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

The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

plagiarismtoday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 546 posts

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

#251

Post by baddox »

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…

When I started pirating things regularly many years ago, I'll admit that some of it was just the fun of having such a huge library of content available for free, combined with my "f* the RIAA/MPAA" attitude.

I mostly grew out of that phase, and began pirating things mostly to discover new obscure content. What.cd was amazing for music discovery, and I definitely went to a handful of concerts and bought a handful of CDs of bands I almost certainly never would have discovered without what.cd. Same goes for old and indie films.

These days I do very little pirating. I'll occasionally pirate a TV show or film that I can't find on the handful of VOD services I or my friends subscribe to. Say what you will about the bad aspects of the modern media ecosystem: DRM, "stream instead of own," fragmentation, etc. But, at least for me, the industry has done a decent job of competing with piracy on convenience.

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

#252

Post by digi_owl »

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…

Copyright has a hilariously convoluted story.

The term is from England, but many of the rules are from France. Because in France they came up with "rights of the creator" that included things like the estate being able to deny someone the use of a play or song after the creators death.

Then these two got merged via the Berne convention on copyright. But USA didn't sing that one until the 1980s(!).

So for a long long time, USA used a variant of the English copyright law, that only concerned itself with the printing of books (then as the tech came online, they expanded it to cover the likes of recorded music and computer software).

One thing to keep in mind is that the Berne convention requires that the signatory nations respect copyright duration of the nation of first release. And thanks to France we have this whole thing about death plus X years.

And like i said, USA didn't sign any of that until very recently. And thus we had situations like Tolkien becoming popular with hippies because an American publisher picked up a copy while visiting the UK, and went on to print a pile of cheap copies back in the US.

Anyways, thanks to global media corporations, lobbyists, and the whole Berne thing, we now have a constant ratcheting of the whole death+X duration thanks to the lobbyists playing on national fears of being out-competed by others with "better" terms for the corporations.

IANAL and all that.

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

#253

Post by jjrh »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #215

>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…

> 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?

That's really a USA thing.

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

#254

Post by sedachv »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #40
sotojuan wrote: post #31

I hope torrents stay strong. No way I could've cultivated my love for films and music without Karagarga and What/Redacted, respectively.

I have a theory that the current generation growing up with their young artists only working through streaming platforms are going to have a tough time in 20 years reliving songs they loved of their youth because the streaming platforms they listened to them on will be long dead and no one bothered pirating it and sharing it. Case in point it's super easy for me to find discogs of even unusual artists I grew up with…

> I have a theory that the current generation growing up with their young artists only working through streaming platforms are going to have a tough time in 20 years reliving songs they loved of their youth because the streaming platforms they listened to them on will be long dead and no one bothered pirating it and sharing it.

This is what happened to a lot of the songs by amateur musicians on mp3.com when it shut down in 2001, and that was all downloadable. I still have a few songs I downloaded from mp3.com that I have not seen hosted anywhere else. For streaming this has been an ongoing problem with SoundCloud for a long time. A lot of musicians delete their accounts or get blocked, move on with their life, and there is not a download option so all that is left are "check out this cool track" dead links.

This is ironic when you consider that a lot of mp3 blogs of the 2008-2011 era were about "rediscovering" amateur cassette and little known vinyl releases from the 1970s and 1980s.

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

#255

Post by amiga-workbench »

akoncius wrote: post #237
mulmen wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

small anecdote: when spotify vecame available in my region (Lithuania), I instantly became paid subscriber because it was really convenient. And my colleagues did the same - it’s just simpler to use Spotify with its was library instead of wasting time in torrent sites looking for some new music. Same applies for me with netflix.

After Steam took off I did the same, it's much more convenient than piracy.

The only exception I make is when software has overbearing DRM in place. I will not hand over money for a tainted product when I can get better for nothing.

With video media I'm largely covered with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video but there is still plenty of content I'm missing. Instead of doing the right thing many networks are rolling their own half arsed subscription streaming services. Nobody in their right mind is going to stay subbed to the likes of CBS All Access when the only thing half worth watching is Star Trek Discovery, I've seen many people ditching their sub now that the season is over.

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

#256

Post by millette »

scientician wrote: post #101
Robotbeat wrote: post #26

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…

I volunteer myself and some of my servers to run software to support Wikipedia, Sci-Hub, The Pirate Bay etc if I can do it and have some safeties in place: - Everything encrypted all the time, I have none of the keys - ... I guess I'd just want to be reassured I'm legally and practically safe. Are there any projects like this already? In another thread someone mentioned PopcorntimeXSci-hub which sounds about right wi…

Built on the dat project https://datproject.org/ - my little finger tells me dat will take bittorrent's P2P place in the not too distant future.

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

#257

Post by wang_li »

make3 wrote: post #176
Y_Y wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An artistic work that came from thin air? That didn't derive partially from the society in which it was created or take inspiration from preceding works? I don't think such a thing exists.

the part of the shared social contribution that is true for all sources of revenue (because this is also true for engineering, business, etc) is usually paid for by the taxes paid the person who will have said revenue

The societal contribution is also present "in the air" for everyone, but only one artist ever makes a particular work. That would suggest that the key contribution comes from the artist, not from society.

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

#258

Post by jjrh »

stuaxo wrote: post #135

The fact that companies can connect and see the IP of all downloaders is an issue. A newer iteration needs better anonymity to become ubiquitous again.

It's only a issue when there aren't laws preventing ISP's from handing over your information without a court order along with sane limits on how much a copyright holder can go after you for.

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

#259

Post by perfmode »

adrusi wrote: post #243
phil248 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have a wireless audio configuration which introduces 200ms latency. This is usually unnoticeable because I watch almost all my video through mpv, which lets me set a 200ms delay on the video to compensate. I can't play Netflix titles through mpv, and as far as I've been able to tell, the Netflix player doesn't have an AV sync setting. My setup is idiosyncratic, and I wouldn't expect Netflix to build in every featur…

My tv can do this. And I think my Apple TV can also.
Post reply on HN