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As crackdown on torrent sites continues around the world, people who are pirating TV shows and movies are having to get a little more creative. Cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Kim Dotcom's Mega are some of the popular ones that are being used to distribute copyrighted content, according to DMCA takedown requests reviewed by Gadgets 360.
These Google Drive links, as well as links to those of other cloud storage services, are then shared by people on select subreddits, forums, and Facebook groups. Over the past two weeks, Gadgets 360 located over a dozen Facebook groups where people openly share such files and request more movies and TV shows.
[...] Jon, who didn't share his last name, said people are moving to Google Drive and other services because authorities worldwide continue to crackdown on torrent websites and other file sharing services. In the last two years, KickassTorrents, ExtraTorrent, Shaanig, Yify Torrents and other websites, which together heydays used to garner over 500 million unique visitors (according to web analytics firm SimilarWeb), have all shut down.
Moreover, Internet service providers are increasingly making it difficult to access the few torrent websites that are still in operation, Jon said. "You've got to be part of a private tracker, public torrenting is over," he told Gadgets 360. Private torrent tracking websites usually require users to be invited — which in itself is a difficult process.
There are several publicly accessible torrent websites that continue to exist, but "torrenting" is getting more difficult by day, multiple people told Gadgets 360. Public sites are mired with pop-up windows filled with ads trying to sell them malware, which makes it a poor experience.
Torrents are dying as savvy pirates come to their senses and abandon antiquated torrent tech, uploading their wares to cloud hosting sites like Google Drive instead.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday September 11 2017, @11:54AM (1 child)
Oh, I donno, sounds a lot like USENET to me. That was pretty interesting from the late 80s up to somewhat recently. I was an active paying EasyNews downloading user, until just a year or two ago.
Hollywood seems to have found the ideal way to kill torrent sites, anyway. Kinda like the music industry. I don't pirate music anymore because nothing good is being produced, nothing "top40" or popular is worth listening to. Likewise a movie about emoji sounds so bad that I'm not even willing to watch it, thus no need to obtain it, thus no interest in torrenting it. I pulled up a list of 2017 hollywood releases and there's apparently nothing that isn't a formula movie or remake number 666 of something that frankly was tired and weak when I saw it first time around in the 70s.
You might lure boomers into a torrent site to obtain media format #99 of some Beatles album from the 60s, they bought it on vinyl, 8trak, cassette, dcc, dat, minidisc, cd, and now they just want a F-ing mp3 of it.
There's more to "illegal bits" than crappy pozzed video and audio, such as crappy poorly written software. I miss late 80s warez BBSes and late 90s FTP sites. The modern way to trade warez is to rebrand anything older than six months as "legacy abandonware" and throw up a website with DL links and pretty much dare anyone to submit a copyright takedown notice, and insanely enough some of those sites stay up for years. That's what lack of centralization does to copyright enforcement.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Monday September 11 2017, @03:12PM
Hollywood seems to have found the ideal way to kill torrent sites, anyway. Kinda like the music industry. I don't pirate music anymore because nothing good is being produced, nothing "top40" or popular is worth listening to.
There's a problem with this logic. Sure, all music made in this decade is trash, but you're ignoring all the music that was made in decades prior. I'm still learning about great music that was produced back in the 70s, thanks to YouTube. Same goes with movies: sure all today's movies are comic book stuff, or a really disappointing Alien franchise installment, but there's an enormous amount of movies out there from decades past. Even if you limited yourself to movies and TV made before 1995, you could build quite a library of excellent movies and shows that would take you a very long time to finish watching (and that's ignoring all the trash, which of course is 95% of everything made).
You might lure boomers into a torrent site to obtain media format #99 of some Beatles album from the 60s
You can also lure younger people in to obtain that Beatles album, people who never bought it before because it came out before they were born. You can also lure fans in to download bootlegs and such. There's got to be an enormous number of soundboard recordings of concerts that fans would love to get their hands on.
The modern way to trade warez is to rebrand anything older than six months as "legacy abandonware" and throw up a website with DL links
6 months obviously isn't abandonware, but stuff older than 10-15 years generally is. What we really need is copyright reform, so all these old copyrighted works can be preserved; if it weren't for the "pirates", a lot of old 80s DOS software would be gone now, just like how we're missing some of Shakespeare's plays [wikibooks.org] plus tons of stuff from the ancient Greek and Roman eras, and so much stuff that was lost when the library at Alexandria burned. Copyright really shouldn't last longer than 20 years, and maybe even less for software.