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Bad Year For Piracy: 2016 Was The Year Torrent Giants Fell (torrentfreak.com)
From a report on TorrentFreak: 2016 has been a memorable year for torrent users but not in a good way. Over a period of just a few months, several of the largest torrent sites vanished from the scene. From KickassTorrents, through Torrentz to What.cd, several torrent giants have left the scene.Another notable website which vanished is TorrentHound. ThePirateBay is back, but is often facing issues. Not long ago, ExtraTorrent noted that it was on the receiving end of several DDoS attacks.
I love you 2016.
.. i still have no problem downloading whatever im looking for.
This shouldn't really be a surprise. Once you're big enough you have a giant target painted on your back both from the rightsholders and from people with an axe to grind. In the past there was always a steady churn of sites, and I fully expect that to keep happening as the well known sites are attacked and brought down and the vacuum appears again for startups to fill until they themselves get too big.
I read the internet for the articles.
Not all the affected sites were "making money" off of piracy. What.CD had no ads and was funded exclusively by donations. There was never a profit motive.
Facts have a liberal bias.
I loved Kickasstorrents. I could get MP4 copies for movies I already owned to watch on my tablet when I traveled. What real options are left out there that won't get you on an NSA/MAFFIA list?
Piracy has always been a story of decentralization. In fact nearly all crime will inevitably rely on a decentralized process. In order to build a large, powerful organization you can't have a larger, more powerful organization trying stop you.
We saw this from the beginning. It started with streaming sites and warez sites, but those were trivial to target and eliminate. So people moved on to p2p in order to decentralize the crime. That worked until the law adapted to target the defacto pirates (the application developers). So it moved to even further distributed services: torrents. Without an application developer to pursue the new central authorities which could be attacked were the torrent hosting sites, so the community also developed magnet links to further remove themselves from the process of hosting.
The inevitable outcome is just that the list of magnet links will also become distributed much like the DNS system.
Since the MAFIAA will never give up, and your protests via clearnet sharing operations both
a) do not sway lawmakers minds
b) fail and fall under MAFIAA pressure
You really should move all your operations exclusively onto the anonymous overlay networks and never ever touch clearnet again.
We're talking I2P, Phantom, Tor, GnuNet, OnionCat, Pond, etc... an entire ecosystem of virtually impenetrable encrypted anonymous comms and data sharing channels awaits you. Start searching these names and finding all the new tools that are out there for you to use.
With at least two of these nets, you can plug your favorite torrent clients directly into them because those nets provide a p2p IPv6 tunnel interface.
And many clients such as Vuze and Transmission (the best two out there) can also speak the native addressing schemes of these networks.
The benefit is, by keeping all your sharing traffic entirely within these private netoworks,
you can share and seed 24x7x365 with complete freedom and impunity. A huge fuck you to the MAFIAA.
And they're fast enough too... you can easily share and fetch all a normal person could ever use... a lossless DVD-9 VOB rip, a couple lossless FLAC CD rips, a game, some books... PER DAY, more than you can consume.
And the best part is, that you can volunteer to help these networks and your peers by running nodes on these networks and allocating some of your ISP bandwidth to these nets. Plus, you can run your nodes in private services and relay modes, never ever offering or risking outproxy mode if you don't want. AND, you can set up your own websites, gameservers, shell servers... anything you want... all without ever needing to ask your ISP for AUP policy permission, for FREE from your own home.
These networks are basically THE PERFECT SHARING network solution, but you all have, for MANY YEARS, refused to see and try that.
GET YOUR HEADS OUT OF THE SAND, OPEN YOUR EYES, DO NEW THINGS!!!
Get on the anonymous overlay darknets people.... it's your only hope of survival,
at least until you organize your efforts therein and come out fighting to take back your rights from the powers that be.
Not only can I download music there for free, the creators upload their music! It's great!
I think it's time we get trackers for trackers to find out what is the latest replacement for a tracker that was just shot down by the content industry.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The tried to shut down Napster (media-only) and we got Gnutella (allowing us to share ANYTHING). Then they shut down all the major Gnutella apps and we got Torrents. I'm excited to see what the next thing is that we'll get - it gets better with every iteration.
I would agree with you if all torrent sites offered were just stupid Hollywood blockbusters, mindless entertainment, but they also offer things that everyone needs to watch to be an educated person. I am from Eastern Europe, where middle-class salaries are around $500/month and we also don't have real public libraries like you do in the West. For me to buy the several hundred films in the cultural canon on Bluray or DVD, it would take me years and so much money that I also wouldn't have anything left over for purchasing culturally important recordings or books. Torrent sites are just as important as Sci-Hub in bringing important information to the average person who doesn't enjoy a huge salary or well-stocked library.
We have to circumvent the ISP to fix the problem.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Or the title should read "Good year for the copyright cartel after buying off more politicians and judges with brown envelopes".
Take Nobody's Word For It.
As of two weeks ago, KAT is back on the scene.
https://torrentfreak.com/kicka...
Shareaza will return torrent files on people's hard drives. I think they will also find files that are on people's hard drives that happen to match the torrent using the other protocols they support, but I am less certain of that, but it wouldn't be that hard to do.
If Big-Ass Network used no-name artist's work without an exclusive license, then BAN is obligated to scrub no-name artist's work from the reference material uploaded to the video host's fingerprinting service. Otherwise, BAN is violating the video host's TOS, and no-name artist has grounds to sue BAN for slander of title.
On the other hand, if BAN's work came first and no-name artist was subconsciously "inspired" by a BAN work, then no-name artist can be held liable because copyright is strict liability. How can this be avoided?
I'm curious, will the magnet links ever shift to a platform such as kazaa or gnutella? Where instead of uploading files, just the magnet links get distributed?
It's not 'invisible' in the sense that they can't tell your connected, but it is end to end encrypted, has support for a half dozen tunnel types, and the C++ verison i2pd currently has support for UDP tunnels (allowing videogames that only need a single host/udp port to be played over it right now, with future plans for an rfc to push for inclusion in the 'official' java i2p router.) Furthermore if you are running Vuze, there is already a plugin for both i2p and tor hidden service peering so you can either do all your torrenting via the darknet, or help peer clearnet torrents into the darknet for people running darknet only torrent clients.
Combine I2P, Vuze, and Retroshare over I2P and almost every usecase is covered.
For me to buy the several hundred films in the cultural canon on Bluray or DVD, it would take me years and so much money that I also wouldn't have anything left over for purchasing culturally important recordings or books. Torrent sites are just as important as Sci-Hub in bringing important information to the average person who doesn't enjoy a huge salary or well-stocked library.
No excuse. VPN and Netflix/Spotify. At least you're paying for it.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Thank God that Piratebay thing is gone.
Netflix has a much poorer selection of important films in the canon than torrent sites, so you cannot get a complete education from Netflix, and in any event for my country's economy Netflix is not significantly cheaper than the physical media that we cannot avoid in large amounts. Spotify is getting a bit better in terms of historically important recordings, but the absence of the ECM label, poor metadata (which makes it hard to find classical recordings), and lossy encoding makes torrent sites still the place to hear music.
Sorry, that should be "that we cannot afford in large amounts".
Netflix blocks VPNs.
If you're in eastern europe, "paying for it" is not even an option much of the time, because distributors often don't make the content available for purchase in certain regions. Besides that, using a VPN also violates most services's terms and conditions, not to mention that many streaming services aren't even available for subscription in some regions. I won't even go into putting ads and tracking into paid-for services.
I say follow the entertainment industry's own example and do whatever you can get away with. They will gauge you at every opportunity, call you (their costumer) a thief routinely, issue bogus takedown requests, engage in criminal creative accounting to rip off artists and evade taxes, track you and sell your private information to advertisers without your consent, among other crap. Pirate to your heart's content. Boo-hoo. Cry me a river.
Why is parent modded +4 and GP modded down to -1?
This site is intellectually dishonest, a herd of basement dwelling social misfits who have no intention of allowing an honest debate.
call it piracy, it's sharing
whoosh, wealthy US ignorance
Funny how pirates always see "I can't afford it" as an actual JUSTIFICATION for stealing...as if the price of something determines whether or not it's morally acceptable for a poor bum to steal it instead of pay for it.
I'd maybe have more sympathy for that if you were stealing food, to survive, but no...you're arguing the movies and shows you pirate (educational ones I'm sure) are "important information" for the "average person," therefore you're well within your right to steal. In fact, it helps you to afford "culturally important recordings or books" on occasion!
FUCK. YOU. LIAR. You do NOT pirate movies and TV shows out of some ingrained desire to preserve the culture of your ancestors, you're a god damned bullshitter of the highest order to even TRY that argument. The reason you do it is that you either a) feel like "Western" companies deserve to be screwed out of their money anyway or b) you really are blisteringly poor and you've somehow managed to rationalize ANY petty theft through the most laughable justifications possible.
Yes, you're from "Eastern Europe" where there are no such things as "real public libraries," get fucked you lying sack of bullshit. It doesn't take a "huge salary" to afford a movie every now and then, you don't have an excuse. You're just cheap. Cheap and delusional.
makes an effort to*
Not saying it's insignificant. They have to successfully block enough to meet lip service.
>theft
>stealing
lol.
Use GP's violin to play Happy Birthday. If you're worried about stealing from someone who's been six feet under for a hundred years, relax, it became public domain in freak accident of rationality caused by "parasites" with more evidence than Their Kind are supposed to have.
Except that you're being intellectually dishonest yourself. Pirating media isn't stealing. You aren't denying anyone the use of their property. If I stole Rogue One, you wouldn't be able to watch it. It's not theft, it's copyright infringement, the meaning of or existence of may or may not exist in the jurisdiction of the "piracy".
It may be illegal (depending on location), but it certainly isn't theft.