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BitTorrent Seedbox Provider Handed Criminal Conviction over Users’ Piracy

37 points by yamrzou 4y ago

psychphysic 4y ago
Yikes will take Denmark off my VPN locations.
omginternets 4y ago
BitTorrent is a perfect case study of how legal and commercial forces combine to marginalize a particular technology. All it took was the creation of legal risk (in this case the possibility of being sued for millions) to create a market for managed seed boxes. At this point, two things simultaneously became true: the public perceived BitTorrent as risky and/or illegitimate, and torrent activity concentrated to a few high-profile targets. The parallels between this and OFAC compliance in Web3 are striking. In fact, OFAC compliance is even riskier for node operators because banned transactions can make their way onto your node regardless of your activity, unlike BitTorrent where copyrighted data only arrived on your node if you’re actually downloading it. My sense is that Web3’s hacker culture is overlooking an important fact: decentralization is a political project, and although the technical means of decentralization are necessary, they are by no means sufficient to realize this project. I suspect two things will happen: 1. Web3 will centralize around a small number of commercial (and perhaps government) actors. Some commercial innovation may happen along the way, which would be good. 2. Web3’s legacy will ultimately reside in scaling consensus techniques, much like the legacy of 2000’s p2p is to be found in todays “elastic” backend applications (think: CassandraDB, et al.) To be clear, indie node operators will likely continue to exist, but I expect it to become marginal (if it hasn’t already).
- Laaas 4y ago
  Technology could allow perfect decentralisation, privacy, and anonymity, but if you are barred from using it, it is of no use.
hgsgm 4y ago
Is possible to legally provide tools for legal filesharing in Denmark? Why doesn't Denmark focus on prosecuting the individuals illegally sharing files, and tha seedbox providers for making those individuals easier to find?
JonChesterfield 4y ago
> The problem for rightsholders is that a subset of the population prefers not to pay for the privilege. This justification is increasingly annoying as the quality of service provided by Netflix and the increasing numbers of competitors races down towards worthless. There's a lot of TV I vaguely remember and would like to rewatch and literally can't find anywhere to pay for it. Plus the less legitimate the service looks the more I wonder if I'd be paying for someone else's piracy, which seems strictly worse than downloading it myself. So overall I hope piracy has survived the challenging years where it was easier to pay than not to. It was famously much easier to pirate game of thrones than to buy it, I wonder if that result generalises yet.
- autoexec 4y ago
  Torrent freak has gotten weirdly pro-media cartel from time to time in their language recently. Sometimes I wonder if that's part of the reason they disabled comments.

37 points by yamrzou 4y ago

Yikes will take Denmark off my VPN locations.

BitTorrent is a perfect case study of how legal and commercial forces combine to marginalize a particular technology. All it took was the creation of legal risk (in this case the possibility of being sued for millions) to create a market for managed seed boxes. At this point, two things simultaneously became true: the public perceived BitTorrent as risky and/or illegitimate, and torrent activity concentrated to a few high-profile targets. The parallels between this and OFAC compliance in Web3 are striking. In fact, OFAC compliance is even riskier for node operators because banned transactions can make their way onto your node regardless of your activity, unlike BitTorrent where copyrighted data only arrived on your node if you’re actually downloading it. My sense is that Web3’s hacker culture is overlooking an important fact: decentralization is a political project, and although the technical means of decentralization are necessary, they are by no means sufficient to realize this project. I suspect two things will happen: 1. Web3 will centralize around a small number of commercial (and perhaps government) actors. Some commercial innovation may happen along the way, which would be good. 2. Web3’s legacy will ultimately reside in scaling consensus techniques, much like the legacy of 2000’s p2p is to be found in todays “elastic” backend applications (think: CassandraDB, et al.) To be clear, indie node operators will likely continue to exist, but I expect it to become marginal (if it hasn’t already).

Laaas 4y ago
Technology could allow perfect decentralisation, privacy, and anonymity, but if you are barred from using it, it is of no use.

hgsgm 4y ago

Is possible to legally provide tools for legal filesharing in Denmark? Why doesn't Denmark focus on prosecuting the individuals illegally sharing files, and tha seedbox providers for making those individuals easier to find?

JonChesterfield 4y ago

> The problem for rightsholders is that a subset of the population prefers not to pay for the privilege. This justification is increasingly annoying as the quality of service provided by Netflix and the increasing numbers of competitors races down towards worthless. There's a lot of TV I vaguely remember and would like to rewatch and literally can't find anywhere to pay for it. Plus the less legitimate the service looks the more I wonder if I'd be paying for someone else's piracy, which seems strictly worse than downloading it myself. So overall I hope piracy has survived the challenging years where it was easier to pay than not to. It was famously much easier to pirate game of thrones than to buy it, I wonder if that result generalises yet.

autoexec 4y ago
Torrent freak has gotten weirdly pro-media cartel from time to time in their language recently. Sometimes I wonder if that's part of the reason they disabled comments.