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A decade ago this week, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Carl Lundström were all found guilty of 'assisting in making copyright content available' via their site, The Pirate Bay. Each was sentenced to a year in jail and their fines totaled over $3 million. Now ten years on, the site has a life of its own without those four. It has been the target of a many takedown notices and has even been blocked multiple times.
Ten years ago this week, four men were found guilty and sentenced to prison for running The Pirate Bay. At the time, Peter Sunde said that the site would continue, no matter what. A decade on he has been proven absolutely right and that in itself is utterly remarkable.
Earlier on SN:
The Pirate Bay Turns 15 Years Old (2018)
How The Pirate Bay Helped Spotify Become a Success (2018)
The Man from Earth Sequel "Pirated" on The Pirate Bay - By Its Creators (2018)
How The US Pushed Sweden to Take Down The Pirate Bay (2017)
What's a Digital Copy Worth? Not Much, Says Peter Sunde's New Machine (2015)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @08:31AM (3 children)
As someone not downloading movies, music, etc I feel I lack a bit of knowledge about "piracy". Is there any trend to move away from torrents to some other more anonymous platforms? Are there even any viable alternatives at all?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday April 23 2019, @09:04AM
The trend is toward illicit streaming services that are effectively "anonymous" because you are not uploading to anybody and there are no legal consequences for using it (at least in the U.S., for the moment).
One "privacy" measure is the VPN. A lot of people are being paid to promote VPNs in the last couple of years, this is apparent when watching some YouTubers or reading up on Kodi addons, etc. If your ISP is your worst enemy, a VPN could be what you want.
If you want hardcore anonymity, you will probably have to accept a significant slowdown, which could impair your streaming/downloading of movies.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Tuesday April 23 2019, @01:00PM (1 child)
Eh, torrents are still a good choice.
We used to have dedicated P2P apps like Limewire and such, but as far as I can tell those are mostly dead. And good riddance...all data passing through centralized servers was a terrible model.
There's the online streaming stuff -- where people just Google "watch [movie] online" or something like that and a few results will turn up. The benefit is you aren't sharing, so you aren't as liable legally...but the downside is the majority of the results are already shut down, outright fake, or just distributing viruses disguised as "codecs".
There's probably still some darkweb stuff...I used to download through Freenet, although the network I used back then has only the name in common with today's version. So I dunno how prevalent that is anymore, but it's definitely possible. It tended to be rather slow though -- days, not hours. I think some people might still use IRC as well, although I don't know much about that.
But torrents seem to be the main option. Torrents can be as secure as you want them to be though, which is both a benefit and a liability (since that security isn't by default). You can use private trackers (typically invite only), you can block known enforcement agencies from connecting to your node (ie, Transmission privacy settings using a list like Bluetack level 1), you can use a VPN or proxy your traffic through Tor. It's an open protocol that takes care of the P2P part, and you can build whatever other systems you need on top of that. I'm having trouble thinking of anything you could do with a new P2P client that couldn't already be accomplished through configuration of your BitTorrent client settings. It's just a matter of knowing what you want to configure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @07:57PM
Bluetack looks like it's offline?