Sing the praises of piracy

So it seems that Demonoid.com, in my estimation the very best thing about the internet, is back.

A little background: Demonoid is a torrent-hosting site. For the elderly reading this, it's a site where people upload media -- software, movies, television programs, music, anything you can think of, some public domain, some copyrighted -- that other people want to download. Remember Napster? I still have most of the mp3s I downloaded from Napster back in the day, before Metallica and Friends shut it down. Well, that was peer-to-peer, meaning your computer would download the file from one other computer. I was pretty bummed when Napster was shut down, but looking back on it, it's funny how much piracy has advanced. Thanks to torrent files, we now illegally download files from multiple sources at once, which means we get them much, much faster, which further means we can download much bigger files. Whereas in 1999 it took me hours to download "Pour Some Sugar On Me" by Def Leppard, these days if you want that song you're more likely to find the entire Hysteria album, and you'll probably get it a lot faster, too.

If you're looking for something very recent or very popular -- every episode of Dexter so far, the Britney Spears discography, any of this year's Best Picture nominees -- a Google search will alert you to several different sources. But over the last couple of years I've found that Demonoid, with its dedicated base of registered users -- joining is free, but you have to know someone or sign up during one of the rare open periods -- is the only place for rare or obscure digital media.

I originally stumbled upon Demonoid because it is the internet source for comic book back-issues. As a child and young adult I spent way, way too much money on old comic books -- the purchase of which, by the way, puts absolutely no money back into creators' or publishers' pockets. Trade paperback reprints are another story, but the comics that have been reprinted are just a drop in the bucket -- it's easy enough to find color reprints of the first fifty or so issues of Amazing Spider-Man, but anything between then and now you might only find in black-and-white, for example. Thanks to Demonoid, I've been able to download entire runs of comics I could never have reasonably afforded as a child (and wouldn't spend my money on now).

But even cooler than that is the comics I probably never could have read were it not for Demonoid. I've downloaded all five issues of Black Goliath, the first black superhero series; Omega the Unknown, ironically-titled in that I had never heard of it; and every appearance of Alan Moore's Miracleman, a property that's been tied up in legal copyright battles for decades now and may never be reprinted in any form in my lifetime. These are not the kinds of comics you'd find all in the same back-issue bin, and yet they're ready for download to absolutely anyone, anywhere.

Last Halloween, I watched a double-feature of downloaded films: Torso, a staple of the Italian giallo cannon and supposedly the inspiration for the wonderful Grindhouse trailer "Don't"; and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, which I wanted to see because the video case spooked me when I was a kid. The latter has since been released on DVD to cash in on the recent Prom Night remake, but at the time you could only get either of them on VHS. Before that, I downloaded the entire Rob Thomas series Cupid, starring Jeremy Piven as a possibly delusional lunatic, possibly omnipotent love god matchmaker -- a series neither in syndication nor available on DVD. (And, oddly, the episodes I downloaded came with scripts for two never-made episodes.)

So it was a sad day a few months back when Demonoid went down apparently for good, after the Canadian recording industry brought down the hammer. (It's always the ones you least expect.) It turns out the site was also down because its administrator -- a Serbian known only as "Deimos" (no, really) -- had some "family issues" he had to take care of. Deimos has passed the site along to someone else, and now it's back at last.

Julia's becoming a Bill Maher fan because of his HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher. Last week I wanted to crush that impulse with a screening of that old USA Up All Night staple Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, but with no DVD release, that dream was ready to die. Two days ago Demonoid came back, and I had that movie within a few hours. Thanks, Internet. Thanks.