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Amid Crackdown On Torrent Websites, Some Users Move To Google Drive To Distribute Movies and Shows (ndtv.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: As crackdown on torrent sites continues around the world, people who are pirating TV shows and movies are having to get a little more creative. Cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Kim Dotcom's Mega are some of the popular ones that are being used to distribute copyrighted content, according to DMCA takedown requests reviewed by Gadgets 360. Google Drive seems most popular among such users, with nearly five thousand DMCA takedown requests filed by Hollywood studios and other copyright holders just last month. Each DMCA requests had listed a few hundred Google Drive links that the content owners wanted pulled. What's interesting though is that while at times pirates upload full movies to Google Drive or other cloud services, in other cases, these Google Drive links are empty and just have a YouTube video embedded.
The Google drive video player looks just like the YouTube player, but if you analyze the traffic, it's clearly making requests to different servers than what YouTube uses.
Is the leader of the pirates and paedos you do know.
Seriously.
If ever there was a time to start a project with hopes of changing the world, it's right now.
Corporate empires will rise and fall, but the fortunes of mankind are at a turning point.
Will the many succumb to the will of the few?
There are still tons and tons of active torrent sites with 100k+ active torrents. It's not like were getting pushed back into the underground by the disciplined corporate stormtroopers.
Hell, we don't even need trackers anymore with magnet links. Can you DMCA text?
For like a couple of bucks/month?
"What's interesting though is that while at times pirates upload full movies to Google Drive or other cloud services, in other cases, these Google Drive links are empty and just have a YouTube video embedded." Ok I'll bite, what's so damn interesting about it?
Just download all of it for free and don't contribute a cent to their wealth. But frankly, even free it's not always worth it so they better start making good stuff. Too many other things to do.
This is hardly a new concept, it predates the explosion of torrent usage. There have always been troves of pirated content uploaded to free online file hosts, as it's easier to use than any program. The reason torrents have become the preferred method is largely because file hosts are under no obligation to keep your files indefinitely, so many useful files are lost simply to to age or complaints from copyright holders. This is especially true with pirated content that has fan translations, there are thousands of hours of completed translation work lost because it was hosted solely at megaupload.
Repeal the DMCA by any means necessary. Whole cloth.
The video is Meat Spin.
Now that we are back to "direct downloads", this is far worse than torrents. I remember before BitTorrent, and I had to look for a working game CD for a game I purchased, because the one I had didn't work:
Try a warez search engine? You wind up having to vote it up three times... then you get shunted to another search engine.
You find a "DDL" site? Oh cool. Ever wonder why the download is the same size no matter what you search for? That isn't a download with your game or topic in it...
You find a FTP list. Every fruitcake that the list has gone past, has crossed a site off of it, saying it is too leet for you.
eDonkey? Great, but because it doesn't do packets at random, so you wind up at 99.9% downloaded... and never will get that last piece.
At least with bitTorrent, you know what you are getting, and it is relatively hard to poison. You are going to get as clean a download as you are going to find.
Now we are back to drive stores... same thing as warez sites, except Google and other sites are faster at pulling that stuff off.
Personally I don't think this is affecting any media industry that much. If it really was they would take stronger action against any distribution means. Most people feel obligated to pay for what they use, and then you have a percent who we will call freeloaders.
how is torrent still a thing? its 2017 for cripes sake.
Has built in torrent support with the original java router/client app package. HTTP proxy support for both in network and optional outproxy. Has a second source implementation in the form of i2pd that is implemented in C++, helping to verify the in-use protocol conforms to the documented protocol. Even has some methods of dramatically reducing latency at the cost of privacy for people who care more about the former than latter, although you need to talk to the right people and do some voodoo to make it work.
The fact that more people aren't already using I2P is kind of sad. Other than the lack of a well publicized 'TBB' style project (There is actually an I2P Browser Bundle available, but it hasn't had the formal verification to make sure it doesn't leak identifiable information like TBB has... It was produced by a relatively new member of the community with only rudimentary knowledge of programming, javascript, etc before they started making builds.)
It is not enough to stop dedicated nation state actors, but it is enough to anonymously disseminate censored or infringing works without leaking your IP address or other personally identifiable information that could be used to pin distribution on you.
Why bother with gdrive, you can embed links in urls.
This is the perfect opportunity to move to torrents over darknets such as I2P (but not Tor). This is also the end-state of piracy, unstoppable and untraceable file sharing. It's the last platform switch you'd have to make. The only downside is that it would force media companies to begin an assault on general-purpose computing.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
What crackdown on torrent sites? What did I miss? I got fed up with the neighbors calling to complain about the smell whenever I was watching a Peter Capaldi episode of Doctor Who so I haven't torrented anything in a while.
They've been saying that bit torrent is on it's last legs since not long after I started to use it in about 2003. But yet it's still going. They apparently didn't know what they were talking about. Happens quite regularly on the internet. Once you see the humor of it, it's quite enjoyable.
STFU. Your going to ruin it. Just torrents.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Crackdown ? Torrentlife hasn't been any bigger for me than now... I can litterally get EVERYTHING with 1 click. What are they talking about ?
You could be fairly certain movies shared via torrenting were pirated. You could be sure of the same to a lesser extent on YouTube. But movies shared via Google Drive - which is tied in with Google Photos, which automatically backs up all photos and videos shot by Android devices - are going to be predominantly home videos.
Say 0.1% of DMCA requests on YouTube are overreaching and block a home video because of something like a copyrighted song being heard playing in the background. If YouTube hosts a ratio of 10 home videos per pirated movie, then that means only 1 home video is improperly blocked (false positive) for every 100 pirated movies blocked (true positive). That ratio means the false positives are few and far between relative to the positive impact of the DMCA requests (getting pirated videos pulled).
But if they start applying those same algorithms to Google Drive, where there are probably 100,000 home videos per pirated movie, suddenly they'll be blocking 100 home videos for each single pirated movie blocked. The false positive rate relative to the true positive rate is now 10,000x higher. The annoyance factor will be that much higher, and they're risking raising the ire of the public, and getting the parts of the DMCA they bought and paid for rolled back by new legislation.
Here are the most effective tools ever made to combat piracy: Steam, Netflix, Crunchyroll, Kickstarter, iTunes, etc etc.
Get my drift? This battle isn't gonna be won by crackdowns, and it will never be fully won at all. It can only be mitigated by very convenient, cheap, and fair legal systems for content sales and streaming.
Here's the thing: there's still an unlimited ammount of resources and tech available for pirates to use... the more you try clamping down on whatever tech is available, the more pirates will double down on alternatives.
There might've been a crackdown on torrent websites, but the category is pretty much alive and well without any signs of change. The so called crackdown didn't leave even a dent on the category as a whole.
It doesn't really matter if popular torrent websites gets taken down, a whole bunch more will pop up out of nowhere hosted in countries that don't care about nor listen to Hollywood demands.
And even if MPAA, RIAA, Hollywood studios and whatnot were able to suddently shut down each and every source of torrent files (will never happen), I'm willing to bet that it wouldn't take days before something new pops up. Torrents are not still used because it's the optimal strategy... it's just what people grew used to and I guess convenient to keep running. But if DMCA companies finally have their way and start really coming down too strongly on those, pirates will just... level up their game.
There files being found on Google Drive are probably not even the surface level of the whole thing... this is just people who don't know better putting files up in places that are easily found. I can't imagine any pirate who knows better putting files up in places known for having an open door policy for law enforcement.
An encrypted torrenting channel on the dark web. An unified encrypted system going through secure systems for file sharing. Secure messaging or e-mail systems being leveraged to share files.
Even for Google Drive and other cloud storage websites piracy could work and be left alone right there... it's quite simple: encrypt the files, fragment them and distribute in inconspicuous bits, build a player that consolidate and decrypt files before playing, and it's done.
This is pretty much what happened in early days of piracy... there were a multitude of file sharing systems, several of them created for legitimate purposes, appropriated by pirates to share copyrighted content.
If people analyze the trajectory that piracy went through the years, it's pretty incredible. File sharing websites, cloud storage services, primitive chat systems like IRC, the entire evolution of P2P file sharing, e-mail, FTP... every step of the way in matters of file sharing on the Internet had a pirate hand at some point.
And I have no doubt that somewhere someone must be developing a system that is fully encrypted, untraceable, and de-centralized... if something like that isn't already available. Because there will always be a fundamental need on the Internet for sharing files in a secure and private manner, and whatever form that takes, pirates will eventually be able to appropriate that.
But this is something known for lots of people since the early days of piracy... even before Napster I guess. The essencial problem with it is that piracy became normalized... as it can mostly be equated to just file sharing if you take the vilification out of the equation. There are entire countries that grew reliant on it for access to entertainment for a huge part of their population, and once it became normalized, where there's a will, there's a way.
You can't give enough powers to Hollywood and DMCA organizations to go after everyone because that'd be essencially giving them the keys to the entire Internet. And not only people will oppose that, governments and other businesses also will.
It doesn't matter on what side you are - for or against piracy, I mean. It's an unstoppable driving force, equalizer, phenomena, and culture overall.
before Google's thought police finds them and starts policing, then they will move again.
I host a private SFTP and FTPS server for family & friends to access my continuously growing ~10TB collection of Movies, Music, and TV Shows.
Some of it I own and ripped myself, the rest of it I use RSS feeds to auto-download content from various sources.
Piracy also is not illegal here, so that's my justification.
Still works.
Could I also get ketchup on the side with that 10-course meal of a post?
TPB and dozens of other sites are still up and running. Wolf!
normally by the time the dcma is filed the link has been pulled due to the hi traffic they create once they hit the public.
What about people who are using torrents to distribute FREE documentaries, software, etc.? Can't have that - it's competition for Sheenywood! (Hollywood.)
OOhhhh, the poor jews!
Before that it was copying 3.5" floppies.
People had stacks of them, boxes. I remember carrying around a billfold like thing full of floppies. Many of them copies of compilers/programs/games.
Special hole punchers for making double-sided discs from single sided ones.
For music it was dubbed cassettes. Cassettes cost $20 to buy, blank ones were cheaper (but still not cheap)
Movies were VCR tapes that were shitty copies, even some video stores rented them. Recorded in EP of course, so you could put more than one movie on a tape. Why not just rent the real thing and keep it? If you didn't return a video tape you were charged for the full purchase price, which was $70-80.
The only way they will kill piracy in the masses is to offer things so affordable that people won't bother with it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
https://www.demonsaw.com/