After 15 Years, the Pirate Bay Still Can’t Be Killed
melmagazine.com
melmagazine.com
People do sign up for streaming services, but not for like, 10. Furthermore torrenting got really convenient and is very fast with adequate Internet (let's say 10MByte/s), so you get a decent quality movie in under 5 minutes (obviously only if there are enough seeders - but the availability of torrents completely dwarfs the availability of streaming providers - if it's really unpopular and maybe a little bit older you just won't find it on streaming services).
Beside the fact that BitTorrent is an interesting protocol in itself, imagine just how much simpler Netflix or Spotify could be implemented, if we wouldn't stream DRM encrypted blobs, but download files? You just need many big fat file-servers and put your media there - if we wouldn't have DRM (AFAIK all streaming providers enforce DRM), this is technically a solved problem.
In addition subtitles, secondary audio, descriptive video, and multi-view video etc. are all things which we mandate by law which do not work well in a file base expierenced.
Peer to peer as a distribution method is not only know, but there are plenty of providers that use peer to peer like streaming setups (see https://streamroot.io/streamroot-dna/). You may be using something like BitTorrent and _not even know it_.
Distribution is 1/10th the story and DRM is only a small part of it as well. BitTorrent does nothing to solve the other 9/10ths and removing DRM doesn't either.
Not a single one of these things is true. In fact, file-based delivery offers a superior experience in several of them with proper implementation. Streaming is popular because it lowers distribution costs, decreases piracy, and allows rights holders to pull content whenever they want.
Personally, I hate streaming. Buffering sucks. Bitrates suck. Audio quality sucks. Never knowing how long something I like will actually be available sucks. It's just an all-around bad experience if you care about your media.
Fast forward for low power clients relies on an "iframe only" track as there decoders can't do many x realtime decode. This is not present in modern file based work flows.
Seeks use the same startup/segmentation requirements as video startup.
Thumbnail scrubbing requires a thumbnail track and is not supported by file based workflows at all.
Clip previews on sites load at low resolution/bitrates and can be poped up to "full resolution" via ABR. Doing a preview of 10x 4k streams without abr wouldn't work even on a modern gaming rig.
I'd love to hear how you'd do SSAI on top of a file based workflow.
You could of course build a "file based" implementation that had all of these features, but you would just be rebuilding DASH or HLS.
I'd love to hear how you'd do SSAI
on top of a file based workflow.
At any rate, I don't think users would balk at being given a choice.
A proper udp based streaming of course tears HLS to pieces
It worked well enough nobody can be bothered with real streaming now...
That's just not true - VLC has many more features than all the web-based (or "app"-based) popular streaming players. Granted, I checked and my VLC does not have "thumbnail scrubbing", but although that is nice, I don't think this is a big deal and if it's really popular, it will be added to VLC (or it may already be there, I did not check).
1. You can't play a torrented file until the download is 100% complete. (Well, maybe 95% complete, depending on how tolerant you and your software are when it comes to malformed files)
That's the way it was designed to work. Otherwise, the bits at the beginning of the file would be much more common amongst your non-seeding peers and the bits at the end would be much rarer amongst your non-seeding peers. Your downloads would start crazy fast and would get progressively slower.
Some clients let you abuse the protocol and "stream" torrents sequentially, but if significant percentages of torrenters (such as literally every Netflix user, in an imaginary world where Netflix simply served everything via torrents) did that it would be an issue.
That's a great way to deliver big files in their entirety via P2P, but that is pretty much the pathological opposite of what is requred for streaming.
For streaming you obviously need that sequential access. You need to optimize for the beginning of the file, since people want to start watching right away. People do not want to wait 60 or 30 or even 10 seconds for a YouTube vid to start streaming.
2. Think about your actual viewing habits. How many times have you watched the first 1% of a video on YouTube or Netflix, and then decided to watch something else instead? Even if we (probably generously) assume most users watch an average of 50% of a given video (I suspect it's much less) that's still 2x wasted bandwidth per video, on average, if video providers blasted out entire files. Netflix's infrastructure (or rather, their AWS monthly bill) is massive already. Imagine it being asked to blast out 2 or 5 or 10x as much data per video as it's already doing.
3. There's also the rather important matter of many (most?) playback devices not having huge gobs of local storage with which to hold complete movie downloads. I've got probably 20TB of hard drives scattered around this place, but that's not the norm.
4. Can't adapt to changing bandwidth conditions by scaling video quality up and down midstream. Personally, I wish I had more control over this as a customer, as sometimes I'd rather just wait than watch a compromised stream, but Average Joe is not going to want to muck around with that sort of choice, or even understand what it means.
If everybody did it, that would be a big problem.
More to the original poster's point, my post answer's the posters question of "why doesn't YouTube just offer file downloads like Bittorrent?"
There are many clear reasons why; my post gave one of the more prominent ones.
You're the seeder. Initially you're the only one with all 100. And everybody's gonna download things sequentially.
Imagine 300 peers grab block 1 from you. Gonna be pretty slow, each peer gets 1/300th of your bandwidth.
Imagine those 300 peers finish block 1 and move onto block 2. Same bandwidth crunch. Although new peers can at least get block 1 from that initial cohort of 300 peers. But nobody can blocks 2 through 100 from anybody but you. Not ideal.
Now repeat the process for 3 through 100. You're gonna be the bottleneck for a loooooooong time for those remaining pieces.
...
...
...now imagine we do it differently. Those 300 peers each grab a random block. This part's just as slow.
But once they have their initial randomly-chosen blocks, our bandwidth explodes. Each of those 100 blocks is now available from ~4 sources (you, and roughly 3 others). And you could even log off at this point, since there is a complete (distributed) copy of your file out there.
As more blocks are exchanged, the effective aggregate bandwidth rapidly increases even farther.
i.e. I'll send block 1 to one peer, block 2 to another peer. Then I can send blocks 3 and 4 to them (respectively), while they each send each other blocks 1 and 2.
That's just not true.
I've used uTorrent, and I recall deciding whether I wanted to stream or not. It worked well too.
(In the case of ZIP archives, 7-Zip can't open partial files, but bsdtar can. Although in my case it was from a damaged floppy disk rather than torrent, but the same thing would do, if you are downloading ZIP files from torrent. But if you are downloading music, then presumably bsdtar is irrelevant.)
Theoretically, yes. But in practice, especially with "modern"/high-speed internet, I can open my torrent in VLC after the first few MB are present on my computer and read the entire file as it comes in, without me the user encountering stuttering or buffering of any kind.
In effect, from the user's perspective, you're streaming the torrent - without running into the often present decrease in quality from the "traditional" stream's encoding.
The rest is your parent justifying their job/industry as if they're a Godsend–perhaps as compared to cable? It's an indefensible position thus far. The streaming services are all trash with pathetic bitrates; all streams average the same ridiculously low bitrate over the entire stream, without accounting for dark scenes that require orders of magnitude more bandwidth. Every Netflix (and competitors') 1080p streams with dark scenes are unwatchable. It's highway robbery to deliver what looks like 180p frames for a 1080p stream. We're supposed to be at 4K these days, yet they can't even deliver acceptable 1080p. Until the streaming services are willing to stop compressing everything far beyond watchable levels, they don't deserve anyone's business. Netflix, I believe, averages ~3-5 GB for a 90-120 minute movie? That number should be, at least via opt-in to those with the bandwidth for it, 20-40+ GB.
I don't necessarily expect fully uncompressed Blu-ray quality, but the standard should be to deliver something watchable, without banding artifacts. At a minimum that would mean massively variable bitrates, where the highest bitrate of a stream should be allowed to be 10-20x+ its minimum bitrate. Compressing a 60+ GB original file into a download of than 5 GB is flat out unacceptable and unjustifiable.
Complaining about the _size_ or _bitrate_ of encoded file isn't worthwhile. Encoding technology has advanced substantially since blue-ray days and we simply no longer needs the 40mbps bitrate.
Indeed HEVC can offer a mathematically lossless encode at around 90mbps for most content.
A concrete example: You say here that what Netflix provides is "visually indistinguishable from a lossless encode". Try actually doing this with an open mind and then make this claim again. It was definitely not the case when I last tried it (very recently).
Argumentation of this nature is sort of endemic in the tech industry: "You think you see or experience this, but I know what you see and experience and you are wrong". It happens in discussions about battery life, visual appeal of different encoding options, basically anything which is at some point subjective and while the people claiming to see a difference could be (factually) wrong in a lot of cases (I often cannot tell), it is very arrogant to sit/stand there and tell them that you know better than them what they see.
The way people perceive (and how to measure it) is in fact not a solved problem. There are studies done and we can often say with a high degree of certainty that something is probably not visible/distinguishable, but claiming something like that for everyone is too strong and also misrepresenting the state of our learning.
Secondary audio is not only additional languages but things like descriptive video services (narration for the blind). VLC does not generally support having multiple active audio tracks without flagging things on the command line.
I have never seen descriptive video services in any streaming service so I very much doubt it is a major issue, and even in that case why wouldn't you be able to mix it with the main track in a separate channel (which is what is done on TV, as TV does not support multiple active tracks either) ?
netflix has them
Still, there is many reason for having the streaming, although it should be a open protocol and not too complicated. And then, if you write a client software and program it to save the file to disk, it can do that too, possibly during playback, and you can program in other stuff too if you want to do.
I thought of idea of Live Audio Video Protocol (but have not actually written any part of it yet, but have some ideas about it), that you can use Ogg streams and you can initiate with file selection, format/quality negotiation, etc, and then receive the stream but you can also send commands to select a channel or subchannel, pause, seek, request data, rate of keyframes (if the server supports changing this, which it might not), and change other settings.
(Actually, I find a few problems with Ogg, and everything else is too complicated, so I made up something which is slightly more complicated than Ogg but not too much, which is called GLOGG; it is mostly like Ogg, but uses UUIDs to identify codecs, allows identifying how individual streams are related (the relation codes are specific to the codec, and are not defined by the container format; you can also specify if a program that does not understand it should ignore it), and a few other things, but still simple compared to most other container formats.)
And about ad insertion, they do that on television without any problem, so I don't know how that is a problem any differences whether it is a stream or file. (Although sometimes they put stuff within the show itself and damaging the picture, they should not do, but that is only my opinion and is unrelated to the protocols.)
Since when are subtitles mandated by law? "Multi-view video"? Maybe I'm just missing something, but I've never heard of any law mandating any of the things you listed above (except maybe from a government-funded project, but I'm not sure either, that just seems more likely to require it).
I do not even mind it is drm as long as I can get a good quality one in 10 minutes. Even if I contribute bandwidth (as long as controller and during my download) and paid.
There is always someone not paid. But it is those who can and willingly do which oddly leave out. Like Mp3 in 1990s.
It would have owned discovery, which would have badly damaged the big studios. And Netflix would probably have never happened.
It would have been a similar story in music.
But P2P was always about people who think a file is a file is a file, and creation costs are an externality, which can be ignored as irrelevant.
So now we have TPB limping along, and new creators are mostly owned by YT - which is legendary for draconian application of copyright in the favour of fellow corporates.
One of these things is not like the others.
- they all have rolling and incomplete catalogs. Pretty often I want to watch a duo or trilogy of movies. Only one of them is available on netflix, or I start watching a serie and it gets removed from their catalog.
- I saw the Lord of the Rings on Netflix. I thought it would be great since I had only watched it once in a theater. But the version that was there was just Netflix's version. Not extended cut, not director commentaries, not bonuses. Just what Netflix gives you and that's it.
- Maybe that's just me, but most of the new Netflix produced content seems to be of lower quality than what was launching 2 or 3 years ago. It seems that Netflix is focusing a lot more on delivering tons of original content even it means having duds.
Bitorrent does not have these issues. Pretty much all the movies are there, in whatever language and cut I would like to see. The irony is that I am ready to pay for a streaming service, even more than what I pay Netflix if necessary but still, while it might be more convenient to just push the netflix button on my remote, it just not up to the task compared to torrenting.
Yes.
I guess people would even pay for Spotify, if it's DRM free (which means the stuff on it can be copied), but that is still considered "radical" (in the Overton window) for shareholders of media distributors.
That "Save your music offline" is a feature in 2019 is ridiculous.
Small nit: with that Internet speed you could only download a 3 GB file, which is definitely not enough for a quality film. Even iTunes, which is kind of infamous for how badly their films are encoded, is usually bigger than that.
The big picture though is that it really doesn't matter anymore because quite a few clients now allow you to download the first 10% or so of the file first, so you can start streaming it instantly. There's no reason a for-pay streaming service built on to of bittorrent wouldn't do the same.
A DVD ISO rip of a 2 hour movie usually clocks in at 8GB, since a dual layer disc can store 4GB per layer.
The expanded LOTR trilogy needs 2 discs per movie, no matter what definition because each break the two hour mark, and even blu-ray can't fit long movies onto a dual layer disc for its format in HD.
That's going to depend entirely on the codec. MPEG2? Sure. With H.264 a 4GB 720p rip from a Bluray is going to be much better than anything you can get on a DVD.
>The expanded LOTR trilogy needs 2 discs per movie, no matter what definition because each break the two hour mark, and even blu-ray can't fit long movies onto a dual layer disc for its format in HD.
I'm pretty skeptical of that. Regardless of what media LOTR actually comes on, the extended cut of Fellowship would have a bitrate of ~29 Mbits/sec on a dual-layer disc. That's entirely acceptable, if not exactly ideal. And I'm not sure what the "two hour mark" has to do with it: Fellowship is closer to 4 hours than 3, and there are tons of two hour long films that come on a single Bluray disc.
You really don't need more. And if you do and have enough computing power, h.265 goes even further in smaller package.
if you want to ruin yourself, try grabbing a Sparks and a Yify encode of your favorite movie and try watching one of the dark scenes in both files. the difference is plain as day on my 27" ips panel.
On the other hand if you really can't tell the difference between a 2 GB encode and an average sized encode, say 16 GB, it's a good hint to make an appointment with your eye doctor. (I'm nearsighted, so I can't even tell 576p from 1080p on my TV without glasses.)
Software developers seem to be the first to adapt: you can't pirate a SaaS or a cloud. One can try and copy it, but will be always behind the first moved and the original creator, because they always seem to have good ideas.
Equating IP with real estate is bad for the society: why would someone keep producing and keep performing if they made a hit with a song, or a movie, or a game?
The movie and TV industry have instead put great effort into building services that are significantly worse than piracy.
And nobody can understand why movie piracy is still rampant, while music piracy is receding.
Example first pressings I have in flac: velvet underground, the doors, led zeppelin, etc
When I was a teenager (20 years ago), this wasn't possible and we torrented whole albums like hell. Some people got in jail back then, or had to pay huge fines for "unrealized profits", which was absurd.
Does that count as piracy?
P2P
Spotify just makes it so easy– click on "offline download", boom, done.
this is not entirely true; musicians also earn a significant amount of money based on how many times their songs are played on streaming services like Spotify.
Hasan Minhaj had a bit about this in Patriot Act, explaining that this is the reason artists like Li'l Pump are releasing albums with dozens of two-minute songs—shorter tracks means more plays means more $$.
What this means, and what trips me out about using Spotify (or even YouTube), is that I literally can't listen to music on their platform without putting money in someone's pocket. Great for artists I love, sad for cultural curiosities I want to understand but decidedly don't want to support, like Li'l Pump or Chris Brown.
make 60k/year in concerts and you'll live without problems in a country like Italy.
It looks like a lot, but it means 150 shows/year at around 400 euros each + expenses (mainly gas, road tolls, some lunch on the road - sleeping, eating and drinking are provided by the promoter or the venue).
I've worked with bands that played more than 200 shows/year that earned around 5k + merchandise per show.
They payed me 100 bucks per gig, just to sell their merchandise.
Provided it becomes a real job and you have to work hard to keep it going, it's totally doable.
Spotify is different however in that the cut artists get out of their streaming revenue is very insignificant compared to the slice that their record labels and Spotify are getting. I think it's important to keep this in mind. Spotify is negative force in the industry.
> sad for cultural curiosities I want to understand but decidedly don't want to support, like Li'l Pump or Chris Brown.
I don't think you should be concerned over the fraction of a cent you helped generate for Lil Pump.
the (overwhelmingly) vast majority of artists on Spotify see pennies.
you can be certain that you're not supporting anyone that kinda needs the money.
That's not the case. Dead artists do concerts. Artists that never physically existed do concerts. You could have a Steven Hawking concert now and people would pay for the tickets if music was good.
Also could you give examples of popular disabled artists that can’t perform on stage?
Because I don’t think I or anyone I know could list a single example.
Basically you got to have a set-top box of at least 54 euros/month, and add 12 euro's extra to watch certain extra shows and movies (which includes Game of Thrones).
I found a solution without set-top box, but then you stream it on your mobile phone, and somehow need to remotely show it on your TV. This solution is 100 euros/month since it includes internet, tv, mobile provider, etc.
So yeah... I have Netflix, I have Spotify. I never need to download MP3's since they are all available on Spotify.
For movies and tv.... yeah...
And then people wonder why torrents are still so popular? Because it's the most convenient, not because it's free.
Basically, I buy good movies and shows that I actually enjoy rather than subscribing to crappy services that rotate through a dozen or so good movies and a mountain of complete crap. I also don't have to watch commercials, and I can watch my movies on my phone or through a chromecast/fire tv/roku whenever and wherever (as long as I have internet). Also, most of these platforms allow you to download to a mobile/tablet device for streaming on a flight or train or whatever.
This can get expensive, of course, doesn't work for live events and you're still relying on all these systems staying active, but I don't like the societal move away from ownership and towards renting. If I know I love Back to the Future, why do I need to pay Netflix/HBO/cable/etc subscription so that I can hope that they add it to their library on the days that I feel interested in watching it again.
Game of Thrones Season 8 is $27 on Google Play. And if it takes you more than a month to get around to watching it, or if you ever want to watch it again ever, it won't cost you more than that. I think that's pretty nice
As for Pirate Buy, it's blocked in Netherland, so Kickass Torrents seems to be the place to go these days.
Except when they are not.
But it seems the content owners haven't moved on, and so there is no legal way for me to get HBO. So even signing up is already the problem. I wish I had the problem of having 15 different services.
An HBO streaming service is on my wish-list since they consistently offer quality content. However, this is not easily possible, torrenting is quicker and more practical - so yeah...
Not for TV and streaming services.
I basically feel Netflix to be a rip off, and Prime's value proposition is faster deliveries, better discounts and a few free Kindle books.
And despite trying to use these services for a long time, I am still a fan and a proponent of torrents for such consumption as I get all the content, on time, on my terms and can consume it in a way I like.
Music, is sorted. TV and Movies isn't.
As a pretty large portion of the stuff seemed to not be available here this made it basically unusable.
- Even though the minimum wage here is half that of the UK, for some reason Netflix is more expensive, and has less selection.
- They have no content in the official language of the country, not even subtitles. When you go to the cinema, movies are dubbed or have subtitles.
- They push a lot of Russian language content, even though most people under 35 don't speak it, and it is not even a semi official language.
Amazon don't have operations here, you can sign up to Amazon Prime for video in another country, but it only shows their own content.
I found this out when I tried to show it to my daughters. Apparently the copyright agreements don't cover how to split the proceeds from streaming, so nobody can sell Amazon, Netflix, etc the right to stream it.
But it is on The Pirate Bay...
It's weird; you can't watch it on demand, but you can virtually DVR it when it is "broadcast" at an arbitrary time.
As an American in Europe last month, I experienced:
Watching Showtime through Playstation Vue was impossible from European IP, and impossible through US VPN. So I torrented Billions instead of trying a redundant unportable Showtime through Amazon Video subscription, or instead of trying a redundant Showtime subscription through their native app assuming they have one.
Watching Game of Thrones through HBO Now also had the same issues. But downloading torrents over VPN worked really fast. I only used VPNs partially out of habit, and partially not to get my host (hotel/airbnb) in trouble.
Because VPNs were so readily detected and blocked, it reminded me to consider buying a dedicated IP address in a few different countries for VPN, instead of having IP addresses that all the VPN users use. I have not done this yet, as I also heard that another way to detect VPNs is by knowing if the IP block is associated with a data center. I wonder if this is really done by the services I use.
Final note is that I did notice that alot of the torrent providers are doing "webrips" now instead of ripping in the highest quality their TV provides applying compression. The webrips are noticeable worse as the streaming service already is using compression.
Kind of weird outcome currently.
The system still sucks but effectively there is enough available to keep me going.
In the meantime if some media isn't convenient for me to consume, it is off my radar. I don't don't bother either way.
Now we seem to be entering a time where, as media mega-corps have appeared and won us back to paying for content and having content easily accessible, they're starting to think they can ramp up the prices and lock away "their" content in a silo with a hefty price-tag for entry.
It seems as if we're going to move back towards a much higher price for taking part in the culture that surrounds current media; and that in turn is going to lead to more copyright infringement. Only this time the media corps have got the internet sewn up pretty well
It would be ideal if the reaction were to rest control of culture from the hands of big business a little with some statutory reform. But that in turn rests on whether countries get democratic reform to proportionalise representation and enable the tackling of smaller issues like disenfranchisement from culture and locking away of works so they can't ever enter the public domain.
We circled. Streaming services partially were about to solve the problem of not paying serious $$$ for a cable subscription (lots of programming that people don't care about/watch) by providing a cheap, affordable service with lost of content that is interesting and worth to watch. Today, streaming services are creating the very same problem they were trying to solve.
This video describes the problem really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDF-S68kx5o
I was trying to show a tv show to my girlfriend last week, it was from 2007, not crazy long time ago, it's just 12 years ago and there was no way to find it legally.
Teh only place where I found it was Amazon prime video, as a per episode paid download, not in streaming, but it wasn't available in my country, even though I'm a primenow subscriber.
I ended up torrenting it (and the only torrent site where I found it was thepiratebay, nobody else had it)
For anyone who has not seen the documentary, yet. One of my favourites.
For one, P2P is mostly a myth — most people (myself included, I will admit) are pure leechers that only seed at very low bandwidth while downloading. Seeders are either altruistic downloaders who rent a dedicated seedbox, or some servers in Russia whose incentive structure I fail to comprehend (or more honestly: haven't looked into).
Number two: because of this, the catalog is not amazing. Even popular recent shows have issues. Case from very recently: I gave up on finding 1080p versions of The Good Place season 1 & 2 (on public trackers at least). Anything not in English? Try your luck but mostly forget it.
It's worse for music — the system doesn't incentivize a lot of small uploads but rather grouping them. So finding rare tracks/b-sides is very hard. Back in the day, Kazaa and eMule were vastly better with rarities.
This is not an indictment of BitTorrent — it's still the best we have. But I wish we had better.
Is this a 1080p rip of The Good Place, season 1 and 2? https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/24818297/The_Good_Place_-_S...
There's also Usenet.
With that said, how do you address it? Probably by making software more affordable for those who pirate it, wish to buy it but cannot. Offering low cost subscriptions, e.g. instead of exorbitant one time fees. I don't necessarily want to buy a game.. I dont play games that much anymore, but I wouldn't mind subscribing to a service that offered it for a month or two, get my jollies and then leave when I'm not using it.
So rather than try to defeat it - and ideas are notoriously hard to defeat... try to "compete" with it and pray that people's conscience kicks in at some point.
I don't see what more past that one can do.
I couldn't disagree more. I pirated Adobe's products many years ago when I was a poor student who couldn't afford the price. I also wouldn't have been able to justify the price of a monthly subscription back then. Now though, I would pay any price up to a couple thousand dollars for a one-time purchase of CS6 Photoshop and Illustrator, but it's literally impossible to do this now.
Even Adobe does it sometimes: https://www.cnet.com/news/5-a-year-for-photoshop-and-other-c...
I want to put the subtitles where I want and pick the font, I want to be able to apply image filters to my movie (I use a monitor calibrated for photo, and it is not ideal for movies, it is much easier to apply a filter than to switch my monitor calibration), also I watch things while working and mpv is much lighter than any browser, I love to be able to seek with the mouse wheel, the stereo mixing on netflix is often horrible and I can't hear the dialogues... There are tons of argument in favor of a real video player.
You pay for a service you don't use. Why? That signals to Netflix that no matter how bad their service is, you'll pay for it.
Waffles didn't innovate. The site that launched after Oink shutdown is largely the same site that is up today (figuratively, I'm sure it'll be back at some point).
The worst part isn't that What is gone, it's that What is gone and nothing can replace it. Like with older games that can't be purchased legally online, the rightsholders have kept us from consuming that content at all. In order to preserve their absolute right to distribute it for money!
The number of people here suggesting Apple Music would have killed it anyway or that Tidal etc is an adequate replacement shows just how effectively the rightsholders have deluded us all again. The currently available streaming services are almost entirely incomparable to the collection once available at What, it's like comparing your local library to the statewide database.
That said, I agree it was a music fan's heaven. Just as Oink was before it. It is sad how badly Apple Music's recommendation system is, how bloated it is with recording industry pushed crap.
the recommendations were pretty well thought out even if not my cup of tea, and you could actually see what was new or active without having to worry about the piper being paid.
if you wanted to listen to your weirdly specific music tastes, it was perfect for that.
Taking this setup down would require someone to take every single person/node down, although it might have more issues with availability.
Citation needed.
Private trackers are and were always for data hoarders and bitrate freaks. The average Spotify subscriber was never the target audience of private trackers.
Another big change for me was the industry got wise to leaks. Now when an album leaks, the labels have a plan to immediately offer it for streaming on a major service or even media partner like NPR.
One of the major values of private Audio trackers was you got to hear stuff way before other people. Even this has been largely taken away. (Though sometimes the previews are now only a few songs)
EDIT: the loss of the forums, knowledge, metadata is truly heartbreaking... i really can't think about it too much
https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/german-parliam...
Ill bet it amounts to 'inappropriate remarks' and that not stating exactly what it is, instead using the 'sexual harassment' doublespeak is just a FUD tool to attempt to sabotage the Pirate Party.
Here's a link to what seems to be the party's response. From my reading, possibly tainted by translation, he agreed to step down if the European Parliament's Consultative Committee on Harassment at Work found that he had engaged in harassment, they did, and he resigned, but they were unable to remove him from the list due to regulations.
While I can't seem to find an account of what exactly transpired, it does appear that the European Parliament's Consultative Committee on Harassment at Work concluded that something did indeed transpire that falls under sexual harassment.
But even without details looking at Julia Redas track record and the fact that the German pirate party and European pirate party distanced themselves from him suggests more than a minor error in judgement. It’s unbelievable that he could successfully trick his party so he could get on the candidates list as number 2. And he will be there on election day! This is no FUD but something they have to blame on themselves.
(That blog entry is linked in this Buzzfeed article: https://www.buzzfeed.com/de/pascalemueller/europawahl-pirate... )
I mean, I'm certainly not going to vote for them because they are far, far away from me politically, but imho their reaction to the whole affair was correct and shouldn't be held against them.
I rather have a rupt to the core bastard, which still prevents a catastrophic climate change, because he game of thrones whole industries.
Cause that's the only way climate change is going to slow down..
Mostly, they campaign for things like police accountability and run candidates to force focus on certain issues like surveillance and net neutrality. They don't win, in those cases, but it's a good way to keep solidly-Democratic candidates from letting the issues slide. But there are some Pirates holding offices like town council seats, which is inspiring to me.
(And on a practical level, they seem to be way better at recognizing their position and making an impact than much bigger factions like the Libertarian Party. Perhaps ironically, they've got some great organization.)
Has this been tried?
They have effectively zero presence in New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, or Philadelphia
> But there are some Pirates holding offices like town council seats
Where? How many?
> And on a practical level, they seem to be way better at recognizing their position and making an impact than much bigger factions like the Libertarian Party.
As someone who's pretty tuned in to US politics, including local politics, I can't identify any impact that the Pirate Party has had. In fact, it's almost impossible to tell that they even exist, in 2019.
https://old.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_tabl...
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/gerrymandering-illegal-mathema...
https://theintercept.com/2017/11/03/maine-ranked-choice-voti...
A ranked-choice voting system would encourage the existence of more parties. Even a run off voting would help with the existence of more parties, while still preserving the simplicity of FPTP (though, getting people to vote is hard enough, forcing them to go vote a second time would probably be even harder).
I know I'm an extremist though(statistically speaking), even in this forum.
Total IP abolition in combination with a strongly enshrined right to repair, which would necessitate access to source code of binaries given, would be perfectly in the spirit of the free software movement.
The same law that protects people from stealing GPL code also protects movie studios from having their content copied and redistributed without permission. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the GPL family of licenses' restrictions on exactly how you can use GPL software are legally difficult to discern from media companies' efforts to restrict how we are allowed to consume their works.
But there are things that I suspect would be easier to disentangle. I wouldn't mind seeing some sort of provision where copyrighted works can more easily fall into the public domain when they've been abandoned by their copyright holders, for example. We could also stand to roll back some of the power grabs that media companies have managed to get codified.
What The Swedish Pirate Party Wants With Patents, Trademarks, And Copyright (2012):
> Copyright must be reformed. We’d like to keep the copyright monopoly for commercial use (but with shorter, more sensible terms of protection). The big problem is that copyright has expanded in the past 20 years, going from being something that only corporations needed to care about, into something that criminalizes the entire young generation (and more and more people who aren’t even particularly young anymore).
> The Swedish Pirate Party wants to; Legalize file-sharing and other non-commercial sharing [...] At most 20 years of protection from the publication of a work. [...] Registration after five years. [...] Sensible regulation for quotations, parodies, and remixes [...] A ban on DRM
http://falkvinge.net/2012/10/13/what-the-swedish-pirate-part...
Richard Stallman (2012):
> I agree with all three of these positions. I do suggest, however, that it would be better not to group together these three issues and only these three. Why would anyone group together these three unrelated laws? I suspect it reflects the mistaken concept of "intellectual property".
http://www.stallman.org/archives/2012-jul-oct.html#16_Octobe...
You can reform copyright without rendering the GPL unworkable. I asked Rick Falkvinge about this a number of years ago (2008-2010), and he seemed quite confident that the GPL would still be viable given their proposed reforms.
(Current Pirate Parties appear to use similar policies, such as Pirate Party UK:"A fair and balanced copyright regime that is suitable for the 21st century is an absolute necessity for the UK to remain competitive in a global economy that is built upon ideas and innovation. Copyright should give artists and innovators the chance to make money from their work; however, that needs to be balanced with the rights of society as a whole. We will work for copyright reform and reduce copyright terms to 10 years to balance everyone's needs." https://www.pirateparty.org.uk/policy/culture/home)
I think it is a rather nice trade to give up GPL if we get in return the right to repair to deal with DRM and no copyright to allow for sharing and modifying software.
But Stallman and the pirate party have come up with a pretty nice proposal in the end: a much shorter time limit on copyright that can be extended if you give more rights to the user.
* People believe that you shouldn't be able to remix art to make money off it.
* People believe that you should be able to pirate games for free, often because they feel that the games makers are exploiting them (via DLCs, in-game purchases, whatever)
* People believe that essays, books, etc. should be pirateable
* People believe that business software shouldn't be pirateable because software engineers need to make money. You'll usually be downvoted if you suggest this on, say, a Jetbrains release or something.
All this taken together, to me, provides some amount of evidence to me that this stuff is just characteristic of the kinds of employment that most people on this forum have, rather than some sort of philosophical position people have on this issue. Hope this saves you some time in discussion.
We're demanding a better solution.
I think fan fiction is a clear example of the kind of vibrant art community that could emerge if the law got out of its way.
The right to piracy wouldn't kill art. It could cripple the art business, though, but that seems to me like a fair deal.
Even if you pay $5 a month for <insert music streaming service> and only listen to my songs, I get literally $0.00 (up to significant figures). They pool everything together so essentially you are subsidising Justin Bieber; just putting it out there...
In Canada, Pirate Party claims to stand for: - Increased privacy of citizens - Increased ability of citizens to own and control their data - Increased visibility and public discourse &debate of technology's impact on private lives, business climate, intellectual property, societal changes, etc
As such, it is the only party here to openly tackle, let alone make it their core platform, what I personally perceive to be the defining issues of the 21st century.
I feel that Pirate Party may end up like the Green party of few decades ago -- initially perceived as fringe, marginalized, irrelevant; until we realize they are tackling emerging core societal problems.
As such, while I'm extremely in favour of supporting creators (all my software, from OS to Photoshop is legally purchased; I duly pay my Netflix/Spotify/Prime, purchase photography and clipart when I need them, go to concerts, go to cinema, tip baskers, participate in Patreon, buy webcomic books, etc; and discussion on whether those appropriately pay artists is important but orthogonal to this one), I do support Pirate Party of Canada through my membership and might consider voting if they had a local candidate.
They're suggesting that we move to a different model.
https://boingboing.net/2019/05/22/dont-pay-the-piper.html
This is, once again, the ethic of the existing model.
This is how it should be - there is simply no rational case for mindless entertainment ("TV/Movies/Music") that costs on the order of $10M or $100M to make!
Actually I am goign to vote for them more because of their proposals on liquid and direct democracy, I haven't followed their debate on copyrights in the last few years. When I was the most popular proposal to replace copyright was a global license, which actually exists in a very badly implemented form in France for bars and shops.
But we don't run that desktop software now. Open Source is better than closed source for many applications, then there is SaaS. I am not going to want to get excited about Microsoft Word as nobody uses word processors these days.
For many, perhaps most people, Pirate Bay is literally the ONLY solution available.
I'm using Pirate Bay in a general sense to refer to Bit-torrent but also in a more specific sense as it applies to their longevity.
I guess I always thought things would go back to IRC once all of these sites got taken down. While I was still getting everything I wanted on Undernet or Dalnet, I remember thinking it was brazen to have this stuff on a public website, and that it wouldn't last long if it was legit stuff. It's funny Pirate Bay is still proving me wrong after all these years.
My IRC revival just doesn't seem to be in the cards. I can't even find an active server outside of freenode, which is basically like a stack overflow chat.
https://www.businessinsider.com/pirate-party-rick-falkvinge-...
Now if what.cd came back...that would be a great time
“Of course I buy my songs and hit up Redbox and buy DVDs! That’s how it works!”
The tools will get easier to use and the outputs will continue to approach studio quality.
You hear the stories from folks in the industry: I grew up making movies with my parents camcorder.
Today’s kids will grow up using a computer and iPad to quickly make a movie, aided by ML tools that help edit and create CG content, and publish it instantly for free.
I grew up torrenting and was a proud member of what.cd when that tracker was still alive.
These days I listen to nearly all of my music on paid Spotify subscriptions. The number of people who have access to either Spotify, Amazon Prime, or Apple Music subscriptions must be huge. Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place.
Video is a different beast, but I do like Netflix. Torrents live on for new releases and less available content, though.
Am I willing to go to a local record store and buy a whole album for $14 every time I find a new song I like? Not really. Am I willing to pay $10/mo for unlimited streaming? Absolutely. Am I willing to make sure I'm home at 9pm sharp on a Thursday to watch a TV show? No. Am I willing to pay $30 to stream the whole season on demand? Definitely.
That time requirement will slow the artist down if he has to do it for free, or may even prohibit them. The idea of renumerating the artist is to enable them to produce higher quality work more often; if he has to spend a lot of time begging on Patreon, and half of his projects now are porn because it's the only way he can get cash for his passion projects, we all suffer.
Sorry, I know I get strident on this topic, and hope I come across as civil, but tools are not that important. You could make a TV show for free at your local cable company, remember public access?
Equating IP with real estate is bad for the society: why would someone keep producing and keep performing if they made a hit with a song, or a movie, or a game?
BitTorrent is peer-to-peer. Anyone can join a swarm and see the IP addresses of other computers they’re communicating with. Knowing the files came from a trusted a trusted uploader won’t hide your identity from that.
Like many others here, Steam/Netflix/Spotify have largely stopped me from torrenting anything. But we continue to slide toward needing a separate streaming service for every single TV series, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see the piracy pendulum swing back the other way.
You can't download "pirated" torrents except through a VPN.
I mean, there are prominent warnings on TPB.
Not only that, spammers have taken over the site - probably, randsomware spreaders. Torrents few minutes old would have thousands of seeds with ridiculous file sizes.
It's sad. TPB's like the Github of torrents. TPB's reputation system and comments was a godsend. Till now, there's still no replacement for it.
I feel something's up with the current owners of site.
Lots of new ones all the time.
> Many times, the search bar claims zero result
Timeouts - very common. Just refresh. Maybe needs a few attempts.
> spammers have taken over the site ... Torrents few minutes old would have thousands of seeds with ridiculous file sizes
As has been the case for a decade, prefer torrents from users with the green or pink (trusted and VIP) icons. The spammy ones from unknowns get deleted often.
I think I recall this with Adobe PhotoShop...