Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell

torrentfreak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 336 posts

Re: Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell

#151

Post by whatok »

rangibaby wrote: post #143
skoczymroczny wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't making EU single market and getting rid of geoblocking pretty much remove regional pricing? The piracy then would surge even more, because in Eastern Europe you can't expect people to spent 10% of their salary on a new videogame.

Well then they should just give everyone the cheap price. I don't see why Hollywood is entitled to x% of my salary. If it means they have to spend a few mllion dollars less on advertising Captain America 4 or Star Wars 8 or Fast and Furious 8 then so be it.

Or you could just not watch those movies. Hollywood is not entitled to your money in the same way that you are not entitled to free or or "cheap" access to their products.

Re: Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell

#152

Post by Larrikin »

jokoon wrote: post #128
Svenskunganka wrote: post #65

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. 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 b…

Also the netflix catalog is not as big as people claims it is (I live in france). There are many movies missing from the 2000-2010 period (and more when you go beyond). There also are many smaller details that makes torrent more attractive, like being able to watch the movie offline, HD with low bandwidth, subtitle choice, etc. Netflix is a good step, and of course the movie industry will use it as "no excuse" argume…

Even in America, at this point most people consider themselves lucky if they find any movies worth watching on Netflix, especially anything fairly recent. Netflix's strength is its TV catalog.

Re: Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell

#153

Post by DugFin »

rplnt wrote: post #141

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. Is even that illegal? Publishing hashes of copyrighted material?

In jurisdictions friendly to the US anti-pirating effort, they've largely adopted a legal standard of "I know pirating when I see it" rather than following the strict definition outlined by the law. "Making available" has come to be interpreted as "telling someone who to ask about what a pirated (whatever) looks like so you can find it yourself".

Re: Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell

#154

Post by scrollaway »

Freak_NL wrote: post #140
scrollaway wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games are essentially solved as far as consumption goes. There's still some fuckery going on with DRM in some companies, but that's the minority. However, they aren't solved when it comes to archival. It's getting constantly worse with the rise of online-only games with closed source, undistributed servers. A subject for another day, though.

Fair point. The archival question is complex because of the inherent difficulty in keeping old software running on modern operating systems. At some point it doesn't pay to keep supporting newer operating systems even if you still have sales; only for the really popular titles. Perhaps containers would work?

Yeah, emulation or containerization works nicely for old games. However, newer games have server components which are required to run the game and/or have any content. When the money runs out, the servers get shut down and usually aren't redistributed. This isn't a problem torrents can solve, unfortunately.

Re: Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell

#155

Post by Canada »

comboy wrote: post #67
stubish wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For distributing all those magnet links of course. Yes, it will be a huge morgue of dead magnet links but not being able to remove them is a required feature. And more importantly it needs to store ratings and not be gameable, or it will be taken over for malware and spam and die a quick death. Which is going to take some thought.

I still don't see how blockchain helps with distribution and what incentive would be to store huge loads of this type of data locally. Ratings are important indeed, but blockchain doesn't make them not gameable. For this you need some working web of trust and oh how I wish we had one already (yes yes I know the technology is there and it 'works', but it must work like an e-mail works for an average user to really be…

In the context of something like the warez scene the ratings system can be read only to end users.

When releases are made to the decentralized torrent repository they are signed by the release group.

Whether or not a particular signer is an official member of The Scene is decided by consensus of The Scene. The web of trust is very small. Everyone involved is tech savvy, motivated, and already knows each other.

From time to time updates to the list of known groups and their keys may be posted, authenticated by a multisignature scheme.

Then clients can automatically discover who's trustworthy and filter on that. No technical skill or effort required of the general public.

Re: Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell

#156

Post by lagadu »

skoczymroczny wrote: post #136
kalleboo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why the EU isn't doing anything about it The problem is that right now the EU isn't one copyright market - each EU country is a separate market, with a tonne of legacy exclusive distribution deals in place. If the EU was a single market, it would be the same size or bigger than the US market and would probably get better attention. The EU is working on it, it just moves at the speed of bureaucrac…

Wouldn't making EU single market and getting rid of geoblocking pretty much remove regional pricing? The piracy then would surge even more, because in Eastern Europe you can't expect people to spent 10% of their salary on a new videogame.

If that were true, everyone would be using the cheaper spotify prices some countries have in Europe, which almost doesn't happen.

The problem is that they require a payment method from a country by having residence there, that alone prevents abuse in the overwhelming majority of situations.

For the record, I am one of those cases (technically I'm a resident in three countries, potentially 4 next year), so I'm pretty much aware of the details of it.

Re: Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell

#157

Post by lagadu »

spoiler wrote: post #107
medecau wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add VAT to the mix and things even out again.

From Netflix's point of view it does even out, but the EU citizen still pays more for less.

No because what we pay in tax we get back in other forms. The US citizen will have to pay for college (instead of being paid to attend), healthcare, court costs, retirement pension, unemployment, etc.

Don't count the taxes as part of what you're getting back, it's very different and beyond the scope of this article :)

Re: Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell

#158

Post by kalleboo »

skoczymroczny wrote: post #136
kalleboo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why the EU isn't doing anything about it The problem is that right now the EU isn't one copyright market - each EU country is a separate market, with a tonne of legacy exclusive distribution deals in place. If the EU was a single market, it would be the same size or bigger than the US market and would probably get better attention. The EU is working on it, it just moves at the speed of bureaucrac…

Wouldn't making EU single market and getting rid of geoblocking pretty much remove regional pricing? The piracy then would surge even more, because in Eastern Europe you can't expect people to spent 10% of their salary on a new videogame.

> Wouldn't making EU single market and getting rid of geoblocking pretty much remove regional pricing

Yes, it would. That's the whole point of the Euro currency and the long-term goal of the EU.

And that's the main reason a lot of people thought the quick expansion of the EU towards the east (or even the south) was a mistake - if you have a common market and a common travel area, but wildly differing economies, you create strife.

Re: Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell

#159

Post by kalleboo »

marcosdumay wrote: post #145
kalleboo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting 27 countries to agree on something sounds like bureaucracy nightmare to me :) So, I just looked up the word "bureaucracy" in a dictionary and it says "a system of government in which most of the important decisions are made by state officials rather than by elected representatives.". I always thought that was what a technocracy was. The secondary definition is "excessively complicated administrative procedure…

You seem to have a very bad dictionary. Bureaucracy comes from the French word "bureau", that means office. It names the way things are organized in an office, and was created for private offices, only adopted for governments later.

I'll forward your opinion to the Oxford Dictionary of English

Re: Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell

#160

Post by csydas »

Svenskunganka wrote: post #65

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. 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 b…

The big issue is that it both is and isn't their fault, in a sense. I believe a lot of the hold-up comes from who owns the distribution rights for various locales, stuff that was determined years ago before online distribution was considered feasible. Odds are they'd gladly have you as a customer and sell you content, but they themselves are unable to because of previous deals. They still get a cut either way, so the studios ultimately aren't worried too much...

так....

Post reply on HN