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."

Comments

For what

[bonch]

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.

Come in handy for what? Piracy?

Why is that good?

Re:For what

[luther349]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you think?
Mirrors!

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[Gideon Wells]

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.

Re:For what

[TerranFury]

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...

Re:For what

[luther349]

acully they have ended that being they started losing cases. why they are bribe heavy on passing laws that can never be enforced.

Re:For what

[kiwimate]

So like Bonch said:

Come in handy for what? Piracy?

Why is that good?

Yes, for piracy.

Why is that good?

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[Zemran]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[luther349]

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.

Re:For what

[luther349]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[Ethanol-fueled]

So like Bonch said:

Filthy suckpuppet, I will compile and identify you all. Fuck off, shill.

Re:For what

[Ethanol-fueled]

You said:

I don't support piracy at all,

Fuck off, limpwrist. Mommy has a teet for you to suckle.

Re:For what

[Zemran]

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

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[grahamsaa]

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.

Re:For what

[danbeck]

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

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

So because you're an idiot that can't keep track of anything you stoop to theft. Got it.

Re:For what

[TubeSteak]

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.

Re:For what

[metrix007]

Bonch, you're kind of an idiot when it comes to piracy. Stop letting your emotions cloud things and actually think things through for a moment.

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.

Re:For what

[TubeSteak]

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

Re:For what

[metrix007]

Bonch, you're kind of an idiot when it comes to piracy. Stop letting your emotions cloud things and actually think things through for a moment.

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?

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst part of this:

if you registered your cd key with your battle.net account, you can download it for free from blizzard.

Re:For what

[epyT-R]

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).

Re:For what

[Fjandr]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[Demonoid-Penguin]

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?

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[Tastecicles]

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!

Re:For what

[dbet]

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.

Re:For what

[kdemetter]

When you get that copy, let me know. I'll help seed it.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[cheekyjohnson]

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!

Re:For what

[houghi]

Copyright infringement has been around since we started carving into clay tablets.

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.

Re:For what

[vinehair]

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?

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

Bonch is an idiot. End of story. Just ignore him and you'll be happier.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[Runaway1956]

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!

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not theft : you already payed for it. No one is losing money.

No, he paid for one single use license and was a moron that lost access to said single use license and stole a new one and is using weak logic to justify his theft of the new license.

Re:For what

[drsmithy]

Why is that good?

Because Copyright is an out of control monster that needs to be opposed.

Re:For what

[swalve]

Adderall!

Re:For what

[mhelander]

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.

Re:For what

[allo]

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)

Re:For what

[allo]

you cannot host a copy of tpb on tpb. Because it would not contain the copy of tpb then.

Re:For what

[SageBrian]

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.

Re:For what

[Lunaritian]

These "single use licenses" are one of the reasons people pirate.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this not marked Funny?

Re:For what

[GameboyRMH]

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.

Re:For what

[msobkow]

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.

Re:For what

[GameboyRMH]

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

Re:For what

[GameboyRMH]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[Flipstylee]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you know the other you are uploading to did not just lose their disc too so your contributing to their piracy.

Re:For what

[nurb432]

If you have to ask why piracy is good, then you wouldn't understand the answer.

Re:For what

[Novus]

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.

Re:For what

[thomst]

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).

Re:For what

[Kjella]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

Your housemate too is a bit of a cunt? Same with mine. She's the emotionally damaged type who'll be dying alone in a house full of cats, ornaments and food. She's heavily overweight, which really doesn't help with the avoiding dying alone thing, and of course this weight is attributed to a thyroid problem. Whether it's true or not, I don't know and I don't care. I'll soon be moving out, leaving her with her mountain of food and her irreparably broken psyche. In the meantime she's wrapping her obvious failings in a blanket of condescension, mood swings and a general inability to realize how much of an unpleasant cunt she is. She'll be on the TV a lot of the time, although normally she's reading or doing something else while the TV sits there in the background, on a random channel with the volume turned-up to a level that'd make the deaf wonder what the fuck was that noise?

Anyway, on topic. Yes, torrents will always be popular when publishers fail to provide their customers with the convenience they seek. My movie collection is almost entirely legit (we're talking less than 1% of over 300 movies that are pirated). I find myself having to torrent when I buy a DVD that can't readily be ripped. I buy the shit, and then torrent if unable to rip the disc in to something that'll play on my TV. Can they be surprised when many people skip the first step? Just to be clear, my housemate is a cunt. I shall never again share a house, except perhaps if it's something I'm sleeping with, and I would rather fuck a piping hot minced beef pie than stick mine in her pudgy fortress of solitude.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

You could have registered your key with Origin and re-downloaded it from EA.

Re:For what

[Mashiki]

Well if you only lost the CD's but still have the key's you can download a copy from blizzard.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

You know she actually complained that I wasn't putting the things on the draining board away? I pointed out that everything on there at the time was something used by her (she cooks and eats far more than I and perhaps three other people would), and that I'm the only one who's been vacuum cleaning the place for the past six weeks. She sends SMS messages, such as when I left a pizza box on the table upstairs. I went to discuss this with her, and noted that this complaint about a frozen pizza box left overnight is coming from a rapacious collector of food and clutter, who when not cramming food in to her face hole, is looking for unoccupied parts of the apartment that can be filled with something. She cannot send SMS about such things without putting sarcastic and condescending comments in, so I asked her politely to just deal problems and to tell me when we next meet - saving SMS for truly serious or urgent issues, which fell apart as in her train wreck of a life, a frozen pizza box left on a kitchen table overnight is an injustice of Anne Frank proportions. I suppose overreacting to the little things helps keep her from dwelling on the unsatisfying train wreck that is her life. I need to get out of here. Oh, DRM bad.

Re:For what

[ediron2]

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!

Re:For what

[buchner.johannes]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

you tell me why that's morally wrong.

Hint: because the government said so isn't a real answer

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?

Re:For what

[GNious]

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.

Re:For what

[luther349]

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.

Re:For what

[smellotron]

You have no clear entitlement to another copy of CDs. This is important to mention, because some people believe they do... If you lose your physical property, you have no right to another instance of that property.

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.

Re:For what

[WalkingBear]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[Things_falling_apart]

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".

Re:For what

[Wow8agger]

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

Re:For what

[ILongForDarkness]

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?

Re:For what

[ILongForDarkness]

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.

Re:For what

[raynet]

Why would then content of torrent change if you downloaded via magnet link or .torrent -file?

Re:For what

[allo]

yeah, there will be some configuration, which is a fixpoint. but its hard to find.

Re:For what

[Joce640k]

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.

Re:For what

[buchner.johannes]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[Joce640k]

  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.

Re:For what

[Joce640k]

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.

Re:For what

[St.Creed]

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.

Re:For what

[icebraining]

No. You can have magnet links with trackers, and .torrent files that use DHT. They're completely orthogonal.

Re:For what

[icebraining]

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.

Re:For what

[ILongForDarkness]

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.

Re:For what

[laird]

"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.

Re:For what

[laird]

"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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, such entitlement.

Re:For what

[laird]

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.

Re:For what

[gerddie]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[S.O.B.]

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.

Re:For what

[Beetjebrak]

Fuck FAT! Hmm.. never thought I'd reverse those two words and it would actually mean something not related to lipids. Interesting..

Re:For what

[Beetjebrak]

Uh.. yeah.. you really need to get out of there. I wish you the best of luck! Oh, and DRM bad indeed.

Re:For what

[kesuki]

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

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

why.. if you had registered your serial with blizzard, you could have downloaded the installer for FREE on their website.

Re:For what

[Hognoxious]

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.

Re:For what

[Runaway1956]

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".

Re:For what

[Insightfill]

But if you would've paid them again, then they would've had more money. You stole their potential profit!

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).

Re:For what

[vinehair]

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.

Re:For what

[cheekyjohnson]

but this is actually the truth.

At least in their minds, anyway...

Re:For what

[Kalriath]

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.

Re:For what

[Kalriath]

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).

Re:For what

[emj]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:For what

[kesuki]

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.

Re:For what

[Thing 1]

Exactly: outside of insanity, the situation is different.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

Rep Lamar Smith, is that you?

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

Bonch, you're kind of an idiot when it comes to everything.

Fixed.

Re:For what

[blind biker]

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.

Re:For what

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

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?

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

Re:For what

[msobkow]

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.

Re:For what

[msobkow]

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.

Re:For what

[msobkow]

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.

Re:For what

[msobkow]

but ... really? You're too lazy to query Google on your own?

Ever hear of "rhetorical" or "leading" questions? I could get the answer easily, but then no one else would know the answer BUT me.

Re:For what

[msobkow]

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.

Re:For what

[toddestan]

They probably come from people who upload content they downloaded from Usenet but are too lazy to unrar them first.

Re:For what

[pgward]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

So Internet should be called Hydra.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

Blizzard lets you download the legit copies for all its games if youve registered the key.....

Re:For what

[swillden]

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.

Re:For what

[Anachragnome]

"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?

Re:For what

[vinehair]

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

Weren't there rants on GNAAAAAAA as well?

Re:For what

[Whiteox]

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.

Re:For what

[Whiteox]

Exactly. What a lot of historians don't understand is that Gutenberg (and others) stole the rights and charged for the copies.

Re:For what

[icebraining]

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.

Re:For what

[AverageWindowsUser]

"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.

Re:For what

[thomst]

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.

Re:For what

[raynet]

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.

Re:For what

[blueg3]

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.

Re:For what

[jdavidb]

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.

Re:For what

[DavidTC]

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.

...you know, DHT can be updated. Hash types can be added to it. What if PGP was added as a hash type, which returned files signed by that hash? And you could also specify a date and time? So pirate bay could be something like magnet:?xt=urn:pgp:FAC382FB055E031A340479EA9E767B67|filelist-%y%m%d%h

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.

Re:For what

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

You don't need to be entitled to receive what others are voluntarily sharing with you (that's how P2P works).

Certainly, but you aren't entitled to it. There is no injustice if it happens to be not available to you.

The question is why some people feel entitled to prevent others from doing what they want with their legally bought property.

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.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

BitTorrent can use a random port. Then ISP blocking is possible only via:

• CPU-costly deep-packet-inspection
• Connection count or Speed throttling which hurt other protocols too

Re:For what

[cffrost]

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/

Re:For what

[brantondaveperson]

Shed analogy. Good call.

But what if you have the keys, but lose the shed? What then?

Re:For what

[brantondaveperson]

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.

Re:For what

[icebraining]

How is the behaviour harmful? The content creator's life is exactly the same before and after the sharing occurs.

Re:For what

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

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).

Re:For what

[icebraining]

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.

Re:For what

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Re:For what

[Tastecicles]

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.

Re:For what

[linhux]

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.

Re:For what

[laird]

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.

Re:For what

[laird]

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. :-)

Re:For what

[laird]

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. :-)

Re:For what

[blind biker]

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

Re:For what

[icebraining]

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.

Re:For what

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

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.

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.

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 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.

Does it really?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

You still haven't found a real analogy.

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

Re:For what

[icebraining]

So all we need to do is eliminate the laws that make promises we have no intention to deliver.

I can live with that.

Re:For what

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a fucking lawyer or something?
Kill yourself

Re:For what

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

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.

Re:For what

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

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.

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.

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.

It depends on the license. It's perfectly possible to have a license that affords no replacement condition.

I don't like magnetic links

[Billly Gates]

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.

Re:I don't like magnetic links

[icebraining]

Yes. anything to avoid paying close attention to what we're doing.

Re:I don't like magnetic links

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. anything to avoid paying close attention to what we're doing.

In a totally platonic kind of (agape) way, I love you.

Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

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"?)

Re:Remote Usage?

[satoshi1]

Research how your client uses magnet links.

Re:Remote Usage?

[luther349]

most client support magnet links anyways.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/18134-Magnet-Links-to-.trottent?s=9148f653036ebe8033c11191a274a500&p=260817&viewfull=1#post260817

Re:Remote Usage?

[grantek]

If you can get a .torrent file onto a remote downloading host you can get a text file with the magnet link there.

Alternatively, you can use a client-server torrent client (like deluge), where the GUI appears on your workstation but the downloading happens on the remote system.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a start, but it's not much better of a solution than just copying the URL and connecting through remote desktop. My reservations for using the method you linked to would be privacy. That is, opening the magnet on my primary computer--which doesn't have the strict IP blocking settings of the remote downloading computer--would expose me to everyone in the swarm.

Looks like I'm just going to have to put up with the extra aggravation of remote connections for every magnet link. :-(

Thanks, though, for the alternative.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps, stop pirating stuff and realize that if you want something you either pay the asking price or do without? You know, be honest and show some principles?

but hey, who can complain about "free"?

Gee, I don't know - how about all the people you're stealing from? (Cue the hordes of arguments about "it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement". Semantic nonsense designed to avoid the real issue.)

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know my client supports magnet links. That's not the issue.

Here is how I currently handle torrents:

1) On my main computer, click link to download .torrent file.
2) For save location, select monitored folder on secondary computer, save the file there.
3) Torrent client on secondary computer spots new .torrent file, loads it.

The problem here is that a magnet link is just that--a link--and not a file. As such, I'm wondering if there's a way to pass the magnet link to another computer as I was previously doing with torrent files, but it wouldn't appear that it is possible. As I see it, I would now have to do something more like this:

1) Find the torrent download page, copy URL.
2) Open up remote desktop connection to secondary computer.
3) Open browser on secondary computer and paste URL.
4) Click on the magnet link and have it passed to the torrent client.

Even then, this isn't an ideal situation. Like many others, I have monthly bandwidth restrictions. Frequently, in order to stay well shy of this limit, if I see a torrent I want, but can't download it at the time, I would save the .torrent file into another directory where I could load it a short while later, without having to try to hunt down the specific torrent again.

I know, I'm just set in my ways and being picky, but I REALLY like the setup I have now. So far, I see no good alternative to this system.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is why discussions on copyright never amount to anything.

On one side, you have people who insist that their opponents are evil thieves and that what they are doing is objectively wrong.
On the other side, you have people who insist that the other side is composed of corporate shills and that they are objectively wrong.

And these two types of people seem to be the ones with the loudest voices.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if you're right in your assumptions, that doesn't change the fact that you're an assumptive asshole who should hold his tongue unless he has solid proof to the contrary.

I might feel more bad about such activities if not for the fact that those poor movie studios and whatnot are continuing to post record profits, and how they try to make way more money off prosecuting pirates than they'd ever legitimately make if piracy didn't exist.

It's a really sad state of affairs when they can make tens of thousands of times the cost of an album off you by prosecuting you for piracy than they can if you just walked into a store and outright shoplifted it--without even needing proper evidence that you actually supplied the files to that many people. Not to mention they try to double-dip by suing the uploader, suing all the downloaders, suing the site that hosted the files, suing ISPs, etc. The way they scam the system is just as bad (if not worse) than all the alleged piracy against these companies' IP.

Re:Remote Usage?

[thunderclap]

Perhaps, stop pirating stuff and realize that if you want something you either pay the asking price or do without? You know, be honest and show some principles?

hmm, what about the stuff you can't pay for? Like the fact that Hulu and YouTube have location restrictions. As does Ten in Australia and BBC in the UK. How do I if I am not in those countries do that. Why should the media companies decide when a program should be shown if it is ever shown outside its host country. If its paid for by the commercials broadcast in the host country then its paid for. Your typical narrow-minded brainwashing is the reason why SOPA is even being discussed in Congress.

Re:Remote Usage?

[icebraining]

1. Install rtorrent
2. Use bash script from here.
3. Copy .torrent files to watch folder

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been doing things almost the same way as you offloading downloads to another server that's monitoring a folder. Magnet links have always been a problem with this method though as you've found. Recently I decided to do something about it, and after about an hour's messing around this is what I came up with.

My desktop is a Mac, so I created an Applescript that registers itself as a magnet handler to the system. Safari recognises this automatically, so when I click a magnet link the applescript gets called and then passes the magnet hash on to a shell script. The shell script then runs a remote ssh command (password-less public key authentication) that hands the magnet URL on to Deluge running on my Linux download server.

All of this just happens in the background, so all I do is click the links, and within a second or two the downloads start on the server.

Since you mention remote desktop I guess you're using Windows, but if your client accepts magnet strings via either the command line, or via a web interface then it would be possible to do something similar.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use transmission-daemon, it allows you to just paste magnet links in. No issue. Beats copying files.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

how do I convert a magnet link to a torrent ?
https://forum.suprbay.org/showthread.php?tid=67371

It should be in app dir.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Runaway1956]

"would expose me to everyone in the swarm."

Careful now, you'll find yourself on the sex offender's list like that!

Re:Remote Usage?

[Runaway1956]

How does that thing work with used car salesmen? Asking price is 3600, I think it's worth 1200, but I might be willing to pay 1800 - so we BARTER!!! I drive the car home for 1750 plus tax, licensing, etc, total cost 1900.

I can't see paying full price for software that is used, either. It was written once, and it's been used a zillion times since it was written. Now, the author wants me to pay full price, like it is new or something?

No, I'll pay a used price, or nothing at all. If the author won't come down on his price, then I'll get it somewhere else - like The Pirate Bay. They have a lot of used softwares for ultra-cheap.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

But not every application supports that. Some "blackhole" the torrent file and leave it up to the client to pick it up there.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

"That is, opening the magnet on my primary computer--which doesn't have the strict IP blocking settings of the remote downloading computer--would expose me to everyone in the swarm."

Same thing here, I block my whole country, so any 'proof' would have to come from a foreign place, much harder to use in court.
I just use Teamviewer (free) and browse the torrent sites with the remote machine's browser, so I just click on the magnet links, that's it.
  I always have the remote desktop open in a window, so it doesn't even need an extra click.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy! First you just write a plugin to your browser such that you can save the contents of the links into XML files, then you save them to a folder on the network, then you just let your BizTalk server pick up the file, transform it into a format that is accepted by the web service that you create as an interface to the torrent client service on your secondary computer (you may have to modify the source code of your torrent client to make it run as a service) and: voila!

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any idea how much it would cost if you had to pay full price? Obviously not.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

If only MLDonkey would have more development resources, I would absolutely recommend it for this. But unfortunately, its BitTorrent support, while working, lags behind, and its Gnutella support is somewhere between buggy and dead. (even eDonkey/Kad support started to lag :( )

Otherwise the thing is great though and has served me well on my home server for over 8 Years GUI separated from server, HTTP client, Telnet client (useful for scripting), lots of options, protocol-independent, theoretically possible to download the same file from multiple networks, etc.

People: Y U NO LEARN OCAML??

Re:Remote Usage?

[GameboyRMH]

I have the exact same problem as the GP and changing torrent clients is a metric shitload of work, so while there are many ways to script a solution, one that involves changing clients is the least preferable.

Re:Remote Usage?

[GameboyRMH]

I'll have to see if Deluge has fixed the problem where it chokes on filenames with certain characters in it that stopped me from migrating to it last year.

Re:Remote Usage?

[GameboyRMH]

Nope just tested again, in a completed torrent containing a directory ending in "." it says that the folder and the files inside are at 0%, and says that another file in the same folder isn't complete when I've verified multiple times with another client that this torrent is 100% complete. This is in Deluge 1.3.3.

It's not in the bug tracker so I'll have to report it.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Rich0]

For whatever reason I can't get my deluge installation to support magnet URLs (the option is grayed out in the web interface). I assume DHT works fine over TCP? My biggest annoyance is the huge number of torrent files out there which don't list TCP trackers - I end up having to edit the tracker list extensively - usually just to substitute most if not all the list with trackers that are actually reachable. For various reasons I can't route UDP on the network I use for deluge...

Re:Remote Usage?

[kiwimate]

I can't see paying full price for software that is used, either. It was written once, and it's been used a zillion times since it was written. Now, the author wants me to pay full price, like it is new or something?

1. You're not paying full price, idiot. Do you have any idea how much it truly costs to develop software? Evidently not.
2. Love the bartering example. Try that at the hardware store, or the grocery store, or, well, almost anywhere. It only works in specific instances. You might just as well claim that the chainsaw you want has already been designed once and copied millions of times, so it's "fair" to only pay the cost of raw materials.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Kalriath]

Jesus fuck that's convoluted!

I'm just that more tempted to try it now...

Re:Remote Usage?

[Kalriath]

That's not bartering, that's haggling. Bartering is when you exchange non-monetary compensation for the product.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Kalriath]

If it's Windows, you could use something like Powershell Server (free for single concurrent connections) to execute your torrent client with a magnet link over SSH.

Re:Remote Usage?

[julesh]

Don't forget to put everything behind a ServiceLocator, just in case you need to switch implementations without recompiling. And any code you write should use dependency injection just to make sure it's totally configurable, and any specific algorithms you implement should be extracted to Strategy objects. Also: every class must have an associated interface that declares all its public methods, just because things are clearer if you do that.

Re:Remote Usage?

[cynyr]

too bad both of those will get me booted from my favorite tracker in seconds.... as they don't follow the protocol well, mis-report stats, and don't honor private torrents.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Code doesn't decay. The reason used cars sell for less than the same model new is that their usefulness has diminished. If they remained in perfect condition you would expect parity prices.

Of course improved technology reduces the worth of both software and cars, but a second-hand copy of Windows ME is as exactly as good as a brand new one.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a really sad state of affairs when they can make tens of thousands of times the cost of an album off you by prosecuting you for piracy than they can if you just walked into a store and outright shoplifted it

Well it's not sad, it's just technology - a more powerful tool gives you the greater ability to do things; communicate, produce and, in this case, break the law.

Re:Remote Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit! Idiots always parrot this around since the very first days, but not a single one of you idiots ever checked!
Can't do that... otherwise you'd have to admit you were wrong. Unpossible!
I actually run MLDonkey, and... why the hell would you even come up with such a stupid lie as mis-reporting stats? What would even be the point of that??
I have no problem connecting to trackers, and MLDonkey probably has the greatest stats module of all file sharing software ever.

Also, it's the *only* multi-protocol file sharing client for headless systems in existence, and one of two in *total*. (The other one is Shareaza, which happened to have some misbehaving in the past, but that is loong gone. Yet it too still gets uninformed retarded hatred from cowards like you.)

Please go die in a hole.

Re:Remote Usage?

[raju1kabir]

Love the bartering example. Try that at the hardware store, or the grocery store, or, well, almost anywhere. It only works in specific instances.

I always haggle (not "barter", that means to trade for goods/services instead of paying with money) at the hardware store, and many other people do too. Not if I'm buying a $1.39 pack of screws, but definitely if I'm buying a $100 drill. It works almost all the time.

am I missing something?

[Presto Vivace]

Is this a death knell for bit torrent?

Re:am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

Torrents are peer-to-peer. It seems to me that what they're saying is that torrent file hosting (The Pirate Bay, itself) may become a distributed service.

Re:am I missing something?

[Kenja]

Nope. But the Pirate Bay will see a sharp decline in use. I know I for one cant be bothered with magnet links. If I cant get the torrent as a string I'm not really interested in going through another layer of abstraction.

Re:am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

A hash is a string. What's the difference? You click a download link, your BT client launches and you download the file. Nothing changes other than the initial connection to get the information about the file from the magnet hash.

Re:am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see the problem either. If anything, magnet links are even quicker! I started using them a while ago when i noticed the option and remembered that uTorrent had a setting to associate itself with magnet links, so i clicked one, and suddenly i had to do several less steps ( save, go to save location, open torrent, add it to client ).

Very convenient.

Re:am I missing something?

[TubeSteak]

As copyright holders bring more pressure on Peer-To-Peer sites, they get progressively more decentralized.
Relying on hashes instead of torrent files is just the next step in bittorrent's evolution.
Instead of offering up files, The Pirate Bay will be offering up links, just like Google.
And except in certain countries, there's nothing illegal about making available links.

Ideally we'd all be using something completely decentralized like gnutella/gnutella2,
but the average user's desire/need for a curated and verified list of files seems to be stubborn.

Re:am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, torrents are going to be around for awhile, but they have already fallen far behind cyberlockers in terms of popularity as downloading (and therefore uploading) from a torrent is illegal in western countries like the US and UK while downloading from a cyberlocker is not.

Re:am I missing something?

[Tastecicles]

downloading from a torrent (or any other source) most certainly is not illegal in the UK. What is illegal is the unauthorised availing of copyrighted content (ie uploading), in any format.

What makes it worse in that respect is the fact that public authorities over here in around 2005 enacted ordinances preventing trade in secondhand goods (ie VHS, DVD) without:

1. proof of identity (including address) from transient sellers;
2. booked recorded transactions between transient sellers and shop buyers;
3. open-door access to police, authority agencies and Performing Rights Society, BPI, BSA and other private enforcement agencies to inspect all aspects of the dealers' trade with zero notice;
4. publicly displayed certificates of compliance with the ordinances;
5. Cash transactions only. No credit notes, barter or swapsies.

So if you want rid of your copy of Apocalypse Now Redux or Munch's Oddysey, now you have to give over your ID to the dealer and you can only deal in cash. So HMRC get their unearned piece of the pie as well. If you're dealing music the BPI want their cut in the form of a license, and if you have a radio playing in your shop loud enough to hear from the counter PRS wade in and extort £400/year out of you (though you can get away with this if all you play is KLF! Seriously! Been there, pissed all over BPI in court!).

Re:am I missing something?

[kdemetter]

No, it doesn't make any difference : TPB has been using magnets for about a year, and i have always used that.
Most clients just integrate with the magnet link , so you don't even have to store it anywhere seperately.

Not sure why they bother though : a torrent file is not much bigger than a magnet link ( infact they kind of due the same thing ).

Re:am I missing something?

[Pentium100]

The problem with magnet links is that uTorrent 1.8.5 downloads the .torrent file and then does not ask where to put the actual files, so it downloads to the default directory. OTOH, when importing a link to the .torrent file, uT asks where to put the files.

Anyway, this is no longer true with uT 2.2.1 (I uses those two versions, so probably some version between 1.8.5 and 2.2.1 fixed it). uT 2.2.1 asks where to put the actual files. It does not display the file size (not a big problem, but it helps when the free space on the HDD is within a few MB of the fie size) or file list though, so if I use the magnet link, I have to start the download and the go to the file tab and deselect the files I do not want.

With uT 2.2.1 it is almost the same if I use magnet link or a .torrent ink, in both cases I:
1. Right click on the link -> copy link location
2. Open remote control of a torrent server.
3. Transfer the link to its clipboard.
4. In uTorrent I click "Add torrent from URL"
5. The link is automatically pasted, I click OK.
6. Select where to put the files, choose the files I want, click OK.
7. Select the torrent, click start.

So, only step 6 is changed.

Re:am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't sound like a Police State at all.
1984 has time traveled to 2012.

Re:am I missing something?

[gnapster]

Orwell was going to call the book 2012, but he was writing it in 1948, and figured an anagram would be catchier.

Re:am I missing something?

[doccus]

Yeah it absolutely amazes me what a nazi mentality applies to media rights in the UK.. I first noticed something was wrong over here in N. America when all my albums had the skull and crossbones 'killing music' tape logo.. then i heard about 'TV Licences'.. i mean Wudafkizdat?.. i mean you have to get a licence to watch a TV or listen to a radio?.. apparently now you also need one to watch a clip in a browser too . Holy shit.And if you're a musician doing a gig.. every cover you do has to be listed IN ADVANCE and approved in order to pay the 'Royalty'? Man that's harsh.. what if you improvise? So it's no wonder to me that the country that has TV cameras on every city block, in every bathroom, and in every public mall, would have such restrictive Media rights.. I mean where were y'all when this was being implemented? Or is it like Canada, where you aren't able to change any proposed legislation even with dissent?

Re:am I missing something?

[Xest]

"So if you want rid of your copy of Apocalypse Now Redux or Munch's Oddysey, now you have to give over your ID to the dealer and you can only deal in cash."

What piece of legislation covers this? I've never heard of this.

I'm aware of the stuff about the PRS but this is a new one on me!

Re:am I missing something?

[Tastecicles]

This should explain it quite succinctly for you. That's the ordinance applicable to my local area. See, they've even got yard sales covered!

Re:am I missing something?

[Xest]

Ah so it's a local council issue rather than a central government issue then. Those are at least generally easier to solve as you need much fewer people to get the local press to embarass them into changing it.

Re:am I missing something?

[Tastecicles]

No, this is one of the tamer ones. I can't link you right now, but some public authorities have written in heavy fines and custodial penalties for violators!

Which begs the question...

[MrEricSir]

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.

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

It certainly RAISES the question, yes.

However, with no question asked in the summary, I don't see how you could accuse anyone of begging the question.

Re:Which begs the question...

[GreyWolf3000]

Have you ever even kissed a girl?

Re:Which begs the question...

[artor3]

Believe it or not, it is possible for a phrase to have multiple meanings. Begging the question, or circular reasoning, is one thing. Begging [for] the question is another. You, as a thinking human being, are capable of discerning which is meant from the context.

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Believe it or not, it is possible for a phrase to have multiple meanings. Begging the question, or circular reasoning, is one thing. Begging [for] the question is another. You, as a thinking human being, are capable of discerning which is meant from the context.

Just shut the fuck up you pathetic fat bastard. Yeah, I do know you're fat. You fat bastard. Why don't you as a human being think about not consuming so many fucking calories?

Re:Which begs the question...

[smi.james.th]

Why is it that someone who tries to encourage others to use idiomatic expressions correctly is so relentlessly flamed on this website? Slashdot readers are usually so civilised, after all...

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's ad hominable!

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot. And by that I mean a fine fellow. Please understand that it's possible for phrases to have more than one meaning, even when those meanings are nearly completely opposite. So please don't think I was calling you an idiot when I called you an idiot.

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that someone who tries to encourage others to use idiomatic expressions correctly is so relentlessly flamed on this website?

Because of the niggers. It's their fault.

Slashdot readers are usually so civilised, after all...

Yes, except for the niggers. Their gangsta culture won't tolerate much civility.

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever even kissed a girl?

I think so.

Re:Which begs the question...

[AmiMoJo]

My only objection is that it breaks my workflow. I run uTorrent in a dedicated low power server and load torrents by dropping .torrent files into a network folder. Now I have to copy the link, open up a remote desktop connection, log in and paste the link into uTorrent.

Hopefully a Firefox addon will be forthcoming.

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does your mom count?

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

no, she stopped counting because the number got too high

Re:Which begs the question...

[Arker]

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.

You mean they reinvented emule?

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut your glorified glory hole mouth up...fucktard

Re:Which begs the question...

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Not me. I use inability to read posts that contain bad spelling, grammar, or use of common phrases as a way to show just how smart I am!

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, it is possible for a phrase to have multiple meanings. In this context, "fat bastard" meant "my affable colleague".

I'm sure you, as a human being, were able to discern the meaning from context.

Re:Which begs the question...

[Tastecicles]

Some people assume WAAAAY too much!

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

The civilized users are long gone.

Re:Which begs the question...

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

It BEGETS the question.

sense 2 - Give rise to; bring about.

I'm on a mission. I will make sure everyone learns this.

See you on the nets!

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still not fully sure how this completely decentralized version works.
Does it brute force IPs until it gets a request or something? Then after that, they share their current network maps, then they communicate with the new nodes, get more of the map, and so on?
That is the only way I can think of it working at least. Given the number of IPs, and people potentially running a client, and the dynamism of IPs, sounds like a painful approach. Still the only thing I can think of though.
Well, actually, unless of course the tracker itself is defined as the person who was seeding the file when they created the magnet. That'd make more sense...

Either way, those 2 methods would work. The former one would only really be needed if the initial seeder vanished and you had no map of the network.
Will be painful when IPv6 finally comes to be the norm, in fact, this whole system itself will probably not work very well since everyone will be static again... at least that is a possible future, a huge set of IPs per person by default for an average amount of devices they would need to run or something.
Proxies and encrypted networks will really need to grow by then for it to really be secure and "private". And considering the last time I used Tor, Freenet and I2P... oo boy those speeds. It will take the numbers of entire torrenting networks to create such a system with useful speeds. Even a few kb will be useful by default since block sizes are pretty small in these systems.
Of course, this is just to get around stupid laws that say "all torrenting is baddddd mmkay".
I think that huge one in Japan still runs, right? Forgot the name of it, think it began with a P.

This also reminds me of that OFFS. Owner-free filesystem. Need to have a look and see how that is doing. The creator went on a hiatus last I checked because of problems in life. Hope it wasn't too bad. (there were a bunch of posts suggesting he was threatened in real life since such a system would make life impossibly harder for law enforcement to get anywhere, probably nonsense, but to be honest, it may as well be true considering how forceful the media industry is!)
Still seems to be at a standstill. Shame, it was such a promising system. Hope the guys alright.
While it is open source, I'm not seeing much on it. Some fork I can't find.

Wow this post went on such a tangent. Apologies.

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

uTorrent has its own webserver.

1. Enable it.
2. Open a new browser tab and navigate to the uTorrent web UI
3. Click 'add from URL' and paste the magnet link in there.
4. ???
5. Profit!

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

2 options.

1. Get a better client, and stop whining about the one you have.
2. Go whine to the developers of your favorite client to add this feature, instead of to us.

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could use rtorrent, which has a textual user interface; ssh -t screen -R is a lot cheaper than a remote desktop connection.

You could even use rtorrent's XMLRPC abilities to pass it the links.

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should get a better workflow.

(Use mldonkey).

Re:Which begs the question...

[b4dc0d3r]

Because people who as a whole believe in the evolution of something as complex as humans somehow don't get the concept of evolution of language. If we stop the natural evolution of language, we would as well spell things like Chaucer did.

Actually, English would still be German, with the rest of the language left in the various other parts it came from.

Or since that was derivative, let's go further back and have everyone speak Aramaic. After all, we don't have the original Indo-European to force everyone to speak, just a hypothetical prototype. No I changed my mind. If you can't express yourself using a drawing on a cave, it's not pure language and must be stopped.

Screw you people, I'm going to visit the slashdot cave, then to Boulder Caves in New Hampshire to see how politics is going. The rest of the afternoon will be on Mammoth Caves' Fark, drawing penises on everyone else's news stories.

Re:Which begs the question...

[smi.james.th]

You've got quite a big chip on your shoulder there.

Sure, evolution of language is fine, new words and idioms develop all the time and old ones fall out of use. Sure. I get it.

Using things wrongly though is irritating. Frankly, this whole "begs the question / evolution of language / caveman" argument is really just a poor excuse for a lack of proper education in English.

Take that how you will. If it insults you, frankly that's your problem. Go back to school.

Re:Which begs the question...

[laird]

It's still BitTorrent, but using the info encoded in an URL instead of a .torrent file. So yes, it's pretty much copying the eMule magnet link idea, but using the BitTorrent protocol. I bet eMule doesn't sue over it. :-)

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Language does change and evolve over time, whether pedants like it or not. Instead of clinging to the 'old ways', it might be wiser to adapt.
Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language

Re:Which begs the question...

[Lisias]

eMule? It`s you?

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Every new construct starts out as wrong though. Also, "proper" English gaves us the abortion that is the spelling of island.

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed you are correct, all things change in a dynamic environment.

However, repeatedly using a word contrary to its meaning and assuming everyone else is as poorly educated as yourself is a sad way to go through life.

Re:Which begs the question...

[Whiteox]

OED:
The original meaning of the phrase beg the question belongs to the field of logic and is a translation of Latin petitio principii, literally meaning ‘laying claim to a principle’, i.e. assuming something that ought to be proved first, as in the following sentence: by devoting such a large part of the budget for the fight against drug addiction to education, we are begging the question of its significance in the battle against drugs. To some traditionalists this is still the only correct meaning. However, over the last 100 years or so another, more general use has arisen: ‘invite an obvious question’, as in some definitions of mental illness beg the question of what constitutes normal behaviour. This is by far the commonest use today and is the usual one in modern standard English.

Re:Which begs the question...

[EdIII]

It's not "begs the question". I saw that and tried to warn you, but we can't change anything we posted here.

I made that *mistake* a few weeks ago too, and boy howdy, the Grammar Nazi's got their Blitzkrieg on that day...... You would think I resurrected Hitler, put him on an unstoppable robot body, and caused the mass extinction of all life on the planet.

You're not alone though. There are local support groups for the victims. For some reason they are particularly vicious regarding some mistakes, and "begs the question" just really pisses them off.

My suggestion is just get a beer and watch the carnage.

Re:Which begs the question...

[cynyr]

a small shell script and transmission-remote should sort that out for you.

Re:Which begs the question...

[webheaded]

uTorrent Status Tool

Honestly, like, I don't think you even looked. Lol. I've been using this for some time now because my media server is housing all files/downloads/etc. It is extremely handy and I just tested it with a magnet URL. In fact, to my dismay, the closest equivalent does not work for Chrome. :(

At any rate, I use that for uTorrent and I've got another extension for SABnzbd. It works quite well.

Re:Which begs the question...

[Grygus]

Irrelevant; getting something wrong isn't evolution, it's just incorrect.

Words have meanings. These meanings cannot be arbitrary, or they lose their purpose. Words can and do change over time, but after the change there still exist correct and incorrect uses of those words! Accept a correction, learn, and move on. Don't argue that you are re-inventing language with your ignorance. Expecting the world to standardize to your understanding instead of bothering to learn the standard everyone else is using is the height of arrogance, whether lazy people like it or not.

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote a little script, which did just that. copy to the remote watch folder. (i am using Rtorrent.) registered the script as default "open with..."
so when I retreive a torrent, the script does it's job.

maybe this can be adapted to urls as well?

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Which begs the question of why they don't simply get laid and chill the fuck out

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

How come you are not speaking the exact same language as Shakespeare did ? Fucking intellectuals...

Re:Which begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Words have meanings. These meanings cannot be arbitrary, or they lose their purpose.

You are truly narrow minded. Words have the meaning we give them, and of course they are completely arbitrary (ie. there's absolutely no reason why the word "dog" should be used for that cure animal). It's a convention, yes, but it's not a natural law that can't be broken. I had no problem understanding the meaning of the OP's post and I doubt anybody had any problem at all, so no meaning was lost there.

Who says languages evolve through intelligent decisions made by educated people? On contrary, language seems to evolve naturally everywhere. Otherwise we'd have far fewer, don't you think?

You, those educated pedants, should watch this documentary, to understand more about language.

Fucking intellectuals. A bit of education makes you think you know everything and everybody else should follow what you think it's right.

These work great with uTorrent Remote

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The ISP's will be asked to block interclient comm.

[mehrotra.akash]

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

Re:The ISP's will be asked to block interclient co

[TerranFury]

And doesn't widespread NAT hurt DHT a lot?

Gee...

[jamstar7]

Guess SOPA isn't gonna work so well now, is it?

Re:Gee...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, it will work as intended alright. It won't stop piracy, but that is not what it's for.

Re:Gee...

[luther349]

sopa is a dead bill at least it seems to be going in that direction they even have started drafting sopa 2 aka open to take its palce. they have eve amended the dns crap in a attempt to get support.its all bs being the next bill will probably be even worse. no half letting half a bill pass so they can get it on the next half do not let sopa pass at all.

Re:Gee...

[artor3]

Depends what the goal is. If the goal is to stop piracy, no, it won't work and never would have. If the goal is for politicians to throw a bone to the content owners in exchange for big time donations, then I suspect it will work quite well.

Re:Gee...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not so much a goal as a catalyst for the creation of the bill. The goals however do seem pretty apparent.

A. Give government a great deal more control over websites.

B. Eliminate competition for the big media corporations. This is what really hurts them, not piracy, and they know it. If they can eliminate or bury content that isn't theirs, well then they've already won this round and can keep their business model working for a while longer.

Re:Gee...

[berashith]

I always thought the purpose was to change the party responsible for enforcing this nonsense. The current rules are civil law, so the owners have to pursue the offenders, with all of the costs and PR hits that come with being assholes. Now, the rules will be criminal, and then government will enforce. They can just shrug and say " sorry, just enforcing the laws, and we all agreed on what those would be " .

Re:Gee...

[Anonymous Coward]

Murdoch paid for laws.
I wondered where the money came from.
Now I know.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/15/murdoch_twitter_rant_sopa/

Time for a Million Mirror March

[hawks5999]

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.

Re:Time for a Million Mirror March

[Anonymous Coward]

MAKE them shut down the entire internet to stop signal.

Careful what you wish for.

My fear is one day the selfish cowards here on /. and elsewhere who pirate everything will look back on the freedoms they used to have on the internet and realize that they are the reason for its destruction.

And I will have a hollow victory in saying "told you so". Hollow, because you'll have ruined it for those of us who aren't cheap bastards. Thanks for nothing, parasites.

Re:Time for a Million Mirror March

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

well, that's either a moving statement on morality and the price of freedom from someone who stands on a precipice, or the nonsense of someone who doesn't know what will happen next, so afraid of the unknown they beg strangers to cease.. afraid of the dark so they want to legislate the sun stay up from now on.. It's your planet, you decide!

Re:Time for a Million Mirror March

[J'raxis]

Damn all those people for actually exercising their freedoms! If you never actually used your freedoms, the government never would've taken them away!

Re:Time for a Million Mirror March

[cheekyjohnson]

they are the reason for its destruction.

But the people who actually did the destroying? Those guys? They had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Just like the ones who implement DRM have nothing to do with that.

Re:Time for a Million Mirror March

[epyT-R]

you should be blaming authority, not the actions of individuals. authority is the reactionary one here, and only it has the power to set the stage.. you can't retain your freedoms by prefixing every action with a potential threat analysis.

Re:Time for a Million Mirror March

[Anonymous Coward]

Like all those Syrians who are MAKING the government shooting them? It really is their fault.

Stop Serving Torrent Files

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop Serving Torrent Files, start serving watermelon. Since, you know, they happen to grow right there anyway.

Incidentally, that is the only place I've seen a bee with a polka-dotted knee.

Re:The ISP's will be asked to block interclient co

[luther349]

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.

Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[paleo2002]

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.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[luther349]

it uses hash tags and theirs no central server also the file name does not matter so stuff can be named anything. basically they cant be blocked,

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of downloading a torrent file, you feed a special url into the client which searches the DHT (p2p database of peers downloading torrents) for peers. Then when it connects to some peers it downloads the torrent from them. Its just as secure as downloading a torrent from the Pirate Bay.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[GuldKalle]

the .torrent files are hosted by the peers, instead of on piratebay. When you join the DHT network (by running a bittorrent client), you are assigned a number, based on your IP. In a similar manner, all torrent files are given a number based on a hash of their contents.
If you are given the number 5 and the next client on the network has the number 9, you must host the torrent files numbered 5-8 (if they exist). You can get those files from the client behind you, as he must have had them before you joined.
You must also know some of the other clients on the network. This is normally some of those close to you, and some of those furthest away from you (as in, you have the IP for client 505, assuming the network goes to 1000).
There are of course backup hosts for the files etc, but that's the general idea

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[Nos.]

I've looked at them a bit, and from what I can tell... its more or less a link that does the same thing a torrent file does. It contains the infohash (unique identifier), file name, size of the file, trackers, etc

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[shish]

As I understand it, the magnet is effectively the hash of the .torrent file; given the magnet, a client will connect to the distributed database of .torrent files and download it from there, and then carry on as if it had downloaded the .torrent over HTTP. Like a meta-bittorrent, using P2P to take the load away from TPB's centralised servers :-P

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[Anonymous Coward]

See? Now don't complain about getting a sentient reply with capitalisation, punctuation, grammatical and spelling errors.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[Osgeld]

or found while digging through 10,000 spamware infected ad sites

whoopie its just like searching for wares on google

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[danbeck]

I have no idea who you are talking to, but if you are complaining about luther349's pathetic example of the written English language, /AGREED.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[afabbro]

the .torrent files are hosted by the peers, instead of on piratebay

So, I'm a big media company and I put up a peer with lots of juicy downloads, you connect and download, I sue you.

How is this better than plain old bit torrent?

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[icebraining]

It's much harder to sue each user than to bring down a tracker, particularly if common sense continues to prevail.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

If "big media company" deliberately shares their own content then they are going to have a tough time showing to the court that they didn't want it shared. And if they share someone else's content, then they don't have standing to sue.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[Anonymous Coward]

So, I'm a big media company and I put up a peer with lots of juicy downloads, you connect and download, I sue you.

How is this better than plain old bit torrent?

What "juicy download"? Since when is a list of block hashes and filenames a "juicy download"? It's also not copyrighted/copyrightable.

You know that DHT only deals in torrent files, right? The actual data is distributed normally (The DHT network acts as tracker, not as a seed or peer).

If you're suggesting that media companies put up torrents for their own content on DHT for people to download, they could have loaded it onto the Pirate Bay already, nothing really changes there. It's still not going to help them, if they make their own content available then they are invoking a defacto "have this, it's free" license and is perfectly legal to download; it's only people who aren't the copyright holder who can't do this legally.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[dotancohen]

See? Now don't complain about getting a sentient reply with capitalisation, punctuation, grammatical and spelling errors.

Maybe the GP used a text-to-speech engine?

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[luther349]

the courts are getting sick of the mass lawsuits. and common sense has been taking hold in many of these cases like judgments for the real cost of the media or only slightly higher rather then millions. judgments saying a ip address is not a form of id etc. so basically now they have to go threw all the steps to really identify the person sharing etc why there trying to pass laws like sopa. i think they even told the riaa to just quit all together.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[luther349]

in a perfect world maybe but the media company's have been busted in the past posting there content on torrent sites just to catch people downloading aka entrapment. they also have been busted trying to sue people for stuff they didn't even own hell even a case where the content owner got a dcma letter. the media company simply what to keep there dead business it has nothing to do with anything else.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[Arrepiadd]

Really, those are your thoughts on this?
How have RIAA and MPAA managed to go after users so far? By sharing pixie dust? Unicorn meat?

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[Anonymous Coward]

By finding torrents of their material on a tracker.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[allo]

they DOWNloaded from you, then they sued you for distributing the stuff. you are allowed to download in most legislations, but you are not allowed to distribute (UPload).

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[Arancaytar]

That is no different from the old attack model, where a media company (or one of their hired investigators) joins a swarm and then harvests IP addresses. In fact, the old model is likely still superior (for the media companies) since "these users have downloaded and distributed actual pieces of copyrighted material" sounds stronger in court than "these users downloaded .torrent files that are used to download [etc.]". Also, the former attack can catch peers that connected via PEX, who might have gotten the .torrent file from somewhere else entirely.

Long story short, BitTorrent is designed for resilience, not anonymity. If you participate in a swarm, you have to be aware that you're doing it in public and risking consequences if someone is watching. This new model doesn't change that; it merely increases the resilience.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

the media company's have been busted in the past posting there content on torrent sites just to catch people downloading

Let's see a citation for that because it sure sounds like bullshit to me. Note you made TWO claims in that sentence I quoted, I want a cite for both of them in a single incident.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[Rich0]

basically they cant be blocked,

Unless you count that in all current implementations I'm aware of it doesn't work over TCP - only UDP. So, any network that doesn't transmit UDP will work fine for torrent files (with TCP trackers) but not magnet links.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[Rich0]

When you join the DHT network (by running a bittorrent client)...

Well, perhaps this should be written as:

IF you join the DHT network (by running certain bittorrent clients on a network that can route UDP bidirectionally from the internet)...

Anybody that can't route UDP bidirectionally to the internet is going to be stuck using torrent files, and apparently other sites.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[laird]

"Really, those are your thoughts on this? How have RIAA and MPAA managed to go after users so far? By sharing pixie dust? Unicorn meat?"

The parent post (Arancaytar) explained things pretty clearly.

Since you don't appear to understand anything about the BitTorrent protocol, I'll try to explain.

Clients start by getting a .torrent file or magnet link, which contains a tracker URL and the hash of a torrent (unique ID, computed from the contents). They join a swarm by connecting to a tracker and sending the hash of a torrent. The tracker responds with the IP addresses of the peers, which you then connect to, and exchange data with. As a part of the exchange, peers tell each other exactly which pieces of the torrent they have, so that they can decide which data to exchange.

What this basically means is that when you're in a BitTorrent swarm you have to expose your public IP address, and broadcast exactly your status (i.e. documenting exactly what you're downloading, and offering to upload). And you give out whatever another peer asks for.

From a legal perspective, this gives a media company (or their agent) everything that they need to prove that you're illegally downloading their content. That is:
- They can download the torrent, and prove that it's their copyrighted material.
- They can join the tracker and get the IP address of all of the peers in the swarm.
- They can download data from all of the peers, proving that the peers are serving the data.
- They can negotiate with the peers, and document that they're downloading the data.
- They can look up the ISPs for each of the IP addresses.
- They can go to those ISPs and (by filing a lawsuit) get the customer names and addresses associated with each of the IP addresses.

The math is quite solid. About the only "defense" is that someone else was using your IP address, that some evil software used your computer without your knowledge, or that the ISP reported the wrong customer for the IP address.

The other protocols mentioned (magnet links, DHT, and PEX) are basically accellerators that don't change the fundamentals, so they don't change the fact that BitTorrent was invented to efficiently deliver large files, not hide what you're doing.

Magnet links might help trackers claim that they don't know what they're tracking, since they're just torrent hashes without the file names, etc., but given that all of the tracker sites list all of that info on their web sites, so that people know what they're downloading, that doesn't strike me as a very good defense. But IANAL.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[Anonymous Coward]

That horrible megaupload jingle comes to my mind

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[Anonymous Coward]

They can negotiate with the peers, and document that they're downloading the data.

Some of the data. It's very seldom that a peer gets the entirety of even a single file from one particular peer. Most often they get bits and pieces from many other peers.

So if a file has 2 pieces and peer A gets one from peer B and one from peer C, and the file is unusable without both pieces... are B and C actually guilty of copyright infringement? Can you prove they knowingly cooperated to achieve this? I would wager that most people don't know how BT works, and anyway, at this stage the media company only has a bunch of IPs and cannot prove the intentions of the people behind them (if any), and they can't find them until they do. It's a vicious circle.

This IMHO is the fatal flaw in the chain of proof needed for a media company to legally get to ask an ISP for client identities. They would have to act as A and document a full download from both B and C (or however many peers participated) and then deal with them as a group, and then demonstrate willful collusion.

Re:Its Late, I'm Dumb, or Both

[laird]

"Some of the data. It's very seldom that a peer gets the entirety of even a single file from one particular peer."

Of course. But if they ask for 5 random 4KB chunks of the data, and all of them match the copyrighted data exactly, and the swarm hash matches exactly, it's pretty hard to argue that you're not downloading and serving the copyrighted data. I've never heard anyone argue that because you downloaded pieces of a file from 100 different peers that there was no copyright violation. I'll point out that you can copy less than an entire work to violate copyright; in music, even a few notes or a sound clip, if they're distinct, can be a copyright violation. It's also incorrect to say that unless you have all of the pieces of the file that it's unusable; it would be better to say that it's incomplete. If the file were encrypted until it were completely downloaded, then you could argue that you don't have a copy of the data, but that's not the case here. Copyright law doesn't say anything about intentions, it says that if you make copies of a work you need permission of the copyright holder (or fall under Fair Use).

My main point is that using BitTorrent, you're broadcasting your IP address and notifying your peers on the network as you download the data, and offering to upload the data to anyone who asks, so you're in a weak legal position. IMO.

I do agree, though, that the weak point (as I said in my original post) is that the media company has to get the person's identity from the ISP, based on the IP address. So you can argue that the ISP got the wrong customer, or someone used your network without your permission, or used your computer without permission, or a virus triggered the download. Which seems plausible. There's one case where "grandma" paid the ISP bill, and one of the grandkids was likely downloading stuff, which of course the ISP couldn't know.

Re:The ISP's will be asked to block interclient co

[GuldKalle]

I don't think it hurts DHT more than it hurts Bittorrent in general.
So if you can use Bittorrent, you can use DHT.

Re:The ISP's will be asked to block interclient co

[duguk]

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.

Welcome to the web

[sakdoctor]

Look before you leap. Hover before you click.

Re:Welcome to the web

[EdZ]

That's all well and good, but how do you tell if the hash in the magnet link you're hovering over is the hash of the file you want, rather than the hash of some different (and possibly malicious) file? Sure, a torrent file could also have a deceptive filename, but at least with a torrent you can see it's contents before you start downloading anything. With a magnet link, you have to wait for downloading to begin before you can actually tell what the contents of the torrent are.

Re:Welcome to the web

[adolf]

If a list of filenames is all that separates your ideas of a "good" and a "bad" torrent, then I suspect that you'll have other problems soon enough.

Re:Welcome to the web

[loufoque]

The new tendencies in web browsers have been to remove the status bar, preventing you to know what a link does.

Re:Welcome to the web

[aitan]

I don't know which browser you're using, but with Firefox it automatically shows a status bar with the destination of the link as soon as I hover it.

Re:Welcome to the web

[laird]

Right, but the link URL of a magnet link is basically just a hash, so you can't tell what you're going to download until you start downloading, and then only if you switch to the BitTorrent client and check to see what you're downloading.

Re:Welcome to the web

[Anonymous Coward]

And somehow this was different when using a .torrent file? If your client is even halfway decent, it'll let you view all the contained files before it actually downloads them. Downloading the torrent info != Downloading the torrent.

Re:Welcome to the web

[cynyr]

Chrome too.

Re:Welcome to the web

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, well then adolf, if you know everything and like to be an asshole, why don't you tell us how you distinguish a good torrent from a bad torrent before it starts downloading when using magnet links?

Oh wait, you would have already done that if you could just to show how superior you are to everybody else in the world. So either propose a good solution in a respectful and respectable manner or shut the fuck up.

Re:The ISP's will be asked to block interclient co

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The ISP's will be asked to block interclient co

[GuldKalle]

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.

i weep, truly, weep for you

[decora]

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...

Re:i weep, truly, weep for you

[Anonymous Coward]

STFU. The only time I download TV shows and films without paying the creators is when the creators sign on with a megalithic content cartel that refuses to take my money, unless I purchase a cable TV subscription or some other equally useless, obsolete, and irrelevant artifact.

Re:i weep, truly, weep for you

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget some people can't pay if they want to... . (refer to sanctions).
from somewhere in the middle east...

Re:i weep, truly, weep for you

[stenWolf]

This is the first I heard of this - the creators who work on any project don't get paid? They don't draw a salary at the end of each month? They actually wait for some shmo to pay 15$ to split it amongst all the crew? Seriously? I thought only very junior software coders worked for profit shares instead of full wages. Are the media guys really so far behind the times?

Re:i weep, truly, weep for you

[Kalriath]

If everyone decided to rampantly download stuff based on your logic, then stuff wouldn't get made - or at least not to the same quality (even for independents, whether or not there is a chance they'll get paid determines whether they can take the risk of working on it full time or just in the 4 hours a day they aren't at work or sleeping).

Re:i weep, truly, weep for you

[cynyr]

or because that show/service is only available in the UK, or Australia or ${CONUNTRY} and you live in the USA.

Re:i weep, truly, weep for you

[doccus]

Don't forget some people can't pay if they want to... . (refer to sanctions). from somewhere in the middle east...

Not just the middle east.. try Canada...

Re:i weep, truly, weep for you

[Eraesr]

What a shame that Slashdot doesn't allow posts to be rated as "ignorant"

maybe you just have shitty taste in art?

[decora]

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?

Re:maybe you just have shitty taste in art?

[bipbop]

People torrent those, too!

Re:maybe you just have shitty taste in art?

[dotancohen]

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?

How about if I pirate something created 27 years ago? Or 50 years ago? Or in the year 1919, which should be in public domain but was stolen from me? Can I not steal it back?

By the way, I do not pirate. All my software and media are 100% legal. But I do support piracy for under certain conditions, as described above.

Re:maybe you just have shitty taste in art?

[cynyr]

how about stuff not available in your country?

The Dakar Rally, not the shitty NBC sports network coverage, with the guy that got the short straw covering it in 30 minutes a day from his desk in LA. The 1-3 hour a day "live" coverage from people on site, that actually follow the rally world and don't really stop caring once the last USAian is basically out of the rally.

a large amount of British TV just never makes it here, even though I could/would pay to see it.

soooo.. hash collisions?

[decora]

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?

Re:soooo.. hash collisions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Enjoy the show as it's guaranteed to be better than another movie with Shia LaBeouf.

Re:soooo.. hash collisions?

[icebraining]

Read parent's post again.

It's a hash of the .torrent file, not of the actual files being shared. You can make sure you there's no collision after downloading the .torrent file, which is only a couple of KiBs.

Re:soooo.. hash collisions?

[Tastecicles]

oh, to have mod points... made I larf!

Re:soooo.. hash collisions?

[Anonymous Coward]

HASH COLLISIONS sounds like a Bruce Willis movie. The sequel to DIE HARDER

Re:soooo.. hash collisions?

[laird]

You curse the gods of probability, because the odds of torrent ID collisions is pretty low. Torrent IDs are 160 bit hashes, so there are 2^160 values, which is 1.46150164 × 10^48. If there were 100m torrents, the odds of a collision would be 1 out of 1^40th, which is a number so big that it doesn't have a name.

Re:soooo.. hash collisions?

[Anonymous Coward]

1^40th, which is a number so big that it doesn't have a name.

most people call that "one"

Re:soooo.. hash collisions?

[Anonymous Coward]

1^40 does have a name - One. And it isn't that big really. I assume you meant 10^40th?

Fucking magnet links...

[Anonymous Coward]

...how do they work?

Re:Fucking magnet links...

[Anonymous Coward]

...how do they work?

They don't work, they just lie around all day pulling their dicks, and waiting for their mother to go to work so they can creep out of the basement, and wash her crack pipe with acetone for their evening hit before heading out for an evening of sniffing panties and crawling through rubbish bins. Just like you really.

Re:Fucking magnet links...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you get them too close they stick to each other.

Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

How do you _join_ the DHT network?

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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"?

Re:How do you _join_ the DHT network?

[Richy_T]

Why the hysteria? It works, here and now which means that the "problems" you have brought up have been considered and dealt with and it's an open protocol which means if you really want to know how it works, you can actually go and find out how.

Re:How do you _join_ the DHT network?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not hysteric and no, it doesn't work. The problems are real problems, and I do know how the bittorrent protocol and its add-ons work. You still need _something_ to jump-start a client to get DHT going.

I can't make magnet links work

[erroneus]

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.

Re:I can't make magnet links work

[kruhft]

On ubuntu (I've used 10.04 or later) magnet links 'just work', popping up a dialog in Firefox and opening them in transmission.

Re:I can't make magnet links work

[Stuarticus]

I use 10.04 and 10.10 and have had the same problem as GP.

Utter Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Nice excuses

[arcite]

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.

Re:Nice excuses

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how you think you're taking the moral high ground there.

"Well I don't need to make EXCUSES like the FUCKER I'm replying to. I'll openly admit I'm a criminal, and I've been breaking the law constantly for fucking YEARS!"

Re:Nice excuses

[VortexCortex]

I like how you think you're taking the moral high ground there.

"Well I don't need to make EXCUSES like the FUCKER I'm replying to. I'll openly admit I'm a criminal, and I've been breaking the law constantly for fucking YEARS!"

I like how this could be applied to someone infringing copyright now, or in the past to Rosa Parks... She didn't need to make EXCUSES to break the unjust law, and sit at the front of the bus. No one need make excuses to break unjust laws either. Be they segregation or copyright laws.

Apply your anti-copyright-infringement ideals to other pro-repression agendas... Scary, eh?

My biggest opposition to current copyright laws is that they elevate copyright infringement from a civil matter to a federal one. International Treaties about copyright law that no one gets to vote on are being discussed in secret. What was once a 10-14 year limit on the copyright monopoly -- Granted in a time when copies were expensive to make and controlled by the few -- has been extended to over 150 years, or 3 generations of humans in a time where to even USE the data you must make many copies... one at every router the packets traverse, one copy on disk after an install, one copy in memory when loaded, one copy in the GPU when rendered, copies on disk again if you enter hibernation-mode. COPIES ARE CHEAP; WHY ARE THE TERMS BEING EXTENDED?

For the record, I'm a software engineer. I only get paid when I work. I don't get paid for each and every duplication of the bits that represent the output of my work -- Those copies take little energy or effort to create. The act of me creating more works is a scarcity, the copies of Music, Movie, Software, etc are not scare, and are easy to duplicate.

The problem is that, unlike me, Big Media has yet to figure out a way to get paid when they actually do work instead of inflating the value of your worth through artificial scarcity of copies. I'm no genius and I've figured out how to make a profitable & comfortable income creating Free and Open Source Software; Why can't they? Everyone has copy machines... including the damn copy machines! NO ONE IS WILLING TO PAY FOR THINGS THAT ARE IN INFINITE SUPPLY.

They've made fortunes selling ice to Eskimos. Now the Eskimos want to collect their ice themselves... SHOULD IT BE LEGAL TO PREVENT THIS? Copy companies (publishers) are outmodded by todays technology, and kept afloat by unjust laws that are destroying the public domain.

I see Piracy as an equal and opposite social pressure that's simply pushing back against the restriction of our freedom to share and twiddle bits. Perhaps you see some great heinous act occurring when i copy bits over Ethernet and IPv4/6 networks vs when I copy bits from external to internal disk, then to RAM, and the GPU. I see no such wrongdoing. I suppose it would blow your mind if I told you that since each packet is a minuscule fraction of the whole I can assert my Fair Use privileges. If not, then WHY NOT? Of equal mind-bending proportions is the fact that it's legal for me to use VLC to stream a DVD to my remote computers, using the exact same "heinous" copy mechanism that you see as offensive.

What am I doing at 4:30am replying to AC on my Birthday of all days?! Well, let's just say I'm practicing... honing my saber for other battles. Indeed, today my family and friends will all recite the "Happy Birthday" song to me in a public space -- This is a grave act of Copyright Infringement, and there's no assurance that the Warner Brothers won't attempt to strike me down with a law suit.

Life itself began as copying chains of atoms. May the best COPIER win has been nature's battle cry. The only thing we have over the Apes is a better system of sharing knowledge, information & ideas. Piracy, because it shouldn't be against the law to do what nature intends us to do.

If you'll excuse me, I've a Copyright Infringing Party to prepare for.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

"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?

Mirroring TPB via torrent

[Arancaytar]

everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future

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...)

Re:Mirroring TPB via torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Not bad an idea.

Each increamental update would point to the previus update or full version.

Each issue of the site and the increamental updates would have to be signed by a gpg public key.

But how are you going to keep track of comments and ratings?

Btw this is begining to sound awfully a lot like freenet.

This is weird

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:This is weird

[Zontar The Mindless]

Skype doesn't work with my Princess telephone, either. Unfair as hell!

Entire site on USB?

[nurb432]

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 )

Personal IPv6 address

[zidium]

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!

Re:Personal IPv6 address

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you really trying to link IPv6 to Revelations?

Re:Personal IPv6 address

[St.Creed]

I guess he was talking about IPv666 :)

Re:Personal IPv6 address

[turkeyfish]

All that will do is prompt people to start stealing devices, impersonating others and bring civilization to a standstill, not to mention the economy.

Not saying they won't try, but that won't work either. If laws are made unjust and unfair enough, people will simply break them. It would be much more effective to try to make things more affordable and hence easier to buy than to steal. Of course, a lot of lawyers and lobbyists would have to find another line of work and it would be harder to retain massive wealth inequality, but hey what's wrong with that idea. Which, of course, is precisely why the race between RIAA will continue unabated. The irony is that the price of rented videos is now so cheap that it makes almost no sense to copy illegally. Of more concern to the 1% is the passing of information other than videos freely by people who don't want to see that happen. Hence, anti-piracy legislation has become a political weapon under the guise of fighting piracy.

Well, so much for democracy, the economy, and civilization. Maybe global warming can't come soon enough to put us out of our misery.

Re:Personal IPv6 address

[Richy_T]

Well, P is basically 6 upside down. And if we take the I and put it after the v, we have vI or VI, the roman numeral for 6 and the final 6 is 6 so...

Will magnet URIs work with filehosts?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:The ISP's will be asked to block interclient co

[Rich0]

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.

Selecting Only a Few Files in Magnet vs .Torrent?

[Vegan Cyclist]

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?

uTorrent has a Web-UI

[Anonymous Coward]

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.
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 .torrent file links and magnet URLs)
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.

Re:Selecting Only a Few Files in Magnet vs .Torren

[nabsltd]

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.

Ktorrent - Fix Thyself!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok Ktorrent, get with it, support magnet links or I'm going back to (shudder) Vuze.

Re:The ISP's will be asked to block interclient co

[GuldKalle]

I stand corrected. Never seen a TCP-only network. If I ever did, I'd be running away, screaming

Re:Selecting Only a Few Files in Magnet vs .Torren

[Vegan Cyclist]

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. =)

Re:The ISP's will be asked to block interclient co

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Linux CLI?

[Tarlus]

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.

Re:Linux CLI?

[Anonymous Coward]

rtorrent is popular with remote seedbox sites, easy enough to run on your own system at home on very low-spec hardware. If you compile with rutorrent support, you can admin it with a web browser. I prefer just to ssh into mine and run with the CLI, but the GUI screenshots look slick enough.

Functionality

[alexo]

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.

No.

[MrEricSir]

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.