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Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

arstechnica.com

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Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#171

Post by DanBC »

GadgetJax wrote: post #56
cocotino wrote: post #15

Wow, 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.

Missing the point that there's not much difference legally between buying a disc and ripping it or buying a disc and then downloading it. (At least, in UK, where format shifting is not legal.)

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#172

Post by DanBC »

blastrat wrote: post #122
joering2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any good examples of when this works the other way around? A US citizen being extradited to another country for non-violent crimes? Something in tune of computer hacking or hosting a website? Other than drugs and murders, I have a hard time believing US govt to give out its citizens to third parties...

extradition treaties are reciprocal, no country is going to extradite its citizens if the other country won't extradite theirs in return. the numbers don't necessarily balance: probably a lot more Mexicans commit crimes in the US and flee to Mexico than the other way around. Usually, I would think, extradition entails countries extraditing their own citizens back to face charges at home; people will tend to commit cr…

> extradition treaties are reciprocal, no country is going to extradite its citizens if the other country won't extradite theirs in return.

That's not quite accurate.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-16041824

> A critical test set out in the treaty is that the British request must include "such information as would provide a reasonable basis to believe that the person sought committed the offence for which extradition is requested."

> This requirement does not apply to requests submitted by the US to the UK

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#173

Post by witty_username »

derefr wrote: post #73
GadgetJax wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Two instances where this isn't practical: • "Abandonware" — IP held by a company that wants to just sit on it and never release it again, and probably forgets it exists. Probably the company that produced the IP was acquired and shut down by the company currently holding it. It's nearly impossible to find a physical copy of most of this kind of stuff. I'm not a collector; I don't want to pay $1000 for the only surviv…

> Usually meaning "some Asian country, and no English-speaking countries."

In my experience a lot of content is only available in the West (due to georestrictions).

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#174

Post by Dylan16807 »

eevilspock wrote: post #93
derefr wrote: post #30

Earlier 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.

What problem are you trying to solve? Downloading torrents works fine. The weak link is the search engine and description-host.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#175

Post by MrQuincle »

biot wrote: post #134
CaptSpify wrote: post #3

As 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…

I'm a person in (1) the Netherlands, who wants to watch the (2) latest season of the Game of Thrones, runs (3) Linux without Apple-software like iTunes, and who does not want to buy (4) single items but has subscriptions on a service like Spotify.

The solution is not to educate the public, but to fix the distribution model.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#176

Post by blowski »

nikdaheratik wrote: post #149
biot wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As an American living in Australia, I'd say your perspective is kind of skewed by the American market. A large number of torrenters aren't cheapskates or thieves but are from outside the U.S. and unable to even get ahold of this stuff due to the way licensing overseas works. Or if they do, it's at 1.5x-2.5x the price. We have a 21st century distribution model tied to a mid-20th century legal framework and business mo…

I'll give some more examples of use cases where the torrent system serves users better than the legal distribution, but has nothing to do with money.

My wife is Brazilian and I'm British, so we're trying to bring our son up as bilingual. Trying to find legally distributed mainstream kids films dubbed in Portuguese is incredibly hard. Sure, you can buy them in Brazil... and then they don't play on hardware in the UK. Neither Netflix nor Amazon Prime have them. Meanwhile, a quick search on a torrent download site gives me access to hundreds of mainstream films dubbed in Portuguese.

Torrents allow me to watch anything, anywhere, with minimal hardware. I don't need to buy DVDs or DVD players. I don't have to work out which subscription I need to use to watch the latest episode of a program. I have downloaded torrents for which I already own the Blu-ray DVD, but it's in a box somewhere and I can't be bothered to find it.

So yeah, there are lots more use cases for torrents than just wanting to be a cheapskate.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#177

Post by fellellor »

drcross wrote: post #25
akavel wrote: post #14

ArsTechnica seems to have the most detailed and best linked (PDF + DoJ press release) article as of now: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/kickasstorrents-a... Somewhat more/complementary details seem to be available on: https://torrentfreak.com/feds-seize-kickasstorrents-domains-... — e.g. regarding methods: [...] The complaint further reveals that the feds posed as an advertiser, which revealed a bank acco…

Should have used bitcoin :(

Should have moved to Russia.

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#178

Post by simplemath »

phire wrote: post #140
awqrre wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't civilians exercise their right to seize anyone's cash?

Sure, Just like "Citizen's arrest" is a thing, I'm positive "Citizen's civil forfeiture" is too.

Ask the Bundy Clan about that

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#179

Post by c4n4rd »

blowski wrote: post #176
nikdaheratik wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American living in Australia, I'd say your perspective is kind of skewed by the American market. A large number of torrenters aren't cheapskates or thieves but are from outside the U.S. and unable to even get ahold of this stuff due to the way licensing overseas works. Or if they do, it's at 1.5x-2.5x the price. We have a 21st century distribution model tied to a mid-20th century legal framework and business mo…

I'll give some more examples of use cases where the torrent system serves users better than the legal distribution, but has nothing to do with money. My wife is Brazilian and I'm British, so we're trying to bring our son up as bilingual. Trying to find legally distributed mainstream kids films dubbed in Portuguese is incredibly hard. Sure, you can buy them in Brazil... and then they don't play on hardware in the UK.…

Note: You can find some shows on youtube.

Cheers and abraços

Re: Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

#180

Post by blowski »

eggy wrote: post #145

Aside from the legal technicalities here, I mostly ponder the future of IP. I think Napster positively affected the music distribution world in the long run. I am not very black-and-white on this issue, however, since there are many contradictions by both sides. I read the majority of comments here on HN about dated business models, big corporation dislike, the old executives don't understand the new market, etc...,…

I get where you're coming from, and I think you make a good point, so I'll attempt to answer it.

--------

    Note that the following is an analogy. 
    I have no idea about the facts of the case, 
    but I'm trying to compare it to downloading
    illegal torrents.
--------

Imagine there's one designer for most of the world's t-shirts but she won't sell them to the UK so you can't buy one. Zara attempts to do a licensing deal which is profitable for the designer, but she's greedy and thinks she can get more money without the licensing deal. So Zara simply copies the t-shirts, UK customers get their t-shirts and the designer gets nothing.

This is essentially the problem. Disney has an almost complete monopoly over the distribution of kids films, and like all monopolies, they end up over-priced with poor service. The government doesn't seem to care. But torrents allow us to break that monopoly.

It's not just about the cost. It's about how the digital distribution industry fails to service customer needs because its monopoly means the status quo is so profitable.

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