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Some Pirate Sites Received More Visitors After Being Blocked
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoIt's often articles on TF that alert me to the existence of specific sites. Seems I may be in good company.
- iruoy 3y agoWith the current trends in streaming piracy must be on the rise again. Are there any numbers on that? Ideally plotted against streaming subscriber numbers
- bluescrn 3y agoHow long until popular YouTube content ends up torrent sites, as the war on ad-blockers escalates?
- tmtvl 3y agoPretty long I'd guess, seeing as you can just put down €7 for a month of ad-free viewing.
- edgineer 3y agoIt's already happening. Why sign up for yet another subscription service to see that one members-only video?
- tmtvl 3y agoWhat do you mean "that one members-only video"? I'm saying that with Premium Lite (which is 7EUR) you can watch videos ad-free for a month on YT. For people who care about not seeing ads it seems like a decent deal. Much better than Twitch where it's 5EUR per channel you subscribe to, which means if you want to watch videos from more than 1 creator ad-free it's already a better deal. And people who don't feel like paying 7EUR/month can choose to either: A) Just watch the ads, or B) Build up a backlog and then binge it all in a month.
- polygamous_bat 3y agoAnd Netflix for another 20, and Disney plus for another 20, and peacock for another 20, and another 20 for the BigCo CEO retirement fund, and voila!
- tmtvl 3y agoWhy do you need Netflix and Disney and YT at the same time? How much free time do you have in a month?
- wkat4242 3y agoThat's a lot of money IMO especially if you don't use it that much. I cancelled my Spotify too as I would use 2-5 hours a month and €11 is not worth it.
- tmtvl 3y agoIf you don't use it that much you can just build up a backlog, then get 1 month of ad-free viewing and binge it. Though if you don't use it that much you probably won't be bothered that much by the ads anyway.
- Moldoteck 3y agoThat's now, but as we know, prices tend to increase. Netflix was what? 5-10 usd in the past?
- polonbike 3y agoPart of it is already there. Think Music videos, exclusive Youtube content/partnerships, Country bloqued content, Full movies, etc ...
- npn 3y agoalready there, as there is no guarantee that a video will exist forever on Youtube. many people hoard youtube videos just because they fear that those video will disappear when they need them.
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoThere was a great fan-made film clip to a John Zorn song that was on YT for years. Then one day, gone. Erased from the internet a magnificently disturbing piece of artistry. Luckily I downloaded it, but that means in time it'll cease to exist. I could re-upload it, but that feels like an invitation to have my account terminated with prejudice.
- npn 3y agoFor me those were some viral videos from the older internet. It is not because those videos violate YouTube policies or anything. The uploaders just closed their accounts. Some videos just exist in my memory now.
- rhino369 3y agoI bet the amount of pirating of Netflix content is up since password sharing is being clamped down on—not that Netflix cares. If an unpaid user falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, did it make a sound? But I can’t help but feel that 90% of the “back to the high seas” comments on Reddit or social media discussions of streaming is just pirates justifying the piracy they were already committing. Pirates love having some moral justification. Shit, they should just admit they prefer getting something without paying for it.
- chiggsy 3y ago>Pirates love having some moral justification. Quellism is fictional, but that does not make it invalid. >the personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal. --Quellcrist Falconer. NOTE: "Make it personal" but this is business not war. Kinda feel I need to clarify that last line.
- godzillabrennus 3y agoI think with price hikes and tools like Plex / Jellyfin making it easier to create your own streaming service for content you want the social media posts are accurately representing a shift of consumers back to piracy.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
- slikrick 3y agohow/why would there be correct pirating statistics lmao
- kelthuzad 3y agogood old streisand effect, classic.
- Alifatisk 3y agoPirating movies has become so easy that people can almost not tell they are pirating movies. One example is popcorntime or webtorrent + finding the movie in Yify.
- wkat4242 3y agoYes but be careful. In some countries like Germany with low consumer protections you will get extortion letters from random lawyers when you use popcorn time.
- yard2010 3y agoAlways use a good vpn.
- wkat4242 3y agoI do, yes. But I just wanted to point this out to those that don't know.
- Alifatisk 3y ago> In some countries like Germany with low consumer protections you will get extortion letters from random lawyers when you use popcorn time. I believe there was some cases in Sweden or Denmark aswell were users got those extortion letters aswell. Scary stuff, out of curiosity, how much do you have to torrent in order to be a target by these lawyers? I guess seeding those torrents makes you a bigger target?
- roxil 3y agoAs a recipient of such a letter, I can tell you that the amount you torrent isn't really the problem, it's about the specific content. It works like this: copyright lawyer company monitors torrent trackers, then goes to a copyright-friendly court/judge with a list of IP-addresses that were up/downloading the copyrighted content of the media company they represent, they get some kind of court order from the judge to pressure ISPs to give up information about users behind the IP-addresses. The letter I got was from Universal's lawyers and amongst the various movies I downloaded, all they cared about was the new "Dune". The letter was detailed with lots of lecturing, legalese, timestamps, info hash of the content and at the end they ask for 400€ or else they might escalate in court. I didn't want to pay or risk it, so there is another lawyer who specializes in these letters who you can pay 200€ to take care of things. I saw the whole thing as a lesson learned that yes, I am being surveilled and no, my ISP is not my friend, but an adversary who keeps logs and doesn't care much about protecting my privacy. From now on I do most of my browsing and all torrenting via Mullvad VPN, paid for with Monero.
- phatfish 3y agoOn a recent trip to Canada i was surprised how many torrent/download sites blocked in the UK were accessible on a residential ISP. I assumed the block list would be about the same.
- musha68k 3y agoAren’t UK officials uniquely notorious at this?
- awaythrow42 3y agoI always felt blocking such sites meant even worse for the users. If you google a pirate or ahem porn right now, it will just send you even more shady sites because all legit ones are blocked. Even searching "websitename bla bla" will send you to a copy of websitename that looks like it but it is with more adware and possible malware
- yard2010 3y agoImho that's because of the recent google enshitification.. make sure to add keywords such as "reddit" to get recommendations from real ppl. It's quite ironic that up until recently we could use technology to get recommendations but now we need real people.
- junofan 3y agoUnfortunately marketing agencies (and now LLMs) are incredible at generating Reddit content.
- wkat4242 3y agoYeah it often makes me aware of their existence. Though I didn't really have a need to go looking for one while RARBG existed because it was so good. RIP :'(
- somenameforme 3y agoOne ironic thing is that one of the easiest ways to find good 'pirate' sites is to simply search for the takedowns. One indirect way to do this search Google for some term like [movie_name torrent] and then go to the links in the inevitable "In response to multiple complaints that we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 8 results from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaints that caused the removals at LumenDatabase.org: Complaint [1], Complaint [2], Complaint [3]." message. Those are the results from 'interstellar torrent'. The takedowns are largely free advertising for the legitimate sites. It requires some basic level of knowledge, but that's true of even just using e.g. torrents on average, so it's probably a quite meaningful factor in this. [1] - https://lumendatabase.org/notices/32859507 https://lumendatabase.org/notices/32859507 [2] - https://lumendatabase.org/notices/34353453 https://lumendatabase.org/notices/34353453 [3] - https://lumendatabase.org/notices/24237273 https://lumendatabase.org/notices/24237273
- yard2010 3y agoNice trick, but you can just use Yandex to look up anything you can't find on google. No DMCA takedowns there :)
- bt4u 3y ago[dead]
- Varloom 3y agoJust use Yandex, it wild wild west over there.
- slothtrop 3y agoIf I do this (and I'm not saying I do) I tend to avoid torrents because I don't want to deal with a VPN to avoid being harrassed. I find a low-quality stream with adblock/noscript on. Because I'm lazy in the last year I've mostly checked very old movies on archive.org
- LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
- endisneigh 3y agoInstead of not consuming, pirates use all sort of mental gymnastics to justify their consumption without paying or following the terms involved. I guess it’s no surprise many of these parasites are taking their ideology to retail. Millions of dollars of goods are stolen yearly, and this is why we can’t have nice things. Why pay when you can take for free?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago> consumption This doesn’t seem like the right term; it’s correct from an economic perspective but nobody “consumes” movies the way they do food.
- spicyjpeg 3y agoAside from the usual "piracy is not theft" argument, which I won't get into, you seem to be missing the fact that in a significant number of cases piracy actually drives legal sales. I have seen quite a few people who pirated a game and liked it so much that when its sequel came out they bought it on day 1 at full price, or recommended it to their friends who in turn proceeded to buy it. The movie/TV/anime merchandise market is larger than ever and I'm pretty sure even pirates like to spend a few bucks here and there if they can afford it; we already know merch is far more profitable than streaming service royalties for most musicians, so I would expect the same to be true for other parts of the media industry.
- endisneigh 3y agoHow many people did you see pirate and not buy? Not sure what the point of this anecdote is this it’s not like pirates resort their activity rigorously in a way that can be analyzed.
- wkat4242 3y agoI don't really justify. I just pirate because I can. I don't really care about the moral discussion at all. YMMV of course. I did share a Netflix account before the clampdown but now I pirate again. I just take the road of least resistance. Like water.
- Varloom 3y agoWith Encrypted Client Hello being rolled out (default on Firefox, optional on chrome/edge with Cloudflare DNS). ISPs can't technically block any website anymore. They used to block DNS requests, then when secure DNS rolled out, they targeted SNI requests. But with ECH there is nothing to block except the ip address, which is dynamic and doesn't even belong to the website if it was hosted on a CDN.
- gdevenyi 3y agoSo Firefox and CloudFlare can block instead.
- _chu1 3y agoFirefox can't because you can just change the code to remove the block, but the Mozilla compiled versions very well could. CloudFlare could, and they seem like they very well would because as a company they seem as comically evil as Oracle.
- justaman 3y agoPiracy as a whole is absolutely seeing a resurgence. The fragmentation of cable into the streaming era started wonderfully. There was a time when one or two subscriptions could service your media needs. I think the most egregious offender is the NFL. To follow your team, you need all these services: ESPN, Peacock, Paramount+, Amazon. Or, you can pay for a sub-par service offered by the NFL. Ultimately, we are paying more for less content with more ads than cable. AND they are selling our data on top of everything. Piracy will gain enough momentum to warrant government intervention that will further degrade and rob us of internet freedom. Mark my words.
- musha68k 3y agoI see it the same way. In the long run imo only two options: a) finally figure out licensing and platforming ambitions to unify so that the onus is not on customers b) upgrade your democracies; become Switzerland Ideally both.
- hn8305823 3y agoEvery time piracy rises to the level where it becomes a problem, the root cause is always poor product/market fit by the content owners. Every. Single. Time.
- _chu1 3y ago100% agree. I don't want to rent access to my music or rent access to TV/movies/anime through whatever people use now and have it able to be taken away from me or altered. Motley Crue's music is like 30 year old and was getting taken off and put back up in different compilation albums multiple times in 2019-2021. I want to own and keep forever, and it's extremely difficult to buy a copy of any of that stuff so I just go on rutracker with Firefox's translate tool and get what I want.
- yieldcrv 3y agoWhen I got back into piracy this year, I found out my projector had both Wifi, storage, DLNA sharing and a whole modified Android OS on it it’s really good! I’ve gone weeks without even using any of the devices connected via HDMI and a lot of the video quality is way better than what the streaming services would send, or what the stability of my internet connection would show, or what that devices version of the streaming app would show 4k rips with latest compression formats are nice
- _chu1 3y agoFrom how out of touch I am with my generation I fail to realize how many people watch TV and anime and whatever through those weird, peculiarly named "free TV and movies" websites with the pop-up ads and kinda-okay quality that have JS scripts and tons of protections to prevent you from downloading the content, one even somehow activated my browser's back button if I opened the developer tools. Who is owning these websites and why aren't they as easily taken down? It's certainly not hard to find them if the most technologically illiterate people I know find them easily.
- spicyjpeg 3y agoThese sites do get taken down relatively frequently, but their owners are masters of ban evasion and quickly reopen them under another name or sell them to someone else who does, as it recently happened with a certain anime site formerly named after a green-haired swordsman. There usually is a hefty layer of indirection and obfuscation between the sites and the actual content served, presumably to make these moves easier (moving a frontend is certainly much easier than moving a multi-terabyte library of pirated media) while also preventing other similar sites from leeching off the same content. The smaller ones additionally tend to employ fairly aggressive SEO techniques, which is why finding them is easy despite the continuous takedowns and name changes; the largest ones seem to rely mostly on word of mouth, just like their torrent counterparts.