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Comment by ezoe | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. The No.1 copyright infringement tool is undoubtedly the most popular web browser, whichever that is.

The browser have other, legitimate uses. Popcorntime pretty much has no other legitimate use other than as a tool for copyright infringement.

I guess the legal argument akins that of Limewire and Pirate Bay

Invaluable for students in film school to showcase their work to a worldwide audience before they make it big in Hollywood.

Interesting. Why a tool like popcorntime versus defaulting straight to YouTube or even Vimeo for film students?

They're just trying to justify illegal software. Like when people defended P2P file sharing as "but you can use it to download linux" or recently bitcoin as "but it's also great for transferring money internationally."

I'm not sure if comparing bitcoin to BitTorrent protocol is actually a valid comparison.

It's like comparing BitApples to BitOranges.

It's great for transferring [large] sums of money internationally.

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...

> They're just trying to justify illegal software.

Please define "illegal software" in this context.

You have a point, to some extent.

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.

It's pretty clearly about piracy. That being said, it can obviously also be used to watch non-pirated movies, and the way things are going with Youtube at the moment (censoring various videos on non-copyright grounds) could actually make PT a great alternative.

illegal software illegal tool illegal math illegal opinion illegal thought

About 70% of what I am earning and spending these days is in Bitcoin.

Just to clarify, you are not a drug lord, right?

No, I am a consultant software engineer (finance, simulations). Also a researcher, but I am not getting paid in bitcoins from my university... yet. There is a (relatively) small, but growing international Bitcoin services economy, without much of red tape and prohibitive regulations concerning hiring people globally.

Out of minor interest, any tips on finding jobs for bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies)?

If you work for e.g. Coinbase, you can opt in to be compensated in Bitcoin. If you are in the business of writing software for crypto exchanges (like myself), this is also kind of a default option.

For the record, War Thunder is using P2P to distribute software updates and has been doing that for years.

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.

At least you won't get your Google account banned over bogus copyright claims.

Underrated comment.

Maybe to be shown alongside all the illegal movie results?

So that we don't have to relies on a platform which is infamous for automatic ban anything it's automated system think inappropriate. Like now, if you utter the word coronavirus, you may get banned regardless of the content.

Nudity would be one thing. Youtube seems to remove nudity pretty agressively even if it's not pornography.

I watch a lot of legal torrent videos using PopcornTime.

I think it's still quite far from having no legitimate uses:

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.

Popcorn Time != BitTorrent, though. The way Popcorn Time and other BT streaming clients does torrenting is pretty bad for the the overall swarm health — everyone is seeding and leeching the beginning but availability deteriorates the deeper you go. My BT client of choice, Transmission, explicitly rejected the idea of getting chunks sequentially (you have to patch the source yourself if you really want to do that). So, if you can, contribute to swarm health by downloading with a traditional client upfront. And seed to a reasonable ratio, of course.

Transmission does allow you to set a priority, so for multi episode series (or albums) you can get the first file and play it while the others are still downloading. But random chunks is fine after that.

With far more people's download speed being much higher than the data rate of the content, this matters far less. Sure, you are downloading some blocks from the start of the file, but you are also getting blocks from the middle and end of the file at the same time, which you can exchange with other users tit for tat.

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.

With the exception of popular torrents (where swarm health is usually a non-issue), most of the time download speed is limited by the number of seeders and their upload speeds, not the leechers’ download speeds. The problem arises when all leechers request the beginning of an old and/or obscure torrent from one or few leechers.

> 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.

Are there any VPNs that support the throughput speeds many consumers have access to these days? I have my client set to a 10:1 ratio, but rarely will a file actually reach that because I don't want to leave my slow VPN online for that long degrading my performance for other online tasks.

You can use split tunnelling or linux network namespaces to keep the VPN running at all times, but with only your torrent client‘s network connection going through it.

Some VPN companies also provide apps with the feature built-in.

I've used commercial VPN with acceptable (think ~100Mbps) but not amazing throughput.

But for BT I just set up a secondary on-demand network interface on my Linux server specifically for OpenVPN (just need a shell script to add a couple ip(8) rules, and stick that shell script into the up command of ovpn config). Then I bind my transmission-daemon to that specific interface (bind-address-ipv4 option). This way all BT traffic goes through OpenVPN, but other traffic is not affected. Works for any OpenVPN provider.

This sounds fantastic, thanks for the idea and explanation!

> The problem arises when all leechers request the beginning of an old and/or obscure torrent from one or few leechers.

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.

It seems better to have 1 availability for the first 95%, than 5% random black holes at random intervals throughout the movie.

"Mum, I only read Playboy for the articles!"

I'm gay and have a Playboy. The one with the richard dawkins interview.

Shit, I should've thought of that excuse.

Why? It appears, in the essence, it's a video player that support streaming over the BitTorrent protocol. Do you also claims FTP server/client software has no legitimate use other than copyright infringement?

There are so many video streaming usage as everyone is now capable of capturing the video and uploading it live.

You know, I am 100% for piracy because I believe in sharing rather than culture paywalls.

That being said, your argument is ridiculous.

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