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

I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

iknowwhatyoudownload.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 786 posts

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#321

Post by necovek »

sevenf0ur wrote: post #147
flak48 wrote: post #89

An intern once thought it was a good idea to torrent a couple of Game of Thrones episodes using my startup's Digital Ocean box. We found out after Digital Ocean forwarded us an email from HBO (who presumably tracked Digital Ocean down via the IP) that we were engaging in piracy. We sent an email to everyone with access, saying whoever was doing it to stop. Then we got a second email (a final warning). Everyone denied…

Game of Thrones was the most pirated TV show in history. I remember when the first 4 episodes of season 5 were leaked at once. Christmas came early!

I have an HBO premium subscription (along with access to HBO Go), but I have downloaded a few of the episodes over torrent to ensure I can watch it where there was no internet or where it was unstable.

While I have technically participated in copyright infringement (I haven't raided any ships, I promise, arrgh), I do not feel I have done anything morally wrong.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#322

Post by FabHK »

stardek wrote: post #216
lostgame wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While literally true; I have always found this argument to be petty and pedantic. I’ve heard every argument in the book; but even the old ads said ‘you wouldn’t steal ____’. The fundamental principle is so similar to the point that discussing it quickly devolves into pedantry. I am one that has had this discussion probably a dozen times; half of those on this forum, and I’ve just decided to stand by my educated opini…

Maybe a very distorted type of theft but from my perspective the main immoral thing about theft is that it deprives someone of what they used to have, or takes the place of a sale. From the limited research I've seen the evidence is, at best, mixed that corporations are losing sales due to piracy. If it was a clear choice between buying something or pirating it, equating piracy with theft would be more reasonable (th…

Furthermore, by the way, theft typically destroys total value. If someone steals a wallet (or anything really), the amount he gets from fencing it is typically much smaller than the cost (including hassle, time spent, and potentially nostalgic value) to the original owner of replacing everything (if that’s possible at all).

Copyright infringement, by contrast, arguably creates value - instead of one person being able to see the movie, two can see it.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#323

Post by contravariant »

sbarre wrote: post #140
carstenhag wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, you only get emails ? In Germany you straight up get snail mails from lawyers demanding you to pay for the damages. But in Germany the only real bad thing is uploading, downloading by itself is more of a grey thing.

Canada currently uses a "notice and notice regime" [0], meaning the rights holder notifies the ISP, who turns around and forwards the notice to the infringing customer, but does not give the rights holder the account information, nor do they take any punitive action towards the customer. However, the ISP must retain historical data on these notices, so if in the future the laws change, rights holders could in theory…

>if in the future the laws change

Almost no legal system works this way. You can't suddenly be found guilty of violating a law that didn't exist.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#324

Post by sixothree »

debacle wrote: post #212
flak48 wrote: post #89

An intern once thought it was a good idea to torrent a couple of Game of Thrones episodes using my startup's Digital Ocean box. We found out after Digital Ocean forwarded us an email from HBO (who presumably tracked Digital Ocean down via the IP) that we were engaging in piracy. We sent an email to everyone with access, saying whoever was doing it to stop. Then we got a second email (a final warning). Everyone denied…

The flip side: When I was an intern I once had four people arrive at my desk (including an HR lawyer) for torrenting ubuntu server. Thankfully I shared a cube wall with someone smart enough to realize the confusion, and explain me out of being walked out. They were monitoring for torrent traffic, but weren't paying attention to what was being torrented. Apparently a company-wide warning had gone out the week before I…

Not long after we started WFH I needed to share a pre-configured VM with a coworker. We tried all sorts of stuff and finally just decided to torrent it. Zipped it up tight with a password and private torrented it overnight. Next morning we were up and running.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#325

Post by mgbmtl »

sbarre wrote: post #140
carstenhag wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, you only get emails ? In Germany you straight up get snail mails from lawyers demanding you to pay for the damages. But in Germany the only real bad thing is uploading, downloading by itself is more of a grey thing.

Canada currently uses a "notice and notice regime" [0], meaning the rights holder notifies the ISP, who turns around and forwards the notice to the infringing customer, but does not give the rights holder the account information, nor do they take any punitive action towards the customer. However, the ISP must retain historical data on these notices, so if in the future the laws change, rights holders could in theory…

Changing the law takes a fair amount of time, and it would unlikely be retroactive. Not to mention that if everyone is doing it (and it doesn't go against the Charter), good luck legislating against it.

Historically, predatory behaviour by media companies in Canada has been pretty badly received by both major parties, which is how we ended up with notice-and-notice, where the emails have a long intro about "this is just a notice and you don't have to do anything".

I don't encourage piracy, but it's probably the kind of thing that most people do occasionally, while also being 'good' paying consumers.

p.s. oddly enough, I get these emails sometimes from Teksavvy, but not from Bell.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#326

Post by nybble41 »

stardek wrote: post #216
lostgame wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While literally true; I have always found this argument to be petty and pedantic. I’ve heard every argument in the book; but even the old ads said ‘you wouldn’t steal ____’. The fundamental principle is so similar to the point that discussing it quickly devolves into pedantry. I am one that has had this discussion probably a dozen times; half of those on this forum, and I’ve just decided to stand by my educated opini…

Maybe a very distorted type of theft but from my perspective the main immoral thing about theft is that it deprives someone of what they used to have, or takes the place of a sale. From the limited research I've seen the evidence is, at best, mixed that corporations are losing sales due to piracy. If it was a clear choice between buying something or pirating it, equating piracy with theft would be more reasonable (th…

> the main immoral thing about theft is that it deprives someone of what they used to have

You should have just stopped there. That "or takes the place of a sale" rider is a very recent invention. You know what else takes the place of a sale? Spending your time doing anything else and ignoring the fact that the work even exists. If I could have paid to listen to a song from artist A and instead I listen to a song from artist B (free or paid, but we'll assume it was with permission either way) then that "takes the place of a sale" for artist A, but there's absolutely nothing immoral about choosing to listen to artist B's song instead. Or reading a book, or sleeping, or whatever. You could even write your own songs and give them away for free, directly competing with artist A and taking the place of many sales, and there still wouldn't be anything immoral about that. Artist A was never guaranteed sales, so they haven't lost anything simply by not making a sale. They still have their copy of the work, so they have not in fact been deprived of anything.

Complaints about piracy always read to me as: "You aren't complying with this monopoly which was promised to us in a rather one-sided deal with a third party (government) which (unilaterally) claims to represent you. If you don't shape up—or even if you do—we intend to sue you for everything you own in courts run by our beneficiaries and otherwise do whatever we can to ruin your life, just on general principles and not because we suffered any actual damages." And yet they have the audacity to pretend to claim the moral high ground…

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#328

Post by sixothree »

sho wrote: post #261
flak48 wrote: post #89

An intern once thought it was a good idea to torrent a couple of Game of Thrones episodes using my startup's Digital Ocean box. We found out after Digital Ocean forwarded us an email from HBO (who presumably tracked Digital Ocean down via the IP) that we were engaging in piracy. We sent an email to everyone with access, saying whoever was doing it to stop. Then we got a second email (a final warning). Everyone denied…

The only moral problem I have in your anecdote is the lying about it. With every fibre of my being, I could not care less about torrenting game of thrones .

I pay for netflix, amazon prime, spotify (and thus hulu), and apple tv+, sometimes youtube tv, HBO+ during Game of Thrones.

I pretty much just torrent much of the content I could find on these services. It's so much easier to just have it appear in the list instead of switching devices, sometimes remotes. Just so tired of boxes and remotes and accounts and having to "type" with a stupid remote control.

Most of this could be solved if I could reliably queue something from my laptop to be played on my tv. Like how YouTube lets you queue videos.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#329

Post by Groxx »

Somewhat surprisingly, it finds nothing for mine (likely some rando IP from my ISP... though that only makes it more surprising).

I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this. Am I not torrenting enough? Do blocklists work? Did my ISP recently acquire an Amish IP block?

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#330

Post by Terretta »

mulmen wrote: post #42

Off topic but this raises a question about iMesssage parsing of URLs. I copied just the base URL (without my IP, so he would get his) and sent this to a friend. The preview in iMessage lists my IP, because iMessage actually visited the link. Does the message he receives show his IP or mine? e: Just tested this, it shows my IP on the receiving end. It appears iMessage creates the preview text on the sender’s side so t…

This feature is a “very good thing” so you can’t force someone to disclose their whereabouts to you by sending them a link to the server you control.

If you don’t want to send people your own info in the thumbnail, don’t send them thumbs of URLs that display your own info to you in image or title text when generating the preview on your device.

Post reply on HN