Looking at my current costs each month - £10 goes to my usenet provider, £5 goes to my VPN provider and another £10 goes to my seedbox provider. Guess how much the creative industry gets? Zero
i am curious about seedboxes, they limit your number of connections, right? does your seedbox help you build your ratio?
i've used netflix for a couple of years, and it sucks compared to bit torrent: lousy selection, poor video quality on streaming, and every time i want to watch something i have to wait for it to buffer. it's only benefit is it's ability to deliver recommendations for random stuff. also there's that whole 28 day wait on new releases. so it's fine for random thing, but the bulk of my video watching is via bit torrent.
The best part is that you don't have to wait days for a download to come, you don't have to risk getting a virus, and you don't have to worry about answering lawsuits.
have you ever used BT? a popular TV show, 350-500mb in size, with a thousand seeders, will download for me in less than half an hour. less than 10 minutes if it's my only active torrent, but that almost never happens cuz i pretty much always have dozens going.
i use RSS feeds to download new releases automatically. they just show up on my server, kind of like TIVO :-)
as for viruses, you don't know shit about filesharing.
copies are put out by groups, known as release groups, and those guys have reputations to maintain (i recommend FXG, kingdom, or aXXo). viruses, fakes and other nonsense trashes your reputation. it's a community, people take care of each other.
the closest i've come to a virus is a false positive on a keygen or other crack for a video game.
and for lawsuits? i got a couple of DMCA warnings in the beginning before i learned how to stay under the radar. it isn't hard to do thanks to private trackers, block lists and encrypted connections, it's just inconvenient and it slows things down. building ratio on a private tracker is always tough.
if i had a pass i could buy, my downloads would be faster and the people that snoop could collect nielesn ratings type statistics.
you are basically saying that atoms (scarce goods) and bits (infinite goods) are the same thing, and that the laws of economics (and possibly even physics) should apply where they simply do not.
i'm not saying that the idea isn't hard to get your head around. dudes like abraham maslow and charles darwin based just about all of their work on the idea that humans are basically hardwired to fight over scarce resources.
As I responded to the other article, most of the younger kids and college types belong to the “more time than money” crowd. They’re willing to spend hours scrounging around the web trying to find a decent copy of the latest movie. They’re also willing to sit through ads if it means the content is “free”.
right, and i'm saying that compared to a pirated DVD rip streamed from a local hard drive, netflix sucks miserably. it sucks in terms of video quality, reliability, and availability.
i am saying that the product available illegally is *SUPERIOR* to the legal one in absolutely every respect.
i am saying that netflix, hulu, boxxee, all of them could be absolutely free, as in zero dollars and zero ads, and they could offer every bit of content ever produced, and i would *STILL* choose the illegal copies because they are just better, all the way around.
the market price for recorded content is ZERO. you can talk about morality, and tradition, and young whippersnappers all you want, but the fact of the matter is that high quality media can be digitally distributed faster, easier and for free, by file sharers.
file sharers have solved the distribution problem. as in mission accomplished. this is the right way to do it, end of story.
what remains for content producers is a product problem: the product that they make isn't sustainable in a market where the price for recorded media is zero.
until the content industries can deliver something BETTER than a product which is SUPERIOR to their current offering, there just isn't a reason for them to sell the things that they are selling.
in my mind, the only improvement to be made is the convenience that comes with legality. bit torrent is easy to do, and staying under the radar isn't hard either, it's just inconvenient.
Also note that if file types are enough to conclude anything all search engines are criminal because they allow you to find all those pirated PDF's, AVI, WMV, MOV, MKV, FLV, DOC, TXT, JPG, PNG, PNM and so forth.
for me the new hotness in piracy is .epub and i lean on google way more than any tracker for epub torrents because they aren't really that popular on torrent trackers yet.
If there was a service where I could legally download as many films and as much music as I liked for a reasonable fee (say £25 per month) I would jump at the opportunity.
rather than a service, i would prefer a license to do what i am already doing.
i call it "the piracy pass", a voluntary license that is the intellectual property equivalent of diplomatic immunity. i do what i have always done, only i get to do it in the open using public trackers and no encryption. when the DMCA notices come in, my license serves as authorization to keep on doing i'm doing.
the mechanism to track is already in place (media sentry, etc.) the mechanism to collect and distribute royalties is already in place (ASCAP and their movie and television equivalents).
there is no search and download service that can compete with bit torrent and torrent trackers, so why bother trying to come up with one?
other than setting up the license, nothing has to change. i keep pirating, just like always. they keep snooping, just like always. the royalties groups and the labels/studios keep screwing the artists, just like always. the only thing that changes is i get left alone and the content industry gets an increase in revenue.
also, if people don't want to pay, they can keep doing what they are doing right now.
honestly, it's really the only way that i can see the incumbent media industry surviving. not that i care that they do, if they die off, someone else with sensible pricing will fill the void.
Sort of puts the lie to "people just want stuff for free" being a myth, doesn't it?
it's just not that simple.
i'm not arguing that people don't want stuff for free, lots of people do, and when i first started pirating, that was the big motivator for me as well. in the beginning, when you have more time than money, getting stuff for free is really tempting.
i'm arguing that piracy is not JUST about getting stuff for free. piracy is simply an all around better way to do digital media.
i download stuff for free all the time. but i also have a netflix subscription. i use netflix for convenience mostly, not necessarily for it's actual content. it's great for being impulsive, or when i am traveling, but sucks compared to streaming media over your LAN.
actually, before bit torrent, i used to rent DVDs from netflix, rip them, and then return the disks. i discovered that the ripz i get from bit torrent are just *WAY* better quality than the ones did myself. plus it was way less work.
i pay for all sorts of other stuff too. i have a pair of servers with multi-terabyte arrays that i keep all my downloaded stuff on. i have a third server dedicated to downloading because the tools i use to stay under the radar of the Copyright Cops makes a PC useless for pretty much everything else. i have a couple of home theater PCs to play my files back on. i have a couple of terabyte sized external drives for trading warez with my friends. plus i run out of disk space every year or two and have to upgrade. and don't get me started portable players.
all that gear was expensive. i also have the top bandwidth package from my ISP (a cable company no less) which is also expensive.
so it's not that i'm cheap, far from it. i'd say that "freeloading" has cost me several grand just in hardware. no, for me it's the basic fact that pirating is just an all around better way to get media.
the pirated product is just better: it works on any device i have, ad free, in any format i choose, and it's usually available days and sometimes weeks before retail.
there's also the community that surrounds piracy, known as "the scene". some release groups, like FXG, don't just release very good Copies Of Things, they release copies of Very Good Things.
i have watched quite a few good movies that i've either never heard of or would have dismissed as chick flicks or art films simply because FXG released them and i trust their taste. in cases where i know the film i want, AXXO always delivers good releases.
i download all sorts of things: stuff i already own physical media for, stuff for other people, i even download stuff i have already downloaded because i need a different format or file type. i'll bet i downloaded "the dark knight" half a dozen times, and that was *after* paying to see it in the theater.
there's also the anarchist/political angle, but i've gone on way too long already.
i'm willing to pay for all sorts of stuff like bandwidth, access, equipment, or convenience, but i'm not willing to pay for content.
as a matter of fact, i would actually pay money to be able to pirate stuff in the open without being hassled by take down notices: i.e. no block lists to manage, no encrypted connections to slow things down, no private trackers to maintain ratio on. that would be convenience that's worth paying for. i've talked about this in the past. i call it "the piracy pass."
people don't just want stuff for free, it's not that simple.
Of course, this isn’t statistical proof that everyone actually is pirating content, but this kind of perception may well become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If everyone believes that everyone is doing it, then everyone may as well be doing it themselves.
And there’s little that could get people to abandon piracy. 81 percent said that they’re likely going to continue to get their video fix for free.
You do know that Google runs Blogger, which allows blogs to be hosted on Blogspot.com subdomains, so that "freemovies.blogspot.com" could exist quite easily?
google is different.
middle aged voters who watch TV would notice if google.com stopped working.
I really don't follow his logic at all though on why this applies to a torrent search, but not to a Google Search. If anything, Google links to more torrents than these other guys do (pretty much by definition as it aggregates most everyone). Isn't that a more substantial connection by his own argument?
why is that hard to follow?
fact: google is a publicly traded company located in the united states.
fact: the pirate bay has a pirate ship for a logo.
clearly google never does anything criminal and sites that let you search for torrents are always illegal.
What it's purpose or motive is sounds like an issue for a court to decide. I have not seen, nor has torrent-finder had a chance to present evidence regarding its motives.
that's the problem with courts, they keep not convicting people. or they rule stuff unconstitutional, or they dismiss things.
draconian laws make it nice and clear that the world needs to stop using the internet and go back to buying CD's.
Oh yeah, then they allow the CP sites to sign right back up 10 minutes later.
right, and now that mooo.com is down, there's no way that they can sign up somewhere else. try again.
and since there are other dynamic DNS hosts who are also free, it's possible that there are multiple dynamic host names pointing to the same content who haven't been taken down. try again.
The end result is that except for pulling down the dynamic dns, there is no real way to track or stop them.
so 84,000 sites have to suffer because DHS sucks at police work? try again.
When people really want to avoid the law, they can do it without issue.
it's a situation often referred to here as whac-a-mole. it's a waste of time and tax payer dollars.
which begs the question, if this isn't going to make a difference, why is ICE doing this in the first place?
It seems to me that what happened here is that certain subdomains were found to have child porn, and somehow the entire domain name was taken down instead of the subdomains. We don't know why that happened, but it's apparent that the mistake was quickly reversed.
that's because registrars handle domain names, not subdomains. that's the problem with pulling a domain name at the registrar level without warning.
in this case, pulling mooo.com pulls it's host records (CNames, aliases, etc.) as well, so while that's guaranteed to make hotkiddieporn.mooo.com inaccessible by that hostname, it also makes stampcollecting.mooo.com inaccessible by that host name as well.
adoption of end to end encryption has been slow going because so few people are dissidents. however, a great many of them are file sharers, which this particular administration seems to have taken aim at.
I hope to see that balance shift in favor of personal power in my lifetime.
action is cheaper than control. it's just so much easier to think stuff up and do it than it is for a central authority to keep individual actions under control.
On the post: Death Of Nokia's 'Comes With Music' Shows That 'Free' With DRM Is A Losing Proposition
Re: Re: Re:
i am curious about seedboxes, they limit your number of connections, right? does your seedbox help you build your ratio?
On the post: Death Of Nokia's 'Comes With Music' Shows That 'Free' With DRM Is A Losing Proposition
Re: Re: Re:
i've used netflix for a couple of years, and it sucks compared to bit torrent: lousy selection, poor video quality on streaming, and every time i want to watch something i have to wait for it to buffer. it's only benefit is it's ability to deliver recommendations for random stuff. also there's that whole 28 day wait on new releases. so it's fine for random thing, but the bulk of my video watching is via bit torrent.
The best part is that you don't have to wait days for a download to come, you don't have to risk getting a virus, and you don't have to worry about answering lawsuits.
have you ever used BT? a popular TV show, 350-500mb in size, with a thousand seeders, will download for me in less than half an hour. less than 10 minutes if it's my only active torrent, but that almost never happens cuz i pretty much always have dozens going.
i use RSS feeds to download new releases automatically. they just show up on my server, kind of like TIVO :-)
as for viruses, you don't know shit about filesharing.
copies are put out by groups, known as release groups, and those guys have reputations to maintain (i recommend FXG, kingdom, or aXXo). viruses, fakes and other nonsense trashes your reputation. it's a community, people take care of each other.
the closest i've come to a virus is a false positive on a keygen or other crack for a video game.
and for lawsuits? i got a couple of DMCA warnings in the beginning before i learned how to stay under the radar. it isn't hard to do thanks to private trackers, block lists and encrypted connections, it's just inconvenient and it slows things down. building ratio on a private tracker is always tough.
if i had a pass i could buy, my downloads would be faster and the people that snoop could collect nielesn ratings type statistics.
On the post: Death Of Nokia's 'Comes With Music' Shows That 'Free' With DRM Is A Losing Proposition
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
so did you.
you are basically saying that atoms (scarce goods) and bits (infinite goods) are the same thing, and that the laws of economics (and possibly even physics) should apply where they simply do not.
i'm not saying that the idea isn't hard to get your head around. dudes like abraham maslow and charles darwin based just about all of their work on the idea that humans are basically hardwired to fight over scarce resources.
As I responded to the other article, most of the younger kids and college types belong to the “more time than money” crowd. They’re willing to spend hours scrounging around the web trying to find a decent copy of the latest movie. They’re also willing to sit through ads if it means the content is “free”.
right, and i'm saying that compared to a pirated DVD rip streamed from a local hard drive, netflix sucks miserably. it sucks in terms of video quality, reliability, and availability.
i am saying that the product available illegally is *SUPERIOR* to the legal one in absolutely every respect.
i am saying that netflix, hulu, boxxee, all of them could be absolutely free, as in zero dollars and zero ads, and they could offer every bit of content ever produced, and i would *STILL* choose the illegal copies because they are just better, all the way around.
the market price for recorded content is ZERO. you can talk about morality, and tradition, and young whippersnappers all you want, but the fact of the matter is that high quality media can be digitally distributed faster, easier and for free, by file sharers.
file sharers have solved the distribution problem. as in mission accomplished. this is the right way to do it, end of story.
what remains for content producers is a product problem: the product that they make isn't sustainable in a market where the price for recorded media is zero.
until the content industries can deliver something BETTER than a product which is SUPERIOR to their current offering, there just isn't a reason for them to sell the things that they are selling.
in my mind, the only improvement to be made is the convenience that comes with legality. bit torrent is easy to do, and staying under the radar isn't hard either, it's just inconvenient.
On the post: The Return Of COICA; Because Censorship Is Cool Again
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
for me the new hotness in piracy is .epub and i lean on google way more than any tracker for epub torrents because they aren't really that popular on torrent trackers yet.
On the post: The Return Of COICA; Because Censorship Is Cool Again
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
it sure is. and the vast majority of that traffic is completely unstoppable, which is something the other side doesn't want to admit either.
the only way to stop unauthorized file sharing is to shut down the internet.
the only way to catch file sharers in significant numbers for it to serve as a deterrent is to do away with everyone's civil liberties.
what judge in his or her right mind would allow such things to occur?
On the post: Death Of Nokia's 'Comes With Music' Shows That 'Free' With DRM Is A Losing Proposition
Re:
rather than a service, i would prefer a license to do what i am already doing.
i call it "the piracy pass", a voluntary license that is the intellectual property equivalent of diplomatic immunity. i do what i have always done, only i get to do it in the open using public trackers and no encryption. when the DMCA notices come in, my license serves as authorization to keep on doing i'm doing.
the mechanism to track is already in place (media sentry, etc.) the mechanism to collect and distribute royalties is already in place (ASCAP and their movie and television equivalents).
there is no search and download service that can compete with bit torrent and torrent trackers, so why bother trying to come up with one?
other than setting up the license, nothing has to change. i keep pirating, just like always. they keep snooping, just like always. the royalties groups and the labels/studios keep screwing the artists, just like always. the only thing that changes is i get left alone and the content industry gets an increase in revenue.
also, if people don't want to pay, they can keep doing what they are doing right now.
honestly, it's really the only way that i can see the incumbent media industry surviving. not that i care that they do, if they die off, someone else with sensible pricing will fill the void.
On the post: Death Of Nokia's 'Comes With Music' Shows That 'Free' With DRM Is A Losing Proposition
Re: Re: Re: Re:
it's just not that simple.
i'm not arguing that people don't want stuff for free, lots of people do, and when i first started pirating, that was the big motivator for me as well. in the beginning, when you have more time than money, getting stuff for free is really tempting.
i'm arguing that piracy is not JUST about getting stuff for free. piracy is simply an all around better way to do digital media.
i download stuff for free all the time. but i also have a netflix subscription. i use netflix for convenience mostly, not necessarily for it's actual content. it's great for being impulsive, or when i am traveling, but sucks compared to streaming media over your LAN.
actually, before bit torrent, i used to rent DVDs from netflix, rip them, and then return the disks. i discovered that the ripz i get from bit torrent are just *WAY* better quality than the ones did myself. plus it was way less work.
i pay for all sorts of other stuff too. i have a pair of servers with multi-terabyte arrays that i keep all my downloaded stuff on. i have a third server dedicated to downloading because the tools i use to stay under the radar of the Copyright Cops makes a PC useless for pretty much everything else. i have a couple of home theater PCs to play my files back on. i have a couple of terabyte sized external drives for trading warez with my friends. plus i run out of disk space every year or two and have to upgrade. and don't get me started portable players.
all that gear was expensive. i also have the top bandwidth package from my ISP (a cable company no less) which is also expensive.
so it's not that i'm cheap, far from it. i'd say that "freeloading" has cost me several grand just in hardware. no, for me it's the basic fact that pirating is just an all around better way to get media.
the pirated product is just better: it works on any device i have, ad free, in any format i choose, and it's usually available days and sometimes weeks before retail.
there's also the community that surrounds piracy, known as "the scene". some release groups, like FXG, don't just release very good Copies Of Things, they release copies of Very Good Things.
i have watched quite a few good movies that i've either never heard of or would have dismissed as chick flicks or art films simply because FXG released them and i trust their taste. in cases where i know the film i want, AXXO always delivers good releases.
i download all sorts of things: stuff i already own physical media for, stuff for other people, i even download stuff i have already downloaded because i need a different format or file type. i'll bet i downloaded "the dark knight" half a dozen times, and that was *after* paying to see it in the theater.
there's also the anarchist/political angle, but i've gone on way too long already.
i'm willing to pay for all sorts of stuff like bandwidth, access, equipment, or convenience, but i'm not willing to pay for content.
as a matter of fact, i would actually pay money to be able to pirate stuff in the open without being hassled by take down notices: i.e. no block lists to manage, no encrypted connections to slow things down, no private trackers to maintain ratio on. that would be convenience that's worth paying for. i've talked about this in the past. i call it "the piracy pass."
people don't just want stuff for free, it's not that simple.
On the post: Death Of Nokia's 'Comes With Music' Shows That 'Free' With DRM Is A Losing Proposition
Re: Re:
great article. i like this part:
On the post: Did Homeland Security Seize... And Then Unseize... A Dynamic DNS Domain?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
google is different.
middle aged voters who watch TV would notice if google.com stopped working.
On the post: The Return Of COICA; Because Censorship Is Cool Again
Re: Re: Re: Re:
why is that hard to follow?
fact: google is a publicly traded company located in the united states.
fact: the pirate bay has a pirate ship for a logo.
clearly google never does anything criminal and sites that let you search for torrents are always illegal.
the logic is completely bullet proof.
On the post: The Return Of COICA; Because Censorship Is Cool Again
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
that's the problem with courts, they keep not convicting people. or they rule stuff unconstitutional, or they dismiss things.
draconian laws make it nice and clear that the world needs to stop using the internet and go back to buying CD's.
On the post: The Return Of COICA; Because Censorship Is Cool Again
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
yeah... that like requires doing this stuff... that police do... when they work...
i don't know what it's called, but doing that work of police is too hard and it's easier to just censor stuff.
On the post: Did Homeland Security Seize... And Then Unseize... A Dynamic DNS Domain?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
right, and now that mooo.com is down, there's no way that they can sign up somewhere else. try again.
and since there are other dynamic DNS hosts who are also free, it's possible that there are multiple dynamic host names pointing to the same content who haven't been taken down. try again.
The end result is that except for pulling down the dynamic dns, there is no real way to track or stop them.
so 84,000 sites have to suffer because DHS sucks at police work? try again.
When people really want to avoid the law, they can do it without issue.
it's a situation often referred to here as whac-a-mole. it's a waste of time and tax payer dollars.
which begs the question, if this isn't going to make a difference, why is ICE doing this in the first place?
On the post: Did Homeland Security Seize... And Then Unseize... A Dynamic DNS Domain?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
in this case it's 84,000 apartments, so it's more like a putting the signs up on all the doors in a half-mile radius.
On the post: Did Homeland Security Seize... And Then Unseize... A Dynamic DNS Domain?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
which is why there are safe harbor provisions, to keep this exact thing from happening.
On the post: Did Homeland Security Seize... And Then Unseize... A Dynamic DNS Domain?
Re: Re:
showing emotions on the internet... no good will come of this.
On the post: Did Homeland Security Seize... And Then Unseize... A Dynamic DNS Domain?
Re: Re: Re:
that's because registrars handle domain names, not subdomains. that's the problem with pulling a domain name at the registrar level without warning.
in this case, pulling mooo.com pulls it's host records (CNames, aliases, etc.) as well, so while that's guaranteed to make hotkiddieporn.mooo.com inaccessible by that hostname, it also makes stampcollecting.mooo.com inaccessible by that host name as well.
On the post: Cable And Hollywood Fight Having Their Gatekeeper Status Taken Away
Re: Re: The point that's raised again and again
you just answered your own question.
there is no long run, and while the incumbent players won't vocalize it, the writing is on the wall.
at my most cynical i think that the incumbents have strategic planning and football ass backwards. you just can't run a company a quarter at a time.
at other times i get a bit optimistic and think that this is a last ditch grab for dollars before the inevitable restructuring.
On the post: Obama Administration Says It Can Spy On Americans, But Can't Tell You What Law Allows It
Re: The solution
http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html
adoption of end to end encryption has been slow going because so few people are dissidents. however, a great many of them are file sharers, which this particular administration seems to have taken aim at.
I hope to see that balance shift in favor of personal power in my lifetime.
action is cheaper than control. it's just so much easier to think stuff up and do it than it is for a central authority to keep individual actions under control.
On the post: Leaked HBGary Documents Show Plan To Spread Wikileaks Propaganda For BofA... And 'Attack' Glenn Greenwald
Re: Re: Re: Security Firm?
kind of. a lot of offensive security types are all teeth and no shell.
Next >>