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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.
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.
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.
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.