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The Pirate Bay To Stop Serving Torrent Files
An anonymous reader tips news that The Pirate Bay is making a move away from .torrent files in favor of 'magnet links.' On Thursday the site made magnet links the default, and TorrentFreak reports that they'll stop serving .torrent files altogether in about a month.
"The announcement is bound to lead to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little will change for the average Pirate Bay visitor. Users will still be able to download files, but these will now be started through a magnet link instead of a .torrent file. The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a 'magnet site' is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy. This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site. Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future."
more like isp level blocking. they will just make tons of mirrors of the site everywhere. kinda like how i said with sopa etc it does not matter what law you pass or how many sites you take down 50 more take its place.
What do you think?
Mirrors!
The problem is site owners use them to place ads next to real links and malware laced ads come up as magnetic links as well. You can't tell what you are downloading unless you pay close attention.
http://saveie6.com/
So, how is this going to work if you don't use your local machine for torrents? Personally, I have a low-power computer for that task that I can leave on overnight while I put my power-hungry desktop to sleep. It's worked well up until now, since I can just save torrent files into a monitored folder over the network, but how are things going to work with magnet links? Will I now have to use remote desktop to my other machine, pull up TPB, and click the link? Sounds pretty shitty to me (but hey, who can complain about "free"?)
Is this a death knell for bit torrent?
Eh I'm kinda torn on this. I don't support piracy at all, but I laughed when I read how magnet links worked and realized that all the protect ip sopa stuff has no good way of protecting against this. It would be good if they realized that there was nothing they could do (at least not as far as blocking sites goes), and therefore did nothing.
What the hell is a Magnet URI?
You could read Wikipedia but the short answer is that it's a file hash, meaning there's no centralized server; just a description of the file that can be downloaded automatically from various decentralized file sharing networks.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Magnet links are probably going to take over, I didn't learn about them until I tried uTorrent Remote with my iPhone... Only way I could easily tell my client what to download... Probably simplify things for everyone, including guys that use seedboxes or WHS or similar media implementations.
Doesnt magnet require clients to communicate with each other using DHT?
Whats stopping the ISP's from blocking DHT itself, atleast this way they have to block individual sites
If everything went magnet they can wipe it all out by just blocking DHT
Well, I don't know to be honest. I could pull numerous possible reasons out of my nether regions:
1) Smaller bandwidth footprint due to the size. Each small file adds up. Making the files smaller helps a lot. If the Pirate Bay has to resort to another ISP with lower quality bandwidth.
2) If the entirety of Pirate Bay can be hosted on a thumb drive then it is hard to simply nuke the Pirate Bay. Just give a few trusted people thumb drive copies as backups.
3) If the Pirate Bay gets torched, you can have many clones pop up in no time. You could do 1A with bigger storage mediums, but if the site is fitable on a thumb drive then it is small enough to get these clones uploaded quicker.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
And doesn't widespread NAT hurt DHT a lot?
Guess SOPA isn't gonna work so well now, is it?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
there was nothing they could do (at least not as far as blocking sites goes),
...but it looks like joining the swarm, logging IPs, and writing John Doe lawsuits is still just as must an option...
Everyone who opposes SOPA should be able to mirror the site now. The ultimate protest is to have a Million Mirror March. MAKE them shut down the entire internet to stop signal.
dht cant be block so easy its p2p much like old school file sharing is theirs no 1 server to block. they could try to port ban but then people would just change it.
I looked at the wiki linked in the summary but it wasn't what I'd call enlightening. Could someone explain (or direct me to an explanation) of magnet links vs. torrents? I'm assuming its a more secure system, but I'm curious how.
BTW, yes I know "Is your google broken?", "here let me google that for you", etc. But, sometimes its nice to get answers from sentient beings instead of an algorithm.
acully they have ended that being they started losing cases. why they are bribe heavy on passing laws that can never be enforced.
Why isn't it?
More pedantically, piracy is what we call it when someone forcibly boards your vessel and steals your real property.
I think you've convinced me to (a) start doing some pro-copyright trolling, and (b) start contributing to the Pirate Party.
You are writing in the future tense but this is already happening... I use http://malaysiabay.org/ because it is nearer to me and therefore quicker...
If they take that down I am sure that a copy will be up within hours... As usual the only people that will really benefit from all this are the lawyers.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
I don't think it hurts DHT more than it hurts Bittorrent in general.
So if you can use Bittorrent, you can use DHT.
What?
Because sometimes there are things it is useful to pirate. Such as losing a Windows install CD, or ending up with a film that is so full of DRM you cannot watch it in the way you want so you download a copy that you can. Legal consumers circumventing their asinine protections are just as much frequenters of TPB as those who just download movies and TV shows every day compulsively.
rember the http warez of the old they would try taking down the sites and they would be back up in hrs with 10 new mirrors. there was even a tool that would generate accounts on every free hoster and upload your site all with a click. went threw this in the 90s and did just fine the only reason it quit was stuff like bittorrent took the need for it away. its the same game over again and the pirates know how to win.
Doesnt magnet require clients to communicate with each other using DHT? Whats stopping the ISP's from blocking DHT itself, atleast this way they have to block individual sites If everything went magnet they can wipe it all out by just blocking DHT
Simply put - no it doesn't need DHT.
Magnet URI scheme on Wikipedia explains that a magnet link can contain anything from a standard URL, to P2P (DirectConnect, Gnutella, eDonkey), a list of keywords to search for, or a BitTorrent tracker (with DHT or with tracker URLs). They can contain a list of one - or many of these different sources too, and even include CRC and MD5.
yea this isn't just bought pirate bay. it just happens to be the biggest target you really think if you let them win they would stop there. there next move will to be to for after any site that has any sort of media they own fair use or not so say good buy to youtube facebook twitter google etc why because they all link to media. these people are not really after pirates they have been around since the birth of man that's how we learn and invent. its bought keeping there dead business alive and the only way to do that is to cripple the internet.
Because sometimes there are things it is useful to pirate. Such as losing a Windows install CD, or ending up with a film that is so full of DRM you cannot watch it in the way you want so you download a copy that you can. Legal consumers circumventing their asinine protections are just as much frequenters of TPB as those who just download movies and TV shows every day compulsively.
So in other words, "because I really really really REALLY want it RIGHT NOW and for free, therefore stfu and give me it RIGHT NOW and for free, QED". Gotcha.
Wow, that was badly written, poorly punctuated, verging on incoherent, and flat out incorrect. I remember when reading Slashdot at least gave you some cogent debates, even if you disagreed with people.
Will I have to go to Pirate Bay to get a copy of Pirate Bay for my thumb drive or will I go to a thumb drive copy for the latest version :-D
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Look before you leap. Hover before you click.
Why is that good?
Because the shows I download legally and pay for are not available in my country with the subtitles that I need to understand them. If the Powers That Be would provide those, I wouldn't need to download a copy from the Pirate Bay. As it is, I buy the download legally off iTunes, because I have a vain hope that some of the money I pay might make it to the artists responsible for the show rather than the accountants who fleece them, and then I download the torrent off the Pirate Bay so that I can understand what I watched.
TPB is useful for filling in the gaps that iTunes and the like leave open. The quality and service that the pirates provide are better than what the authorized distributors provide.
Plus, I can rest assured that my pirated copy will work on any device I may happen to purchase and at any time; I don't have to worry about region locking, permissions servers being taken offline (anyone remember PlaysForSure?), or other arbitrary and unnecessary constraints placed on my purchases. So long as standards like AVI or DIVX or H264 can be read, I'm good to go; there's no threat to the longevity of my purchases.
So, using TPB to provide open standards-based backups that are free of useless and arbitrary impediments that add no value to me ensures that I'm no longer placed at the whim and caprice of the content industry. I give them money (I legally download a copy via iTunes) and in turn receive the goods without any restrictions (I download a copy via the Pirate Bay).
That's why the Pirate Bay is good.
Many NATs are "open cone" they allow all traffic in on a udp port after a single packet is sent out from one, plus UPnP.
they'd have to DPI every UCP packet on the network. Also, DHT is used for other things than BT. But yeah, it's possible.
What?
Bonch is a known troll. Slashdot -- feature request: allow filtering based on username/UID. For the time being, Bonch is the only user who posts things that I'm consistently not interested in reading, and, well, I've been active here for years, but there could eventually be someone else that's worth ignoring completely. Sure, you can call this flamebait if you like, but I've got karma to burn and I know I'm not the only person who thinks that bonch is best left alone and ignored.
Facts have a liberal bias.
life must be very hard indeed, if, in the course of downloading films and music without paying the creators, you accidentally have to watch an advertisement. how can you survive? what gives you hope? how do you wake up in the morning and face each day? knowing that somewhere out there, there might be ads, RIGHT NEXT to your magnet links, just waiting for you to accidentally click the wrong thing.
surely there is something we, as Americans, can do about this horrible problem. maybe if we all wrote our congressmen...
honestly, do you really need to pirate another Creed album or the latest transformers movie? I mean, jesus christ, why dont you read a fucking book or something?
all of a sudden you download transformers 4, and find out that its really an old episode of The Waltons. what do you do then?
Yeah, pretty much. e.g. I own Diablo II. A few weeks ago I looked around for my CDs, but was having trouble finding them. My only options were to pay for it twice, pirate it or to give up. I picked pirate... you tell me why that's morally wrong.
Hint: because the government said so isn't a real answer
...how do they work?
Why is that good?
Because infringing copyright is what will preserve the last few generations of copyrighted material whose owners have/will disappear and leave them orphaned?
Because not making copyrighted content available across large parts of the world does nothing to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts?
Because 120 years of copyright is not what most of us would call a limited time?
Copyright infringement has been around since we started carving into clay tablets.
It's not going away.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Piracy has little or no cost to content owners. A potential sale is not a lost sale. They still make mad money. People who can't afford it or wouldn't otherwise pay for it still getting access is not a bad thing, as they they give back to the community. Piracy results in a net benefit, rather than a net loss.
Seriously kiddo, think about it.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Slashdot -- feature request: allow filtering based on username/UID.
That feature has existed for the longest time as the Friends/Foes" list.
Click on a user's name, then choose "Friend this user"
You'll get a menu offering you three choices:
Friend
Neutral
Foe
It's three clicks, assuming you already have the friends/foes modifiers set.
If you don't... go into your comments preferences
https://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm
and set Foes to whatever negative modifier you want.
-6 means you'll never see their posts unless you browse in the gutter.
While you're in there, consider changing your default posting method to Plain Old Text.
Links will automagically get urlified and you'll stop posting blocks of text, because your line breaks will carry over
/unless you try to use a forward slash at the beginning of a line
//you can still use html with POT
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Piracy has little or no cost to content owners. A potential sale is not a lost sale. They still make mad money. People who can't afford it or wouldn't otherwise pay for it still getting access is not a bad thing, as they they give back to the community. Piracy results in a net benefit, rather than a net loss.
Seriously kiddo, think about it.
Why doesn't slashdot let me paragraph my first...paragraph?
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
The worst part of this:
if you registered your cd key with your battle.net account, you can download it for free from blizzard.
so that maybe young people can learn how to use software they'll encounter later in their professional lives..you know, kinda like what you did in the 80s as a kid (based on your low UID).
I've had to do that for a number of OEM reinstall CDs as well. Manufacturers don't send them, or they set it up so they must be created by the customer. Guess what, most people don't have a clue, so when you have to re-image a hosed system your options are to purchase the media (even though you already have the rights to what's held on the media) and wait for shipping or torrent an OEM reinstall disk.
If I were downloading them to create pirate installations, I'd just download a VLK image and be done with it, so that's not a valid rebuttal.
Or he could've lost the CD-keys and since you need a valid one to do even Single Player...he'd have to either keygen or crack the game (or buy a CD-key), which are still bad in the eyes of Blizzard-Activision.
Of course, if he did the smart thing and kept a personal-use ISO on his hard drive of the disc he made a copy of himself, he'd still be seen as a criminal...by somebody, anyway.
The title of the article is a bit sensational. It almost reads like TPB is shutting down completely. A better one could'a been "The Pirate Bay Switches To Magnet Links".
It never was like that. You must be thinking of a mailing list before AOL unleashed the masses. Or maybe a particularly memorable write(1) session. All I can remember from the early Slashdot is goatse links.
Come in handy for what?
Being able to download files that are hard to get elsewhere.
Piracy?
Are you saying everything linked on PirateBay is "pirated"? Is everything you write bullshit?
I did the same thing with Spore recently : i still had the manual, with my key, but i couldn't find my dvd anymore.
So I went to TPB, downloaded the dvd , installed and played.
You should consider that this takes maybe 20 minutes to do. Searching trough all my stuff to find a scratched dvd, is going to take much longer.
It's not theft : you already payed for it. No one is losing money.
Mod up! Why'd you post AC? You've made some bloody good points there.
I'm the same. I've got, for instance, all the "24" boxsets, but I want to watch it on my netbook on the many long and boring train journeys I must endure. TPB is extremely handy for me, because while the DVDs are at home I can *legally* download DVD-quality rips on my torrent aggregator for my *own personal use*.
Score one for sensible: no external DVD reader required, no discs to lose or damage (they're nice and safe at home), and only 2lb to carry!
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Piracy is good because we don't live in a world where people create something, and then through copyright get to make some money off of it. We DO live in a world where rights to large numbers of works are bought up by a very small number of corporations, who pay governments to be able to keep those rights forever. They collude together to fix prices, and make sure that only their entertainment can ever reach the shelves of your local bookstore or video store.
Piracy hasn't gone far enough. This system they've created is something I will fight against will all my being. They are stealing and controlling our culture. My hope is that piracy is so pervasive and easy that even currently released blockbuster movies or bestseller books make no money. Yes, there will be collateral damage in terms of artists not being able to support themselves entirely through their art, and a drop in new entertainment produced in the near future. This is an acceptable price.
When you get that copy, let me know. I'll help seed it.
Slipping shoelaces ?
I pirate so that I know if something is worth my money. After all of the times I've been burned on bad movies, music and games, I'm not about to hand over my money that easily any more. If I like what I see/hear/play, I buy it. If I don't, it gets deleted.
It's not theft : you already payed for it. No one is losing money.
But if you would've paid them again, then they would've had more money. You stole their potential profit!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
> the .torrent files are hosted by the peers, instead of on piratebay. When you join the DHT network (by running a bittorrent client)
So, how do you _join_ this DHT network, if you don't know of any peers you can connect to? TPB disabled their tracker, which means you can't find a single peer there. Now they'll disable torrent files, which means you can't even start a torrent and hope one of its trackers work _unless_ you are already connected to DHT?
This all assumes you are running a torrent client that is already somewhat active, i.e. "in the network". On a newly-started torrent client, you must find a torrent _from some other site_ to jump-start your client (to get a peer you can do DHT with), and only _then_ you can start TPB's torrents.
Where's the tracker extension that says "Give me a peer, any peer, don't care which torrent they are on, I just want to join DHT"?
That is what they want you to believe. The reality was that at that moment there was no copyright. Everything was public domain.
Even when Gutenberg started, all people did was copy the books others wrote by hand.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This is an acceptable price.
By whose divine measure? Yours?
Pray tell, what is your occupation, so that others may deem your livelihood a waste of time as well?
Bonch is an idiot. End of story. Just ignore him and you'll be happier.
I found instructions on various sites for how to do it, but none of them work.
I run Firefox (9.0.1), Fedora and Azureus. I don't really want to change that combination. No matter what I add to the about:config of firefox, it always says there is no application associated with the magnet: URI handler.
Okay, just as I was writing this, I thought "what if Firefox is now relying on the OS to manage this the way it does for the mailto: handler?" Sure enough, I found a way.
http://maketecheasier.com/open-magnet-link-in-browser/2010/02/19
I hope this helps someone else.
Relying on hashes instead of torrent files is just the next step in bittorrent's evolution.
Utter nonsense.
Relying on hashes to point to torrent files is just the next step in The Pirate Bay's evolution.
It you think than that hashes generically have anything directly to do with bittorrent, you are simply not qualified to speak on the subject.
As we all know, in the dark ages societal or technological progress were at standstill because of rampant copyright infringement. There were entire monasteries full of people making manual copies of valuable manuscripts, without compensating the content providers! Some people claim that it was Gutenberg that made the breakthrough that lead to the renaissance and modernity, but the real advance was the invention of copyright laws. Of course at the time the laws were still primitive, allowing only a few decades of copyright protection and with no provision for modern usage restrictions that are essential for many innovative business models.
Piracy is good, yes. Have you been drinking Rupert Murdoch's Famous Internet Censorship flavored Kool Aid? Piracy is good. Even Bill Gates said that piracy is good - what greater authority on the subject can there be?
http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/2803
http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropiracy9
WTF is with this globalization, one world government view that pirates are a cancer, eating at the world's economy? There are probably tens of thousands of people in China who could never have been able to buy Windows, who are working in the tech world today, because pirated copies of Windows were available. Ditto with India, and God knows how many other countries. EVEN THE UNITED STATES!!! (How many American parents were unable to purchase, or see the wisdom in purchasing, Windows 95 in 1995?)
Of course, we're back to the definition and purpose of copyright law. Copyright law was never intended to ensure that an author would make a profit. It was only intended to ensure that IF THERE WERE A PROFIT to be made, then the author should get some of that profit.
Piracy is good, if for no other reason than underprivileged people acquiring educational tools. Games and music? I just don't give a rat's ass about the music syndicates, movie syndicates, and games. They can all go belly-up if they lack the imagination to find new business models.
Piracy is good. I got my first Windows NT via torrent. I got my first Linux via torrent. I got my first MacOS via torrent. I'm among the wealthiest 1% of the world's population, and I couldn't afford everything that I've ever played with on the computer. What about that other 99%?
I support piracy, whole heartedly. My counterparts in backwoods African and Asian and South American countries NEED piracy, if they are ever to join the 20th century. You know, the century that we retired a decade ago?
Hey, one of the women I work with went home on vacation a few weeks ago. She has already overstayed her stay. I asked her husband how I could email her. I learned that her hometown only got electricity about 25 years ago, and there IS NO INTERNET!!! Cell phones don't work. If I were to communicate with her, it would be via POTS, at some exorbitant cost.
Now, pull your head outta your butt, and support Pirate Bay, and the Pirate Parties. They provide a crucial service to huge segments of the world's population.
Oh - I'll note here, that I've not personally pirated anything in a long time. Today, I don't need WinNT, anything that Adobe makes, or even Sun/Oracle. With OSS, it's free anyway. I still get most of my stuff via torrent though!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Unlike Anonymous Coward, I can openly say I use Pirate Bay exclusively to get the software and media I want, when I want it. I haven't purchased a DVD, CD, or many games in years. I have hundreds of gigabytes of downloaded data. Piratebay is good because its convenient, that's all.
"Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future."
So... You can also make a magnet link to a torrent of the entire Pirate Bay, and IM this link to a place where The Pirate Bay is blocked?
Because Copyright is an out of control monster that needs to be opposed.
Adderall!
No, he would have spent three hours searching his house until he found his old DVD (at least that's what I would have done and I took it to be what GP meant) if the pirate bay option had not been there. There would never have been any more money going to the game company or anyone else, only a net productivity loss (three wasted hours) to the benefit of absolutely no-one.
But while downloading, you uploaded parts of it to people, who may have payed, if they would not have downloaded the parts from you.
(just playing devils advocate)
you cannot host a copy of tpb on tpb. Because it would not contain the copy of tpb then.
AC is dead on.
While TPB may be used for 'pirated' copies, it is also extremely useful for retrieval of data rightfully paid for.
Many times I have had to download a copy of a show that normally I would have been legally entitled to watch. OnDemand tv is great, but the networks seem to think we only need to have the last 3 episodes available. This is poor practice of the networks, as I may not have heard of a good show till it is in mid-season, and they don't allow me to catch up on the whole series. example: Walking Dead, Revenge, American Horror Story, any CBS show.
So, to catch shows that I missed, I need to download it. It is not available via 'official' channels. I catch up to the series from the start, and they now have a viewer they would not have had.
I've also had a hard drive crash full of music, and a day later the backup drive crashed. (environment heat issue). Because of the availability of .torrents, I was able to replace all of my music that I had paid for. Perhaps in the old days with CDs and Vinyl, I would have had to purchase new copies thereby giving profit to the industry. However, what kind of business model is it to rely on profits from replacement purchases due to accidental destruction?
We need sites like TPB.
You could even make the database into a torrent itself, though you'd have to go to some effort to make incremental updates easy to propagate without too much wasted bandwidth. Maybe a core file updated every few months, with regular incremental updates in separate torrents?
(Yo dawg, I heard you like torrents...)
These "single use licenses" are one of the reasons people pirate.
TPB can fit on a flash drive right now, when they shut the tracker down a few years ago it was around 20GB compressed, I figure it can't be more than 40GB right now, and there are 64GB flash drives on the market, although they are expensive.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Can someone explain how a .magnet bypasses .torrent blocking? I don't see how changing the file suffix could do that.
But in practice, I'm finding it takes 50-90 seconds to download a .magnet vs. 2-3 seconds for a .torrent, so it must be a HORRIBLY inefficient protocol in the way it uses bandwidth, 'cause the end result is the same checksum and peer search data as a .torrent.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If the Powers That Be would provide those, I wouldn't need to download a copy from the Pirate Bay.
There's a cracking group called The Powers That Be, and you can find torrents for their files on The Pirate Bay :-P
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I agree with him and I do sysadmin and software & web development. Feel free to deprive me of all the royalties I receive from people using my products.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I think this is a total lack of respect for people who's still using CRT monitors. Magnet link will distort the whole story. Only people with money to afford LCD screen will get the truth. Information wants to be free!
And then you forgot you'd given the CDs to a friend, or you'd sold them on eBay..
With piracy, you can have your cake AND eat it!
If your situation was so damn common, there would be a way of redownloading and reclaiming your codes. But there isn't, because you're using one dubiously-justifiable edge case to justify everyone else being able to abuse the system.
Absolutely, I own a blu-ray player, and can't count the number of times
that i've downloaded a copy of a movie i own, that i can't watch because
the tv is tied up and my pc has no blu-ray player.
How about they offer a download for that ( updated daily or hourly )? Perhaps break it down by category so the files are manageable. This could be distributed in any number of ways to get around blockages that are starting to occur.
( Not that i actually use TPB so it doesn't effect me directly, its too full of garbage and viruses, and i don't use commercial software/content, but i do support why they are doing )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Because you know the other you are uploading to did not just lose their disc too so your contributing to their piracy.
If you have to ask why piracy is good, then you wouldn't understand the answer.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Actually, you could, as long as the Pirate Bay download is a link to the data or rules to recreate it and not just a binary blob that contains all of TPB including itself. For example, quines can contain the information necessary to reconstruct themselves.
Can someone explain how a .magnet bypasses .torrent blocking? I don't see how changing the file suffix could do that.
But in practice, I'm finding it takes 50-90 seconds to download a .magnet vs. 2-3 seconds for a .torrent, so it must be a HORRIBLY inefficient protocol in the way it uses bandwidth, 'cause the end result is the same checksum and peer search data as a .torrent.
Try Wikipedia.
There are lots of other explanations of the protocol out there, but ... really? You're too lazy to query Google on your own?
Magnet URIs take longer to "download" because they're a hash check on the target file's content, not just a text file, like a .torrent file. The advantage of .magnet links over .torrent links is that .magnet links don't require trackers, so even if the MAFIAA manages to get every tracker on the planet shut down, .magnet links will still work.
The disadvantage of using .magnet URIs is that you wind up with your download directory cluttered up with pointless and annoying subdirectories filled with ads for wanker "warez" groups and "samples" about which you couldn't possibly care less (I'm looking at YOU, TVTeam), or - again, pointless - RAR files (I'm looking at YOU, scenebalance) that are totally unnecessary with .magnet links, because the hash check eliminates any possibility of file corruption in your download (n.b. - If the original file is corrupt when it is uploaded, all the hash checks and RAR archiving in the world won't fix it. Or, in other acronyms, GIGO).
Check out my novel.
Yes, in theory that is an option. But unless you get the legal system to play along with a rubber stamp IP equals person and three strikes you're out then that's not going to get very far. And there's many countries that won't accept that kind of spray-and-pray lawsuits. The second part is damages, unlike the US that likes to award millions of dollars in awards you can for example see that the TPB leaders were convicted to pay about 1.5 million USD eavch - same as one Thomas Rasset for sharing 24 songs. Neither of those is AFAIK final though, but they're not going to get a statutory $750-150000/song in the rest of the world. In short, it just won't scale because it won't even cover the cost and raising the fines to a level where it would is publicly unacceptable.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Though it's nice that you downloaded Linux using bit torrent, you can't "pirate" it that way. You'd have to distribute modified binaries refusing to provide the source.
And even then I'd rather call it copyright infringement, actual piracy is done just off the coast of Somalia.
You could have registered your key with Origin and re-downloaded it from EA.
That's what personalized IPv6 addresses are for!!
Look, Obama's going to say something *this year* like, "IPv4 is over, we need IPv6 now but there's no killer app. I want to take over the Commerce Department [he just said this], and I want to create an Internet ID for every U.S. citizen and require that for buying and selling [he just said that, too]."
The next step is to create an IPv6 registry and assign every person their own little subnet of, say, 1024 addresses. Then it will be mandated into law that people must only use their IPv6 address (no proxies, etc.) when making online purchases. Or perhaps it will just tie into the algorithms that way: IPv6 doesn't match name, no sale. Later, more legislation can extend this to all online activities and even logging into local computer accounts (they may call it "Verified Computing").
The IPv6 could, for bonus points, include a checksum of the person's DNA, thus allowing for easy IDing later, as the police state encloses further.
Scary scifi or prescient horror? We're going to find out, and soon!
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
Well if you only lost the CD's but still have the key's you can download a copy from blizzard.
Om, nomnomnom...
Well put. Except for the moment I got jarred out of your essay by you claiming to torrent (created 2001) your first windows NT (replaced by win2k in 2000). I realize it's *POSSIBLE*, but that has to mean either you were grabbing lame warez or know how to retrieve files from the future or that mentioning other means than torrents would harsh up your whole piracy-n-torrents cadence thingy. The orthogonality of those options is what broke my train of thought... oh, look, a kitten hugging a bunny! Cheers!
You are writing in the future tense but this is already happening... I use http://malaysiabay.org/ because it is nearer to me and therefore quicker...
If they take that down I am sure that a copy will be up within hours... As usual the only people that will really benefit from all this are the lawyers.
Why would you use http on a torrent site? That's silly. If you use https, get magnet links, and disallow unencrypted downloads in your bittorrent client, you have full privacy. malaysiabay.org, contrary to thepiratebay, doesn't seem to provide ssl, so I wouldn't use it.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Will I have to go to Pirate Bay to get a copy of Pirate Bay for my thumb drive
Yo dawg, I heard you like Pirate Bay, so I put Pirate Bay on Pirate Bay, so you download while you download.
OK then. The reason is a combination of two points:
1) You have no clear entitlement to another copy of CDs. This is important to mention, because some people believe they do. They believe that if they bought something, this gives them a right (morally, if not legally) to use it in perpetuity, transcending any physical representation of the object. What is less clear is exactly why this is. It doesn't appear to be derived from any analogy in traditional physical property, as there is no such right in physical property. If you lose your physical property, you have no right to another instance of that property. You cannot demand it from the manufacturer, the retailer, or the government. It therefore must be a right unique to non-physical property.
So then, the question still remains, from where does this entitlement come? Is it just an arbitrary rule? Perhaps it's derived from the fact that copying is possible. However, the possibility of an action certainly does not imply that you have the right to that action (since there are plenty of immoral actions that are possible).
Perhaps it's not so much the possibility of obtaining another copy as it is that you could have taken better care of the disks, or backed them up, while completely avoided the business of piracy. That certainly seems like one of the most plausible of the possibilities, however this doesn't seem to be completely justified. We couldn't, for example, apply the same logic to the lottery without defeating its purpose. Every time someone plays the lottery, the numbers are essentially arbitrary, and had they taken the winning numbers, they would be a lot better off. Does this mean that they are entitled to a share of the winnings, even if they lost? No. The system relies on people failing in order for it to succeed. There needs to be some kind of evidence here that people are entitled to reap the rewards of potential actions they could have taken, that they failed to actually take.
So, to conclude part 1), I hope you at least see why taking an extra copy is at most morally neutral. There's nothing wrong with taking something you'rey not entitled to, so long as it doesn't hurt other people. If you find a broken computer in a ditch, you are perfectly welcome to take it, even though you had no specific right to it, simply because taking it does not harm anyone else. However, if you take a computer out of someone's place, you still have no right to it, but you are also harming the owner, so the theft is actually morally wrong.
2) You are harming the producers. The copy you co-opted for yourself reduces your demand for the game, drastically reducing the possibility that you'd buy it (again). All the usual piracy arguments apply here: they need the revenue to keep creating games and we have a moral obligation to fulfil our promises to them as outlined in copyright law. Now, I realise you've already paid for the game, but you paid for that single copy of the game, which is no longer available to you, and you have no entitlement to another. This puts you an even standing with anyone who has never owned the game. If you want another copy, the law says you must buy it. Since you are not entitled to it, and taking it would harm others, it is morally wrong to take it.
Oh wait, was that question supposed to be rhetorical?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Last I checked, magnet links arent files to be downloaded, but a link similar to a URL.
Exampe:
magnet:?xt=urn:sha1:YNCKHTQCWBTRNJIV4WNAE52SJUQCZO5C
If it is slower, it is because your torrent client has to locate a known peer with information about the magnet-link, and then get the torrent information from it. Unless your computer is insanely slow in handing off the data from your browser to the link-handler.
yea don't you love it when there to lazy to even unrar the files from newsbin to see if it even works naa skip that 30 second make the torrent file.
The difference is that with some software, producers are making the claim that the sale is a non-transferable license to use the software in an attempt to eliminate the secondary market. They want to eat their cake and have it too, by forcing people to pay for both use (licensing), and also for ownership (physical media). However, there's often no concession offered for such a restriction. That is why people feel entitled to re-download copies of software to which they own CD keys, but have since lost the media. If it's morally gray, it's because the whole situation is tit-for-tat.
In this example, someone else pointed out that Blizzard actually appears to do the right thing: they honor your purchase of the license by letting you re-download with a known CD key.
The concept of theft requires that you deprive someone of a limited resource. In what way is someone downloading from a third party a copy of a dvd that they already have the legal right to use depriving the makers of that game of anything?
His actions cost the game company nothing, they lost nothing, nor incurred any additional costs (such as replacing a physical item, or using their bandwidth for the download). Instead, they gained a continuation of the relationship that began with the original purchase of the game.
Because with physical property, the value is IN the property. If you lose it, there is a real and significant cost to replace it. With non-physical property, the physical part is just a way to convey the valuable part to you. The physical media is not particularly valuable in and of itself.
In some countries it is not advisable to participate in p2p networks because of the legal risks involved with uploading. Using filehosts (rapidshare and friends) seems safer for the time being. Is there a chance that magnet URIs will work with filehosts?
If I bought a shed and then lost the keys in a fishing accident, would it be wrong of me to get a locksmith to come and drill the lock out and replace it with another functioning one? Or would I have to buy a new shed because I lost the locking mechanism. I cannot believe and will not agree that losing a license key means I lose access to the product I bought. I will use a keygen or a crack in order to use my product if I do not have the "key".
Diablo 2 is probably a bad example, because of all things, Blizzard has a pretty enlightened view on the Diablo 2 license keys if you have registered it.
I bought my copy of Diablo probably 10 years ago, and registered it to my battle.net account, and I long since lost my CD's. Since then I have had the hankering to play it a few times, and instead of having to pirate it, and wonder if I'm downloading the root kit of the week, I just go to my battle.net account and re-download the installer.
-matt
So if you can use Bittorrent, you can use DHT.
Not entirely true - Bittorrent does not require a network that can transmit UDP, but DHT does (in its commonly-used implementations - I can't think of any reason that it couldn't use TCP, but it doesn't).
So, if you're on a TCP-only network (they do exist), then you can use Bittorrent with a torrent file and a TCP tracker, but not a magnet link.
It's the same thing with drug dealers but that doesn't stop the police from trying. There are a lot of novice users out there. I have friends that stopped downloading things once Kazaa stopped having a lot of stuff. Sure a search and an hour learning about torrents could have made it possible for them to start downloading again but once it wasn't dirt simple, or even just "use the thing I always use" they just gave up and started hoping things would show up on You Tube and the like (not in the US so no hulu and netflix sucks here).
A more scary thing would be if they start making search engines filter out sites that are and sites that link to p2p networks. I guess kind of the same battle as taking the sites down but a simple check when crawling the site if it has links to magnet or .torrent files would do a huge amount of the work. Sure it would kill some legitimate uses but when has that stopped Big Brother?
Mah just move to a country that doesn't enforce copyrights from downloaded stuff, problem solved :-) Kind of weird I can't get sued for copyright infringment but the government still allows ISPs to throttle connections based on protocol so: free but slow. Still 3Mbps with no worries of cops knocking on the door is nice. 3Mbps is fast enough to get new content faster than I can watch it anyways.
Why would then content of torrent change if you downloaded via magnet link or .torrent -file?
- Raynet --> .
yeah, there will be some configuration, which is a fixpoint. but its hard to find.
SOPA is already useless.... all it's good for now is for political/business use - shutting down web sites you don't like, eg. competitors.
No sig today...
Mah just move to a country that doesn't enforce copyrights from downloaded stuff, problem solved.
The problem are not the downloads (which are legal -- right to own a private copy), the problem are the uploads that are illegal -- a difficult issue with Bittorrent.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
RAR files are still useful for distributing content that is too large for FAT fileaystems. i.e. HD content or VM images with files larger than 4GB. I agree that there is no need for the common 64MB size files.
I'm finding it takes 50-90 seconds to download a .magnet vs. 2-3 seconds for a .torrent,
Um, magnet isn't a "download".
Educate yourself before proceeding.
No sig today...
In this case it is "use the thing they always use".
A more scary thing would be if they start making search engines filter out sites that are and sites that link to p2p networks.
The point of this is that it makes those sites obsolete (almost).
You no longer need .torrent files, only a list of what's available. The list is much smaller than the files and can be easily passed around peer-to-peer. Just get yourself subscribed on a trusted list and the pirate bay will be stored in your own PC.
No sig today...
Before we had internet, we were trading tapes and disks in schoolyards and in closed meetings. These were distributed over the entire country again.
If they push hard enough, it will go back to those days. The net effect on piracy will be near zero.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
There are many times i may only want a specific file (or files) from a Torrent, and that's easy enough to do with a .torrent file, but with Magnets, at least in uTorrent, that isn't an option. I have to download all the content...
Am i missing something, or is this something we'll lose out on with Magnet files?
No. You can have magnet links with trackers, and .torrent files that use DHT. They're completely orthogonal.
Dilbert RSS feed
You don't need to be entitled to receive what others are voluntarily sharing with you (that's how P2P works).
The question is why some people feel entitled to prevent others from doing what they want with their legally bought property.
Dilbert RSS feed
I think (stats?) that there is a heck of a lot more piracy now because it is so convenient. Before you had to buy your buddy a VHS tape or whatever and have him make a copy for you. That required both a willingness to spend some money and knowing someone with what you want. Now I download a few GBs of stuff a day that I might want but if I don't I delete it. It costs me next to nothing and I don't have to know anyone personally that likes the same things I do. So going back to pre-internet days at least for me would mean near 0 piracy versus several rips a day with the internet.
"But in practice, I'm finding it takes 50-90 seconds to download a .magnet vs. 2-3 seconds for a .torrent, so it must be a HORRIBLY inefficient protocol in the way it uses bandwidth, 'cause the end result is the same checksum and peer search data as a .torrent."
Downloading a .torrent file gives you all of the info needed to start the swarm in one file transfer.
Downloading a magnet link uses Distributed Hash Table (DHT), which is a distributed mechanism that does a huge amount of work in order to spread information across a huge swarm of peers in a resilient way, with tons of redundancy and checking, such that there's no dependency on any one server. That means that, for example, if the Tracker is shut down, the system keeps working. Resiliency is great, but the cost is that instead of a single action to retrieve the torrent file, you put out queries to your peers, who ask their peers, and so on, performing thousands or even millions of queries between peers in order to retrieve the torrent file. Aside from being slower, it's also less reliable, in that there's a limit to how many times the query message gets repeated (so that each query doesn't spawn off an infinite number of queries) you might be downloading something obscure that your peers, their peers, etc., don't know about.
"Can someone explain how a .magnet bypasses .torrent blocking? I don't see how changing the file suffix could do that."
Magnet links aren't links to files ending in .magnet, they're URLs with a different protocol label (magnet: instead of http:) which are passed to a BitTorrent client to handle. If the blocking is looking for an HTTP request of a filename ending in .torrent, it won't see one.
Of course, if a firewall is blocking the BitTorrent protocol, then it'll be blocked whether the transfer is started by a .torrent file or a magnet link.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
"1) Smaller bandwidth footprint due to the size. Each small file adds up. Making the files smaller helps a lot. If the Pirate Bay has to resort to another ISP with lower quality bandwidth."
Note that while the magnet link is smaller than the torrent file, saving TPB bandwidth, it uses DHT's to locate and retrieve the torrent file, which uses thousands to millions of times more bandwidth than the torrent file. Admittedly it's peer bandwidth, which TPB doesn't have to pay for, but it shouldn't be ignored completely.
"2) If the entirety of Pirate Bay can be hosted on a thumb drive then it is hard to simply nuke the Pirate Bay. Just give a few trusted people thumb drive copies as backups."
TPB (or any other tracker) isn't really a web site that can be 'hosted on a thumb drive', it's a dynamic database of torrents, which is searchable, etc. Any copy on a USB drive would immediately be out of date. Better to use database replication, so there could be multiple mirrors of the database in different places, each running a copy of TPB.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Wow, such entitlement.
Sensible from a consumer's perspective, and it's certainly what many people do (so their boxed sets stay "good as new"), but at least in the US I wouldn't say that it's legal. The media companies' position is that owning a copy of a work in one form doesn't give you the legal right to freely download the work. You can buy some disks that put all formats into one box/purchase - I've bought many Blu Ray disks that included DVD and digital copies. Those cost a bit more, because the media companies have to pay the artists and composers once for each of the formats. That is, if you buy a Blu Ray/DVD/Digital version of a movie, the director, actors, composers, musicians, etc., get paid three times, once for the Blu Ray copy, once for the DVD copy, and once for the digital copy. And, of course, there's the additional production and manufacturing cost of making the additional disks/downloads.
Outside the US the situation may be different.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Come in handy for what?
Being able to download files that are hard to get elsewhere.
Piracy?
Are you saying everything linked on PirateBay is "pirated"? Is everything you write bullshit?
If gets even better: Copying isn't theft, and it isn't piracy. It's what we did for millennia until the invention of copyright, and we can do it again, if we don't hobble ourselves with the antiquated remnants of a censorship system from the sixteenth century.
Uhh.. dude.. You're not buying the software as in *owning* it. You buy a license for use, which is usually perpetual. Big difference there. So yes, I want my intangible bits and bytes back please. The CD they first came on is totally irrelevant here.
Do you have any idea how stupid that sounds? That you think it makes sense to have to chop up the latest HD content into 4GB chunks because of a 30 year old file system.
I think it's time to retire your DOS PC.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
Fuck FAT! Hmm.. never thought I'd reverse those two words and it would actually mean something not related to lipids. Interesting..
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
Uh.. yeah.. you really need to get out of there. I wish you the best of luck! Oh, and DRM bad indeed.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
here is the truth for ya, 3Mbps is a transmission of 3 million symbols or pulses. symbol based protocols while complex can increase bandwidth drastically(although pulse transmission require almost no overhead as any computer or person can tap a button/generate a pulse rapidly).
i remember when dialup seemed slow, despite that i got a full 115000 symbols per second under a compressed protocol.
3 million symbols if 16x16 pixel 8 color imagecodes should at_full_load theoretically transmit a file of 6.144e+09 every second. last i checked cellphones could detect 32x32 with 12 orientation pixels, albeit in black and white. so really the question is, what made dialup seem so slow at 300 baud that is still 281 ascii words per minute or 3.5 80 wpm typists.
this is the god honest truth as well as i know it
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
You'd be surprised how many industries rely on obsolescence, planned or otherwise. Here is a good documentary about it, if not a bit biased: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bxzU1HFC7Q
why.. if you had registered your serial with blizzard, you could have downloaded the installer for FREE on their website.
Pipe wrenches are useful for banging in nails - if you don't have a hammer.
If all you need to do is split files into smaller chunks, use one of the 23 million programs that do that, do it properly, and do nothing but that, so help them God.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Win2k, WinXP, Vista, and Win7 are all Windows NT. And, I may have erred - I think that I actually did download my first NT OS using a download manager. Sorry if I offered any false facts that were actually pertinent to my point. ;^)
As for grabbing "lame warez" - how do you think those hordes of "pirates" were getting their stuff in 199x? There weren't a lot of choices, unless you went out into the streets to buy your copy from another pirate, who actually had downloaded the same "lame warez".
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
You get modded funny, but this is actually the truth. While the "VHS->DVD->Blu-Ray" upgrade treadmill is often cited, it's also pretty clear that if you destroy a CD in a bad player, your receipt is pretty worthless in begging for a replacement at the local Best Buy.
Some vendors recognize this flaw and have workarounds. Blizzard, Microsoft and even Disney have 'replacement programs' where you can get a replacement for free (Blizzard) or minor cost (Disney/MS).
I use uTorrent with a web-based UI. It allows me to access the Utorrent UI as if I was using the RDP connection.
After you enable it in the uTorrent UI on your machine, go to http://your.server.IP.address/gui and type in the username and password you provided when you enabled Web-UI. .torrent file links and magnet URLs)
Right Click to copy the link location URL from your torrent search page.
Click on the File icon in the Utorrent Web-UI (New Torrent)
Right click on the "Torrent URL" field and click Paste. (Yes, even does
Click OK.
After a few seconds, you should see the new torrent show up. It's a ton easier than having to RDP in to check your server.
Am i missing something, or is this something we'll lose out on with Magnet files?
You're missing the fact that a magnet link is nothing more than an indirect way to download the .torrent file. Think of it just like a URL shortener...you click on the link, and magic happens that eventually gets you to the page you want.
A magnet link for .torrent file is the same thing, just that instead of asking a single server where the .torrent file lives, the magnet link causes a query to the Distributed Hash Table (DHT)) database, and your torrent client finds the .torrent file from the DHT query results.
I agree with him and I do sysadmin and software & web development. Feel free to deprive me of all the royalties I receive from people using my products.
Really? You think that's an equal comparison? I have no words, other than you're being intellectually dishonest.
but this is actually the truth.
At least in their minds, anyway...
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
It's not theft if you already have a license. Hell, I'm not convinced it's even copyright infringement.
HOWEVER: Diablo II is a pretty shit example to use - enter your CD-key into battle.net and Blizzard will let you download Diablo II and all the patches for free. No buying twice or pirating involved.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Only if we can also deprive you of your salary. That's what you're advocating doing to the real independents (as opposed to the corporate producers).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
1) You have no clear entitlement to another copy of CDs.
Over here you do have such an legal entitlement, and why would anyone restrict such a thing? Sharing among friends is not something you can restrict, it's impossible, any attempt to make such restrictions will only lead to very bad things. I share all software and music in my possession to everyone that ask for it, and I even offer it freely. It would be very bad manner not sharing, not only the producers but also to my friends.
But hey GPL gives you a different perspective.
I got my first Windows NT via torrent.
You must be pretty young. Windows NT was relevant some 6 years before BitTorrent existed, let alone was a popular way to obtain pirated software.
correction 3Mbps is 3,000,000 bits of data per second, not a baud rate like smartphone scanning which is a symbol rate. so for instance a 4-bit symbol code will give a 2400 baud rate to transmit 9600 bps. also qr codes are larger than 32x32 i didn't look it up it's slightly more than 2900 8-bit bytes per frame. the rest of the comment is valid math though.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Exactly: outside of insanity, the situation is different.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
So then, the question still remains, from where does this entitlement come?
That's the wrong question. The right question is: "Is there any reason why I shouldn't do this?". If actions are immoral by default, and you need to prove entitlement, then why do you feel entitled to pour milk on your cereal in the morning?
You are harming the producers. The copy you co-opted for yourself reduces your demand for the game, drastically reducing the possibility that you'd buy it (again).
By this definition of harm, you are harming the producers too, by not buying a copy of the game. Or their other games. Or other producers' games.
we have a moral obligation to fulfil our promises to them as outlined in copyright law.
Now, here we come to the source of your argument, which relies on an unspoken assumption: that the current incarnation of copyright law is the morally correct one. And the only basis for that is, as the GP says, "because the government said so".
Rep Lamar Smith, is that you?
Bonch, you're kind of an idiot when it comes to everything.
Fixed.
And I, too, agree that copyrights should just die. I'm a scientist, and I am appalled at the science that is being swallowed up by the for-pay journals, at the journals that require me to renounce any copyrights to my own work. And I hate it that even very old scientific papers are still behind fucking paywalls.
Copyright has to end. It has to go away.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I don't think you fully understood my point, particularly entitlement and its role in my system of morals. As I carefully explained in my "conclusion of 1)" paragraph, a lack of entitlement does not necessarily imply that the action is immoral, rather it's morally neutral: fine to do unless it hurts someone. Hence the meat of my argument: no entitlement + harm to others = morally wrong.
In the case of cereal and milk, remember that I own both the cereal and the milk, and I am entitled to use them however way I want, so long as, naturally, it doesn't harm others (e.g. both the cereal and milk over the heads of people walking in the street). Pouring the milk over the cereal harms no one in general, and so I am entitled to do it if I so choose.
I agree. However, in this case, you have more entitlement to do whatever you wish with your money than the producers have to your money. That is, until you decide to use their works, in which case they have entitlement to what they charge you. In that case, similar harm occurs, but this time there is no entitlement.
This is really not the basis for my argument. It does not remotely rely on this assumption. It is not a reformation of "because the government said so". Pretending otherwise does not demolish my argument.
The basis of my argument, FYI, is my entitlement-harm system of morals. There are many varied ways to obtain entitlement, and many varied ways to generate harm. For example, our society has promised producers a limited monopoly over copying their work. A promise like this means we have no entitlement to copy. The fact that they used this assumption to carve themselves a livelihood. By breaking this promise, we can damage or even destroy their livelihood, so the harm here is perfectly evident. Again, no entitlement + harm = wrong.
Notice that there is no mention of where this promise comes from. There's no justification of whether copyright should be here or not, and there's no accounting for the opinion of the government du jour. Once the promise is made, we either keep our end, or we deliver fair warning that we want to change the terms, so that no producer that has created works for copyright is robbed of his entitlement to do so.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Thank you for the explanation. A couple of minutes delay was never an issue in the first place, as most downloads take hours anyhow, but I was thoroughly baffled as to why the .magnet links were so damned slow. Good info.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Actually, in Canada there is precedent for the idea that you own the content in perpetuity.
Back in high school, the age of vinyl records, my friend's older brother REGULARLY sent in damaged LPs to the record company for replacement. They always shipped him a new one to replace the damaged copy, no charge. He didn't even have to send them "mailing and handling fees", just the damaged record and a cover letter providing his return address.
Because of that, a precedent was set that, at least in Canada, you DO have the right to the content even if your first copy of the media is damaged or unavailable for some other reason. I think it's perfectly reasonable to extract format shifting as an extension of that precedent.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Maybe that helps clarify why I get SO pissed off when the US tries to shove it's copyright laws down other nation's throats. We have our OWN legal system in Canada, and DRASTICALLY different precedents have been set than those in the US.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Ok Ktorrent, get with it, support magnet links or I'm going back to (shudder) Vuze.
Ever hear of "rhetorical" or "leading" questions? I could get the answer easily, but then no one else would know the answer BUT me.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
And what would be the point of downloading a file that expands to be too big for your example of an ancient and creaky FAT file system user? They STILL wouldn't be able to access the media.
I HATE .rar downloads, though they're easy enough to deal with. It's a hammer of a solution in desperate search for a nail to justify it's continued existence.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
They probably come from people who upload content they downloaded from Usenet but are too lazy to unrar them first.
I stand corrected. Never seen a TCP-only network. If I ever did, I'd be running away, screaming
What?
And I, too, agree that copyrights should just die. I'm a scientist, and I am appalled at the science that is being swallowed up by the for-pay journals, at the journals that require me to renounce any copyrights to my own work. And I hate it that even very old scientific papers are still behind fucking paywalls.
Copyright has to end. It has to go away.
I am a scientist who is all too infuriated by copyright. I release all my modelling code under GPL licenses, and publicly release collected data. I also reserve copyright to all articles which I make freely available on my site and others. Copyright can slightly increase revenue for the producer/artist, but this increase is not greater than the cost of establishing, enforcing and protecting that copyright. I do not believe in charging curious minds in order to line the pockets of accountants, lawyers and possible future trolls.
Lewis CK showed us all how a living can be earned without copyright. The majority of the my research, and in turn my salary, is supported by government grants or industry sponsorship or both depending on who the work will directly benefit. I do not need to charge future implementers, innovators or consumers to support my work and will do everything in my power to prevent them from being charged.
So Internet should be called Hydra.
Blizzard lets you download the legit copies for all its games if youve registered the key.....
you put out queries to your peers, who ask their peers, and so on, performing thousands or even millions of queries between peers in order to retrieve the torrent file
It's not that bad. The Bittorrent DHT guarantees a maximum of log n queries to find any file, where n is the number of nodes in the DHT. If you assume one billion nodes, then it'll still take no more than 40 queries. Of course those queries may be going anywhere in the world, so some of them may be high latency. Also when you start a node up from scratch there's an additional delay, because your node must first join the DHT, which takes up to log n queries plus some time to transfer the data your node is supposed to provide from its "neighbors" (who may be anywhere in the world).
DHT is one of those ideas that seems like it should be workable, barely, in the lab... but turns out to work shockingly well in real life. Kinda like the Internet, actually.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Yep, i'm familiar with this so far - what i'm wondering is how, when i begin a torrent in uTorrent, do i get it to retrieve the data (list of files in the torrent) before i begin any further downloading?
TIA for any advice. =)
"Resiliency is great, but the cost is that instead of a single action to retrieve the torrent file, you put out queries to your peers, who ask their peers, and so on, performing thousands or even millions of queries between peers in order to retrieve the torrent file."
This idea (magnet links instead of .torrent files) might backfire.
ISPs are already overloaded/oversold and have been bitching about P2P since inception. When all the added bandwidth of all these millions of handshakes starts to add up, the ISPs might finally have enough evidence to convince our Congress Clowns that it is, indeed, time to draw the curtain on P2P and thepiratebay.org in a manner far more damaging to the Internet then SOPA/PIPA combined.
As many have stated already, once magnet links are the norm, there is no way to shut them down, that is except for shutting down the Internet, or severely neutering it. Imagine what would have happened if Bradley Manning had simply uploaded all those diplomatic cables in the form of a torrent--the US government would have been taking an entirely different stance towards P2P. Such a leak would be unstoppable if everyone was using magnet links. So what does everyone think would happen if such a scenario presents itself--the government knows a huge leak is being disseminated and the only way to stop it is to shut down the Internet--what course would our current government take in a situation like that?
I don't disagree at all, I have major issues with how copyright is being extended to stupid levels and I especially dislike, when I was doing academic work, the way that you need to pay for a lot of scientific research - but I just don't agree that the method of fighting it is to deliberately break the law in this case. It is not a cause that deserves that kind of response, unlike more serious issues like corruption and the kinds of violent protests in the past used to help secure women's rights and such. If you don't agree with copyright, don't buy copyrighted material *and stick to free material.* I've said before in an older post, you have a right to live and to have liberty but you don't have a right to be entertained for free. Entertainment is so easy to make for oneself that it is ridiculous that anyone should feel the need to pirate to accomplish this.
I think your very true example of the science paywall is a hairier topic however. I'm not saying all science is good but for-pay journals shouldn't need to exist - they should be free for all. It's still tough to justify that deliberately breaking law is appropriate for the science realm considering the hit-and-miss nature of the field but at least there it has a non-trivial impact.
Weren't there rants on GNAAAAAAA as well?
voluntarily sharing with you
Some want to download ONLY and not share. The only reason they share is because they are forced to. Try setting your client to 0 bytes upload (whilst downloading) to stop sharing and therefore becoming legal. You just can't do it because the software won't let you. Why is this significant? Because the software itself is forcing users into 'criminal activity'. There are thousands+ out there who want the product (like FTA shows) but do not want to be liable or risk liability.
Also the physical loss of purchased digital media is not the same as blowing up the lawnmower and having to buy another one. That's because of the nature of digital media. You can't replicate your lawnmower, but it is possible to replicate digital content so all of a sudden, the rules change. Those rules include 'leasing' or the right to use the software. Just because you pay for it doesn't give you full rights over it. If you want full rights, then buy the rights for it.
That's the way it is.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Exactly. What a lot of historians don't understand is that Gutenberg (and others) stole the rights and charged for the copies.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Some want to download ONLY and not share. The only reason they share is because they are forced to. Try setting your client to 0 bytes upload (whilst downloading) to stop sharing and therefore becoming legal. You just can't do it because the software won't let you. Why is this significant? Because the software itself is forcing users into 'criminal activity'. There are thousands+ out there who want the product (like FTA shows) but do not want to be liable or risk liability.
First, I don't see how that relates to my post. Second, there are torrent clients that don't upload as well as other methods like RS/MU/etc and newsgroups.
Also the physical loss of purchased digital media is not the same as blowing up the lawnmower and having to buy another one. That's because of the nature of digital media. You can't replicate your lawnmower, but it is possible to replicate digital content so all of a sudden, the rules change. Those rules include 'leasing' or the right to use the software. Just because you pay for it doesn't give you full rights over it. If you want full rights, then buy the rights for it.
That the way it is.
But is != ought. Just because it happens to be that way right now according to the legal code of many countries doesn't mean it should.
Dilbert RSS feed
"If you use https ... you have full privacy"
I wouldn't assume that. But they wouldn't want to admit they can read your https encrypted traffic in court. So yeah, it would work.
Why would then content of torrent change if you downloaded via magnet link or .torrent -file?
It doesn't. The thing about .magnet links (which CAN contain trackers - and frequently do - but don't HAVE to) is that they contan the hash of the actual torrent file contents, whereas .torrent files (which CAN contain DHT information - and now frequently do - but don't HAVE to) simply list the filenames in the torrent and the trackers for that torrent.
So, it's not the contents of the TORRENT that change, depending on whether you join it via a .magnet link or a .torrent file, but the information ABOUT the torrent that differs in the two LINKS. The torrent itself doesn't care how you join it - and its contents remain the same.
The thing about the .magnet link containing the file hash is that you get all the CRC information you need to ensure that the file(s) you download will be digitally intact - which is what prompted my comment about scenebalance and his superfluous RAR files. RAR files contain file integrity information - but that doesn't guarantee that the RAR files themselves can't wind up becoming corrupted during your download. The difference is that, with the file hash info at hand, your Bittorrent client KNOWS whether the data it's downloading is intact - and can discard and re-download any data that gets corrupted during your download. Without it, you download the whole torrent, un-RAR the contents, and only THEN does your RAR application tell you that the contents are corrupted.
So, to sum up, fuck scenebalance and his stupid RAR files.
Check out my novel.
Apparently you've never seen tor - it is a TCP-only network. It works just fine for bittorrent, assuming that you use a client that doesn't leak info or doesn't have any info to leak. Its creators would prefer that you not use it in this way.
I thought that even .torrent -files have hash checksum for each blocks the torrent actually consists of and eg. Azureus always checks the integrity of all files after download for me. The reason RAR is used is because it support multipart volumes better than ZIP so that is what the scene uses with their FTP servers and IRC. It is silly to put those in the torrents (well, sample -dir can be handy to check for the quality so you can cancel the download if it looks too bad) but I think MAGNET links don't give any better file checksumming quality than .torrents do.
- Raynet --> .
You also have to not use a tracker -- or use only small, well-secured private trackers. Otherwise they'll just get your IP from the tracker list.
You also have to not be downloading something popular. Otherwise they can simply scrape a site like TPB for magnet links (or .torrent files), use tracker + DHT + PEX like anyone else, and crawl most of the active peers. Encrypted connections do not magically ward off the people you would like to be anonymous from. The attacks you're concerned about -- someone sniffing your traffic -- are much more difficult to perform than simple IP discovery by following the BitTorrent protocol as if you were a downloader.
The reason encrypted connections exist in BitTorrent clients is not for security or anonymity, but to obfuscate the protocol from ISPs, who often use protocol detection for P2P throttling.
Anybody have a good recommendation for using magnet links from the CLI? I tend to have a headless, GUI-less Linux machine handle large downloads for me.
/* No Comment */
When I open a .torrent file with uTorrent, it lets me select the files in the torrent that I want to load (sometimes I may be interested in just a small subset).
I can't seem to get this functionality with magnet links.
You have no real entitlement to monopoly control of bit patterns you create. This is important to mention, because some people believe they do, and the law says they do, but that doesn't make it so. It's just one religious opinion.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
What DHT needs at this point is some sort of RSS feed-ish system.
There needs to be a way to make a magnet link to content that doesn't exist yet, or that can change later. Then the pirate bay could exist purely as a DHT-entity...your client torrents it in. (And the backend is hidden somewhere trusted.)
I can't imagine how this could possibly work, though, considering how DHT works. You'd have to has something besides the changing part, and then you've got hypothetical fakes out there.
Where that first part is the pgp fingerprint, and the last part is filled in by your torrent client, so it would look for signed by them 'named' filelist-2011011614? So they just make a new one with a new name every hour. (How this name is specified, I do not know.)
Does that make sense? I know it sorta screws up the idea of 'hashes', as that is not, in fact, any sort of hash, and idiots could produce two identical torrents with the same 'hash'. But assuming the Pirate Bay isn't so stupid as to do that, I don't see why it couldn't work, assuming that people had torrent clients that understood pgp signatures.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Certainly, but you aren't entitled to it. There is no injustice if it happens to be not available to you.
Well, the copies the OP downloaded was not his legally bought property, but I think you mean more generally about the government preventing copying of works. The entitlement comes from the general entitlement of people in a democratic society to prevent the harmful behaviour of other people. This principle trumps the freedom to use your legally bought property in any way you like. For example, if you buy a gun, this does not give you license to shoot someone with it. If you buy eggs, that does not give you license to pelt them at cars. There's plenty of precedent for prevent people from using their property in certain ways. In fact, you can't really prevent anything if using property the way you wish is an (to borrow a patently American term) inalienable right because property can be factored into any criminal activity.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
BitTorrent can use a random port. Then ISP blocking is possible only via:
Here are a few more https torrent sites I use:
https://eztv.it/
https://btjunkie.org/
https://torrentz.eu/
https://www.demonoid.me/
https://isohunt.com/
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Shed analogy. Good call.
But what if you have the keys, but lose the shed? What then?
Your argument is flawed since if purchased media (CDs, DVDs, etc etc) followed any of the regular rules surrounding other types of things that we might buy, then we would be well within our rights to make as many copies of the media as we like and hand them out for free to our friends.
But we can't do that, because software producers insist that they are not *selling* us the media, but rather granting us a licence to *use* the media. And hence we believe, quite fairly in my opinion, that we are entitled to another copy at a nominal fee if we lose our original. And of course plenty of companies do honour that view, including those who don't deal in media at all.
How is the behaviour harmful? The content creator's life is exactly the same before and after the sharing occurs.
Dilbert RSS feed
Not really. Perhaps immediately afterwards no, but then again, in the split second before my gun going off, and the realisation that the bullet is speeding towards my victim's face, the victim's life appears exactly the same. In the longer term, the financial value of their work has been sapped. Every person who has the probability of their buying the work even slightly diminished by their decision to pirate instead has harmed the artist at least by the opportunity cost, i.e. the difference in probability multiplied to the price of the item.
It's easy enough to see this effect when measured in large quantities. Suppose there is some band who are so talented and popular, they have the potential to surpass the Beatles. Now suppose everyone has access to high speed internet, and everyone, except the very first customer, had opportunity to gain a copy for free. Further, suppose that the act of downloading instead of paying does not harm the artist. Then, everyone naturally would choose to download the same product, while keeping their own extra capital. There would be no imperative to give charitable donations to the artist, because this act of downloading does them no extra harm over buying the music.
However, when we take a look at the bigger picture, suddenly we see this immensely popular and talented band, of which many hundreds of millions of copies had been copied, and of whose music many hundreds of millions of people had enjoyed, are left with $20 instead of millions of dollars, for thousands of dollars outlay. Already, the cumulative choice of all their fans to take the "harmless" route of copying has resulted in them in debt for thousands and millions (in fact, billions, given the numbers) less than they could have been had the fans chosen to buy instead. One choice ends with a far more negative scenario, while the other choice ends with a far, far more positive scenario. Therefore, the cumulative choice of the former is harmful, in that it makes the person's life worse than it could have been.
Now, from experience, people have some trouble with this definition of harm, so I'll push the point a little further (even if it isn't necessary). At this point, people tend to object to the uncertain projection into the future to define harm. I think that it's well enough defined to be functional. Let's say I launched, 3 seconds ago, a bunch of ICBMs at the US, aimed at the commercial centres of several of the largest cities. So far there have been no casualties, no panic (as I have alerted no-one), no money spent trying to rectify the crisis, nothing. However, I think a reasonable person would have no trouble inferring here that I have already caused harm to the US, simply because there is no other action or time which causally links me to the immanent deaths. Sure, there is the point where the bombs go off, but I didn't explicitly make them go off there, rather I programmed them and launched them so they would go off there. It was my initial action that caused the harm to happen. As another quick (and disturbingly similar) example, we say the person harms another with a gun when the trigger is pulled, not when the brains splatter on the whitewash. Either way, projection into the future is often necessary to satisfactorily define harm, which is why I have no objection to it.
In any case, we have at least established that the cumulative choices of fans can harm the people they idolise. I see no objection to distributing a portion of the responsibility of that harm to each of them, thus proving that piracy at least can be harmful. Whether it is in practice or not is another matter, but given the uncertainty on this issue, I would tend to award the artists their legally guaranteed right to decide for themselves, and honour their decision (while persuading them to change their minds).
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
In the longer term, the financial value of their work has been sapped. Every person who has the probability of their buying the work even slightly diminished by their decision to pirate instead has harmed the artist at least by the opportunity cost, i.e. the difference in probability multiplied to the price of the item.
Replace "pirate" with "second hand sale" or "lend".
We have now determined that lending is hamful (what are we teaching to children?!) and should be made illegal.
Or we can agree that "potential harm" is not the same as actual harm.
However, when we take a look at the bigger picture, suddenly we see this immensely popular and talented band, of which many hundreds of millions of copies had been copied, and of whose music many hundreds of millions of people had enjoyed, are left with $20 instead of millions of dollars, for thousands of dollars outlay. Already, the cumulative choice of all their fans to take the "harmless" route of copying has resulted in them in debt for thousands and millions (in fact, billions, given the numbers) less than they could have been had the fans chosen to buy instead. One choice ends with a far more negative scenario, while the other choice ends with a far, far more positive scenario. Therefore, the cumulative choice of the former is harmful, in that it makes the person's life worse than it could have been.
Now suppose that instead of pirating, they decided to use those $20 to buy icecream. That band you were talking about is now in the same situation (debt and all).
Therefore we can conclude that buying icecream with money on could use to buy CDs is harmful and we must illegalize icecream sellers.
Now, from experience, people have some trouble with this definition of harm, so I'll push the point a little further (even if it isn't necessary). At this point, people tend to object to the uncertain projection into the future to define harm. I think that it's well enough defined to be functional. Let's say I launched, 3 seconds ago, a bunch of ICBMs at the US, aimed at the commercial centres of several of the largest cities. So far there have been no casualties, no panic (as I have alerted no-one), no money spent trying to rectify the crisis, nothing. However, I think a reasonable person would have no trouble inferring here that I have already caused harm to the US, simply because there is no other action or time which causally links me to the immanent deaths. Sure, there is the point where the bombs go off, but I didn't explicitly make them go off there, rather I programmed them and launched them so they would go off there. It was my initial action that caused the harm to happen. As another quick (and disturbingly similar) example, we say the person harms another with a gun when the trigger is pulled, not when the brains splatter on the whitewash. Either way, projection into the future is often necessary to satisfactorily define harm, which is why I have no objection to it.
Yes, but it's still not sufficient. Your analogies are flawed, because the harm is caused by the actual action, and not by the "potential absense of an action" that can be caused by the one being discussed.
In any case, we have at least established that the cumulative choices of fans can harm the people they idolise. I see no objection to distributing a portion of the responsibility of that harm to each of them, thus proving that piracy at least can be harmful. Whether it is in practice or not is another matter, but given the uncertainty on this issue, I would tend to award the artists their legally guaranteed right to decide for themselves, and honour their decision (while persuading them to change their minds).
My point is that piracy can not harm any more than other legally and socially accepted actions can, like buying used, borrowing or even abstaining from obtaining the work.
Therefore, either all are to be criminalized, or none of them.
Dilbert RSS feed
No, think back to my original argument, before we went off on this tangent about harm. Harm is only sufficient to make an action immoral if there is no entitlement behind it. With lending and second sale, we are entitled to these actions (to varying degrees given the laws and customs of the society you live in), so much so that it outweighs the harm. If we made only truly harmless actions morally good, you basically get Santa from Futurama. That aside, lending and second sale does indeed harm artists, as does simply choosing not to buy from them. It's an unfortunate, but unavoidable truth.
Also, I'd like to see a definition of "potential harm" that encompasses shooting guns and launching ICBMs, but not purposefully devaluing someone's assets without their knowledge, let alone permission.
Well, there is a definite act of copying. Copying causes people to demand what they copied less, which results in the artist being starved of money. I'm not seeing any kind of clear distinction here.
That aside, it is a very shallow and narrow-minded definition of causality when you exclude inaction. For example, can I morally be excused for running over a blind kid (with a puppy) because I cannot be held responsible for my decision not to brake? Or could my favourite restaurant be excused for deciding not to clean their crockery? Perhaps my failure to stop my finger moving was responsible for the aforementioned brains on the aforementioned whitewash? You can see, with such a vague distinction, the definition can easily be co-opted to justify many clearly immoral acts.
What is important here is the fact that you make a decision, be it to take an action, take a different action, or shrug and walk away. The fact is that we are not inert objects moving through space, and we do not simply stay predictable until an external force is applied to us. We have the ability to make decisions, and regardless of what those decisions are (be it to act or not to act), we are responsible for the decisions we make. At this point, I truly hope we agree on this point at least, because anything else would make me despair for the human race.
It's a fine point, but clearly not one that I share. Like I said, I require more than simply the causing of harm in order to justify making something illegal. There's also the point that piracy is, in one sense, the most harmful, since it is the one that people are most likely to choose over buying. Don't get me wrong, if second sale was as harmful as piracy, I would judge the harm of second sale to outweigh the entitlement of people to have the right to it. But, as it turns out, in order to have a successful second sale market, there needs to be plenty of first sales, and plenty of people want a first hand copy more than a second hand copy, so there is more justice in having it legal than illegal. For this reason, I am fine with banning piracy but not second sale.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
um... I don't think that's quite how movie revenues work...
AFAICT, actors get paid an agreed fee on completion - they pay their SAG fees from that, they pay their travel and accommodation from that. They pay for *everything* from that. Production crews are salaried. Regardless of how much the movie takes at the Box Office.
Once the cost of the movie is offset, any remaining profits from disc/merchandising goes directly to the label. Actors and production crews get no further royalty (unless like Lucas you play it smart and retain merchandising rights unto perpetuity).
So while the customer is getting fucked up the ass three times for something he legally doesn't own(!) in three different formats, the label is creaming it and paying MPAA a flat fee to do all their legal bullying of six year old Sophie for downloading a copy of some forgotten Disney trash.
Nice people, eh?
In the case of music, what iTunes does for the benefit of the artist (who has to pay out his own pocket for pressing and distribution) is remove the requirement of physical discs. That's not a profit for the artists, it's money he doesn't have to spend (and probably would have to get a loan for, even if your band is called Metallica). HOWEVER, he still has to pay for advertising and airplay, and part with a large portion of the 6c per album he earns after distribution, licensing and the rest, to the MPAA/BPI for "legal" protection against... poor little Sophie. Oh, yes, she deprived Lady Gaga of an entire 6c by downloading an album instead of going to HMV.
Where does the rest of the twelve bucks for a CD go? Straight to the label. Pure unadulterated profit. No wonder they get pissy when technology threatens to take a huge dump on their rug.
So music artists are slaves, basically, actors are guns-for-hire, production crews get regular work as long as the Writers' Guild doesn't stage another walkout, and the labels just *rake it in* while repeatedly sodomising Joe Sixpack-Can't-Wait-For-The-Next-Die-Hard.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
If I'm not mistaken, EMule has accepted Magnet links for years. So did EDonkey 2000. So have various Gnutella clients.
Those very same Manget URIs on Pirate Bay will work with any of those existing file sharing clients.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
No, magnet links (not ".magnet") eliminates the need to host a .torrent file, they don't eliminate the need for a tracker. Other technologies may do that, but magnet links only replaces the .torrent download with a P2P discovery and download mechanism that downloads the same .torrent file from the P2P network instead of (for example) TPB's web server. Once you have the .torrent file, downloaded using a magnet link, things work just like before, including using the trackers listed in the .torrent.
Many ISPs are already doing packet inspection triggering traffic shaping. This is creepy, IMO, because it penalizes people based on the network protocol used by an app, which seems weird. For example, if you use a P2P network that uses HTTP for everything you're better off than if it uses a P2P protocol, which IMO encourages bad behavior (i.e. if all apps use HTTP for everything, it's hard to manage traffic when you want to).
Speed throttling, on the other hand, seems fair. That is, if you're paying for X data rate, you get it, no matter what protocol your software happens to use.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
You're right - I was thinking of the eMule search 'fan' problem, which is much worse than DHTs as optimized by Kademlia (cool stuff). Still, turning one query into O(40) queries, which have to be done sequentially, is still a pretty big performance hit, and you're still not guaranteed 100% coverage (in the real world), so if you can have a reliable central tracker it's much better than DHTs. Though if you can't have a central tracker for non-technical reasons, a DHT is better than nothing. :-)
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
The technology is already there to release info in ways that can't be stopped. They're going after Bradley Manning in order to deter future leaks from making it out to the network. Of course, the WikiLeaks info was also vetted and published by newspapers and magazines, but you don't see the government going after them. :-)
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Hey, I'm a great fan of Louis CD, too!
(Great) minds think alike, huh? Yes, his latest direct-to-fans initiative paid handsomely for him, and he said he enjoyed being in charge of his own art (not quoting exactly).
Is there any chance we could get in touch? Your ideas about scientific publishing of your own works intrigue me and I think I could learn a few things.
This is my throw-away account: howdilydoo (at) gmail [dot] com
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
No, think back to my original argument, before we went off on this tangent about harm. Harm is only sufficient to make an action immoral if there is no entitlement behind it. With lending and second sale, we are entitled to these actions (to varying degrees given the laws and customs of the society you live in), so much so that it outweighs the harm. If we made only truly harmless actions morally good, you basically get Santa from Futurama. That aside, lending and second sale does indeed harm artists, as does simply choosing not to buy from them. It's an unfortunate, but unavoidable truth.
But wait. As far as I know, most people don't consider entitlements to be a moral excuse. So what you're saying is that we're all terrible people because we don't buy every work we can possible afford.
I think that's absurd. One must remember those who decided to go into debt with their money and time was the band, not us, and nobody promised them anything.
We're not morally responsible than you are because I gave away my house expecting you to buy me a new one.
Well, there is a definite act of copying. Copying causes people to demand what they copied less, which results in the artist being starved of money.
Does it really?
It can lead to that. But, again, we're not responsible for the artists' need for sales - he chose that path, not us. We can't be held accountable for other people's poor decisions. Was bailing out the banks a morally imperative too?
That aside, it is a very shallow and narrow-minded definition of causality when you exclude inaction. For example, can I morally be excused for running over a blind kid (with a puppy) because I cannot be held responsible for my decision not to brake? Or could my favourite restaurant be excused for deciding not to clean their crockery? Perhaps my failure to stop my finger moving was responsible for the aforementioned brains on the aforementioned whitewash? You can see, with such a vague distinction, the definition can easily be co-opted to justify many clearly immoral acts.
Read it again. It's not the absense of action (file sharing isn't absense). It's the potential for such absense that results from my action.
You still haven't found a real analogy.
It's a fine point, but clearly not one that I share. Like I said, I require more than simply the causing of harm in order to justify making something illegal. There's also the point that piracy is, in one sense, the most harmful, since it is the one that people are most likely to choose over buying. Don't get me wrong, if second sale was as harmful as piracy, I would judge the harm of second sale to outweigh the entitlement of people to have the right to it. But, as it turns out, in order to have a successful second sale market, there needs to be plenty of first sales, and plenty of people want a first hand copy more than a second hand copy, so there is more justice in having it legal than illegal. For this reason, I am fine with banning piracy but not second sale.
I shall dedicate my life to produce CDs and sending them to you. I hope you see the harm you're causing me by not sending me $1000 for each.
Dilbert RSS feed
That, or I'm not saying what most people say (or at least I'm not using the same terminology). Actually, I think you find, if you actually explain what entitlements actually mean, most people would agree. Otherwise, like I said, you get Santa from Futurama: almost any action is immoral. There must be some mechanism that people use to distinguish between harmful moral actions and harmful immoral actions. Every action we do has some kind of detrimental consequences for someone else, but for most things, they are considered things that we have some kind of a right to do. Hence the role of entitlement.
We promised them implicitly with our laws. We may not have drafted them ourselves, but while we live under them (and reap their benefits), we are responsible for them.
Well, it's not exactly clear in general. I was more referring to a specific action occurring that could cause harm, or at least could cause harm, in order to debunk your absurd inaction theory of morality. But if you want a specific answer for this study, I read it as evidence that:
a) Piracy doesn't currently kill all demand
b) More significantly, music fans are almost all pirates
There needs to be a fair bit more to establish that piracy is not harmful. I also consider it fairly possible for piracy to become ever increasingly harmful as it becomes more of the social norm, and as people realise that it's not socially expected to repay people for their work. So, in short, it doesn't completely convince me that it's harmless.
He chose that path on the good faith that you would abide by what we promised him, and that wouldn't copy his work without his permission. You subsequently made the decision to disregard his good faith expectations, and in breaking this promise, you are completely responsible for all consequences that occur. As yet another example, your employer promises (but not personally, but it's not like that's any excuse to weasel out of it) to abide by the law and deliver your pay cheque as agreed when you started working for them. If they decide not to pay you, they are responsible for negative consequences. The courts would completely agree if you decided to sue; you could charge them for damages for any misfortune that beset you after they stopped paying you.
I read it the first time, but I read it again. Exactly what is wrong with the potential for absence? I have already argued fairly comprehensively both that potential factors into harm, and that an absence of action does not excuse you morally from the consequences of your decision. Do you have something particularly against their combination that is not present in their parts?
Actually, I haven't been arguing by analogy. I've been avoiding analogies deliberately, for this very reason. The aptness of analogies are almost completely subjective. All it takes is a stubborn debater to simply continue to point increasingly trivial differences between life and the analogy, and the analogy simply becomes more pro
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
So all we need to do is eliminate the laws that make promises we have no intention to deliver.
I can live with that.
Dilbert RSS feed
Are you a fucking lawyer or something?
Kill yourself
If honourably discontinuing your responsibilities in the deal is the aim, then this would be the morally correct way to do it: live according to the law until it changes, and dispose of the law when everyone is properly forewarned. This is about where the discussion on morality ends. Whether people actually want life without this law is another matter, for another discussion, on another day. Right now, I'm happy to leave it at this.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Sure, but we're not buying within the "regular rules". We're buying goods that are copyrighted, and copyright works by changing the "regular rules" for a specific class of cases. Whether you agree or not, this is simply the way things are. We cannot reasonably derive our morality from assuming the world is the way we want it to be, in lieu of the way it actually is. And given that copyright is the way things are, we have no entitlement to copy copyrighted works.
It depends on the license. It's perfectly possible to have a license that affords no replacement condition.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.