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I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

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Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point I find it hard to draw a distinction between a library and a torrent. Gotta to avoid legal trouble, but from a moral standpoint outlawing torrents is like outlawing the library.

And making a copy of something that hundreds to even thousands of people worked hundreds of thousands of hours on just because you can also has some negative morals do it. I don't know what analogy to make since all the physical ones fail. Maybe it's like hiring someone for a service and not paying. You get a haircut and don't pay. You hire a lawyer and don't pay. You have an accountant and don't pay. In all of those…

A library pays once and then allows an unlimited number of people to use an item. A torrent uploader buys once and then allows an unlimited number of people to use an item. The only core distinction is the number that can access it at once. I will grant this is something of a significant distinction, but only if we grant that a torrent technology that allows only one user of any given uploaded item at once is the same as a library, and thus has the same moral implications (multiple uploads can allow for multiple users as long as they don't exceed the number of independent uploaders at any one time, much like a library can have more than one copy of a book as long as they buy more than one copy).

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#712
post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand. I have a paid Dropbox and GDrive accounts which I use for important data. Having a 2 TB storage that I can use to share whatever I want with others or even across my devices is pretty useful for those cases. I have downloaded data there since I created my account that still is safe and available after almost 5 years.

GP's point is that it's not safe, without redundancy when the drive on your seedbox eventually dies - everything on it is lost.

Sure, that's why I only use it for temporary situations (e.g. sharing a file with another device/person) and not for long-term data storage solution.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point I find it hard to draw a distinction between a library and a torrent. Gotta to avoid legal trouble, but from a moral standpoint outlawing torrents is like outlawing the library.

>At some point I find it hard to draw a distinction between a library and a torrent. So why use torrents instead of the library? You know full well the difference.

Some people use torrents, others use the library, and some use both. Are you asking why some prefer a library to a torrent? For them, likely ease of access and greater access to content. Effectively torrents are an expansion of the library where sharing is easier than ever.

Are you suggesting a library is only moral because of the difficulty in using it? If so, what if someone were to suggest that current libraries have become easy enough to use that they have already crossed that line?

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#714
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Can you explain why? I can understand why people want things for free, but thinking that you shouldn't contribute towards the production cost of the programme you enjoy seems strange to me.

[deleted]

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#715
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Can you explain why? I can understand why people want things for free, but thinking that you shouldn't contribute towards the production cost of the programme you enjoy seems strange to me.

I'll be honest, I want other people to contribute while I enjoy it for free.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really know what you’re arguing, you seem to be making a few assumptions about my position, which are probably wrong. In terms of $100M movies, I think they almost all suck, but that was the value you suggested. I’d say that no movie needs to cost $100M! But plenty of movies cost $10M. If it takes 100 people a year to make a movie then you can easily spend $10M on salaries and overheads alone. > Interestingly…

> So what ? I too can ignore every big budget predictable cliche and say so what. Lets ignore the successes of alternatives. Is Kanye West and Britney Spears the best you can do with millions of dollars ? I'll stick to punk and EDM ... no thanks. > I’m a huge fan of indy media but, because of that, I pay for it, and I don’t like it when people freeload. Is copyright / patents the only way to finance and get money bac…

There are a lot of undeserving idiots with money out there, no doubt. And they have certainly taken advantage of copyright to get wealthy. But it seems to me that you just want to solve this by making everything “indy”, on the cheap, and as much as I love independent music and film (I saw 40 movies over a two week period at a film festival last year, it was awesome) I think the world is far more complex and interesting than can be expressed by a couple of dudes with a camera.

The problem is that some productions are simply expensive. Think about sending an imax camera to the space station. There is literally no way to make that cheap. And why concentrate only on music and movies, what about games? What about journalism? There are a huge number of industries that depend on at least some form of copyright, even if not specifically the bastard form that exists at this moment.

> Is copyright / patents the only way to finance and get money back ? Absolutely not. Thats the argument I am making.

But as far as I can tell, you’re only arguing against copyright, you’re not actually making an argument for a viable alternative, and that is my problem.

Just because you dig EDM and punk, and these specific types of music can be made on the cheap, doesn’t mean all good media can be made cheaply. Just because most $100M movies suck doesn’t mean that $10 million movies shouldn’t be made.

Accept that, and then explain to me how to repeatedly raise the $10 million investment needed to create high quality, high cost products that will be given away for free, no strings attached. I think you’ll find that the problem is that doing so is incredibly hard and extremely risky, which is why nobody is doing it.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#717
post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine did too. Though oddly the wifi in the classrooms was fair-game, but this was before most people had laptops, and even fewer ones that could last more than 2 hours without charging. I remember downloading some content over IRC to share on the campus network because I knew how to use it and it was slow, but not blocked.

My university had bad wifi and I think 50mb drive space per student. I ended up plugging in my laptop directly and spoofing a whitelisted IP/MAC combination (the PCi just plugged out) for several assignments.

Those fees they charge the international students did go somewhere, then :-D

I had as much backed-up space as I could justify (some gigabytes by default), plenty of space for laptops where there were power sockets as well as 1Gb/s wired and fast wifi connections, personal webspace/server, a PostgreSQL database, a Tomcat server, remote SSH access to all computers and a distributed computing system (Condor).

Looking at the current guide for students[1], they also get access to a local Gitlab instance, a private IaaS cloud and a GPU cluster.

[1] http://www.imperial.ac.uk/computing/csg/services/

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#718
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

They make kinda do it pretty easy to stream the major services on TVs now. I can't imagine its easier to just torrent the files. I kinda don't care if people torrent, but they've made it easy enough I don't bother.

The trouble is of course I'm paying for something that isn't as versatile (shows/movies come and go, I can't watch without a connection) but I think its easier and the tradeoff is worth it. I don't tend to watch shows over and over so that helps.

Although I agree typing with the onscreen keyboard and remote just sucks...

Of course I am old and remember the hassle of video rentals which involved physical media (where what you wanted often wasn't available), so my threshold for retrieving content might be higher.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#719
post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew him well and he was well-liked and professionally well-regarded throughout at least my division of the company. He was a high-energy, tireless guy with great ideas and worked nearly daily with senior-level management, often traveling with them all over the world. I, along with a whole lot of others, were absolutely dumbstruck by his profound fall from grace.

Ye I guess seeming like a nice person doesn't prove or disprove anything, but lets not dive to far into your colocated worker's case, but generally. I had a malware once that distributed (legal) porn. Since then I have had that in the back of my head when reading about child porn. I mean, what more effective way to ruin someones life by framing without having to involve yourself physically by planting drugs etc. It d…

Professor in the next office came back from vacation a few years ago and started noticing his unix workstation was doing a great deal of disk access. Disks also seemed to have a lot less space than he remembered. Worked with IT and found out a porn server had been stood up on his system while he was gone. It happens.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#720
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it was great and it wasn't available legally in so many countries, or it was with forced reader and no native-English language versions in TV or 480p streaming online. It's most pirated because it was great quality product with low quality service and delivery.

There's was also providers in the UK who's bad video compression made the picture so dark it was unwatchable.

Are you sure you weren't just tuning in to season 8, episode 3
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