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The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mostly use streaming sites instead of BT these days. Why? You have to get through tons of ads, have to hope they are of decent quality, etc. With BT I download, and in about 5 minutes I have the whole thing in HD.

It's also illegal, and this isn't the 90s or early 2000s -- copyright laws are being enforced.

Ah, if only there was a 1:1 correspondence between what is "legal" and what is "ethical/fair"...

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

#152

The reason why for me, someone with a netflix and amazon prime account in Germany, bittorrent is neither dead nor declining (for movies and TV shows): a) Being on time. If you want to take part in the online discussion about tv shows, you have to watch them on time. For a ton of shows I can't even buy episodes on the day they come out. Torrenting is still the far superior choice. b) Languages. Yes netflix, I know tha…

> PS: Mostly thanks to Bandcamp.com music torrenting is completely dead for me.

Seconded. My music search these days is

    Find interesting band
               +
               |
               v               not sure I can
        Is on bandcamp? +-no-> be arsed to even
               +               check torrents
               |
              yes
               |
               v
           buy entire 
         discography on
            bandcamp

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

#153
post #62

I can't read the article because the website is down. But I have something to say about torrenting movies. Late last year, my old parents who don't speak English came to visit me for a couple of months in the US. I'm just a graduate student with a limited budget, and my mom is car sick so we couldn't go out every night. I didn't want them to waste time on Facebook after dinner until we went to bed, so I had to think…

This is a major issue with streaming services. Netflix usually doesn't offer even English subtitles to an English-speaking movie if you're in a non-English speaking country! At least with DVDs you could rip it and add subtitles yourself if needed.

Netflix seems to be pretty opinionated about subtitles. Try watching Narcos without subs, you can't. "Off" means the Spanish parts are subbed, and switching it to Spanish means the English parts are subbed!

Netflix, a Californian company, simply couldn't fathom that some people might understand English and Spanish.

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's almost like they should use some sort of peer-to-peer distribution system to allow scalable distribution of their content...

Reminded me of the Coral CDN [1] project. Shame it's dead now. [1] http://www.coralcdn.org/

Wow, I had no idea this went away (although that would explain why I never see that style of link anymore)

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

#155
post #8
post #3

Putting Kodi under "Streaming Piracy" is pretty inflamitory. Kodi isn't there to enable streaming piracy. (There are non-offical plugins that do that, but they've made many announcements about Kodi's stance on Piracy)

But let's be honest, 99.99% of Kodi and Plex use is purely for pirated content. Otherwise, I'm not sure where everyone is getting all these non DRM digital downloads. And most aren't using special plugins with Kodi, they just use Kodi to play their content they get from torrents and Usenet.

Kodi is the only way I've managed to get my HD HomeRun cablecard adapter to work for my local TV channels through Comcast. So it's not purely pirated content...

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> With the EU in accession and the US in decline on the global stage

you're kidding right?

after brexit the EU has lost 70 million citizens, its second biggest economy, its largest city (which also happens to be the world's financial capital), and its main military/cultural power

whereas Trump will be gone in a few years

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

#157

The reason why for me, someone with a netflix and amazon prime account in Germany, bittorrent is neither dead nor declining (for movies and TV shows): a) Being on time. If you want to take part in the online discussion about tv shows, you have to watch them on time. For a ton of shows I can't even buy episodes on the day they come out. Torrenting is still the far superior choice. b) Languages. Yes netflix, I know tha…

> PS: Mostly thanks to Bandcamp.com music torrenting is completely dead for me. Seconded. My music search these days is Find interesting band + | v not sure I can Is on bandcamp? +-no-> be arsed to even + check torrents | yes | v buy entire discography on bandcamp

Heh. Pretty much exactly like that for me :)

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

#158

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?

I have been 100% digital media (we're talking movies, music, PS3 games, PS4 games, Nintendo Switch games, iOS app store, Mac app store, and Steam/Origin Client/GOG on PC) for over 10 years now. Maybe even 15.

This is where things are going IMHO.

Sometimes this has forced me to spend more money on drives/other storage (for example, I manually upgraded both my PS3 and PS4 to the largest capacity drives they support). And I have a NAS with a bunch of drives in it. Worth it, IMHO.

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

#159

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

rtorrent https://github.com/rakshasa/rtorrent

Plain text, runs in a terminal (which means screen or tmux allows for remote, headless, operation).

No ads, just torrenting.

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

#160
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. Which is why it ends with the author's death. OH WAIT. But it's totally necessary; back before it existed no one ever made any money for their creative works, so with no incentive no one ever made anything creative before copyright law. OH WAIT.

What if the author is a company? Like Disney.

Then they should get copyright for 14 years since publication, like in the first copyright law, the Statute of Anne. There is no benefit for society to extent copyright past that point, since it does not induce creative corporations to publish more works: profits 20, 50 years into the future are not relevant to current business decisions.

The original idea was that copyright is a compromise that maximizes the social welfare, people give-up their natural right to copy and share for a limited time so that more culture is created. Of course, once the system was set in motion, the holders of valuable works had a very strong motive to exert political pressure to extend the copyright to absurd lengths and push the notion of "intelectual property" at face value, instead of the original social compromise. No one was left to fight for the public domain and now we have these huge dynastic corporations that are strongly anticompetitive, using warchests of past works that new creators haven't yet amassed. If not for the internet and long tail consumption it enabled by lowering entry barriers, a few companies would own all comercial culture.

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