GitHub reinstates Popcorn Time code
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
PT itself is a relatively banal app anyway, even if it gets nuked someone else will rewrite it. Napster begat Gnutella begat BitTorrent begat Popcorn, it will not end until the movie business gives consumers what they want: a cheap global service to watch anything anytime.
So I downloaded it off Usenet instead.
Edit: Starz apparently has distribution rights at the moment. 7 days free then $8.99/month. So I could’ve legally watched it for free by signing up via Apple and canceling. Sigh. This is exhausting Hollywood. Get your shit together.
I rarely watch whatever's on. I prefer to watch specific movies from a list of recommendations. This was simply impossible.
Sometimes I couldn't find the movies I wanted. Sometimes they weren't available in my country. Sometimes they weren't available in their original language, or with the right subtitles. Sometimes the streaming platform didn't like my hardware. Sometimes it didn't let me watch the movie over more than 24 hours.
Paying to watch movies felt like paying for making the experience more grating.
Piracy gives me any movie I desire in around 20 minutes. I get a file. I own this file for as long as I want. I can play that movie offline, put it on any device, share it with anyone, or transform it as I please. It's mine.
I don't think I'll be paying for streaming again. Movie tickets absolutely, but not streaming.
One can get HDCP bypass solutions no money at all, but the technology should never have existed in the first place.
Worse yet, despite failing so horribly, development is still going into it, with major players like Netflix pushing it as well.
Ever since the mid-2000s through to today there's a load of TVs, displays, etc on the market that claimed to be DP and HDMI compatible but failed on the edge-cases (e.g. pumping 4K@60Hz down a DisplayPort 1.2 pipe). In my experience the gear that was HDCP compliant tended to perform better (but by no means perfectly cough Philips...).
Compare that to the mess of compliance and functionality with SCART connectors in the 1990s. I had a TV with a true RGB SCART input and a bunch of devices claimed to offer RGB SCART output, yet didn't actually support it (I assume because few consumers knew how to take advantage of RGB SCART, given the default was Composite-over-SCART and at SDTV it looks good enough).
There are certain adapters that do other things, but can also be used to strip HDCP.
It's often used as part of a setup to capture the HDMI output from Macs, since those sometimes have HDCP as well.
* one service to pay for
* what they want to watch
* on the device they choose
* on their schedule
* at their location.
Content holders want: to restrict, distinguish, and control every one of those.
And frankly, just having an easy accessible way to rent any motion picture if it's not on a streaming platform. There's no reason for digital copies to be so inaccessible. Some things are literally only available on dvd/blue-ray or pirated.
Wouldn't whatever this "easy accessible way" is be the one service you're skeptical people want? I don't think anyone saying "I want one service" means "I hope to be locked in to one provider", but rather "I want one easy interface, and not to have to worry about surveying and paying for lots of siloed libraries."
Of course it's way better if you steal without consequence, but this is not a scalable approach.
Which music streaming service is that?
[Not snarky, genuinely interested.]
Not all. There are many songs I had on CD that I can't play anymore.
Businesses are in the game of enticing customers. If your homeware store is so bad that double-digit percentages of the population choose to steal glasses and cutlery from local bars rather than shop at your store, you need to take a long hard look at your business and figure out what the fuck you're doing so wrong.
You can bitch and moan about how it's wrong for people to steal from the bars if you want, but that's reality denial. It will not get you more customers.
Any other way you look at it digital media distribution should be a couple of dollars and an http (or torrent if they want to skip the bandwidth costs) file transfer away.
Why do you feel so indignant about something that doesn't effect you? If you want to pay for a dozen different streaming services, nobody is stopping you.
I am a little bit indignant because it does affect me. When a small number of people abuse the system it means the rest of us can't have nice things.
If there were not rampant piracy, I would not have to know what is DRM and all of its associated inconvenience, because it wouldn't have to be a thing.
Not that the current solution isn't broken -- I do pay for (nearly) a dozen different streaming services. But I can't help feeling that I'm subsidising your lawless, anti-social approach, and it doesn't seem exactly fair that you get the better experience.
You have to acknowledge that if everyone did like you, then the whole thing wouldn't be able to sustain itself. It only works because most people take the hit and play by the rules.
It's really quite saddening to me that some classic cinema is essentially dead, completely inaccessible.
I eventually found Mubi, which is a relatively cheap arthouse movie streaming/rental service. So at least I have that for now. Until they go out of business because they're not popular enough.
At lest the German version that I get to see. I want to know how much that costs but it only offers me a 7days free subscription. Even when I go to the gift option it asks me to sign in...this is terrible.
maandelijks €9,99 per maand
jaarlijks €7,99 per maand
Afgeschreven in één betaling van €95,88
Might have to give this a try.
It doesn't even have to be something as niche as that. Even popular productions can be impossible to watch if the rights holders aren't interested.
Try to find 77 Sunset Strip. It was a massively popular television series that ran for years on TV. It simply doesn't exist anymore. Not on broadcast, cable, streaming, DVD, or any other platform. You can't even torrent it.
I have a relative who lives off the grid. He has this massive collection of thrift store VHS tapes that he watches. I'm so envious every time I see it. So much quality material that simply cannot be watched anymore by any means because they never made the transition to digital.
You sure? Seems to be around on torrent sites these days. (At least, most of it.)
But yes, it's frustrating that there's media out there with no legal way to watch it. At least, not unless you're lucky enough to stumble upon a secondhand physical copy.
I have that issue as well and i'm happy I see more and more vintage stuff (shows and movies) on Archive.
Its like PT on steroids with add-ons.
The only caveat is taking 5 additional minutes to install add-ons (TPB+ can be your first choice to get you going)
There is one that list IMDB TOP 250, in order, ready to stream
I have Netflix and Disney+ just to buy moral credit; but since ~1y torrent at will again. Thank you MPAA for enlightening me
When you decided you don't give a damn, the Torrentio plugin is where It's at, scrapes way many public trackers.
"IMPORTANT: We do not collect any history or logs of what addons/sources you use for streaming! Furthermore, if you login as a Guest User, no personal data will be collected whatsoever." - https://web.archive.org/web/20200514142904/https://www.strem... (Their own privacy page doesn't load for me)
That clause has not always been there.
.consent-banner { display: none; }
ion-tab[tab="new"] .content-header { display: none; }
ion-tab[tab="popular"] .content-header { display: none; }eg. I use instantwatcher.com
uBlock Origin is not the same as uBlock. I prefer Origin.
How to open the Dashboard https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dashboard
Guess what, it does not just disappear from my Plex/Emby server...
Online stream services was suppose to resolve the CableTV problem of paying for 1000 channels to watch the 5 you want.
Now Every network, every media company, every one is creating their own streaming service with all of their content "exclusive" so I would need to sign up for like 20+ services to get access to about 60% of the content that I want to watch as the other 40% is simply not on any streaming service at all it is either too new or too old
Justwatch.com has more than 85 Streaming Services in their database... that is crazy
e.g. I explicitly disliked a show and anytime I'd open Netflix, for days/weeks, it be on top either a banner or one of the first in one or many categories. Felt almost like mocking :)
If your libraries is shallow (which anyway consisted of mostly r trite subpar content) it's your problem - don't hit me with your pathetic dark pattern. Their support kept giving robotic answers. It was outrageous.
They had a really good short lived comedy series called "Party Down" that I loved. Had a great cast! https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1073507/
I think Outlander might be one of its more popular series now. Based on a book series and brought to TV by Ronald D Moore who did Battlestar Galactica (which personally I am cautious about because the last season or 2 of BSG was not my favorite)
About ten years ago, Starz had a deal with Netflix to stream their content next day. I remember watching some of Party Down that way as it aired.
WOW. I had netflix once for a few days, I paid for netflix just to watch House MD, a week into netflix, they removed House MD from my region, I cancelled subscription and moved to PT. Never came back to netflix, I just no longer trust them, too much effort and too much legal complications. I can imagine paying for one portal, but more than two? That's more expensive and less user friendly then cable TV.
1. No, I don’t want to get rewatch suggestions.
2. Yes, I’d like to have always the same thumbnail for the same show.
3. Yes, I’d like to tell you "Never show me this show again".
4. No, I don’t want any automatic screen movement.
A cherry on top would be having a toggle to only show me shows with English subs.
1. The content is nicely organised;
2. There's a button for it on my TV remotes; and
3. The UX is way more accessible for the elderly members of my family.
I run a local media server for things I have on BluRay or DVD, I used to archive shows I could also get on one of those 2 platforms but it became major hassle because they would remove and add the shows my family wants access to all the time... When I started tracking it, it was amazing how much churn there was on popular titles
My current frustration is stargate. It is not available digitally in my region in any legal way because mgm is trying to negotiate a buyout by apple and doesn’t want any streaming rights to get in the way. I wanted to show it to my son and my options are limited to ordering a physical disk for a one-off viewing, or piracy.
How would you feel to rent a car, go halfway to destination, take a nap in a hotel, then you wake up , car has no wheels, because wheels you had couldn't be used on that specific road, and you weren't warned about it. Breach of trust? Waste of time? Disappointment?
Netflix have the data, he has the money, what's the problem?
The problem is "too much legal complications" and that problem does not exist on Popcorn Time.
So you sold a license to a local broadcasting company to for a time window and number of runs for a show. Not more you can do with no back channel for customers to request individual shows and pay for them. By only granting one license per are you can enforce some scarcity and get your money & hopefully users liked it. Channels could the compete who gets the best time based licenses, who gets the new hot stuff first, etc.
Now here we are with a global network with basically any user being able to request any show and pay for it (or get a subscription for a channel carrying it) and yet the media companies still carry one like one had to win an auction to get one of the broadcast masters, drag in on top of a hill to broadcast it and then return it back to someone else to do the same thing.
Yhis is just a service that fills yet another gap from all this fragmentation, but in a way it's better than some media company having a monopoly on anything we can watch.
Now Netflix has a higher market cap than most Hollywood Studios, and Spotify has a higher market cap than most if not all record companies.
But this is the classic case of not listening to your customers and innovators dilemma.
Old models of business are very slow to change and it has happened time and time again. Movies, music, newspapers, and so forth.
JustWatch tell me that AMC on demands had it to rent for 5.99$, is it possible that you missed that? It could be them that got the exclusive right for it... that had to be expensive for sure if it's the case.
All of the convenience arguments are gone now, it’s just about $15 you didn’t think you should have to pay. Super weird thing to admit!
I get doin it, but I don’t get defending it.
I regularly tell my kids no when there's a movie we have to pay full price for. They can wait a few months.
Let's reword that as:
"I couldn't get this thing for the price I wanted so I stole a copy"
Seriously? Imagine going into a box store and doing that. You would face a high probability of being arrested for theft.
Speaking of CDs: the music industry (maybe RIAA was involved, I don’t know) seems to have figured out digital content delivery. I’ve got exactly one subscription for music: Spotify. I can get all the music I want to listen to with this, more than I could ever get when I used BitTorrent (public trackers were sometimes limited, and seeding on ADSL was hard). If they were to raise the price, I’d still use it. There are issues with how artists are remunerated for their work, but the problem of distribution is basically solved. Why can’t the film industry do this?
You deprived someone of the revenue generated by their property. Still theft.
If you squat in an apartment, is that theft?
Revenue from a purchase that I'm not going to make is non-existent. It can't be lost or gained.
You have not; that revenue never existed.
Squatting is sometimes legal (in the UK at least) and squatters can end up owning the property if they live there long enough.
It's not theft.
Even if he was authorized to make the copy he would have still needed to pay to use the copy.
He's not authorized to make or use the copy.
It's not a useless distinction though. One can argue that stealing is bad because when I steal your car, you don't have access to your car anymore. If I were to copy your car I wouldn't harm you.
That doesn't mean it's okay to illegally copy something, but comparing it to theft is unhelpful at best and misleading at worst.
I would happily pay something like $30 or even $50 per month if I would get access to everything anytime. But then again that's probably because right now I pay around $15 per service that only give me ~5% of the total content each.
So presumably, only $4 dollars a month is more than enough to cover the cost of producing all Hollywood movies - ignore of course, all other sources of revenue such as cinema tickets and product placement etc.
Is marketing and distribution online really 9x the cost of producing the movie itself?
[1] https://stephenfollows.com/how-has-the-cost-of-making-a-movi...
Jokes aside, this is a very interesting calculation - it seems the issue with a system like this would be the monopoly and centralization, as the numbers themselves stack up quite ok.
And marketing costs are huge and for some reason not included in the film budget.
In 2020, people are consuming "movies" and "television" like they're the same thing. You have to include those in the cost.
Finally, if you're including worldwide subscribers, you have to include worldwide producers, not just Hollywood.
Other movies will balance this out though by making a loss - that's the business model. The interesting thing would be the average profit margin across all films at a studio or the industry.
Privacy.
Streaming services have increasingly terrifying and inescapable telemetry. Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Google - all of them collect extremely telling things about us due to when we pause video, for how long, which bits we rewind back to, when we consume the content during the time, where (GPS-wise), how often we play them, the collective profiling of us based on what we download in general...and many other things we don't even know about.
After listening to Shoshana Zuboff's audiobook 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' - the most important book I have ever read on technology - I am very aware of this. The data companies don't want us to be aware of what they're doing to us.
I'm not condoning piracy, and I believe content creators should be fairly compensated for their hard work - but unless there's a convenient way to be able to consume content in my own open-source local software such as MPV, all offline, and in full privacy without being spied on, I refuse to legitimise the alternative.
I realise there's still blu-ray and DVD, but not always - many releases are web only, now. I'd even pay a premium more for such non-DRM content...your move, Hollywood.
It was never natural to have people watch and profile us when we're already paying money to watch personal entertainment, on this massive global scale.
And most importantly, those few randoms don't have a flood of other data being scraped from your phone, social media, credit card transactions etc. to cross-correlate your viewing with. They don't see that you paused the movie when the main character put on some Nikes and went online shopping for a pair of Nikes for yourself. They don't see that you have friends over. They don't see what brand of microwave popcorn you watch with your movies. They don't care.
> when we pause video, for how long, which bits we rewind back to, when we consume the content during the time, where (GPS-wise), how often we play them
is entirely hidden. What model gives that up, but keeps the identity of the video you're watching private?
I agree about streaming services.
But any peer on the torrent you downloaded knows your IP address. Content holders often do this, they monitor the IP addresses that download their shows and send the user a letter via their ISP to cease and desist.
You think I'm only talking about Netflix? What about the data giant Spotify?
https://libraryfreedom.chat/t/extraordinary-amount-of-teleme...
And as for the one company you mention, Netflix, here's some info which simply proves your claim wrong:
https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/2uffl9/how_much_da...
They'll share their data with the NSA when they come knocking, just like all the other large corporations. In fact, they probably already _are_ sharing it.
Now said president discovers that a few people he considered trustworthy seem to be secretly having qualms about his increasing powergrabs. He manufactures a few roadblocks in their careers and within a year and a half they have all been cleaned out.
With them gone he is able to go ever further and more brazen. One day he proclaims himself dictator, and all branches cheer and celebrate.
Ever heard of Max Schrems? He did exactly this (use GDPR to obtain his records) for Facebook.
Not sure why you think Netflix would never go through the same hullabaloo - they operate in the EU as well.
I don't know about Hollywood movies, but for TV shows that would require the makers buying a perpetual license for anything they use in the show. That would probably make it too expensive to make something anyone would actually want to watch. Shows would have to have no cultural references (eg a pop song) in them at all.
Honestly, I can survive the thought of not having a Bowie song in every other production.
The app is for watching movies. there are lots of movies that are legal to distribute this way for anybody. And people could have rights to copy specific films from other routes. Copyright terms (if they exist) vary by jurisdiction, some countries have eg 25 years from date of production for movies.
Also, the benefits of tit for tat sharing to prevent Leachers are also less important - with more people having faster internet, there isnt anymore the "everyone wants to download far more than they can be bothered to upload" issue.
> there isnt anymore the "everyone wants to download far more than they can be bothered to upload" issue.
There’s the “people quit their BT client as soon as they finish their download” problem which faster internet doesn’t solve.
If the sending client prioritizes data to clients requesting rare blocks, that problem is solved. It will also give clients an incentive to download the rarest blocks first to keep the swarm healthy.
Please define "illegal software" in this context.
It's not great for doing anything illegal, and criminals get caught faster because they're using Bitcoin [1].
[1] https://mashable.com/article/dark-web-child-pornography-ring...
And most major Linux distributions do have torrents for their installation images.
Also more recently distributed technologies have been kinda morfing together with P2P, with PeerTube, IPFS, Fediverse and all the various cryptocurrencies.
The way Popcorn Time is advertised makes it pretty clear:
>No restrictions. Watch any movie or TV show as many times as you want.
>Awesome catalogue. If the movie or TV show is out there, Popcorn Time will find the best version possible and start streaming it right away.
There are so many video streaming usage as everyone is now capable of capturing the video and uploading it live.
That being said, your argument is ridiculous.
What's so different about TV/movies?
Movies such as that of the Mission Impossible series and the Avengers series cost $150M-$350M per movie to make [1] [2], without a theatrical release and/or a temporary pay-per-view model via Apple Movies or Amazon Prime (or most of the world being on a $20-30+/month Netflix, Disney Plus, etc. subscription, which is not the case yet), there wouldn't be much interest in financing such movies.
[0] https://sonicscoop.com/2017/05/25/budget-record-album-2017/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission:_Impossible_%E2%80%93_...
No one signs up for Spotify to binge listen for a month and then unsubscribe. In video, that's not uncommon. I heard of people who would wait for Game of Thrones to end the season, then buy a month of HBOGo and watch the whole thing, then unsubscribe. Likewise for movies; if you're okay not being up to date with the latest movies you could just buy a subscription for a month once or twice a year, watch the things you've missed and then unsubscribe.
I think that's a big part of the reason movies don't go in that direction. Most of what you're paying for in a movie is novelty: a novel plot, novel characters, novel setting, etc. Music is effectively the opposite; you find something you like, and you listen to it all the time. Their model works perfectly for a "pay per view" system.
As for the fragmentation, I suspect the amount of money that the rights owner gets to keep is higher on their own system. I.e. Netflix gets a flat $X/month/user, which they have to split among all their publishers. If you're a large enough publisher the math on what Netflix will pay you versus the number of subscribers you can get yourself probably works out.
The only better, yet still tenable, model I can think of would be for Netflix to go to a model similar to cable. I.e. you pay $10 to get access to Netflix's library. If you want to access Disney content on Netflix, you pay $8 for a Disney upgrade. If you also want WB, you pay $6 for a WB upgrade (in addition to the Disney one).
It would likely be cheaper than paying for Netflix and a separate Disney+ (I have to believe the marginal cost for distributing a movie is lower if we centralized on Netflix than it is for them both to have their own CDNs, etc). Publishers still get paid per-user, so they don't have to worry how big their piece of the Netflix pie is. Users get a single interface to stream all of their favorite stuff.
Piracy is always going to be more prevalent for movies for two primary reasons:
1) Movies are ephemeral for most people. You watch it, and you move on. You don't need something like Spotify to manage a massive library of content, you can download stuff and delete it. Keeping it involves a lot of storage
2) Music has a much larger convenience factor. I'm fairly often doing something else (driving, working, exercising) and think "dang, I want to listen to this thing I've never listened to before". Movies are typically something I plan more. I would like to see a particular movie, but not right this second. I can wait a few hours or days for it to download, no biggie. Discovery is the bigger issue with movies, and that's already provided by third party sites like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB.
Netflix was giving the industry what... 10 dollars per family? They think they can get more than that by splitting into 20 different platforms. They're probably right.
Lol. Netflix is a joke, every time i sign up again I find it lacking tonnes of content.
It optimizes for flicking through its catalog so nobody notices its missing nearly everything.
It does this to wear you down into submission watching or rewatching some old crap.
I went to watch the last season of the 100 before the new release, found its catalog is two seasons behind. Its a mess.
Netflix content beats many open TV channels in my area, at least in the fiction and documentary arenas. And like some TV/cable networks do, Netflix invests heavily in producing their own content. It's just a matter of time until they figure out how/if/when they will launch a TV-like continuous stream of content that includes news, weather, sports, gameshows, realities... And add more focus on "live" and sell differentiated content packages by user taste.
Click on it for autoplay to start and watch a bundled playlist of current (random) content or, if they decide to dig into it: news, weather, sports etc.
This has nothing to do with Netflix though and everything to do with broadcasters buying rights in a region/country.
If ABC agreed to an exclusive license of Arrow to TV3 Australia, then Netflix cannot stream Arrow to Australia customers of Netflix. But can stream to New Zealand.
What these production companies need to do is stop being greedy, let a few services exist for competition, and allow licensing to 1 or more services.
As consumers we may need to buy 2-3 subscriptions, but production companies can pick and choose which services have their content by licensing to the highest bidder.
Unfortunately what we have is every production company trying to run their own service to get the maximum profits which means consumers are stuck buying 5+ services to watch all we want. And because of this, piracy will continue to exist.
You can defend netflix all you like. Its still a sub par experience to torrenting.
Stop trying to "fix" a working distribution network.
Start improving it. Legitimize the distribution, get rid of the scummy torrent sites, empower the people, and run ads directly in the content like they are already doing with product placement or self release with skipable ads.
No, its not the perfect, most effective profit wise, but that isnt the fucking point is it. Supplying the people with entertainment is. Artwork is. Culture is.
You can still make profit, nobody will complain, but if you start shitting on the fans you deserve to get whats comin.
Seriously, the industry had its entire distribution channel paid and developed for free, and they shit on it instead of embracing it.
Can you imagine if amazon was able to get people to deliver their products to eachother for free? You think theyd be upset?
Netflix stuck on season 5.
Why?
Prob same old bullshit. Exclusivity and some shit murdoch run network trying to maintain relevance in a youtube world.
Netflix is garbage all over the world, it was only every half decent in USA where its now being erroded
Isn't monopoly generally regarded as a bad thing? How do we reconcile that with a single provider in this case?
The real consideration in regards to copyright and market forces is how market forces right against copyright - the existence of tcp, bittorrent, popcorn time, the hundreds of websites streaming copyrighted material against the rightsholders will - they are all the actual market offering information without the monopolization aspect. Its the distortion in the intention because you aren't supposed to have options in procuring copyrighted works - the distribution channels were originally complicated and expensive enough that centralization was required to create copies and thus anyone violating copyright was targetable. The system becomes dysfunctional when millions of people are giving away copies for free, on demand, instantly, anywhere in the world via the Internet - or in the olden days, via CD or VHS rips. It was the advent of digitization of information that brought about the paradigm shift threatening the institution, not any one specific implementation of the concept.
But yea, monopoly is generally regarded as a bad thing in economics. Why is a huge segment of the economy then built around manufacturing artificial monopolies, primarily to the benefit of those with the means to enforce the terms of said monopolies - rarely an individual creator, often a fortune 500 company.
Just say that every content producer must license their work for a "reasonable" price which is connected to the actual viewership (we can do this with streaming).
Companies may litigate this into oblivion but more likely the majority of content would become available cross- distribution.
Don't cinemas work somewhat like this? You have chains owned by WB or whatever by they also show content from other content producers.
Nobody would complain if a Netflix competitor emerged with a library at least as large.
Netflix in 2020 is an entirely different service than it was in 2011 back when their library was full of major titles.
The reality is that the owners of content want their own distribution platforms, maybe because they saw what Apple did to the music industry via iTunes, but I’m not sure.
so the content creation companies shot themselves in the foot by pulling their content to try to own the distribution platform (because it would theoretically give 'em more profits vs sharing it with netflix).
But consumers saw value in netflix because the large library of content to be had for around $10 price point - this beats piracy of $0 for unlimited content. Now, for the same level of content as before, you'd have to pay for a half-dozen or so subscription services - likely adding up to 60-90 dollars per month. Piracy is starting to look good again for most people.
Analysts speculate that the market for streaming services will saturate eventually, but I’m not sure we’ve seen it yet. Disney’s stock is the only one I can see that doesn’t have a YTD gain, but that particular decline follows the the global market trends and Disney faces hard times with their parks these days. Bottom line is that these new platforms don’t seem to be hurting that much.
Large content owners saw the writing on the wall when they were negotiating their contracts with Netflix by adding termination clauses once Netflix viewership reached a certain point.
The consumers are really the only ones hurting at the moment IMO.
You expect them to hand their content over to a middle-man (who is also a competitor), when building a streaming service is trivial with lots of capital?
We were obviously heading in the direction of fragmented, a la carte services for a long time. I don't find having multiple services aggravating; I guess I'm in the minority.
All github does is provide convenience. If you want to use github in a peer-to-peer fashion all the tools are already there.
This is because Pagure stores not just code but also all the project metadata (issues, PRs, Wiki pages, etc.).¨
In comparison most other git forges, including the big ones (GitHub/GitLab) store all project metadata in a central database, so if you want to move or even backup/restore a project you need to do a complicated export/import process.
In comparison on Pagure you can just clone the repo and get all the project data with it. Then just put it on another Pagure instance - done.
Should not be hard to adapt this system to be backed by a distributed system from below.
Proper p2p would be like joining a DHT swarm with a hash and downloading pieces from other peers.
Mercurial had a single command for this, "hg serve", that would just pop up a webserver for sharing. It was extremely useful for me during university, and I've often considered it a key failing that git does not provide a similar command out of the box. As a result, the distributed nature of git is hidden from a lot of people.
For the record, the command to make git do what mercurial does with hg serve is "git daemon --reuseaddr --base-path=. --export-all --verbose --enable=receive-pack".
Obviously this is insecure and anyone who can establish a connection can push and pull from your repo, but if you're just jamming with some friends you don't need github.
The vast majority of Linux developers don't have their own publicly-accessible repository that you can pull from - they push patches to the mailing list.
Various archives can host copies of the mailing lists (you can ask https://www.mail-archive.com to do so for you), and the git repository can obviously be mirrored anywhere anyone who can clone it likes. Congratulations, you now have a globally mirrored, decentralised development process where the canonical repo and any patches submitted never disappear.
You don't even have to "host a server". Simply allowing ssh access to your machine is enough.
But instead having many small hand-maintained servers, the admin of each is responsible for what's hosted on it, and of which there is no registry, doesn't sound much better. Very likely there would be a handful of effective central nodes in that network, but if you take down a couple of them, you end up with a situation where already-involved devs might still be able to navigate the landscape, but for a newcomer it might be really hard to find one of those nodes, or be sure it's one with the "right" revisions.
Also, please be gentle with the instance linked above. If you're running patchwork and have git-ssb installed, it should be available on http://localhost:7718 instead, that's really the way to go.
Anyway, I'm not sure how any kind of p2p system like that's gonna work for the average person and become mainstream when most consumer devices run on battery and drop off the network constantly to save power. Yes there are gateways but that kinda defeats the purpose. Seems better suited as a datacenter tool than something to ship out to normal end users.
At any rate it's not designed for anonymity, so its utility as a piracy tool is limited unless you're on a private IPFS network, which requires server resources.
The idea is quite nice but I wish it wasn't based in NodeJS. I also don't like that it integrates BitCoin - personally I think it just motivates people to try and take over the project.
EDIT: There's also GitChain [2] which again seems abandoned (since 6 years).
One solution is hiding names from everything like say Pirate Bay/Silk Road but I would not trust anything like that to run in my machine. I wouldn't even download TPB app if it is going to be released. It would also make discovery very hard.
I mean realistically speaking, only solution to DMCA is through lobbying but that is almost impossible for individuals to do. This is something that needs to be done through large tech companies but it seems they think laws like DMCA increases the regulatory burden on their competitors and hence don’t care.
But that's where bittorrent comes in, they've solved that issue already.
A p2p bittorrent / magnet file index would work though, through Git (for an offline copy) or otherwise. I'm sure something like that already exists though, I've not been in the piracy world for a while now.
When you buy a DVD, you can rent it to others without a license. Physical ownership.
When you buy a digital file, you're not allowed to rent it out to others without a license. Digital non-ownership. But you have the bits - that's physical ownership.
People want "one place to rent movies" but that will never work. They'd be a middleman monopoly between you and the studios - and middleman monopolies always turn out bad.
In my opinion, there is a "free market" system that the invisible hand wants, which is a digital analogue of what we had with physical distribution, that reconciles the fact that a digital file really is a (virtual) physical object (on a hard drive), and nothing else will work:
You can rent your own digital files to one person at a time via streaming.
Result: There would be multiple online streaming rental stores that have huge catalogues of whatever you want.
Speculation: Everyone would just use those. Studios would raise the prices for digital files to $10k+ because they know it will be rented out. The total sales of units would amount to the high water mark of the number of people who want to watch a file at the same time.
We'd have a rich market where there are multiple players in each layer.
This can never happen but only simulated, up to a point. Copying physical objects requires manufacture work, copying data is essentially free if you neglect the transmission costs. Whatever paradigm digital ownership adopts will not resemble the physical world renting mechanism.
I used your sentence as a straw-man, please forgive me. :)
Sure you could still pirate (just like you could copy DVDs) but if the path of least resistance (factoring in quality, legal and moral costs) is to just rent it legitimately then that's what people would do. Video stores could have just copied DVDs and the studios were very afraid of DVD-Rs when they came out, but that didn't pan out because it's obviously illegal and immoral.
There was a company in California in the early days that had actual people putting actual DVDs into actual DVD players that would stream on demand across the internet, but they folded when they got a legal threat. It might be legally OK - I don't think it's ever been tested in court.
>According to the MPA, the application includes links to pirate sites, pirate APIs, and pirate torrent trackers, which are used to download pirated movies and TV-shows.
Laughing in Awesome Piracy[0]
^-- that's a very sarcastic way to say: yes, git the protocol may be decentralized, but git the (distribution) ecosystem is not and was not ever really censorship resistant beyond "I can keep what I have and share it in a small circle"
If you weren't already, I'd strongly encourage having some kind of caching proxy between you and the NPM repositories, just to ensure that some kind of takedown action won't screw up your builds.
The fact they had no concern at all filing a frivolous take-down request shows how broken the DMCA checks and balances are. This is a long standing problem [1]
[1] https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/media-entertainment-law/...
MPAA is not stupid and they knowingly abused the process in this case because they wanted to put Microsoft in a tight situation and gauge their response. Of course it went exactly as planned with Microsoft rolling over like every other tech company that won’t stand up for its users’ rights.
This is _exactly_ why we need decentralized P2P tech btw.
> Moreover, the Project in question hosts software that is distributed and used to infringe on the MPA Member Studios’ copyrights. See Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., 545 U.S. 913, 940 n.13 (2005) (‘the distribution of a product can itself give rise to liability where evidence shows that the distributor intended and encouraged the product to be used to infringe’)
I agree though, they went around the courts with a DMCA takedown, and should’ve sued.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,....
The MPAA are legally savvy enough to know this was an abuse of process. If any DMCA reforms are needed, top of my list would be removing takedown privileges from copyright holders that abuse it.
We have the technology to allow everyone to have access to any film produced that we still have available in some format, but the distributors/copyright holders just can't organise themselves to make this happen, but instead give us a broken experience. I see projects like popcorn time pushing the boundaries a little bit, trying to make the problem evident.
I, for one, would like to see the copyright law reviewed. It could require you to pay part of the profits from the derivative work to copyright holders, but not give the copyright holder the power to prevent you from distributing it, for instance. That could would allow netflix, apple tv, etc to have pretty much whatever they wanted in their collection.
However, I don't think content creators have an obligation to make their content universally available. I do feel as though I should limit myself to whatever avenues of distribution the creator has decided on. If that means I can't access the content at all, so be it.
I think the same about Sci-Hub although it's easy for me to say since I'm fortunate enough to be employed by an institution that gives me access to the vast majority of articles I would want anyway.
> in a way that doesn't create an institution of intellectual property that makes the world better for everyone?
That question is loaded with your opinion (in particular the opinion I was suggesting is baseless) and so isn't really an answer at all... you want the world your way, I'm asking, beyond your opinion that it's "better for everyone" (ignoring artists, I guess), why you seem to think there's an issue of right/wrong here.
But on your terms instead of theirs? Why would you want to reduce my power of my creation? Won't that have a chilling effect on what I produce? Can't I charge whatever price I see fit for my own work?
If I were a chef, and it were possible for you to duplicate food, would you apply the same reasoning to my infinitely duplicated meals? I should be paid, but have no leverage myself in how / how much?
Edit: and let's say I have a valid reason for not wanting to cook for you, in particular; that choice also should be taken away from me? How do you see the role of artists in our society? Assembly line workers, churning out art for mass consumption?
I don't pretend to have figured everything out, but the rate publishers pay creators doesn't need to be fixed. As long as exclusivity contracts are not allowed (including self publishing). I think we should be experimenting, though. If the rules change and the end result is that there's less content (or of lower quality), then it could be a justification to go back to the old system. We won't know if we don't try.
Taking your food example. If we had a way to duplicate food for free, it would suck if anyone is starving or having to eat the same thing everyday because of our laws. We have the power to losslessly copy data now, we should be taking advantage of it rather than outlawing it.
They could have froze and privated the repo and investigated the issue.
This isn't the same as a pirated move or song on YouTube. This is code. And version control or code repos are very important.
Even if I'm wrong, this is a valid way to dos my repo. Like when it happens on YouTube people loose money right and that's some people's main income. This can be even worse.
If you aren't okay with that, use a service provider in a jurisdiction not governed by DMCA laws, or run your own service provider and take on that liability yourself.