Amid Crackdown On Torrent Websites, Some Users Move To Google Drive To Distribute Movies and Shows (ndtv.com) 84
An anonymous reader shares a report: As crackdown on torrent sites continues around the world, people who are pirating TV shows and movies are having to get a little more creative. Cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Kim Dotcom's Mega are some of the popular ones that are being used to distribute copyrighted content, according to DMCA takedown requests reviewed by Gadgets 360. Google Drive seems most popular among such users, with nearly five thousand DMCA takedown requests filed by Hollywood studios and other copyright holders just last month. Each DMCA requests had listed a few hundred Google Drive links that the content owners wanted pulled. What's interesting though is that while at times pirates upload full movies to Google Drive or other cloud services, in other cases, these Google Drive links are empty and just have a YouTube video embedded.
"Empty"? (Score:4, Informative)
The Google drive video player looks just like the YouTube player, but if you analyze the traffic, it's clearly making requests to different servers than what YouTube uses.
Entrepreneurial pirates needed (Score:1)
Seriously.
If ever there was a time to start a project with hopes of changing the world, it's right now.
Corporate empires will rise and fall, but the fortunes of mankind are at a turning point.
Will the many succumb to the will of the few?
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If you factor the time required to find a viable DL vs buffering the first 5% of the video, torrents are a more reliable / faster alternative.
Not being a webapp is what pushed torrent users away.
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You have no idea how nice things have become for the pirates. From a position of ignorance you should have nothing to say.... yet here you are.
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Can you DMCA text?
Yes
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Torrent get you sued, while sharehosters generally don't and when you just stream they might even be completely legal in your jurisdiction. So there is good reason to switch away from torrent when you aren't using a VPN to conceal your identity.
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Torrent get you sued, while sharehosters generally don't and when you just stream they might even be completely legal in your jurisdiction.
Even if not completely legal, downloading does not impose even close to the same penalty as uploading aka "distributing."
Torrents put you in the distributor camp.
Re: Why bother? (Score:1)
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You are doing something wrong.
I use usenet/newsgroups and have TWC (now Spectrum) with no issues - fast downloads with the usenet provider I have. I use to use astraweb but just changed due to payment problems but that wasn't related to TWC
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FUCK I hope that doesn't happen to BrightHouse (now Spectrum).
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Centralizing means a lynchpin. Point sources are meant to be supplementary options, DDLs being "convenient" and all. Just don't build a jenga tower atop a Single Point Of Ultimate Failure.
Decentralization is good practice even outside teh leetwarez distro. Though not viable for all scenarios.
Repeal the DMCA. (Score:3)
Repeal the DMCA by any means necessary. Whole cloth.
Re: Repeal the DMCA. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's one thing that'll never happen short of changing how our government works.
Just need to find a market solution to fuck over old industry, the only radical power that works in the United States is the kind driven by dollar bills: capitalism.
Re: Repeal the DMCA. (Score:5, Funny)
You can easily get it repealed.
Just tell Trump that Obama created it and he'll undo it before his morning dump.
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Never any mod points when they are worthy of being used....
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Repeal the DMCA by any means necessary. Whole cloth.
Make Gigabit internet and mac & cheese a right and provide both to every citizen free of charge!!
I mean, while we are demanding things that will never happen in the US thought I would throw those on the list as well.
Re: its 2017 (Score:1)
Dude get off the internet, it's way older than torrents.
Darknet torrenting, hellloooo? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the perfect opportunity to move to torrents over darknets such as I2P (but not Tor). This is also the end-state of piracy, unstoppable and untraceable file sharing. It's the last platform switch you'd have to make. The only downside is that it would force media companies to begin an assault on general-purpose computing.
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This is the perfect opportunity to move to torrents over darknets such as I2P (but not Tor). This is also the end-state of piracy, unstoppable and untraceable file sharing. It's the last platform switch you'd have to make. The only downside is that it would force media companies to begin an assault on general-purpose computing.
Not worth the effort. The only place they really bother to try holding back the tide are the torrent websites, once you have the magnet link it's such a giant whack-a-mole. The mass lawsuits have gone nowhere, the "six strikes" policy is just fluff, if you want to be the original seeder maybe you need a VPN but... here's 90 million moles to whack [uproxx.com]. And that's presumably grossly under-reporting the number of private ways people have shared the file. Even if they managed to prosecute and fine 90,000 of those -
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The only downside is that it would force media companies to begin an assault on general-purpose computing.
They've already tried that and lost. The tech companies essentially strung them along and then ultimately ignored them. There's no way that any tech company is going to give up general purpose computing for the MFing entertainment industry, especially not while Donald Trump is in charge. Hollywood supported Hillary Clinton openly and everyone knows how much Donald Trump hates and punishes disloyalty. At least as long as Trump remains in office, Hollywood is screwed and they know it. Maybe that's one good th
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Huh, this seems...impossible? How do the RIAA/MPAA know who to send notices to?
Hold on (Score:2, Funny)
What crackdown on torrent sites? What did I miss? I got fed up with the neighbors calling to complain about the smell whenever I was watching a Peter Capaldi episode of Doctor Who so I haven't torrented anything in a while.
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The smell? I think you need to consult a urologist....
Reports of it's death are greatly exaggerated (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well, traffic on the internet has shown that the biggest user is no longer Bittorrent in the US - it's Netflix. Bittorrent downloads has been displaced for years now (it's still #2). Of course, upload traffic is still Bitt
Gaddamn it. (Score:2, Funny)
STFU. Your going to ruin it. Just torrents.
Very risky progression by the *AA organizations (Score:5, Interesting)
Say 0.1% of DMCA requests on YouTube are overreaching and block a home video because of something like a copyrighted song being heard playing in the background. If YouTube hosts a ratio of 10 home videos per pirated movie, then that means only 1 home video is improperly blocked (false positive) for every 100 pirated movies blocked (true positive). That ratio means the false positives are few and far between relative to the positive impact of the DMCA requests (getting pirated videos pulled).
But if they start applying those same algorithms to Google Drive, where there are probably 100,000 home videos per pirated movie, suddenly they'll be blocking 100 home videos for each single pirated movie blocked. The false positive rate relative to the true positive rate is now 10,000x higher. The annoyance factor will be that much higher, and they're risking raising the ire of the public, and getting the parts of the DMCA they bought and paid for rolled back by new legislation.
No use... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here are the most effective tools ever made to combat piracy: Steam, Netflix, Crunchyroll, Kickstarter, iTunes, etc etc.
Get my drift? This battle isn't gonna be won by crackdowns, and it will never be fully won at all. It can only be mitigated by very convenient, cheap, and fair legal systems for content sales and streaming.
Here's the thing: there's still an unlimited ammount of resources and tech available for pirates to use... the more you try clamping down on whatever tech is available, the more pirates will double down on alternatives.
There might've been a crackdown on torrent websites, but the category is pretty much alive and well without any signs of change. The so called crackdown didn't leave even a dent on the category as a whole.
It doesn't really matter if popular torrent websites gets taken down, a whole bunch more will pop up out of nowhere hosted in countries that don't care about nor listen to Hollywood demands.
And even if MPAA, RIAA, Hollywood studios and whatnot were able to suddently shut down each and every source of torrent files (will never happen), I'm willing to bet that it wouldn't take days before something new pops up. Torrents are not still used because it's the optimal strategy... it's just what people grew used to and I guess convenient to keep running. But if DMCA companies finally have their way and start really coming down too strongly on those, pirates will just... level up their game.
There files being found on Google Drive are probably not even the surface level of the whole thing... this is just people who don't know better putting files up in places that are easily found. I can't imagine any pirate who knows better putting files up in places known for having an open door policy for law enforcement.
An encrypted torrenting channel on the dark web. An unified encrypted system going through secure systems for file sharing. Secure messaging or e-mail systems being leveraged to share files.
Even for Google Drive and other cloud storage websites piracy could work and be left alone right there... it's quite simple: encrypt the files, fragment them and distribute in inconspicuous bits, build a player that consolidate and decrypt files before playing, and it's done.
This is pretty much what happened in early days of piracy... there were a multitude of file sharing systems, several of them created for legitimate purposes, appropriated by pirates to share copyrighted content.
If people analyze the trajectory that piracy went through the years, it's pretty incredible. File sharing websites, cloud storage services, primitive chat systems like IRC, the entire evolution of P2P file sharing, e-mail, FTP... every step of the way in matters of file sharing on the Internet had a pirate hand at some point.
And I have no doubt that somewhere someone must be developing a system that is fully encrypted, untraceable, and de-centralized... if something like that isn't already available. Because there will always be a fundamental need on the Internet for sharing files in a secure and private manner, and whatever form that takes, pirates will eventually be able to appropriate that.
But this is something known for lots of people since the early days of piracy... even before Napster I guess. The essencial problem with it is that piracy became normalized... as it can mostly be equated to just file sharing if you take the vilification out of the equation. There are entire countries that grew reliant on it for access to entertainment for a huge part of their population, and once it became normalized, where there's a will, there's a way.
You can't give enough powers to Hollywood and DMCA organizations to go after everyone because that'd be essencially giving them the keys to the entire Internet. And not only people will oppose that, governments and other businesses also will.
It doesn't matter on what side you are - for or against piracy, I mean. It's an unstoppable driving force, equalizer, phenomena, and culture overall.
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> And I have no doubt that somewhere someone must be developing a system that is fully encrypted, untraceable, and de-centralized...
The story is about cracking down on websites. "Meta-Torrents" can eliminate the need for websites. These are files which contain magnet links and descriptions of torrent files, and are themselves torrented. So, say someone compiles a meta-torrent of popular recent movies. It would be a relatively small file, which can be distributed by multiple means, like email attachme
It goes even further back... (Score:2)
Before that it was copying 3.5" floppies.
People had stacks of them, boxes. I remember carrying around a billfold like thing full of floppies. Many of them copies of compilers/programs/games.
Special hole punchers for making double-sided discs from single sided ones.
For music it was dubbed cassettes. Cassettes cost $20 to buy, blank ones were cheaper (but still not cheap)
Movies were VCR tapes that were shitty copies, even some video stores rented them. Recorded in EP of course, so you could put more than
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Netflix
Funny story. I used to pirate a lot of anime series. The other day I started watching Steins Gate. It was great. Then on a plane to the Netherlands, open up Steins Gate ... no option for english subtitles.
They had the series, but for some reason the ability to add english subtitles was beyond them. The .torrent file I ended up with 15min later didn't have these problems.
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Here are the most effective tools ever made to combat piracy: Steam, Netflix, Crunchyroll, Kickstarter, iTunes, etc etc. Get my drift?
The more of those services there is, and while they still run under regional availability they will never get that far. Until those services are as one stop shop and easy to use and your torrent site of choice they can only do so much.
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Piracy is easy because you go to a website, click a magnet link and then you watch the movie after it is done cooking.
Netflix is easy because you go to a website, click a video link and then you watch the movie after it is done buffering.
Spotify is easy because ...
DVD or BluRay? I have two options; one is go outside and buy it from a store that actually sells the movie I want, which won't happen, because the movies I want are fresh releases, so stores in my area just won't have them until like... 3 months f
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Seems to me bittorrent could be adapted as a marketplace -- low-cost subscription/purchase (beating even Netflix since this won't need to make profit at the distributor level) and micropayments for anyone who seeds, perhaps based on ratio -- and you've got a huge and instant distribution network that only costs you the trouble of creating a new torrent app and doing an initial seed, and after that takes care of itself... with a much longer tail than normal retail.
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That's nice...
most are dead links (Score:2)