Torrents and copyright infringement is related, we can all agree on that. But I believe that pirating is related to a very fuzzy legal system regarding this topic and unfair treatment by the major movie studios & music labels. I'll try to explain as good as I can.<p>Being a european citizen, it is very frustrating knowing that pirating is illegal even though being a Netflix, HBO & Spotify customer. Pirating is a much bigger trend in EU & AUS than it is in the US, and I think that it mainly boils down to the US-based movie studios restricting and delaying access to content to non-US citizens. Some may think that this is acceptable, but I can't see how treating one customer differently from another is acceptable just because they have different nationalities. I'm paying exactly the same amount of money as the next US-citizen for the content, yet I am treated differently.<p>One other thing that troubles me is that there are higher quality content available via torrents than via the legal alternatives. Having invested in a 7.1 surround system and a 4K 3D Android TV, you would expect that the legal alternatives would have content available for such hardware, but they rarely do.<p>Personally I think it's absurd that the movie studios expect to be on the european market but treat those customers as second-hand customers, and I don't understand why the EU isn't doing anything about it. The EU and US relies on eachothers markets, yet music labels forces the Swedish-invented Spotify to restrict access to certain songs for non-US citizens.<p>I do acknowledge that some people are pirating because it's free, but I don't think that the general public does so. I'd be the happiest Netflix & HBO customer if I had the same content library as my fellow US friends.
Please have a look at this pull request I submitted some time ago to Bittorrent.org: <a href="https://github.com/bittorrent/bittorrent.org/pull/35" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bittorrent/bittorrent.org/pull/35</a><p>It's about updating torrents via DHT mutable items. Meaning that torrent sites could share their public key and simply seed an .rss file containing their indexed torrents (a mapping of infohash -> descriptions). When they want to share new torrents, they simply update their torrent to a new .rss file and consumers will hop on that new swarm.<p>We need more support to get this into a standard BEP and also into torrent clients.<p>I know there are other networks (IPFS, I2P, Freenet, ZeroNet, etc..) that do this, but BitTorrent is the most widely used and I think implementing functionality in the torrent ecosystem itself would have much more effect.
The reason piracy is so popular is because it is free and because it's incredibly convenient, in that order.<p>The convenience factor is basically, if you want some content (movie, game) it's a simple search and download away (streaming torrents seem to be gaining traction). No legal alternative offers this level of convenience.<p>I suspect piracy will become harder for the average user due to three letter agencies making life harder for pirates, but it won't stop the determined ones.<p>Speaking of determined torrenters, Peter Sunde, the founder of TPB had something interesting to say about torrent aggregators being shut down [1]. The idea is that even though downloading torrents itself is p2p, finding the magnet links is still centralized and that is an area that needs to be decentralized.<p>[1] <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-piracy-scene-needs-innovation-160726/" rel="nofollow">https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-piracy-scene-nee...</a>
>TFW your children won't experience having access to all the software, music, and other content they could ever want just by knowing how to use a computer better than most people<p>Feels bad man. Having access to a cracked version of Photoshop at 13 years old changed my life.
What would it take to build a secure & resilient torrent site?<p>I'm guessing fully decentralised and I've seen mentions of<p>* ipfs (<a href="https://ipfs.io/" rel="nofollow">https://ipfs.io/</a>)<p>* zeronet (<a href="https://zeronet.io/" rel="nofollow">https://zeronet.io/</a><p>* Riffle (anonymous communication)<p>Couldn't we leverage bits of the blockchain technology?<p>Since it's a fully distributed shared database where writers don't trust each other and no middleman is trusted either?<p>(edit:formatting)
The first thing that got me to pirate movies was that DVDs did not work because of their DRM after I installed Linux. I had plenty of legally bought movies that just did not work on my computer until I found the right Gentoo packages (libdvd-css or something)... I never tried Netflix because it took so many years for it to work with Linux. Being a free software user, it is easier to pirate stuff than to buy the content. If companies just gave me access to a DRM free .avi/.ogv download for a decent price, I would buy the damn movies.
The thing that gets me is that everyone's fine with libraries and used book stores, as well as sales of second hand games and DVDs, <i>none</i> of which send profits back to the creators or rights-owners.<p>But <i>digital piracy</i>, that's amoral. Sigh. I like seeing the contortions of logic people pull off to try and explain how these things are different.
With the recent shut down of KAT, we're kind of in a "low phase". It always has been a game of cat and mouse, but now, we've sadly lost two big mouses. I hope someone will quickly take up the torch.
Are they going to come after the private trackers after this? The numbers are relatively very small though. I would hate if that happens.<p>I pay for content whenever I can but those trackers provide me with stuff I mostly never get anywhere else (and in the format and size I want) even if I want to pay.
I hope we get a nice implementation of Riffle[1] sometime soon.<p>[1] <a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/devadas/pubs/riffle.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://people.csail.mit.edu/devadas/pubs/riffle.pdf</a>
so if you are running a torrent aggregation service its illegal.. but if you are running a torrent aggregation service along with a regular web search service it becomes legal? maybe there is an opportunity for pirates here...<p>looking at google (and any other web search engine)
It's amazing that even on HN, the conversation is no longer moored to the past.<p>Copyright in America has been extended beyond reasonable restriction, driven by the MPAA and RIAA who began chipping away at the net as we knew it, and continue to do so today. All of this at the behest of firms which continue to use the most interesting of accounting techniques to show losses, while simultaneously doing everything in their power to make it harder for people to comfortably and easily access media (starting from the time of CDs to today).<p>All this on top of the fact that studies show that torrenting movies don't indicate lost sales and actually working as a signal to indicate the popularity of a product.<p>all this on the forum where it's reasonable to expect people to know the value of the network effect.
Just few years back torrentz was still serving magnet links (just the hash, without trackers embedded), so you didn't even have to visit the torrent sites.<p>Is even that illegal? Publishing hashes of copyrighted material?
GOOD RIDDANCE. The example of Zuckerberg stealing the idea for Facebook and getting rich has contributed to the foolish belief that it's okay to "enjoy the benefit of something that was SUPPOSED to be paid for -- and NOT PAYING".<p>"I didn't steal any copyrighted material, my site just helped people who WANTED to enjoy the benefit of copyrighted material that was SUPPOSED to be paid for but didn't pay. So I'm in the clear!"<p>NO. Torrentz "Drove the getaway car", taking thieves to where the crime was committed.