Slyck.com is a defunct website that once produced unique original

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 r ...

news stories, shared aggregated technology news stories from the World Wide Web, and had a user forum.

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 a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Sh ...

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 () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...

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

Impact

Due to the lack of mainstream news coverage on p2p, file sharing and discussion of copyright legislation, Slyck.com had a significant impact as a news site, which ''

New Scientist ''New Scientist'' is a 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 organisation publish ...

'' cited as a "popular file sharing news site", ''Digital Audio Essentials'' (2004) referred to Slyck.com as "an excellent resource" for news and information on file sharing, and in ''Steal This Computer Book 4.0'' 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 Loki Torrents 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 was represented in the Slyck.com coverage. Notably, Slyck.com extensively covered the Torrent website, The Pirate Bay, and the efforts by Swedish and other national authorities to shut down the website and prosecute the founders/owners of the Pirate Bay. Slyck.com covered other news topics like roll out of Broadband Internet, new technology and hardware and advances in 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 t ...

Nir Arbel Soulseek is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing network and application. The term Soulseek might refer to (1) one of the two networks, or (2) one of the three official user client interfaces. Soulseek is used mostly to exchange music, although user ...

of SoulSeek, and Pablo Soto of Optisoft S.L and Kevin Hearn of WinMX 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 for ...

, 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, open source operating systems (such as BSD and Linux) could not play encrypted video DVDs. ...

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 BackupHDDVD is a small computer software utility program available in command line and GUI versions which aids in the decryption of commercial HD DVD discs protected by the Advanced Access Content System. It is used to back up discs, often to ...

, a software hacker who first circumvented the

AACS AACS may refer to: * Advanced Access Content System, a standard for content distribution and digital rights management ** AACS encryption key controversy * American Association of Christian Schools, an organization that unifies individual Christi ...

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, as well as the video streaming service Netflix. Founded in 1922 as the Motion Picture Producers and Distribu ...

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

Legal threat

In March 2010, Slyck.com 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

Slyck.com no longer actively or significantly provides any file sharing news articles, with the last posted news article on file sharing, dated 16 June 2016. As of September 2020, Slyck.com is no longer accessible. The final archival by the wayback machine is dated 27 Feb 2020."Slyck.com"
Internet Archive, 2020-02-27. Retrieved 2020-09-20

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