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> This quote conveniently leaves out that the pirate's product doesn't cost the end user any money. This is not necessarily true. There are people who spend mo

> This quote conveniently leaves out that the pirate's product doesn't cost the end user any money. This is not necessarily true. There are people who spend more on a seedbox or VPN each month than a Netflix + Rdio/Spotify subscription cost. Furthermore, private trackers have restrictions on them (ratio limits, etc.). Depending on what kind of content you're looking for, it's not exactly "free" either in money or time to be an active Bittorrent user. It just so happens that that cost is still less than the "legal" alternative - if a legal alternative even exists (look at pippy's comment about accessing content in New Zealand).

derefr 13y ago
> Furthermore, private trackers have restrictions on them (ratio limits, etc.) You know, I've never understood the point of private "community" trackers. Anything mainstream will be on TPB. Anything extremely fresh will be on the release group's own (almost-always-public) tracker. And for the really long-tail stuff--unpopular nonfiction books from the 80s, for example--they've just never been digitized at all. What's an example of the sort of thing people find private trackers uniquely valuable for?
- PhasmaFelis 13y ago
  Curation and organization is one. For example, search a good movie tracker for Pulp Fiction and you'll get a dedicated page for that film--including stuff like poster image, YouTube trailers, and IMDB link--with torrents organized by quality, resolution, special features, and so forth. The other is, well, you're wrong about the long-tail stuff. TPB, for example, has lots of audiobooks but is very short on printed material. A dedicated book tracker may have a much better selection of fiction, textbooks, and other sorts of specialty books (tabletop RPGs, for example).
- gibybo 13y ago
  They are often faster (higher ratio of seeders to leechers), and are much less likely to have swarms of bots connecting to their torrents recording all the connected IPs so they can send threatening letters to ISPs/users.
- JelteF 13y ago
  The unpopular old stuff will still be seeded when you want it a couple of years later, since (almost) everyone that has downloaded it and hasn't thrown it away want's their ratio's up. They won't stop seeding it until they remove the files. So the main reason to do it is high download speeds on old unpopular torrents.
- enneff 13y ago
  Curation and organization. Continued seeding of really old stuff.
- disposablename 13y ago
  Private trackers have per-user torrent keys and are often even locked to your IP address, so anyone who is not authorized (MPAA) will not be able to see any peers (a list of who to send scary letters to).
- jd007 13y ago
  private trackers usually offer much faster release time than public trackers (shows are available less than a minute after pre on the good trackers, which often is about a few minutes after airing), have tons of good seeders so you can get pretty much all files very fast (even if its a bit old), and content that is otherwise not available elsewhere at all (for content-specific trackers mostly, such as music ones) also, release groups usually dont have their own trackers, their releases are generally ftp'd to a few topsites and distributed from there (some private trackers get directly from the source thus having a slightly faster pre time and are more desirable/exclusive, others get it further down the chain of distribution)
- Haywain 13y ago
  Private trackers, especially private niche trackers, have far more obscure and interesting content than any single release group or TPB. Private trackers are full of very dedicated users that will go far and beyond to fill even the most absurd and rare requests. The difference between private and public trackers is quite literally night and day, in terms of both content and security. Also, there is Usenet which is great for quick release and sometimes rare stuff but had been hammered by the DMCA recently.
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  Private trackers have much more carefully curated content than public trackers. It makes for a much smoother download experience. Not to mention that the downloads happen as fast as your connection can support. I haven't used public torrent sites in years - the private option is so much more attractive.
- thebrokencube 13y ago
  Quality control, and speed. This may not be as big of a problem as it used to be a few years ago, but private trackers give you quite a bit more assurance that what you're downloading is what is advertised. Also, since to be part of a private tracker you have to maintain the ratio, many users set up seedboxes and just leave their torrents on, while this doesn't seem to happen quite as much on public trackers.
- STRiDEX 13y ago
  Private trackers get scene releases hours (maybe 1 or 2) before they show up on TPB. On good trackers the number of seedboxes can max out any leecher's connection. The best trackers race to supply the content the quickest. This is called tracing or torrent racing. The groups with public trackers are p2p groups. The scene does not use torrents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene Watch tracing live: https://trace.corrupt-net.org/live.php https://trace.corrupt-net.org/live.php
- krrrh 13y ago
  You'd be amazed at the effort that goes into curation and comprehensiveness on a good private tracker. Because ratios are so important there is a strong incentive to upload obscure stuff that is missing. Additionally, the ratio economy can be tweaked for things like providing subtitles (including translations where there have been none before). There's a private film tracker that I'm aware of where I believe half of the members must be film studies professors. They will post monthly themes on obscure genres such as "queer cinema prior to 1950" or "Italien cinema under Mussolini" and these will literally include hundreds of films. It's so impressive that I think some of these private trackers could reasonably argue in court that they are engaging in fair use for academic study. It's archival work at a scale that would be unimaginable if restricted to recognized institutions.
- Noxchi 13y ago
  This is like saying why do you need niche news websites like HN, when anything mainstreem will be on the 3-letter channel and everything else will be obscure, unpopular stuff. It's true, private trackers generally are "obscure" if you consider every person in the world (just like the majority of the world doesn't read HN). But if you niche down to your basic interests, then there are good private torrent trackers that will generally have almost everything worth having in that area.
dsrguru 13y ago
I believe nlawalker's point was that if a paid service is identical in functionality to a free "pirate" alternative, there's still an incentive to use the free one. Even if the paid service is better than the free one, many people would opt to stream illegally over, say, purchasing region-free non-drm DVDs.
- stormbrew 13y ago
  A stream is not identical in functionality to a DVD. Aside from that, this is a difficult to prove assertion. I'm not sure there's actually been a paid legitimate service that's actually better than the free pirate one overall, when you take out the morality equation. Netflix, rdio, etc. do seem to be doing quite well at proving that people are still willing to pay for a good service with legitimate content, though. Imagine if they were actually as good as the alternative.
  - Blahah 13y ago
    Google play almost solves this problem for me with music. I have a hopeless addiction to fairly off-the-beaten-track hip-hop, and used to have to use private trackers and forums to find good stuff. I got Google play music recently, uploaded stuff I already had, and now I get really good suggestions for new, rare stuff every day. It's still not as comprehensive as what's available on the rest of the internet, but it's better than any other paid music thing I've tried.
  - e12e 13y ago
    I think the closest I know of is vodo.net -- but it has the usual problem of free/indy media -- a lot of it is simply crap. But it has some low-budget gems, like Pioneer One: http://vodo.net/pioneerone http://vodo.net/pioneerone (Note that one person's gem is often another person's crap...) Yet, vodo.net, even being free -- still has higher friction than The Pirate Bay, less choice in [encoding] quality -- but at least supports offline usage (unlike Netflix).
    - Blahah 13y ago
      PioneerOne plot sounds a lot like Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.

derefr 13y ago

> Furthermore, private trackers have restrictions on them (ratio limits, etc.) You know, I've never understood the point of private "community" trackers. Anything mainstream will be on TPB. Anything extremely fresh will be on the release group's own (almost-always-public) tracker. And for the really long-tail stuff--unpopular nonfiction books from the 80s, for example--they've just never been digitized at all. What's an example of the sort of thing people find private trackers uniquely valuable for?

PhasmaFelis 13y ago
Curation and organization is one. For example, search a good movie tracker for Pulp Fiction and you'll get a dedicated page for that film--including stuff like poster image, YouTube trailers, and IMDB link--with torrents organized by quality, resolution, special features, and so forth. The other is, well, you're wrong about the long-tail stuff. TPB, for example, has lots of audiobooks but is very short on printed material. A dedicated book tracker may have a much better selection of fiction, textbooks, and other sorts of specialty books (tabletop RPGs, for example).
gibybo 13y ago
They are often faster (higher ratio of seeders to leechers), and are much less likely to have swarms of bots connecting to their torrents recording all the connected IPs so they can send threatening letters to ISPs/users.
JelteF 13y ago
The unpopular old stuff will still be seeded when you want it a couple of years later, since (almost) everyone that has downloaded it and hasn't thrown it away want's their ratio's up. They won't stop seeding it until they remove the files. So the main reason to do it is high download speeds on old unpopular torrents.
enneff 13y ago
Curation and organization. Continued seeding of really old stuff.
disposablename 13y ago
Private trackers have per-user torrent keys and are often even locked to your IP address, so anyone who is not authorized (MPAA) will not be able to see any peers (a list of who to send scary letters to).
jd007 13y ago
private trackers usually offer much faster release time than public trackers (shows are available less than a minute after pre on the good trackers, which often is about a few minutes after airing), have tons of good seeders so you can get pretty much all files very fast (even if its a bit old), and content that is otherwise not available elsewhere at all (for content-specific trackers mostly, such as music ones) also, release groups usually dont have their own trackers, their releases are generally ftp'd to a few topsites and distributed from there (some private trackers get directly from the source thus having a slightly faster pre time and are more desirable/exclusive, others get it further down the chain of distribution)
Haywain 13y ago
Private trackers, especially private niche trackers, have far more obscure and interesting content than any single release group or TPB. Private trackers are full of very dedicated users that will go far and beyond to fill even the most absurd and rare requests. The difference between private and public trackers is quite literally night and day, in terms of both content and security. Also, there is Usenet which is great for quick release and sometimes rare stuff but had been hammered by the DMCA recently.
w1ntermute 13y ago
Private trackers have much more carefully curated content than public trackers. It makes for a much smoother download experience. Not to mention that the downloads happen as fast as your connection can support. I haven't used public torrent sites in years - the private option is so much more attractive.
thebrokencube 13y ago
Quality control, and speed. This may not be as big of a problem as it used to be a few years ago, but private trackers give you quite a bit more assurance that what you're downloading is what is advertised. Also, since to be part of a private tracker you have to maintain the ratio, many users set up seedboxes and just leave their torrents on, while this doesn't seem to happen quite as much on public trackers.
STRiDEX 13y ago
Private trackers get scene releases hours (maybe 1 or 2) before they show up on TPB. On good trackers the number of seedboxes can max out any leecher's connection. The best trackers race to supply the content the quickest. This is called tracing or torrent racing. The groups with public trackers are p2p groups. The scene does not use torrents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene Watch tracing live: https://trace.corrupt-net.org/live.php https://trace.corrupt-net.org/live.php
krrrh 13y ago
You'd be amazed at the effort that goes into curation and comprehensiveness on a good private tracker. Because ratios are so important there is a strong incentive to upload obscure stuff that is missing. Additionally, the ratio economy can be tweaked for things like providing subtitles (including translations where there have been none before). There's a private film tracker that I'm aware of where I believe half of the members must be film studies professors. They will post monthly themes on obscure genres such as "queer cinema prior to 1950" or "Italien cinema under Mussolini" and these will literally include hundreds of films. It's so impressive that I think some of these private trackers could reasonably argue in court that they are engaging in fair use for academic study. It's archival work at a scale that would be unimaginable if restricted to recognized institutions.
Noxchi 13y ago
This is like saying why do you need niche news websites like HN, when anything mainstreem will be on the 3-letter channel and everything else will be obscure, unpopular stuff. It's true, private trackers generally are "obscure" if you consider every person in the world (just like the majority of the world doesn't read HN). But if you niche down to your basic interests, then there are good private torrent trackers that will generally have almost everything worth having in that area.

dsrguru 13y ago

I believe nlawalker's point was that if a paid service is identical in functionality to a free "pirate" alternative, there's still an incentive to use the free one. Even if the paid service is better than the free one, many people would opt to stream illegally over, say, purchasing region-free non-drm DVDs.

stormbrew 13y ago
A stream is not identical in functionality to a DVD. Aside from that, this is a difficult to prove assertion. I'm not sure there's actually been a paid legitimate service that's actually better than the free pirate one overall, when you take out the morality equation. Netflix, rdio, etc. do seem to be doing quite well at proving that people are still willing to pay for a good service with legitimate content, though. Imagine if they were actually as good as the alternative.
- Blahah 13y ago
  Google play almost solves this problem for me with music. I have a hopeless addiction to fairly off-the-beaten-track hip-hop, and used to have to use private trackers and forums to find good stuff. I got Google play music recently, uploaded stuff I already had, and now I get really good suggestions for new, rare stuff every day. It's still not as comprehensive as what's available on the rest of the internet, but it's better than any other paid music thing I've tried.
- e12e 13y ago
  I think the closest I know of is vodo.net -- but it has the usual problem of free/indy media -- a lot of it is simply crap. But it has some low-budget gems, like Pioneer One: http://vodo.net/pioneerone http://vodo.net/pioneerone (Note that one person's gem is often another person's crap...) Yet, vodo.net, even being free -- still has higher friction than The Pirate Bay, less choice in [encoding] quality -- but at least supports offline usage (unlike Netflix).
  - Blahah 13y ago
    PioneerOne plot sounds a lot like Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.