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The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

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

#211

Post by lostcolony »

make3 wrote: post #141
lostcolony wrote: post #104

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.

1. things that are worth something (like money) don't disappear at their owners death 2. this is disingenuous. it is already the case that the massive majority of artists have a very hard time generating a sustainable revenue stream from their work, and this has always been the case. the goal of a copyright system is, amongst other things, to try to help with that.

1. The author no longer receives value for it. Per another comment, allowing the paid transfer of copyright, but limiting it to a small amount of time since creation/publication (i.e., 14 years), to allow the owner of the copyright to milk it, still provides plenty of value and incentive, while also allowing things to return to the public domain as part of our shared culture.

2. So with copyright it's super hard for artists to live off their work. How is that defending copyright? If you're claiming "Well, it'd be even worse -without- copyright!", you haven't actually made a case for that. Certainly, if we want to fix the fact artists have a hard time, perhaps an alternative monetization scheme, irrespective of copyright, is the right answer?

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

#212

Post by megaman22 »

blt wrote: post #9

Saving movies to disk doesn't make much sense. The files are huge, and rewatching is not that common. BitTorrent is great for music, sadly we lost what.cd to law enforcement.

I don't see a ton of point in bittorrent for anything smaller than a movie file or Linux live-cd, at this point. I've got 250 mpbs down, and while I only ever get that much bandwidth from the speed-test sites, anything that is in the tens to low hundreds of megabytes downloads in seconds.

It's a far cry from the early days, when you'd start downloading an album of compressed mp3s on LimeWire, and hours later realize you got some pieces corrupted and they wouldn't play.

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

#213

Post by pmarreck »

lghh wrote: post #164
pmarreck wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Regardless if it's "ethical/fair" or not (and it's really concerning that you're conflating the two words) it's still illegal and you can get hit pretty hard for it. Saying it's ethical doesn't get you out of court or a hefty fine.

Give me an example of something that is ethical but unfair, or fair but unethical

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

#214

Post by freehunter »

pmarreck wrote: post #151
bitwize wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"...

Feel free to use ethics as your legal defense when you get sued... as for me, I'll stick with a solution that's both ethical and legal.

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

#215

Post by shrimp_emoji »

>Cause 5: VPN Usage

>The real problem here is that there’s no way to know just how much of VPN traffic is growing or how much of it is BitTorrent. Though different traffic studies look at the internet from different vantage points, some simply would not be able to see VPN-obscured BitTorrent traffic.

I'm on a VPN all the time, and torrenting without a VPN, to me, is living on the edge. I'd constantly wonder: how long before I receive a stern letter? Every day would be a desperate roll of the dice. I'd turn to alcoholism to dull my anxiety. That kind of life's not for me. So the hundreds of gigs in shows and movies I torrent (can't purchase those anywhere without DRM, can you? And paying for them indefinitely to get them [if the licensing doesn't run out] with streaming compression seems silly instead of just downloading them once) is obfuscated! Yay!

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

#216

Post by lostcolony »

distances wrote: post #187
coldacid wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not wrong, though.

Yes, he is right of course. The "mock surprise" way of delivering a point isn't at all conductive to a discussion though.

The point I was replying to was either equally flippant, or it was incredibly naive. I am assuming someone on HN, posting about copyright, is the former, not the latter. If the person was literally so naive to believe that the only way for a creator to be paid for their work is to have the copyright system we currently have, then I apologize for my tone.

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

#217

Post by mulmen »

phil248 wrote: post #205
jimmies wrote: 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…

Torrenting for me has always been about convenience, not money. I recently wanted to watch a new show called A.P. Bio. It's free on NBC's website. But after struggling through one episode with lags and ads with no volume control, I gave up and just torrented the show. Until they master such exotic technologies as "streaming video" and "volume control" they're going to keep driving people to torrenting. Netflix figure…

I'd like to know the ratio of "legitimate" viewers to pirates for Netflix and major network shows. Does the quality and convenience of the Netflix player reduce piracy?

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

#218

Post by andrestan »

mattmanser wrote: post #28
bdz wrote: 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…

"enforce its commercial appropriation of European culture, history and stories"

How do you actually mean by this? It seems to me that the vast majority of big Hollywood movies are of US origin and not European. For example see here, http://www.businessinsider.com/highest-grossing-movies-of-20... where only Beauty and the Beast could argued is "appropriation of European culture". If anything, it seems like the EU not enforcing copyrights is an attempt by the EU to itself commercially appropriate US culture. The US populace generally isn't spending its money on imported films from the EU. The reverse on the other hand happens quite a bit.

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

#219

Post by freehunter »

Semaphor wrote: post #78

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…

>b) Languages.

It is so damn hard to find media in other languages, and there is no reason for it. The US and Germany are both very technologically advanced countries producing a great amount of media in their own majority languages, but as a German speaker in the US, Harry Potter is about the only German language novel I can reliably find. I like Harry Potter, sure, but I like other books too. I shouldn't have to fly to Germany to find them.

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

#220

Post by imglorp »

phil248 wrote: post #205
jimmies wrote: 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…

Torrenting for me has always been about convenience, not money. I recently wanted to watch a new show called A.P. Bio. It's free on NBC's website. But after struggling through one episode with lags and ads with no volume control, I gave up and just torrented the show. Until they master such exotic technologies as "streaming video" and "volume control" they're going to keep driving people to torrenting. Netflix figure…

I've been tagged for torrenting things which were broadcast over the air. The way I saw it, there was no way to get the show on my device and on my schedule, and the content provider was actually getting someone watching their program--with ads intact--for no additional effort or expense on their part. Financially, they won. They didn't see it that way :)
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