'Tor and Bitcoin Hinder Anti-Piracy Efforts' (torrentfreak.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A new report published by the European Union Intellectual Property Office identifies a wide range of 'business models' that are used by pirate sites. The organization, which announced a new collaboration with Europol this week, signals Bitcoin and the Tor network as two key threats to ongoing anti-piracy efforts. According to the research, several infringing business models rely on encryption-based technologies. The Tor network and Bitcoin, for example, are repeatedly mentioned as part of this "shadow landscape." "It more and more relies on new encrypted technologies like the TOR browser and the Bitcoin virtual currency, which are employed by infringers of IPR to generate income and hide the proceeds of crime from the authorities," the report reads.

Comments

Sharing is a business now?

[Anonymous Coward]

No one I know has ever paid money for pirated media. That's kind of the entire point. What is this drivel about business models?

Re:Sharing is a business now?

[bluefoxlucid]

How do you offer a better product at better than free? People obviously want the artist's product; and a rational person wants that product for the lowest price.

Re:Sharing is a business now?

[PatientZero]

A rational person also wants to be able to consume said content easily. The content producers are doing their damnedest to make it as difficult as possible. Why can't I type in a movie name and watch it on my Tivo? Oh sure, it searches Netflix and Amazon and Xfinity and Hulu and . . . but then when you choose your provider (you can't always see the cost so it's hard to choose) you still have to search again in the actual app to watch it.

But then you can't download it to pause/rewind quickly, or you have to watch commercials, or you only have 24 hours to watch it, or you can't watch it in Bumfuckistan, or . . . WTF! I am happy to pay for content. I would be happier if the content providers got their shit together instead of fighting content sharing and wringing their hands over Bitcoin.

Re:Sharing is a business now?

[bluefoxlucid]

While that's true, Napster and Gnutella were easier than anything I've used, and probably easier than anything possible. Spotify is about as easy, except I have to pay for Spotify.

Do you think anyone today outside a few eccentrics would buy music online if Napster hadn't been stopped? The music industry never stopped piracy, but they stopped the spread of such simple tools as a household item. Don't tell me Bittorrent is anything like opening an application, punching in something (Metallica, Avengers, Windows Enterprise Cracked), and downloading; I've used Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay and Google and Nutorrent and all the rest, and it's nice when you try to download Ubuntu and they give you a .torrent to use, and horrendous if you're hunting for something specific.

That's the victory they achieved: they stopped the ubiquity of free music, swapping from person to person, on every phone, on every tablet, on every PC, everywhere, with services like iTunes and Netflix being universally met with confusion at why such a thing would exist. They're now trying to stamp out what amounts to an underground coal mine fire: out of sight, irrelevant to 99.999% of the world, and impossible to stop with any amount of force.

In other news; water is wet, the sky is blue...

[Penguinisto]

Wake me when the EU starts demanding a ban on knives because criminals use them to stab people, thus hindering anti-assault efforts.

Urgh. Sometimes governments really get stupid when it comes to translating common sense to any concept that happens to be "...on a computer."