Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
I am not stealing, I am downloading. I have ZERO intention of purchasing most of the products I download but I do purchase some of the good ones.
IF they ever come up with the perfect DRM then I will stop downloading BUT I will not start purchasing their shit. I'll simply look for other forms of entertainment.
So have I have not stolen anything.
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.
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...
"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
The problem is this:
The *IAA and their friends have set up a thicket of rules that result in a legal, purchased copy being *less* valuable to me as a customer than a "stolen" copy. Further, they have made complying with the rules almost impossible. If I play my radio where others can hear it, that's a "public performance" and I need a license. If I play music in my class, I need a different license for that. If I want to complie a playlist (ie copy tracks off a cd and make my own cd) I need a license for that too. Ech of these licenses is sold by a different entity, and the process for getting one takes weeks.
So "stealing" is much, much easier, and *everyone* does it. I mean *everyone*. Even Grandma Moses.
So if the *IAA were to simplify their rules, and actaully ask their customers what adds value, they might survive.
But the result of their stupidity is that there is now an entire generation that has grown up pirating music, and sees nothing wrong with it, in fact, there is value added to a pirated product. It can be freely shared, it doesn't have DRM, it doens't have those FBI warngins, it can be played anywhere in the world. That's makes it more valuable than a restricted product.
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.
True. And I depend on my lovely fiance for sex. Knowing that she can easily say "no", which is the better practice?
Treat her with disdain, attempting to convince her she should be lucky to get the little "D" when I offer it, and ensure that I get what I want prior to giving her any sort of satisfaction? Maybe even going so far as calling her immoral for figuring out how to sex herself, for free (hot) when HELLO!? I'm right here with the wienermobile, and any time she thinks about the sexin she should be coming to me, as the only lawful provider in town?
Or, improve my offering by a) making sure she'll get something out of it, b) treating her with respect and caring instead of disdain and distrust, c) having the exchange become personal and welcoming instead of sterile and cold, and d) providing a service she truly enjoys, keeping her coming back for more?
Now, I'm no scientist or corporate executive, but I can tell you pretty clearly which approach has NOT worked out so well for me in the past, putting my little production facility right the hell into bankruptcy.