in peer-to-peer software. Formerly named MusicCity, it created Morpheus, which was one of the first major peer-to-peer Internet applications. StreamCast was a defendant in th ...

, Nir Arbel of

SoulSeek Soulseek is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing network and application, used mostly to exchange music. The current Soulseek network is the second to have been in operation, the same management runs both. The older network, used up to version 156 ...

, and Pablo Soto of Optisoft S.L and Kevin Hearn of

WinMX WinMX (Windows Music Exchange) is a freeware peer-to-peer file sharing program authored in 2000 by Kevin Hearn (president of Frontcode Technologies) in Windsor, Ontario (Canada). According to one study, it was the number one source for online m ...

were interviewed regarding their software and P2P networks. *

Jon Lech Johansen Jon Lech Johansen (born November 18, 1983, in Harstad, Norway), also known as DVD Jon, is a Norwegian programmer who has worked on reverse engineering data formats. He wrote the DeCSS software, which decodes the Content Scramble System used fo ...

, nicknamed DVDJon, was interviewed, regarding the

DeCSS DeCSS is one of the first free computer programs capable of decrypting content on a commercially produced DVD video disc. Before the release of DeCSS, free and open source operating systems (such as BSD and Linux) could not play encrypted video ...

software that allowed for DVD discs to be played on the Linux Operating System, and allowed for development of duplicating software for DVD discs. * Muslix64, a software hacker who first circumvented the AACS protection scheme for HD DVD and Blu-ray discs, discussed his reasons for the circumvention of the Digital Rights Management software. * Dean Garfield, then head of the

MPAA The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is an American trade association representing the five major film studios of the United States, the mini-major Amazon MGM Studios, as well as the video streaming services Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. F ...

's legal team, was interviewed by Nicholas Parr about the MPAA's legal campaign against movie piracy.

Legal threat

In March 2010, Slyck was threatened with legal action by the controversial UK law firm ACS:Law for defamation, due to comments made by forum users on Slyck.com's UK file sharing Allegations/Lawsuit Discussion sub-forum. Nothing came of the threatened legal action.

Current status

By June 2016 Slyck had ceased publishing new news articles, with the last file-sharing news article being posted on 16 June 2016. As of April 2020, Slyck is no longer accessible. The final archival by the

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Launched for public access in 2001, the service allows users to go "back in ...

is dated 8 March 2020."Slyck.com"
Internet Archive, 2020-03-08. Retrieved 2024-06-13

References

External links

* {{official website, http://www.slyck.com/ American technology news websites File sharing communities Internet properties established in 2001 File sharing news sites