how are newsgroups safe all these years? how comes feds aren't going after newsgroups?
All news providers comply with the DMCA nowadays. They are legally protected as hosts of user-generated content.
Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested
131–140 of 356 posts
Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested
#132Wow, this sucks, I love KAT, what now? TPB is rubbish.
Whip out that credit card and start buying stuff instead? Who cares if you don't use it much, it's all relative. I like buying CDs and Bluray, then I rip them for everyday use. But its nice to have something tangible to back it up. Plus its all legal and protected, since I don't rebroadcast any of the content, just private enjoyment.
... unless you live outside of the US where it's impossible to buy legal copies of a lot of content.
Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested
#133Perhaps this is pedantic, but i wonder if magnet links provide any legal securities when compared to actually hosting the torrent files themselves.
Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested
#134As an American, I wish we would stop doing this. It isn't effective, and it's a waste of time/resources that could be better spent elsewhere. I'd even argue that its counter-effective to progress. Instead of punishing people for making more efficient systems, we should reward them, and try to integrate.
A person in the US who, for example, wants to watch all but the latest season of Game of Thrones can go to iTunes and, within seconds, purchase and start watching. And it will be in better quality than the torrent which was ripped off some TV broadcast and re-compressed. iTunes is available for both Windows and Mac (plus various iOS) and is super simple to use. And the one purchase lets you either stream or download to any of your devices and watch whenever you want.
The very latest content does get artificially restricted due to various business reasons (licensing deals, etc.) and I suspect that will change over time to go to an instant-release model. Ditto for fewer geo restrictions. We're starting to see these changes more and more. For music, there are far more options available: Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, etc. where one low monthly fee lets you play almost anything you want.
However, despite all this incredible ease for lots of different media, people still want content for free. Maybe the solution is to combine enforcement with an educational campaign so that people are aware of the myriad legal options available to them.
Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested
#135Can't read this site because of their adblocker detection.
Seems ok with Ghostery as well.
Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
It feels like you could factor off the trust requirements into a much smaller kernel, though. For example, you could operate (your instance of) your pseudo-legal service yourself, but open-source the codebase (sticking it on GitHub even) and accept patches from anyone. You could also implement a simple replication architecture for your service, where at any time one node (yours) is considered to be the 'canonical mas…
A distributed blockchain sounds right. Now imagine that "mining" for this blockhchain is serving torrents, and you have to spend currency to download. The currency can be sold for monetary currency (e.g. dollars or bitcoin), so leechers could pay seeders.
and soon you'd have monopolies seeding and the whole decentralization fades.
Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested
#137Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested
#138Another black market business opportunity brought to you via fed money. DOJ, FBI, polish police, etc, etc all spent tax money on this takedown. All working so the next guy can make a website and make $16 million / year. And it only takes one guy to run the site apparently. Who knows maybe the next guy will use Tor, Bitcoin, read Grugq's blog and be 5x as expensive to hunt down. Thanks US tax payers!
The disincentive to start the next pirate website is the fact that the owners/operators of said website are subject to arrest and jail time. If actions like the ones in linked article didn't occur, you would find a large array of piracy websites pop up and operate with impunity. Under such a scenario, each website would individually earn less.
Yes, piracy websites will always exist, but the purpose of these shutdowns is to minimize the net profitability of operating piracy websites and to deter would-be operators. However, the constant shutdowns of piracy websites does create a perverse incentive in which those that succeed do so at a massive scale.
Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested
#139This will be interesting to watch. Torrent sites only host torrent files; I'm sure he'll argue that the DMCA requests were invalid because the people filing them didn't own copyright to the torrent files, which were the only thing that the site distributed. Where do we draw the line? Do we prosecute people for posting a magnet link? If a movie studio puts an MP4 of a not-yet-released film on its servers, is it illega…
Aren't file-hashes derived works?