How Do Seeders Profit From BitTorrent? 195
arcticstoat writes "As you may remember, a recent study claimed that just 100 users were responsible for downloading 75% of BitTorrent content, and were doing it for money, raising a lot of questions about the study. How do you profit from seeding, and how can the same 100 users be responsible for 75% of downloading and 66% of uploading. The details of the study are clarified in an interview with one of the key researchers, showing that the study's actual statistic is that 66% of the original seeds indexed on the Pirate Bay come from just 100 users, and these seeds then go on to account for 75% of downloads. The interview also details how it's possible for this small number of seeders to make a profit from seeding, via embedding links to their own indexing sites in the filenames and bundled TXT files, which then get money from advertising if downloaders decide to visit the site, assured of quality downloads. Meanwhile, other ways of profiting include 'premium' registered accounts."
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
_AGAIN_ with this nonsense?
I strongly doubt anyone is getting rich from the trickle of people who actually go to the URLs found in torrent info files. They seem to be more for notoriety than profit.
Yes, the trackers make money of the ads.. but unless there is some secret backroom deal where TPB and others funnel money to axxo and friends.. I don’t see the corollary between index site traffic and motivation for users to seed.
People do it for the e-pene. People were (and still are) doing this on IRC long before there was any way to make a profit. People insist on keeping their share ratios up, even when not required... and they see no profit either.
And the interview doesn’t _detail_ anything. It quickly explains some very shallow “research” with plenty of bias, then makes a pretty dubious guess, and finally proceeds to make an even lamer admonishment of people who illegally download.
_AND_ using TPB and Mininova as your main source of data good grief.
This isn't a few guys who've had a look at what's happening on BitTorrent a couple of times and made notes
Weird... cause that’s exactly what it feels like. This thing reads like some high school kid’s half assed research project. They grabbed some data.. made a bunch of broad assumptions.. then proceeded to unsubstantiated correlations.
This whole “study” is a complete joke. If these researchers had any brains they’d just let this thing quietly die and move onto something else.
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./bitchx
#exceed> /msg botsrv1 xdcc send the_cure_boys_dont_cry.rar
/good ol' days
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Oh man.. nostalgia trip!
I actually used bitchx for chat! For a long damn time too. I resisted irssi (with it's silly activity numbers) for quite some time.
and now I use xchat.
sigh...
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I strongly doubt anyone is getting rich from the trickle of people who actually go to the URLs found in torrent info files. They seem to be more for notoriety than profit.
People might not get rich from the genuine torrents. I bet people get rich from fake torrents where the download is a readme.txt and an encrypted rar and you're instructed to visit some url, sign up to a bunch of affiliate programs (and subjected to drive by attacks) to get the supposed password. Of course the password and the rar will be fakes.
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I would delete the file without a second thought.
That's probably because you are a person of at least room temperature intelligence. There are a lot of really stupid people out there.
Browse some youtube comments or yahoo answers. The rampant success of all the various "you'd have to be an idiot" scams will suddenly seem less surprising. It's actually quite depressing. Not to mention the extreme cases.. like people who fall for the Nigerian scams.
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There are just some things that can't be cited.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
someone who likes to pirate entertainment
I'm actually pretty good about paying for content these days.
As for research... this thing was completely torn apart the last time it graced slashdot. Ergo the top bit of my comment. The fact that these points have been brought up by a huge number of people, and from my recollection arn't even touched on by the study, to me shows that their research was pretty thin. They are the ones writing the study.. they should have researched why I (and the huge crowd who share the same opinion) are wrong and presented that.
Or here's an idea.. _actually_ talk to a file sharer. Someone managed to get an interview with axxo once.. so it's not impossible.
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It doesn't hurt that music (the thing I pirated most) is easy to get through Spotify and other equivalents, and TV series are available cheaply on DVD quite quickly.
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Yup!
Very similar experience here. Doesn't make it right.. but I'm honest about it.
Although I think there is some value in convinience as well. I'm a very impulsive person. Give me the ability to pay and be watching something within 10 seconds (streaming) or an hour (full download) and you'd make a bit of money of me. As it stands I'm Canadian, and thanks to the CRTC/CBC.. this is generally not much of an option.
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It's not just college students - I was in my early highschool years back when I ran an ftp drop site. My part-time job was enough to pay $40 every month for the connection ... OR for 1 movie and 1 CD.
It wasn't exactly a tough decision ...
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So yes, some think that "can't afford, but want anyway.." is a perfectly good reason. You are welcome to disagree of course, and the law simply doesn't care why.
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I
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To make a hard drive, the one I have, you need metal, plastic, other materials, to make parts from the materials (platters, heads, arms, wire for motor coils and the actuator coil, PCB, chips, resistors, capacitors), you then need to put all those parts together, test the resulting device, package it and send it to me.
If my friend also wants to buy that hard drive, you need to make it again, starting with the raw materials (that also need to be dug up), make the drive, test it, package it and ship it to my
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The reason they think of that stuff as intangible is because they can't wrap their heads around the very tangible risks, cash, and time that goes into creating it in the first place.
No, that's not it. Stealing a keg of beer deprives someone else of the beer. Copying an album or movie does not deprive anyone of that movie -- it merely reduces the distribution and copying cost to nearly zero. Most people easily see the harm in stealing something physical, as they identify the unfairness of taking something away from someone else. In the case of movies, nothing's taken away. Rather, the publishers don't get a sale. Not Giving someone money is not the same as taking money from them.
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Each beer or meal has a real cost to produce. A piece of electronic content has fixed costs, but each copy is free.
In a parking lot, the number of "slots" is scarce - if you put your car there, there is a real possibility that they'll lose a client who wanted to put his/her car there but couldn't.
a sense of entitlement to others' work
Citation needed.
an entire generation of whiny parasites that won't understand how destructive they are
Movie profits have risen each year for the past decade.
Music artists are being paid more in sales + concerts.
The music "industry" (middlemen) is dying.
In the words of the Dead Kennedys in their In G
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Show the intellectual integrity of ignoring the writers, musicians, film makers, etc
Integrity is consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations, and outcomes.
If a person believes the concept of copyright to be incoherent or immoral, how is the action of file sharing inconsistent with such belief?
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If a person believes the concept of copyright to be incoherent or immoral, how is the action of file sharing inconsistent with such belief?
No, the question is: why would you want to consume (or how could possibly enjoy) the work of artists that you consider to be immoral? For example, I generally will not purchase art from people who I consider to be actively promoting irrational world views. Art is communication. I don't want to celebrate or enhance the voice and world view of people that I consider to be destructive. So I don't pay them money. But nor do I rip them off.
You seem to be implying that the idea behind pirating the works of pe
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Duh. If I steal somebody's beer, I've deprived somebody of beer. If I drink it, the legitimate owner can't.
If I copy somebody's song, I've deprived nobody of anything, with the possible exception of a lost sale, which wasn't very likely anyway. From a global economic standpoint, I've made something valuable and increased the total wealth of society. I may be benefiting the musician(s) by giving him/her/them additional exposure (although to be honest this would apply to the beer also).
Yes, there's r
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but if they don't like the price that a chef or a brewer or a parking lot operator asks for what they do, we should continue to hold people accountable for ripping them off when the only excuse is
But, in those cases, the person's time/money is being used, and they are directly harmed. Not so in the case of copyright infringement (you could argue potential profit since I don't feel like arguing about that right now, but if they have no money to begin with, there was nothing to be had).
morally
Subjective.
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If that's the real answer (college kids rip stuff off because they're short on cash), why isn't this considered a reasonable tactic for getting better beer than they can afford?
You can drink as much beer as you want for free, as long as your drinking does not reduce the amount of beer that the bar has. For example, a group of 10 friends go to a bar and buy 0.5L of beer. One of them drinks it, but the mug is still full, so he passes the beer to the next friend. In the end, they will have collectively drunk 20L of beer, but they only bought 0.5L and look, the mug is still full.
OTOH, when someone buys a movie DVD, the movie disappears and the actors/director/etc have to go and film
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Beer is a finite resource that when "pirated" denies someone their opportunity to make a sale off that item. Digital entertainment is an infinite resource that when "pirated" denies no one their opportunity to make a sale off that item.
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This is, of course, entirely subjective. Either that, or entirely inaccurate.
Why would would want to waste your time watching something which, according to you, is only $5 worth of entertainment? Maybe because you're actually getting more than $5 worth of enjoyment out of it? And if that's the case, what do you have against paying a fair price for something?
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what the hell _is_ "worth of entertainment" ?
badminton set can provide countless hours of "entertainment" to some people. i haven't met an idiot who would try to value a badminton set based on the amount of "worth of entertainment" it would be supposed to provide.
people assess the value of goods based on how expensive they perceive them to be to manufacture, store and ship, plus some margin (which includes advertising and whatnot). and that is a sane approach.
i hereby proclaim "worth of entertainment" as ab
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I like that."Entertainmentworth" should be an SI measure of bullshit, like grams of mass or libraryofcongresses of data.
So, the Justin Beiber movie would be measured in....megaentertainmentworths, while Bill Nye the Science Guy would be measured in picoentertainmentworths.
Depending on the episode, Mythbusters would measure in between kiloentertainmentworths and microentertainmentworths.
Anything involving politics would require new SI prefixes above "yotta" to properly scale.
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Same with entertainment. I could care less how much is wasted on "manufacturing" the product. What I care about is will going to see Avatar entertain me more then going to see Justin Babier in 3D. There is a very distinct "worth of entertainment", but everyone meas
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My impression of that guys response "worth of entertainment" is that he is an industry shill.
A buck a TV episode in the best format available is what those are worth. I'd buy a month's episodes just to have them even if I watch them infrequently. But $5.00 an episode is ludicrous. I do not value those shows as much as I value that $5.00, especially over a year's worth of purchases.
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So why waste time? Well, I find your stance on the matter to be wrong. TV, for the most part, has no value. It has a cost to produce. I'll agree that TV has a better dissemination cost per person. But education & news have worth regardless of the medium of conveyance, So "TV" is not the true valued part or many "TV" things. Ergo TV has no value. We could all be out
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They can sell what, 50k copies of an episode of Two and a Half men a week at $5.00. Or they can make a greater number of sales to those 14.9 million people that watched it weekly in 2009. Would you rather have 2.5 million weekly sales at $1.00 or 50k at $5.00 a week? I'm sure 2.5 million sales a week at $1.00 would seriously offset the production cost of $4 million an episode, plus they'd still have their advertisers for the TV broadcasts.
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Maybe because you're actually getting more than $5 worth of enjoyment out of it?
I kind of had that realization myself. We gripe about the cost of entertainment.. especially TV box sets. I paid somewhere in the area of $400 for the entire ST:DS9 series. That seems insane.. but when you actually think about how much "entertainment hours" that is... it suddenly seems a little more reasonable.
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Why would would want to waste your time watching something which, according to you, is only $5 worth of entertainment?
Or perhaps they just want to save money? Perhaps people just like paying less because that means that they have more money to spend on other, more important, things? No! Impossible! Clearly he doesn't like the entertainment! If you're not willing to pay obscene amounts of money for something, it clearly means you don't like it!
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"How would you know? His/her price for entertainment might be a lot lower than yours."
Of course - that's why I prefaced my comment by saying it's entirely subjective. The fact that he complains about the price caused me to infer that he values it to be quite low. I can understand that - if he believes its entertainment value is low, he wouldn't want to pay much for it. But that seems to be at odds with his desire to pirate it. If he's already, by my assumption, classified it as being of low entertainment va
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That's an interesting point. Many of us are accustomed to paying $15 (or $13) a month for a service that we use 15+ hours a week. (I'm being naiively optimistic: most uf us play more than that.) That boils down to the entertainment costing us less than $0.25/hour.
A DVD boxed set is normally one season of a show. Let's look at something one might reasonably consider representative, The Shield. It has about 13 hours of content; let's be generous and say it has 15. It costs $20. That's $1.33/hour, which is
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Why would it be measured in terms of income? That makes no sense.
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$100 means to you much more when you earn $200/month than when you earn $10k/month.
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It makes no sense since you have so many people that have interests in quite a number of pieces of entertainment. I watch several CSI episodes a week and then watch a couple comedy episodes. Add to that various shows such as NCIS and Law and Order and I'd be spending a great deal of money at $5.00. If the prices were sane and at $1.00 an episode I'd be able to purchase and watch most of my favorites.
But, then you have to deal with all that awful DRM.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
I admire the way you've cited good solid research in your rebuttal. If you hadn't backed up your statements about why "people do it," your comments would have come across like just another angry sounding, defensive opinion from someone who likes to pirate entertainment.
Note that the "researchers" making this extraordinary claim also cite no data, only speculation. Also, note that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Honestly, if someone looks angry and defensive and out of touch with reality here it's you, not the GP.
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I admire the way you've cited good solid research in your rebuttal. If you hadn't backed up your statements about why "people do it," your comments would have come across like just another angry sounding, defensive opinion from someone who likes to pirate entertainment.
Maybe you should start using your brain for a change, and stop expecting that everything is laid out in front of you, so that your tiny intellect could be satisfied.
Some things can not be 'cited', you monkey. Real world is not Wikipedia.
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who likes to pirate entertainment.
I like to pirate entertainment. It's more convenient for me. Until the legit product is as convenient, I will continue to "pirate". I'm not afraid to pay - when my mother wanted access to online video, I didn't show her how to set up a usenet service and subscription... instead, I bought her a netflix membership. Hell, my usenet service costs more than a netflix service, so it's not about cost.
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I just love downloading pirated stuff. I might not even use it but will burn a DVD anyway.
I pay extra for every empty dvd, cd or harddrive. this money goes to right holders organisations, wether they pay out to the actual right holdres is not my concern. This effectively pays for my pirating, which is not even illegal in my country due to relaxed fair use regulations.
So MAFIAA, RIAA, and other malafidous organisations can kis my sweet behind.
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angry sounding, defensive opinion from someone who likes to pirate entertainment.
I don't see why he would even bother posting his comment for this reason considering the fact that most 'pirates' don't even do the things mentioned in the article.
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Oh and I watch hulu.com too. Why not? ABC, NBC, CBS, etc are using the People's airwaves free-of-charge, so might as well enjoy the product they produce on OUR property.
Wow, you're such a rebel. Hulu licenses their content and displays ads. It's just an extension of broadcast. It's owned by the broadcasters.
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Sorry, but them's the apples. FWIW, I'm in the same boat as you, though, which is why I read reviews and opinion pieces from sources I trust before buying entertainment media anymore. Maybe you should do the same.
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>>>not right
Not correct. Most credit card companies force stores to accept returns. All you need is proof (such as a delivery confirmation number). And of course there are legal rights, which is how Paypal landed in a lot of trouble, when they violated the consumer protection laws.
As for reviews, as I commented elsewhere, most of the reviews you see in magazines or on Amazon are PAID REVIEWS or PAID employees of the selling company. In fact amazon.com caught one of those movie companies and exp
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Most credit card companies force stores to accept returns
Which has nothing to do with the law. That's a business arrangement between the merchant and the processing company that they're paying to handle your credit card. They (the retailer) wants to have more opportunities to sell things, so they enter into an agreement with one or more card processing companies in order to have that option. Part of that agreement is to support the card processing companies' OTHER agreements, which are with the card-issuing banks and their customers, the card holders. Plenty of
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
You're over complicating this, don't watch pirated or otherwise.
Reminds me of people who spoke for prohibition, and before that, for abstaining from sex.
Former got essentially swallowed up by reality, latter got caught abusing young boys. Neither is "life-threatening to go without". Which goes to show that "well, just go without!" argument has some rather serious flaws.
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You're over complicating this, don't watch pirated or otherwise.
Reminds me of people who spoke for prohibition, and before that, for abstaining from sex.
Former got essentially swallowed up by reality, latter got caught abusing young boys. Neither is "life-threatening to go without". Which goes to show that "well, just go without!" argument has some rather serious flaws.
It's not a question of whether it's right or wrong, so much as whether or not it's inevitable.
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I'm not talking about black and white. As for inevitability, you may want to read up on how prohibition was set up (specifically, just how widely your particular sentiment was spread about prohibiting alcohol), and how soundly it was ignored by those who were the target of these laws. The similarity to issue we're discussing is undeniable.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>You're over complicating this, don't watch pirated or otherwise.
Let me simplify it for you:
- buy Transformers2. Watch it: "Man that was shit."
- goto store: "Sorry sir you can't return this because you didn't like it." "Okay, but how about this Hershey candybar and DVD player? The bar tastes like wax and the player doesn't have S-video output like advertised." "Sure no problem." "That's bullshit that I can return other products, but not movies."
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- Later: The company that made T2 releases Star Trek Reboot 2. I remember how this company already screwed me, so I download it instead. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." I won't be fooled again.
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the player doesn't have S-video output like advertised
Are you really so obtuse that you don't understand the difference between a factual error (or lie) on the box or ad selling the device, and the qualitative assessment of whether or not a movie is "good?" I saw tons of reviews telling me that particular movie was bad, bad, bad. Your attempt to pretend there is no such information available so that you can justify ripping off your entertainment is embarassingly juvenile. What are you, eleven?
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I've seen some of my favorite games bashed by almost every review I saw. Just because a few people say it is bad, that doesn't mean you'll think it's bad.
justify
I don't think that there's really a need to do this, to be honest. Just as 'good' is subjective, so is 'bad'. The only people I think are idiots are people who say that copyright infringement is wrong and yet continue to infringe upon copyright just so they can have entertainment which they don't even need.
What are you, eleven?
I don't think that there's really a need for ad ho
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If two actions produce the same (expected) result, why are they morally different?
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
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You can have integrity and still do things other people think are unethical. Maybe an anarcho-communist pirates things because he thinks everything should be free. He is upholding his beliefs.
You're right about that. Many people used to consider slavery to be ethical. But that makes them a hypocrite. Tell you what, I'll allow you the privileged of working for me and I'll simply not pay you for your time. The day pirates stop accepting paychecks is the day they stop being hypocrites.
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I choose to boycott.
If you're not going to give them your money anyway, what's the difference (except that downloading would provide more entertainment, of course)?
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>>>you can see and hear ample, legit clips online before buying, as well as thousands of reviews by [marketers and paid reviewers]
>>>
Fixed that for you. It means you can see 60 seconds of clips on TV or online, plus raving reviews, and the actual movie is still excrement. It means there is NO way to know if the product is good or not until you actually see it for yourself.
That's why I view first, buy later.
- Then if it IS good, like Gattaca, I buy it.
- If it is bad, I've not thrown away
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Even in those cases, the laws allow a return if the item is not as advertised. i.e. "This mower is sold as is," and the mower does not work, and there was no opportunity to try it before hand, then the Seller is required to refund the money or else face jailtime. That is the law.
The same should be true with movies, even if it's just store credit towards future purchases
The same is true for movies: if the movie doesn't work, you can return it for an exchange or store credit. If it works and you just don't like it, well, too bad.
Not that I disagree with you on the larger point, but you're mixing up your analogies pretty horribly.
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You can see and hear ample, legit clips online before buying, as well as thousands of reviews by people from every possible perspective and level of taste
Music is highly subjective, as are movies. Many of my favourite movies are ones that are (objectively) complete crap: I've watched Equilibrium more often (and own the DVD) than I've watched my Matrix DVD, or Braveheart. You can't depend solely on reviews. (This is the value of Netflix: watch it, and if you like it enough, buy it.)
For music, this is even more important. I've bought CDs after liking one song, and found that I could not stand the entire rest of the CD, to the point where I don't listen to it
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Jefferson considered, say, free speech and assembly to be natural rights. Thus the founders made a point (via the first amendment) of explicitly saying that the government can't mess with it.
He and the other founders considered the practical necessity of intellectual property protections to be paramount to fu
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To add to your post: http://mises.org/books/against.pdf [mises.org]
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Is this "precious time" thing a common statement in the US. I've just started to notice a lot and I'm wondering what to attribute it to. I'm finding it to be a feckless counter argument. My time sat in front of the TV has no value what so ever. It is being misspent. Even more so if there is no beer left.
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Car dealers and realtors are not exceptions.
They guarantee the right to return a car or house, and that right is even enforced by law. (Lemon laws, failed building inspections, and such.) In fact I know a realtor who was thrown in jail when he screwed-over too many people w/ homes that didn't have proper insulation. The money was refunded and houses demolished.
I doubt it's as pervasive at they suggest. (Score:3, Interesting)
Most (all?) private trackers that I use absolutely forbid any advertising in the torrent. For the most part the rules on the private trackers dictate untouched scene releases. Some allow for unrarring of the goodies but the nfo and other scene-sourced stuff must remain intact.
Public trackers are another matter completely.
srsly? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:srsly? (Score:5, Funny)
Kleenex.
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In many cases, the porn you download /is/ the advertisement. On most, if not all, current produced-for-internet porn you can find the name of the outlet somewhere in the frame. If you like the quality, you might want to go get the rest of their stuff. People who never pay for porn do not cost them anything -- question is whether the people who pay for it after having gotten parts for free outweigh the people who may have paid for it but opted to scour usenet instead -- the age-old unanswerable question, rea
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so......much.......innuendo...
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ebooks make seeders money (Score:3)
I've downloaded a few e-books (PDFs) and upon opening them, were greeted with the seeder's or creator's homepage (or affiliate URL). One of the books I downloaded was about day trading. The person who put together the PDF injected his homepage and services in the first 2 pages of the book. Does he make money? Who knows. Does he get a few visits to his website for a bit of work? Yup.
Bundled text files (Score:2)
"via embedding links to their own indexing sites in the filenames and bundled TXT files"
Ah, those would be the text files that I uncheck before I start the download, ensuring that they never reach my computer.
If I'm downloading a torrent for one file, and there are other files in the torrent, they all get unchecked first.
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When not RTFA = repost ? (Score:2)
I didn't knew that when people were not R[ing]TFA (or actually RTFPaper), it was worth a repost when someone who actually read the paper would talk about it.
just another lame attempt (Score:3)
to try to find a more concrete reason to go after bittorrent. Everyone's tired of hearing them whine about the zillions of dollars they're losing from the violation of their imaginary property. Usually Plan B involves showing how someone, somewhere is making money. (someone's making money off their IP, they want a cut, ok I get that) But this doesn't work for bittorrent because nobody's making money on it. But they're going to give it a go anyway.
Trying to insult peoples' intelligence tends to LOWER your credibility and sympathy, not raise it. You'd think they'd learn. No, on second thought, they never do learn, do they?
Re:just another lame attempt (Score:5, Funny)
Hey the TV networks are losing $22,589,304,200,123.15 every second because of bittorrents. These evil pirates are making these kind souls that make this content for our enjoyment, out of the goodness of their hearts... Poor by STEALING their content.
Because if after a TV show like "big bang theory" airs and it hits the torrent sites, NOBODY will buy the DVD's or watch any of the reruns. Sales of TV show DVD's are at ZERO.. Nobody at all buys them, nobody is watching reruns. They are poor as paupers and we all simply ignore them and continue stealing...
Those poor poor destitute souls... all you evil people are making them so poor that in order to survive NBC had to be sold to Comcast for pennies on the dollar.
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and of course that's money being taken out of the mouths of starving artists living in slums unable to feed their family. all that money should go to them. Less the 99.3% we the riaa skim of the top anyway. But it's the PIRATES that are the evil.
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Alternative Hypothesis (Score:2)
Not a dime (Score:4, Interesting)
I never profited a dime from my seeding activities, but then that was never even a secondary goal of doing it in the first place... quite the opposite. It was anti-greed or anti-capitalism.
I actually run a BitTorrent website (Score:2)
they are seedhosts (Score:4, Informative)
You pay for a seedhost. They do the torrenting for you and you simply download what you want directly from them while they boost your ratio.
Seedhosts (really?!) (Score:2)
Holy crap, hosted bittorrent seeding servers ("seedhosts [google.com]") exist ... and people pay for them?
That could explain a lot of the lopsidedness in the numbers.
I would hope that seedhost businesses make generous donations to the EFF and similar organizations that work to protect and improve the legality of media sharing; were I in that business, I'd make that a selling point, e.g. "5% of proceeds are donated to the EFF."
Also, doesn't boosting your ratio not matter unless you're in a gated BT community that m
lol reminds me of Microsoft vs. Open Source (Score:5, Interesting)
Balmer: Sir, there is a new threat facing us, Open Source.
Gates: No bother, we'll just rip off what they do and when they sue us we'll buy the company.
Balmer: It doesn't work that way. They're busy trying to emulate the look and feel of Windows. They're ripping us off.
Gates: Then we'll sue them.
Balmer: There's no company to sue.
Gates: If we can't buy them or sue them, what are we supposed to do? Let's go after the programmers. Surely we can pay them more than they're making right now.
Balmer: They're not making anything right now.
Gates: What? Preposterous! Anything worth doing is worth doing for money. What could possibly motivate them?
Balmer: Love and the respect of their peers. I assure you I am as baffled as you are.
Most of this stuff was done as a hobby, for bragging rights. It's like any other kind of hobby people get involved in. People were surfing and rock climbing and flying model airplanes long before there was any sort of sponsorship involved and sponsorships were basically from companies looking to cash in from association with the hobby, either trying to become a lifestyle brand like soda companies aligning themselves with extreeeeeeeeeme! sports or actual suppliers of the equipment wanting to get their name out amongst the participating amateurs.
The mistake these people are making is assuming that what motivates them motivates others. Usually it happens the other way around, people doing it for the love getting disillusioned by those doing it for the money so it's always nice to see it go the other way around for a change.
Malware? (Score:2)
I always figured it was about spreading malware. People who are willing to download software from unknown sources on the Internet seem like easy targets to me. Install pirate Diablo II, get a free keylogger!
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Last night, I downloaded the a patch for a popular game. It's freely available, but the download from EA was slow -- something like 100kbps, and this was a 2GB patch. With the torrent, I was pulling it down at 1.2MBPS, the maximum that my AT&T connection can do.
But I have no idea if there was a trojan in that file. Probably should have checked the sum, but alas -- I have no idea of how to do that...oops.
a sense of fairness (Score:3)
I think seeds are mostly from people with a sense of fairness. It's not really pure altruism. I upload at least as much as I download because the whole system is not sustainable otherwise (essentially a selfish motive). I don't believe in taking from the swarm more than I am giving back. It's true that quite a few people don't care, which is probably one reason why all torrents eventually die. But there are enough people with a sense of fairness to make the system mostly work. It's really about trading. The swarm gives me a copy of the movie/game/CD and I feel compelled to give back at least as much data as I was given. I guess it's an honor system of sorts. I think many or even most people wouldn't steal stuff even if they thought they wouldn't be caught.
It's that same sense of fairness that powers bittorrent and also motivates some people to buy content instead of downloading it. I do both. I download everything first to try it. If I like it then I buy the usually higher quality paid version. Games/software are the exception because the paid version is actually lower quality than the downloaded one due to draconian DRM. I only purchase DRM-free software, which basically doesn't exist anymore.
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Used to be, back when nerds ruled the roost, that an argument would take a while before Godwin's Law took effect. It wasn't the tool of first resort.
PS might want to check H&S's respective political parties
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OTOH, I , as a regular seeder (with a "up to" 80mbps (about 32mbps average) connection) do not see any money, even though I have 60+ ratio on some private trackers and upload about 10TB/month. I do not get faster downloads than I would have if I had ratio of 2 or so. I also seed some public torrents and the trackers do not care about the ratio, though on some torrents I have about 100+.