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BitTorrent Usage Increases In Europe, Following the Pirate Bay Blockade
MrSeb writes "In a twist that will surprise no one except the RIAA, MPAA, BREIN, and other anti-piracy lobbies, the amount of BitTorrent traffic has stayed the same or increased in Europe following the blockade of The Pirate Bay in the UK, Netherlands, and other countries. This news comes from XS4All, one of the largest European ISPs, which has published a graph of the network traffic associated with the BitTorrent protocol — and sure enough, since the Dutch Pirate Bay blockade began in February 2012, traffic has stayed the same or increased slightly. There are probably a few reasons for this: a) The European blockades created a lot of publicity (and no publicity is bad publicity); b) TPB isn't the only torrent site out there, and many of its torrents are available elsewhere; and c) Internet denizens are a lot more savvy (proxies, VPNs, etc.) than the MPAA and co give them credit for."
Well duh!
It's true !!
An equal hypothesis could be, everyone has stopped downloading files from the pirate bay and with all the free time they have now they are unable to watch movies, the are now committed WoW or D3 players, or whatever other games use Bittorrent as a patch delivery mechanism.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Piracy will never go away. It's literally part of the market itself. No matter what kind of laws or restrictions they impose, people always find a way to share information. So it's not a force that's hurting the market, it's simply part of it. And if the copyright holders can just learn to use it to their advantage, it can be one of the most powerful forms of advertising online. It doesn't cost them any customers or money, it only provides new opportunities.
There I fixed it for you.
From TFA:
If it was easy to create an official, legal version of The Pirate Bay, then the entertainment industry would’ve done it already - they’re not that stupid.
What was it again that Einstein said?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Ever since they blocked The Pirate Bay I started using it. XS4ALL is my ISP and they will fight for my freedom to use it or not use it. So I stick with them. And lo and behold setting up a proxy is easy enough(Block google is probably much more effective) and yep of we go downloading stuff. Just to give a big fuck you to BREIN and Tim Kuik(leader of that bunch of nitwits).
The irony is is that I never downloaded anything that wasnt free(as in beer) over bittorent.
Let's ponder for a moment what happened most likely. Take Joe Randomcopier. He doesn't know jack about getting around DRM or how to "crack" software, all he actually does know is how to use a torrent program. And that he knows 'cause it's point-and-click, and no harder to use than any other user space program out there.
His access to torrents gets blocked in some way. Be it that the tracker becomes unreachable, be it that his ISP filters, be it whatever it may. What will Joe do? He doesn't have the tech knowledge to figure out a way around. What Joe does have, though, is the internet and access to its knowledge. Joe might not know much, but he does know that someone knows more than he does and that someone will publish the information he needs. And he knows how to use Google, Bing or whatever other search engine there might be out there. Even if Google, Bing or most other engines start blocking "such" information, Joe will by then have found a new engine that doesn't. How? By using the same venue of information gathering he uses now. No matter what information you try to block, it's a bit like fighting malware: You can only start fighting it once it is out there somewhere. And playing whack-a-mole has never really been a very efficient way to curb information distribution.
So Joe gets pointed to some board, some blog, some podcast, some youtube video that shows him in terms even Joe can reproduce how to get around this blockage. If everything fails, someone clever enough will come up with a new kind of torrent client that ignores said blocks, be it by redirecting the blocked accesses to trackers through proxies or by disguising the blocked protocols as HTTPS traffic. Joe doesn't and needn't know how it works. Joe just needs a pointer to the place where he can download that program or configuration. And those pointers he will get, no matter what you try to do.
So yes, the "average copyright infringer" doesn't know how to work around those blocks. But he doesn't have to. Just like the average game copier doesn't need to know how to crack copy protection. All it takes is one person smart enough to do it, the others can just copy his work.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In the Netherlands, if one googles the pirate bay (which is what many users do instead of typing in the URL, especially those that aren't particularly computer-savvy) the second and third hits both provide a list of proxies. It is just a matter of clicking a different link. Circumvention is very easy even for the most clueless.
If the anti-pircay organizations want to achieve something, they should probably sue Google to have them censor searches for the Pirate Bay. Given that ISPs can be forced to block it, there is a fair chance judges will require Google to censor such searches.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18722054
Since when does all BitTorrent traffic = piracy? I download 10's of gigabytes/year using BT and none of it is pirated content. All of my BT traffic is legitimate and legal.
In my opinion, this association of "all" BT traffic with illegal downloading is preventing BT from being more widely utilized for legitimate uses. It is nothing more than a distributed file-transfer protocol; the fact that some amount of BT traffic is used for illegal activities is really irrelevant. We should be driving more legitimate usage of BT to tilt the traffic patterns more towards legal use of the protocol and drown out the "noise" of illegal usage. This is the only way to ensure widespread use of the protocol in a way that survives any legal attempts to block it. The more BT is used for illegal activity the more likely it will be blocked or filtered at some point.
Just imagine if someone "discovers" that TCP/IP is being used to transfer these illegal BT packets all over the internets...
"If it was easy to create an official, legal version of The Pirate Bay, then the entertainment industry wouldâ(TM)ve done it already - theyâ(TM)re not that stupid."
It took almost 20 years of hard work at RCA to develop the CED video disc format. You know, the discs where a needle in a groove picks up the video. Hit the market a few years after the laser disc.
What, you mean you've never heard of it? Not too surprising, actually.
But yeah, they're SMART, they are.
This space available.
TPB has been banned in my country for a few years already. I did use it sometimes, but I never thought much of it. I found other torrent sites to be so much better... Its ban has never bothered me too much. I keep wandering what these people who banned it have been thinking. Did greed really rot their brains so bad?
I am not surprised that activity is the same or has increased.
its absurd to assume / assert / suggest / claim that on every street of every block, of every neighborhood, of every community, of every city, of every county of every state, of every country there is even ONE much less more torrent users. That's crazy talk.
I doubt I have one neighbor who has used a torrent.
The idea of compressing data to save bandwidth seems like something providers would promote...unless they are trying to force you to use more bandwidth (by spreading FUD to deter torrent usage), exceed your caps and thus be able to charge you more money.
My bandwidth is throttled to less than BROADBAND speeds (768Kbps) both upstream and downstream, yet I do not use torrents...guess I will have to start using them. Why are Cable providers allowed to fraudulently say their service is broadband when they throttle bandwidth to less than 768Kbps, especially upstream, 24 X 7. The only time I see 768Kbps or greater upstream is during the Speed Test.
The DRM / DCMA pro industry wants us to believe that torrents are widely used. This is NOT true. They want us to believe that ONLY thieves use torrents, which based on comments (not that I need them) to this post we KNOW NOT TO BE TRUE.
So what is their game? Pathetic.
How can they identify BitTorrent traffic, since virtually all such traffic is encrypted and all the ISP can see is that it is SSL?
Are some people still silly enough not to encrypt their transfers?
There is lots of Proxy sites avilable in the internet..which can download torrent files easily... i'm using http://publicproxy.in/ ..in my country lots of sites blocked...
also if you want you can download movies directly from
http://sceneunited.com/
I also found a Proxy network..where lots of proxy sites working fine
http://proxybite.org/
In europe we hear a lot about like video and books in services like Google Play, ITunes, Amazon, Netflix. But the reality is that these services has done a very poor job in supporting the european market. I don't know who is to blame, the EU for not creating a single european content market, rights holders for making it too cumbersome to add their content to these services. Or maybe Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and others are just too lazy or too inept. Who do you think is to blame?
a friend of mine always says: every fance has a hole...
"This news comes from XS4All, one of the largest European ISPs..."
XS4All is a big provider in the Netherlands, but not the largest. They are definitely not one of the largest in Europe.
They do however have a long history of standing up for the rights and privacy of their customers.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
how it could matter with the 1:1 traffic? i never try one to compare.. please tell me about the different.
Give 'em hell mateys, don't stop yer swashbucklin' 'till all the DRM-lubbers rest in Davy Jones' locker!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't understand why content providers are so hostile towards the idea of free crowd-sourced backups of their data? Beware, Do-Gooders, no good deed goes unpunished!
The Admin and the Engineer
Sorry; nice try, but copying material which is copyright or patented is not counterfeiting either. To be counterfeiting, there has to be a sale with intent to defraud. If you copy a dollar bill and frame it on your own wall, that is not counterfeiting. If you copy a song or movie or painting and then play it or enjoy it on your own wall for yourself, that is not counterfeiting. And it is glaringly obvious that if you copy a Ferrari in your own garage for yourself, not trying to sell it as a Ferrari, it is not counterfeiting.
So you cannot steal ideas?
Let's put it this way: an idea can be owned as much as a person can.
For both, there are/were laws that declared them property, allowed to buy and sell them, and so on. And both kinds of laws worked by draconian restrictions on personal freedoms.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Everyone here needs to tell one person they know that isnt very computer savvy about using peerblock and utorrent to download torrents. Or hell using peerblock and frostwire (since now can search torrents in its UI) for those more inclined to having a easier interface.
From TFA:
If it was easy to create an official, legal version of The Pirate Bay, then the entertainment industry would’ve done it already — they’re not that stupid.
Actually they are that stupid... Countless surveys and similar has made it obvious that the primary reason for piracy is unavailability and to a lesser degree price. So how has the industry responded to these fully-in-their-control-easy-fixes? By doing absolutely nothing. Yes, they are THAT stupid.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
I don't know if they realized this but popular torrent files can be uploaded and shared anywhere else on the internet too lol. They're like 20kb on average. In fact, I think there's some new thing where you can just click a highly encoded link and it tells your bittorrent client which file it refers to so you don't even need to download a .torrent file at all. So some little text post on some dumpy little forum could start a torrent download just as easily as the pirate bay.
I repent from my evil ways and accept you as my savior.
BitTorrent should be marketed as "Cloud Backup Device". You need to backup a file? Seed it, and it will be mirrored across the globe. Do you have a movie that you don't want to lose because of damaged media? Mirror it accross the globe.
People with computer will always get their porn. regardless of RIAA or MPAA or wateva agency shutting down sites.
When you need to blame someone or a group, unfortunately, you blame the biggest target. obviously here, seems like they thought it was TPB. They also thought people were fucking idiots that don't know how to bypass this block. With google, forums, blogs and youtube, and some knowledge, patience and some logic doesn't hurt either, anyone can find the info you need to bypass it. Also, TPB is not the only out there but /. knows that so this article is not a surprise here.
It's obviously another case of the Streisand Effect: the media coverage about TPB being blocked generates interest and people will go see what it is all about. Then there was news coverage about the proxies to bypass the block. Popular blogs like "geen stijl" point towards proxies, in particular one that has "fuck" and "tim kuik" (.nl copyright industry rights enforcement figurehead) in it.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
bittorrent != 'piracy' [sic] ...but that's difficult to explain to some people.
Substitute "mp3" for "bittorrent" and it's Deja Vu all over again.
But, the MAFIAA says that this time it's different - this time their world will end tomorrow for sure, not like the last thousand times they said it would
Maybe the ancient MAFIAA leeches will finally do the world a favor and drop dead - there is no room for 20th Century anti-technology leeching scumbags today (over a decade into in the 21st Century).
I live in the UK and I have Virgin, and I can and do access and use the pirate bay, not to mention demonoid and all the others which aren't blocked.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Piratebay is blocked? Since when?
It's an interesting metaphore, not only because both sex and data don't rely on exchange of physical goods,
but also because in the sex situation, too, there's an alarming big number of persons trying to go for the first solution and invoking shame, morality, religion, requiring abstinence/virginity, punishing adultery with stoning, marriage as a way to secure a partner forever, children as a way to force a mariage, etc.
Whereas simply not being a jerk works in many different aspects of life as your to example suggest.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]