Live data from Hacker News

The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

plagiarismtoday.com

51–60 of 546 posts

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#51
post #16

At least where I live, Hungary, torrenting was decriminalized some years ago as long as someone isn't doing it for profit. It's still illegal but they stopped going after end users. The biggest private tracker has 770k users atm with an exceptional 1452% seed to leech ratio. Basically almost everyone (ie daily internet users) is using it in the country. Also they introduced a "blank media" tax on everything (CD, DVD,…

Until the EU want to do a new trade deal with the US, and the US decides it wants to co-opt your legal framework to enforce its commercial appropriation of European culture, history and stories through Disney and Hollywood. And then you'll be getting lots of enforcement. The whole copyright thing is just a US export thing, as soon as it becomes a problem for them, they'll force the EU to make it a problem for you too…

Obama has already tried doing that with ACTA (remember that one?) and also with the newer TTIP. He failed.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#52
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My home setup is entirely digital. Just a Shield Android TV attached to the back of a TV. I don't have any spinning disc players anymore. All discs are ripped, put on my NAS, and served with Plex.

Same here. I still have all my physical CDs from the past 25-odd years but they are in sitting in boxes after being ripped. 99% my "TV watching" is time-shifted using the Shield, with a combination of streaming and downloaded stuff. I have weaned myself off of all physical media except for vinyl records (don't ask - it's a hobby). I wired my house with Cat5e and everything lives on a fat XFS formatted RAID array. Now…

In the UK, we get three or four per hour on the most popular commercial networks. We record everything we want to watch on a Humax just so we don't have to suffer the ads, and pause for a piss, drink, or surf as and when. Or rewind parts we didn't pay enough attention to. Or skip bad segments. I wouldn't bother otherwise. I'm sure it's provider dependent, but US shows appear to have ads every 5mins, and that looks like torture.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#53
This strikes me as an area where distributed apps on a blockchain could have a big impact.

Currently, top piracy options like torrent websites and Kodi addons constantly get taken down by the government (through methods described in this article).

But what happens if a distributed YouTube exists with every movie in pristine 1080p quality, that lives on a blockchain so the government can't shut it down or issue DMCA takedown requests?

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#54
post #16

At least where I live, Hungary, torrenting was decriminalized some years ago as long as someone isn't doing it for profit. It's still illegal but they stopped going after end users. The biggest private tracker has 770k users atm with an exceptional 1452% seed to leech ratio. Basically almost everyone (ie daily internet users) is using it in the country. Also they introduced a "blank media" tax on everything (CD, DVD,…

Until the EU want to do a new trade deal with the US, and the US decides it wants to co-opt your legal framework to enforce its commercial appropriation of European culture, history and stories through Disney and Hollywood. And then you'll be getting lots of enforcement. The whole copyright thing is just a US export thing, as soon as it becomes a problem for them, they'll force the EU to make it a problem for you too…

With the EU in accession and the US in decline on the global stage, I suspect the US will have less ability to force these issues in future negotiations with the EU.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#55
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of people use Bittorrent to download movies/shows to watch once, and only once.

From what I overhear from discussions between download enthusiasts, a large fraction will even remain unwatched, just feeding a collector habit.

I mean it kinda makes sense; when you decide you want to watch a movie, you want to have multiple movies you haven't watched to choose from. This kinda requires that you download a lot of movies that you don't watch.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ripping physical media for personal use is not piracy despite what the MPAA would have you believe.

Yea but who goes through the trouble of ripping blu-rays to put them on plex?

That'd be me. It's almost meditative.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#57
post #49

What's more interesting to me is using BitTorrent not for pirated movies but as a content distribution system enabling more free services like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a super heavily visited website, so must pay a lot for hosting. They manage to pay for it all with donations, but other sites can't. For example: What if Open Access journals used peer to peer for nearly-free content distribution? That'd allow the open…

It's a shame Big Browser doesn't have any intention of supporting torrents as a standard protocol. Fortunately, new browsers such as Brave are already working on supporting IPFS and other decentralized protocols.

I believe they Firefox has opened up to answering ipfs URLs in the near future.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#58
post #41
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few people I know just check out movie from the local Library on DVD and Blueray, rip them and then watch them from Plex.

Which does fall under the umbrella of piracy.

Yep, but the motivation may be simply one of convenience. My DVD player loops the menu all night long if you happen to dose off - and it's a struggle to get up and stop it. Even selecting and starting a movie on a DVD can be a trial.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#60

Site is down, but I noticed recently that the bit torrent client is looking more and more like 90s malware every time I download it. It has been streaming commercials for a while now. Ive decided to look for an alternative client next time I need to install one

qbittorrent is pretty good
Post reply on HN