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And despite all these efforts, I'm still a happy user of the pirate bay whenever I want to watch something that I can't find on iTunes or Amazon. For me, the Pi

And despite all these efforts, I'm still a happy user of the pirate bay whenever I want to watch something that I can't find on iTunes or Amazon. For me, the Pirate Bay has been the most reliable way to find stuff over the last years, for so many things it's still better than all the paid alternatives that I use. So much money wasted on futile attempts to suppress a website...

johndoe90 9y ago
I hope TPB will teach copyright owners a lesson that there's no point and no way to fight piracy.
- sharmi 9y ago
  For the one TPB that has survived, there are several file sharing websites (decent ones that are actually usable) and torrent sites that have been pulled down and the copyright owners have prevailed. I think this more points to the technical acumen of the ppl behind TPB. I am not taking strong sides against or for fighting piracy. I do hope the greater share of the profits do end up with the original authors and not the content distributors.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    These days TPB is little more than a indexer of magnet links. I think there was a claim floating around that one could offer all the TPB magnet links in a simple text file that would be a maybe a MB in size.
    - anc84 9y ago
      It's more but not even 100MB: https://archive.org/details/pirate-bay-torrent-dumps-2004-2016 https://archive.org/details/pirate-bay-torrent-dumps-2004-20... This does not include the descriptions though. Also check out https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo
    - Teever 9y ago
      I downloaded it once. The entire catalog of TPB in magnet link form worked out to 63mb zipped IIRC.
- 187123w12 9y ago
  Sure, you can already see on YouTube what kind of garbage the "non-oppressed" "idealistic" "artists" produce. I only watch stuff from the oppressed era where copyright was still working. It is several orders of magnitude better.
- shaan7 9y ago
  There is, just make it easier (and in some cases, even possible) for people to pay for content (see the comment above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15920913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15920913) There are always people who are ready to pay and people who will go to every length to not to. Instead of focusing on giving a good experience to the first crowd, companies end up screwing it up and then waste time on trying to force the second crowd to pay.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    That reminds me of the fanfare up in the cold north when Netflix expanded their offerings those shores. Only that once one checked the catalog on offer, it was downright anemic. Several TV series lagged by multiple seasons for example. Never mind that since then Netflix have lost the right to distribute quite a few movie catalogs that may hold hidden classics, as they shift their focus onto producing their own content and the copyright holders wants to keep the percentages that Netflix got for themselves. This however leads to market balkanization and drive people to once more consider alternative sources.
  - scandinavegan 9y ago
    I read a great article years ago where a Disney executive argued that they had to view pirating as a competing business model, and provide a better experience instead of just trying to shut it down. Disney and pirates compete on price, quality, availability, ease of use, and so on. Price is going to be hard to compete with since pirated stuff is free, and I guess they are attacking the availability of pirated material to increase their own by comparison, but what I wish they would focus on is to make it easier for the user to find the stuff they want. If I knew I could go somewhere for all of Disney's catalog of shorts and feature films, I'd be happy to pay a small amount per movie or subscribe for continuous access. Instead it's spread across multiple services, or you have to buy individual DVD boxes and try to assemble your own collection which is a lot of work. They could make it a lot easier for me to watch that specific short (now I go to YouTube and hope it's there) or movie (I check if it's on Netflix or another streaming service, and if not, I skip it). My (limited) experience of NFL.com is that they've done great when it comes to making it easy to watch current and older games, with options to subscribe to all games or just one team. The English Premier League doesn't have the same centralized streaming service I know of and instead depends on selling the rights to TV channels to show games, which leads to consuming a lot of pirated material if you want to follow a specific team all season or want to watch all concurrent games. If the content providers just compete in the areas they can affect, most people will pay to use it it's more convenient than the alternative.
sveme 9y ago
There's the extremely annoying tendency at least at German streaming providers (iTunes, Amazon/Google Video) to remove rental access to movies about nine months after DVD release or when a second movie of a series is about to arrive at the theatres. Only buy access remains accessible. Now that physical video rental stores are on terminal decline, online stores have an effective oligopoly without real competition and push customers towards paying a maximum. The only alternative in this case remains thepiratebay.
- chrisper 9y ago
  There is also the issue that movies in Germany and such only have the German Audio track in 5.1, but the English one is in 2.0. How ridiculous.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    But most Germans don't care for the english track in the first place, being used to subbed dialogue.
    - jhasse 9y ago
      It's changing. I'm seeing movies in English a lot more often in cinemas than I did 10 years ago.
    - chrisper 9y ago
      But there is no technical reason not to include other languages in 5.1? I would get the argument for DVDs and maybe live TV, but not for streaming...
    - egeozcan 9y ago
      There are a lot of immigrants, like me, who can speak and understand German but miss a lot when watching movies. Subtitles would help a lot but even that is missing with a lot of providers (I wonder what people with hearing disabilities do).
      - 9y ago
jacobr 9y ago
It's really cool that many torrents that are over 10 years old are still seeded.
dom96 9y ago
Does anyone have any insight on how TPB has managed to stay online this long?
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  IIRC it was sold / transferred to an unknown party and hosted outside of any jurisdictions. The mistake the original owners made was that their names could be traced back from the website.
  - aurbano 9y ago
    > hosted outside of any jurisdictions I'm curious about this - does it mean hosting in a country that "doesn't care", or is there some other option that I'm unaware of?
    - Feniks 9y ago
      There are shady hosting companies who don't ask a lot of questions. Some of them even accept BTC. At the end of the day TPB is just ones and zeros in a basement somewhere.
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      You could host on 2 servers and combine at the client (one server has even bits, the other odd) - that technically wouldn't be hosted anywhere only existing transiently at the client location?
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      "We towed it outside of the environment!"
- tim333 9y ago
  There's some info on their 2014 set up - >At the time of writing the site uses 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) hosted at different providers. >All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers. https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proof-virtual-machines-140921/ https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proo...
jyriand 9y ago
I subscribed to Amazon Prime, thinking that I can stream series and movies that I was interested in, only to find, that only things that I could watch were shows produced by Amazon itself(Man in the High Castle etc), channels and movies were restricted content because of my location. I don't understand why it's still an issue.
- bederoso 9y ago
  You can blame that on the studios, they make licensing content extremely complex. Streaming services (Amazon, Netflix, etc) would love for you to be able to access their catalog from anywhere (as you can see since Amazon allows you to watch their own content from anywhere) but are limited by contractual clauses and/or exorbitant fees, which make this sort of deal not worth it. Studios are used to a territory-based model instead of a globalised market, since that's pretty much how cable works, so when you negotiate content with a studio the contract will tell exactly which territories you're allowed to stream the content from.
- juliendorra 9y ago
  It is still an issue because of the way the market is structured. Movies exclusive distribution rights are sold separately to distributors in each country to maximize revenues, in advance if possible. (Or once the movie has toured festivals for independent movies, making it impossible sometimes for years or forever to buy a digital download in one’s country)
marcoperaza 9y ago
So I see that you run https://eggerapps.at/ https://eggerapps.at/ , where you sell various pieces of software that I'm sure you've spent a lot of time creating and perfecting. How would you like it if I set up a mirror with cracked versions of all of your apps, and then successfully diverted all of your sales to it? And then when you sue me, how would you like it if I openly mocked you? I'll post your takedown letters on a section of my site where I call you a fool, do the digital equivalent of spitting in your face, and continue to flagrantly violate your rights. That's exactly what the Pirate Bay does and I don’t understand how someone who sells their painstakingly created intellectual property could support that, let alone admit to participating in it. Edit: na85, and what if I only divert 10% of the sales? Why should I now be totally innocent?
- theothertom 9y ago
  I do see that site will happily sell me software, with a variety of payment methods, to a huge list of countries. Some TV/film/(to a lesser extent) music is not available at all to consumers in any given country. It seems at least morally reasonable to download from TPB if you've tried Amazon/Netfilx/iTunes first and the content isn't available (as OP mentioned that they do)
- na85 9y ago
  >and then successfully diverted all of your sales to it? No doubt you can back up this assertion that the pirate Bay diverted all or at least the majority of movie sales.
- rprime 9y ago
  Given that he himself is a creator and someone directly affected by piracy (in this case software cracking) I assume he knows what he's talking about. As a creator as well, I am aware that my software is out in the wild and people are using it for free and so far I've yet to notice any harm coming from it, quite the contrary. Even if we live in a connected world, we still don't live in a fair world, having a credit card or a PayPal account is still a hard thing to obtain in quite a bit of countries and so it happens that from time to time I receive emails of users that are using cracked version of my software offering to snail mail me checks or asking me for alternative payment methods, in these cases me knowing that they get enough joy of my apps is payment enough. In my case I do believe this is free marketing, in the end a good chunk of users come back and buy the apps if it's truly useful for them and counting the others that wont buy it as lost sales is stupid as they would not spend the money anyway.
Dirlewanger 9y ago
Yup, and now we're getting into an even worse situation. We're going from bundled cable packages to numerous walled garden streaming platforms that, were one to subscribe to them all to get most of the content they'd get from cable, it would surpass whatever the monthly cable bill was by a large amount.
6ak74rfy 9y ago
May I ask what measures you take to stay safe? I am new to the US, got Netflix and Amazon Video but soon realized they hardly have what I am interested in. So I got myself a Vpn (BlackVPN, if that matters) and started using Popcorn Time. I am still a bit wary to download torrents, something I used to do a lot back home. So, any suggestions on what more I can do before starting torrenting?
- wdewind 9y ago
  https://app.put.io/ https://app.put.io/ Put.io is absolutely the best way to download torrents. I am not affiliated with them in anyway except that I am a massively happy user, and assume you will use this service only to download legal torrents, like me :)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

johndoe90 9y ago

I hope TPB will teach copyright owners a lesson that there's no point and no way to fight piracy.

sharmi 9y ago
For the one TPB that has survived, there are several file sharing websites (decent ones that are actually usable) and torrent sites that have been pulled down and the copyright owners have prevailed. I think this more points to the technical acumen of the ppl behind TPB. I am not taking strong sides against or for fighting piracy. I do hope the greater share of the profits do end up with the original authors and not the content distributors.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  These days TPB is little more than a indexer of magnet links. I think there was a claim floating around that one could offer all the TPB magnet links in a simple text file that would be a maybe a MB in size.
  - anc84 9y ago
    It's more but not even 100MB: https://archive.org/details/pirate-bay-torrent-dumps-2004-2016 https://archive.org/details/pirate-bay-torrent-dumps-2004-20... This does not include the descriptions though. Also check out https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo
  - Teever 9y ago
    I downloaded it once. The entire catalog of TPB in magnet link form worked out to 63mb zipped IIRC.
187123w12 9y ago
Sure, you can already see on YouTube what kind of garbage the "non-oppressed" "idealistic" "artists" produce. I only watch stuff from the oppressed era where copyright was still working. It is several orders of magnitude better.
shaan7 9y ago
There is, just make it easier (and in some cases, even possible) for people to pay for content (see the comment above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15920913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15920913) There are always people who are ready to pay and people who will go to every length to not to. Instead of focusing on giving a good experience to the first crowd, companies end up screwing it up and then waste time on trying to force the second crowd to pay.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  That reminds me of the fanfare up in the cold north when Netflix expanded their offerings those shores. Only that once one checked the catalog on offer, it was downright anemic. Several TV series lagged by multiple seasons for example. Never mind that since then Netflix have lost the right to distribute quite a few movie catalogs that may hold hidden classics, as they shift their focus onto producing their own content and the copyright holders wants to keep the percentages that Netflix got for themselves. This however leads to market balkanization and drive people to once more consider alternative sources.
- scandinavegan 9y ago
  I read a great article years ago where a Disney executive argued that they had to view pirating as a competing business model, and provide a better experience instead of just trying to shut it down. Disney and pirates compete on price, quality, availability, ease of use, and so on. Price is going to be hard to compete with since pirated stuff is free, and I guess they are attacking the availability of pirated material to increase their own by comparison, but what I wish they would focus on is to make it easier for the user to find the stuff they want. If I knew I could go somewhere for all of Disney's catalog of shorts and feature films, I'd be happy to pay a small amount per movie or subscribe for continuous access. Instead it's spread across multiple services, or you have to buy individual DVD boxes and try to assemble your own collection which is a lot of work. They could make it a lot easier for me to watch that specific short (now I go to YouTube and hope it's there) or movie (I check if it's on Netflix or another streaming service, and if not, I skip it). My (limited) experience of NFL.com is that they've done great when it comes to making it easy to watch current and older games, with options to subscribe to all games or just one team. The English Premier League doesn't have the same centralized streaming service I know of and instead depends on selling the rights to TV channels to show games, which leads to consuming a lot of pirated material if you want to follow a specific team all season or want to watch all concurrent games. If the content providers just compete in the areas they can affect, most people will pay to use it it's more convenient than the alternative.

sveme 9y ago

There's the extremely annoying tendency at least at German streaming providers (iTunes, Amazon/Google Video) to remove rental access to movies about nine months after DVD release or when a second movie of a series is about to arrive at the theatres. Only buy access remains accessible. Now that physical video rental stores are on terminal decline, online stores have an effective oligopoly without real competition and push customers towards paying a maximum. The only alternative in this case remains thepiratebay.

chrisper 9y ago
There is also the issue that movies in Germany and such only have the German Audio track in 5.1, but the English one is in 2.0. How ridiculous.
- coldtea 9y ago
  But most Germans don't care for the english track in the first place, being used to subbed dialogue.
  - jhasse 9y ago
    It's changing. I'm seeing movies in English a lot more often in cinemas than I did 10 years ago.
  - chrisper 9y ago
    But there is no technical reason not to include other languages in 5.1? I would get the argument for DVDs and maybe live TV, but not for streaming...
  - egeozcan 9y ago
    There are a lot of immigrants, like me, who can speak and understand German but miss a lot when watching movies. Subtitles would help a lot but even that is missing with a lot of providers (I wonder what people with hearing disabilities do).
    - 9y ago

jacobr 9y ago

It's really cool that many torrents that are over 10 years old are still seeded.

dom96 9y ago

Does anyone have any insight on how TPB has managed to stay online this long?

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
IIRC it was sold / transferred to an unknown party and hosted outside of any jurisdictions. The mistake the original owners made was that their names could be traced back from the website.
- aurbano 9y ago
  > hosted outside of any jurisdictions I'm curious about this - does it mean hosting in a country that "doesn't care", or is there some other option that I'm unaware of?
  - Feniks 9y ago
    There are shady hosting companies who don't ask a lot of questions. Some of them even accept BTC. At the end of the day TPB is just ones and zeros in a basement somewhere.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    You could host on 2 servers and combine at the client (one server has even bits, the other odd) - that technically wouldn't be hosted anywhere only existing transiently at the client location?
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    "We towed it outside of the environment!"
tim333 9y ago
There's some info on their 2014 set up - >At the time of writing the site uses 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) hosted at different providers. >All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers. https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proof-virtual-machines-140921/ https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proo...

jyriand 9y ago

I subscribed to Amazon Prime, thinking that I can stream series and movies that I was interested in, only to find, that only things that I could watch were shows produced by Amazon itself(Man in the High Castle etc), channels and movies were restricted content because of my location. I don't understand why it's still an issue.

bederoso 9y ago
You can blame that on the studios, they make licensing content extremely complex. Streaming services (Amazon, Netflix, etc) would love for you to be able to access their catalog from anywhere (as you can see since Amazon allows you to watch their own content from anywhere) but are limited by contractual clauses and/or exorbitant fees, which make this sort of deal not worth it. Studios are used to a territory-based model instead of a globalised market, since that's pretty much how cable works, so when you negotiate content with a studio the contract will tell exactly which territories you're allowed to stream the content from.
juliendorra 9y ago
It is still an issue because of the way the market is structured. Movies exclusive distribution rights are sold separately to distributors in each country to maximize revenues, in advance if possible. (Or once the movie has toured festivals for independent movies, making it impossible sometimes for years or forever to buy a digital download in one’s country)

marcoperaza 9y ago

So I see that you run https://eggerapps.at/ https://eggerapps.at/ , where you sell various pieces of software that I'm sure you've spent a lot of time creating and perfecting. How would you like it if I set up a mirror with cracked versions of all of your apps, and then successfully diverted all of your sales to it? And then when you sue me, how would you like it if I openly mocked you? I'll post your takedown letters on a section of my site where I call you a fool, do the digital equivalent of spitting in your face, and continue to flagrantly violate your rights. That's exactly what the Pirate Bay does and I don’t understand how someone who sells their painstakingly created intellectual property could support that, let alone admit to participating in it. Edit: na85, and what if I only divert 10% of the sales? Why should I now be totally innocent?

theothertom 9y ago
I do see that site will happily sell me software, with a variety of payment methods, to a huge list of countries. Some TV/film/(to a lesser extent) music is not available at all to consumers in any given country. It seems at least morally reasonable to download from TPB if you've tried Amazon/Netfilx/iTunes first and the content isn't available (as OP mentioned that they do)
na85 9y ago
>and then successfully diverted all of your sales to it? No doubt you can back up this assertion that the pirate Bay diverted all or at least the majority of movie sales.
rprime 9y ago
Given that he himself is a creator and someone directly affected by piracy (in this case software cracking) I assume he knows what he's talking about. As a creator as well, I am aware that my software is out in the wild and people are using it for free and so far I've yet to notice any harm coming from it, quite the contrary. Even if we live in a connected world, we still don't live in a fair world, having a credit card or a PayPal account is still a hard thing to obtain in quite a bit of countries and so it happens that from time to time I receive emails of users that are using cracked version of my software offering to snail mail me checks or asking me for alternative payment methods, in these cases me knowing that they get enough joy of my apps is payment enough. In my case I do believe this is free marketing, in the end a good chunk of users come back and buy the apps if it's truly useful for them and counting the others that wont buy it as lost sales is stupid as they would not spend the money anyway.

Dirlewanger 9y ago

Yup, and now we're getting into an even worse situation. We're going from bundled cable packages to numerous walled garden streaming platforms that, were one to subscribe to them all to get most of the content they'd get from cable, it would surpass whatever the monthly cable bill was by a large amount.

6ak74rfy 9y ago

May I ask what measures you take to stay safe? I am new to the US, got Netflix and Amazon Video but soon realized they hardly have what I am interested in. So I got myself a Vpn (BlackVPN, if that matters) and started using Popcorn Time. I am still a bit wary to download torrents, something I used to do a lot back home. So, any suggestions on what more I can do before starting torrenting?

wdewind 9y ago
https://app.put.io/ https://app.put.io/ Put.io is absolutely the best way to download torrents. I am not affiliated with them in anyway except that I am a massively happy user, and assume you will use this service only to download legal torrents, like me :)
deleted 9y ago
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deleted 9y ago

[deleted]