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Piracy Movies Television

Scene Bust Triggered Historic Drop In 'Pirate' Releases (torrentfreak.com) 85

Posted by BeauHD from the government-enforcement-action dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Every day, millions of people download or stream pirated content including movies, TV-shows, games, MP3s, and books. Many of these files originate from a small and tightly organized 'community' commonly known as The Scene, which is made up of dozens of smaller 'release groups.' These groups tend to operate in the shadows with little or no public profile. At least, that's what the unwritten rules dictate. That's for good reason as the people involved risk high prison sentences when caught. It's very rare for Scene group members to get busted but last week the US Government claimed a major victory. With help from international law enforcement partners, several raids and arrests were carried out, with the SPARKS group at the center of it all.

As soon as the first rumors about the raids started spreading on Tuesday, the number of Scene releases started to drop. A day later, when confirmation came in, it became even quieter. With data provided by Predb.org we take a closer look at these dropoffs, showing that some categories are affected more than others. Before delving into detailed groups, it's worth pointing out the overall impact, which can be summarized in two numbers. On Wednesday, August 19, there were 1944 new releases. A week later, a day after the first raids, this number was down to 168 releases. The drop in new releases happened across all categories.
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Scene Bust Triggered Historic Drop In 'Pirate' Releases More

Scene Bust Triggered Historic Drop In 'Pirate' Releases

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  • Awwww, things better now (Score:3, Informative)

    by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Friday September 04, 2020 @03:55PM (#60474610)

    those poor entertainment cartel millionaires weren't getting all their shekels.

    • Re:Awwww, things better now (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Areyoukiddingme ( 1289470 ) on Friday September 04, 2020 @06:05PM (#60475024)

      those poor entertainment cartel millionaires weren't getting all their shekels.

      And the number of additional shekels they will be getting for the next few weeks will be indistinguishable from seasonal or even random fluctuations. There's essentially no money being freed up by the lack of availability of the unauthorized versions because nobody was paying for them. So economically/financially, nothing changes. For more obscure works, a.k.a. not blockbuster movies, long term aggregate revenues will go down some small amount, for lack of exposure.

  • The government is good at something! Granted its something that is irrelevant or actually makes life a bit more inconvenient for normal nonloaded people but at least my tax dollars aren't completely going down the drain.

  • You got some kids, morons (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Friday September 04, 2020 @04:01PM (#60474642)

    Nothing has changed, nothing will ever change.

    • Re:You got some kids, morons (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PsychoSlashDot ( 207849 ) on Friday September 04, 2020 @04:40PM (#60474744)

      Nothing has changed, nothing will ever change.

      Complacency is not a good attitude for this. Every year electronic surveillance gets more intrusive and privacy becomes more difficult. In 20 years I can't see wide-scale piracy being possible, just like I don't see casual speeding in cars being possible. Cars will require always-on wireless nannies and your GPS will rat you out, just like your mandatory OS telemetry will. Sure, you can roll your own Linux box today, but it will be harder and harder as time goes by, until it's impractical.

      I'm not advocating piracy per se, but saying that the assumption it's always going to be available as it is today is likely incorrect.

      • Nah, it'll just go back to being harder. Did you try pirating anything in the early 90s? Stuff launched on German war3z BBSes and crap like that?

        People got spoiled by easy warez. Government stooges jumped at the command of their masters and finally figured out how to start cracking down. What's funny is that the studios probably won't make any extra money from knocking out SPARKS.

        My guess is you'll have to be pretty 'elite' in the future to even pirate anything, much less contribute to the scene.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Some of these guys were in their 50s. They have been doing this stuff since the 80s, cracking copy protection on games that came on audio cassette.

      The piracy scene will recover in a few months. It will be interesting to see what they charge these people with since in many countries copyright infringement is only a civil matter unless it's done commercially, and they were giving the stuff away for free without even any ad revenue.

  • You are nothing but coke-loaded leeches, sucking all alert and beauty of this planet dry and dead until nothing but "i.p." remakes remain.

    I hope you overdose on research chemicals and die like a dog in a gutter.

  • and books will be harder to find at the library.

    OK bad analogy ;) Maybe
    It is harder to find stuff on the internet without a good search engine.

  • Holy shitty graphing display batman (Score:4, Interesting)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Friday September 04, 2020 @05:17PM (#60474828)

    This story needs to be published on the graphing hall of shame. It's very rare to find a graph that isn't some fancy new marketing nonsense, actually has axis labelled correctly, displays data correctly, and yet somehow still makes people wish the creator just dumped raw numbers on the screen.

  • Regardless of any "scene busts", the lack of new movie releases due to productions paused/delayed from lock-downs already can easily explain any "historic drop" in "pirate releases". When there is nothing to pirate...

  • Has there been a drop in TV uploads?

    Yes. But it may have nothing to do with this, this time of the year is a regular 'dead zone' in scheduled programming - no late night shows right now for example, and relatively little new programming otherwise that typically gets shared. Check again next week..

  • Ignoring movies for the moment, I'm going to talk about playing music in my car. Similar principles apply to movies.

    My car is a Tesla. It comes with a Spotify client. This is included in the price of the car, so it doesn't cost me anything to use it.

    So I find something I feel like listening to and start playing it. ... and drive through an area with poor connectivity so it buffers. ... and get out of the car, and cannot continue to listen on my phone.

    So before too long, I buy a double-ended USB stick and pi

  • 'highly organized' they say. I'm a former member of a release team and that's laughable. They're giving us too much credit. There's a couple admins of an IRC channel who I send my encodes to and a qa volunteer checks it for problems and quality and then it shows up on their shared content. Most encodes are scripted with an avisynth template that I wrote then reused on pretty much everything; making minor tweaks depending on if it was animated, recorded on film or not, etc. Most 'communities' are leachers w

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