| URL | slyck.com |
|---|---|
| Type of site | News site with articles and statistics on the state of major P2P networks. |
| Registration | Optional (to post on forum). |
| Available language(s) | English |
| Owner | Tom Mennecke |
| Created by | Tom Mennecke |
| Launched | August 10, 2001[1] |
| Alexa rank | 131,786 (January 2012[update])[2] |
Slyck.com is a website dedicated to file sharing. It offers news, reviews, and opinion, and has a user forum.
Contents |
Slyck began operations as Slyway.com in 2000, owned by Ray Hoffman.[3] During this time, Slyck was an aggregate news site with some original content. It also had guides to the most popular file-sharing resources at the time. These included Napster, iMesh, Scour, Usenet and IRC.
Slyway began writing its own news articles, which became a notable feature of the site due to the fact that there were very few other sources of news on P2P and filesharing development. This became the primary responsibility of their first news writer, Thomas Mennecke. Slyck.com would become one of the first sites dedicated to P2P and file-sharing with original news. A year after Slyway opened, it was renamed Slyck.com. The site was reviewed favorably in print: New Scientist cited it as a "popular file sharing news site",[4] Digital Audio Essentials (2004) referred to Slyck as "an excellent resource,[5] and in Steal This Computer Book 4.0 the site was "up to date on the latest filesharing technology and news."[6]
In March 2010, Slyck.com was threatened with legal action[7] by the controversial[8][9] UK law firm ACS:Law for defamation, due to comments made by forum users on Slyck's UK Filesharing Allegations/Lawsuit Discussion Sub Forum.[10]
Currently all news articles attributed to Slyck are written by Thomas Mennecke, this since the departure of other writers.
Slyck.com was one of the first news websites for P2P, but it is no longer the market leader. According to Alexa Internet, Slyck has been surpassed in the number of web pageviews by both Zeropaid.com and TorrentFreak.com since about 2007.[11]
Slyck has interviewed notable individuals such as Michael Weiss of StreamCast[12], Nir Arbel of SoulSeek,[13] Pablo Soto of Optisoft S.L.[14] and Jon Lech Johansen (DVD Jon),[15] cited in James Boyle's The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind.[16] In 2003, Slyck was the sole news source to interview Kevin Hearn of WinMX about that network's future.[17][18] It gained some fame for interviewing Dean Garfield of the MPAA in 2005.[19] In 2007 Slyck interviewed Muslix64,[20] the hacker who first circumvented the AACS protection scheme for HD DVD and Blu-Ray discs, which was cited by the BBC news website,[21] the Electronic Frontier Foundation[22] and InformationWeek.[23]