When I say used to I mean the days of limewire, napster, and sublimedirectory to name a few. Or IRC or even ICQ.
Where’s the love for Usenet?
The Piracy Eras:
- Pre-DMCA: The golden age of piracy, no one worried about anything. Music piracy was common, video files were way to large to bother with.
- Post-DMCA: Possible prosecution from big copyright, but also hard to track individuals down, so not a lot of worry, but a lot of angst about it.
- iTunes Music Store: Did more to end music piracy than any legal action. Cheap enough and easy enough that a lot of people stopped bothering. Pirate Bay for video, expect multi-day or week downloads.
- Torrent tracking/poisoning and ISP consolidation: More prosecutions against small pirates put more of a damper on it.
- Cheap Streaming: Did to everything what iTMS did to music piracy
- Expensive Streaming: Now. Bringing back pirates, but people are more cautious due to 4.
One thing I think is worth mentioning (US specific), there was a period in the 2000s with a lot of prosecutions, but then industry groups switched tactics to pushing ISPs to do enforcement with mass copyright letters, and ceased actually bringing lawsuits against small pirates for the most part. People are normally more worried than they need to be.
Oh definitely. And it really depends on your ISP. Before the ISP consolidation it took enough work that sending out those letters to every small local ISP that they wouldn’t bother for Jane Rando who downloaded a few episodes here and there. Now that (in the US at least) most people use one of two or three ISPs who all have a cozy corporate relationship, it’s harder to fly under the radar. But if you have a good privacy-forward ISP it’s not a worry.
It basically means you need a VPN to torrent because if you rack up enough letters they might shut off your internet, but there’s a big distinction between those letters and a lawsuit, they are way closer to just a scare tactic. Their text suggests a lawsuit might be a followup possibility, but that isn’t really true.
Here in Sweden the launch of Spotify was the step that basically killed music piracy overnight. They even had the creator of uTorrent working on building the service, interestingly enough. I believe I downloaded my last song the day before I got a closed beta account.
Nice summary! Thanks for explaining!
Thanks! I figure all this grey in my beard should be good for something.
Tor is untraceable and 100% free
Thanks to node operators like me 🏴
I thought Tor says NOT to use it for piracy cause it’ll be slow as balls
That does not dissuade the keepers of the old ways who know the agony and triumph of whole series downloads spanning months, watching that extra green pixel light up as another random chunk came through day after day until finally the progress bar became whole.
… and then it’s in fucking Spanish
… or porn with a cover story… ¡Ola! 🙏🥰🙌
Thanks for the node
deleted by creator
Don’t governments run their own Tor exit nodes as honeypots?
it is a US military program, so yes, they run nodes as honeypots.
this is way to valuable to be used against pirates though.
Yep. They wouldn’t want to show their hand too much.
The good thing is that it’s in the US military’s interest to actually keep it private and secure though.
Yeah you’re right and the only secure method I know of is Tor hidden services which never exit the network itself. Both you and the server will never know where the other is. It’s kind of like an anonymous dead drop in a park between a spy and their handler.
I2p is another good system to use for torrenting as well it’s just slow as balls (might be better now?) but you don’t need a VPN for that either since it uses garlic routing inspired by Tor’s onion routing.
Can you dumb it down for me how to get started with tor? or link me in the right direction?
- Download Tor browser
- Browse with Tor browser
2a. Go to Tor “hidden services” listed at places like https://dark.fail/
People started getting consequences from their ISPs so they have to take measures to avoid that and those are not free. You’re welcome to still torrent without a VPN or seek out direct download sources but good luck with that.
I got a 1900€ bill that I had to hire a lawyer to fight, so now all my devices wear a condom to hit the internet no matter
I read it but can you dumb it down?
I downloaded a song for my kid 15ish years ago and Telekom tracked it to me so I got a fine.
I was going to say: I live in Germany and they’ll absolutely go after people who pirate.
They cuck so hard for American IP holders it’s honestly incredible. Even the yanks own companies don’t ride people that hard for it.
First time? That seems excessive.
Yes, it was the first time
I hope you joking but if not holy shit. Don’t they hand out warnings a bunch of times before hitting your bank? I am in the states BTW
Holy shit is right. I got no warnings I downloaded a popular song one day after dinner and got the letter three or so months later, my wife was super pissed.
15 years ago? That can’t be true
Edit: the way it was written, I understood it as being prosecuted 15 years after the download. That indeed is impossible and never happened
Why can’t that be true?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hurt_Locker
Check the lawsuits section
You wouldn’t torrent a car?
I already got the specs if I need to 3d print one. And yes I would.
The hell I wouldn’t 🤨
Try soulseek. But $ ruined nearly everything
Canada is still a piracy safe haven, I don’t use VPN. I get funni letters sometimes and laugh at them. Prosumer reseller ISP don’t give a dang. Penalty caps are so low that it’s basically malicious compliance at the Federal level, so nobody gets sued because there’s no money in it for the copyright trolls. Just have to avoid dealing directly with the telecom mafia: Rogers, Shaw, Telus.
Tbh I use direct download as a source more than torrents these days. There’s a lot of free hosts now that aren’t painful to use like in the past when you needed to pay a subscription to some company like Rapidshare to get anything done on sites like Warez-bb.
I got a cease and desist letter that forced me to get a lawyer and start court proceedings which stretched over three years, to avoid paying a monthly income in “damages”, for torrenting The Hurt Locker (allegedly).
So now I use a VPN.In minecraft
The weird part is, it wouldn’t even have mattered if I did it or not.
I was living with roommates and the contract with the ISP for the house’s internet connection was in my name.
So according to German law at the time, I was legally on the hook for copyright violations by anyone on the shared WiFi.
By the time all the legalese letters back and forth were done and the opposing law firm would have had to officially charge me in court, the law had changed.
The old law would still have technically been applicable for my case, but I guess my push-back with a lawyer, and the risk of a judge being sick of the useless workload, made it too risky to be profitable for the copyright vultures.
The dream is still alive in small countries the corporations don’t care about! I sail in vast oceans without VPN.
Lars Ulrich, the only Dane I never liked. Most Danes are agreeable but Lars had someone piss in his baby bottle and he never got over it.
(this is coming from a kid who thought they were awesome until i started playing drums myself)
that and he’s a fuckin glorified metronome. terrible drummer.
to be that talentless and still bitching about napster…
yeah 12 year old me got the fuck over some lame ass metallica
If he ever made a local appearance, as a fellow Dane I would ask why he was ruining the scenery by showing his face in such a beautiful part of the country. He’s not only a great example of why P2P is more than just people wanting free shit, he also made a pretty good case that money can’t buy happiness or talent
I still pirate without a VPN
Yeah I pirate straight to my TV no VPN, no debrid, nothing.
All I do is require encryption on all connections.
Uninstalled pretty much all the streaming apps because it works well enough my whole family prefer pirating to finding the right app for a given show.
Only problem is the cache builds up fast and it’s a closed source app so I can’t fix that
Soooo this might be a bad time. But my pirate stream site is starting to suck (pop ups showed up/ things aren’t loading).
Anybody got a good one? AARGG
Don’t know if we can mention any. Lemmy said something about legal reason but i think a DM or PM or whatever M is ok.
I think you’re right. What you’re saying rinings a bell…
Idk a while ago on r/piracy it didn’t matter. So I got a hand full of sites back then. But they’ve all gone dark now a days.
I hear the IRC channels are the way to go to find out new streaming sites now. But I’ve got no idea how to go about that.
I don’t pay for a VPN but I do pay for a debrid. TorBox has a $3/month plan and it allows you to download torrents at 1Gbps from HTTPS endpoints with a no-logs policy.
