P2P Piracy Is Alive and Growing, Research Suggests
While the rise of online streaming sites can't be denied, a new research report from anti-piracy outfit Irdeto shows that P2P remains very relevant. In fact, it's still the dominant piracy tool in many countries. Irdeto researched site traffic data provided by an unnamed web analytics partner. The sample covers web traffic to 962 piracy sites in 19 countries where P2P was most used. This makes it possible to see how P2P site visits compare to those of pirate streaming sites.
The data reveal that there are massive differences in the relative use of P2P versus streaming sites between countries. In Russia, for example, only 2% of the visits go to streaming sites, while the rest of the traffic goes to P2P portals. P2P also outperforms streaming in other countries such as Australia, the Netherlands, and India. This pattern is reversed in Germany, where 88% of all visits go to pirate streaming sites. Similarly, streaming is also the dominant web piracy tool in the United States, France, Spain and other countries.
Additional research in eight countries shows that piracy traffic has grown during the course of 2017. This growth also applies to P2P sites, in all but one country, Germany. Looking at the sample as a whole, Iredeto notes that 70% of all pirate traffic goes to P2P sites, which appears to run counter to the popular narrative that streaming is more dominant today.
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The Pirate Bay Turns 15 Years Old
Founded in 2003 by a group of hackers and activists, The Pirate Bay aimed to bring file-sharing to the masses. In the fifteen years that followed, the site transformed from a small community to Hollywood's resilient arch-rival, serving millions of users. And that's not the only thing that changed. Todayish, The Pirate Bay turns 15 years old, which is quite an achievement considering the immense legal pressure it has faced over the years.
While the exact launch date is a bit of a mystery, even to the site's founders, August 10 was previously chosen as its anniversary. What we do know is that the site was brought online in 2003 by now-disbanded pro-culture organization Piratbyrån, which is Swedish for Bureau of Piracy. The group was formed by political activists and hackers in the same year, many of whom had already launched other web projects challenging political, moral, and power structures.
One of the group's unwritten goals was to offer a counterweight to the propaganda being spread by local anti-piracy outfit Antpiratbyrån. With BitTorrent as the up-and-coming file-sharing technology, they saw fit to start their own file-sharing site to promote sharing of information.
The Pirate Bay first came online in Mexico where Gottfrid Svartholm, aka Anakata, hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time. After a few months, the site moved to Sweden where it was hosted on a Pentium III 1GHz laptop with 256MB RAM. This one machine, which belonged to Fredrik Neij, aka TiAMO, kept the site online and included a fully operational tracker.
Related: Anti-Piracy Firm: P2P Piracy Still Relevant
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snotnose on Thursday August 09 2018, @05:27PM (4 children)
$15 is a lot more money in Moscow than it is in NYC. If $streaming_service is charging $15/month in both cities the Muscovites are much more motivated to hit P2P sites.
For me streaming isn't an option. I tend to listen to albums, not songs. I don't know any streaming sites that A) stream albums; and B) has an album I don't already own.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday August 09 2018, @05:31PM
I buy most of mine used. My budgets always have an entry for some CDs.
I rip them, add them to iTunes but only so they'll get synced to my phone. On my Macs I always drop each album's folder on VLC.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @07:56PM
They're not talking about music; nowadays its all about pirating movies and tv. Even if music is not explicitly excluded, the difference in bitrate between audio and video makes music a footnote in any study based on traffic volume.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday August 10 2018, @12:58AM
They are talking pirate P2P vs pirate streaming. No dollars involved here.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Friday August 10 2018, @07:57AM
Google play music streams albums.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday August 09 2018, @05:28PM (8 children)
From time to time the Vancouver, Washington police department will announce that they just arrested someone for torrenting child pornography.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 09 2018, @07:11PM (7 children)
What's with the new sig? Hoping someone will use your SSN and improve your credit for you?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday August 09 2018, @07:48PM (3 children)
there's not a whole lot anybody can do to make my credit any worse than it is.
What I'm hoping is that lots of identity thieves are able to use it to get lots of loans.
Do you know how to deal with bill collectors?
_I_ know how to deal with bill collectors: "I'm homeless. The only reason I get to eat is soup kitchens."
Grammatically incorrect yet but that's what I actually said. They never called again.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 09 2018, @08:01PM (2 children)
You know what happens when you end commercial credit, yeah? No more home loans. No more auto loans. No more student loans. If you want one of the above and can't afford it, tough shit until you can.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @09:32PM (1 child)
Well with the elimination of the usury middle men there will be enough money freed up for the economy that people can *gasp* just afford to pay for stuff!!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 09 2018, @10:50PM
Works in theory. In practice there are a whole lot of stupid motherfuckers who spend rent money on giant rims and low profile tires, lift kits, competition-level car stereos, and other idiotic shit rather than bills. What makes you think they're capable of saving for a home?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday August 09 2018, @07:50PM
Didn't he used to have that in his signature?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by chromas on Thursday August 09 2018, @11:53PM (1 child)
Who's the dipshit who decided a primary key should be a zooper secret password, anyhow? Help! People can see my uid! They're gonna steal all muh soykarmas!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 10 2018, @12:04AM
Dude, it's your secret access token to the world's largest ponzi scheme. The minimum age is going to be 175 by the time you retire and your benefits will have been cut to just enough for a bag of legal weed a month so you're too stupid to care.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @05:40PM
A lobbying group setup to inflate the affect of certain activities on their client's market issues a press release stating they are still relevant and necessary. Sounds legit to me.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @05:48PM
We have the MEATS!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @05:54PM (9 children)
I thought about it once, but then I saw the website and said fuck that. It's much easier to grab a torrent than fuck with umatrix for an hour trying to get a site to work without running java miners and having a million popups
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday August 09 2018, @06:45PM (8 children)
I just use a dedicated browser in privacy mode with Adblock Ultimate on it, and pick a site that works. Even if you did decide to fiddle with uMatrix, it would probably take 2-5 minutes to figure out what needs to be enabled/disabled (typically the worst and most useless ad/tracker domains are at the bottom of the list and can be ignored) and then it should work for months/years or until the streaming site [solarmoviez.ru] dies.
Another option would be to use a dedicated sub-$100 TV box/stick with Kodi on it. Very easy to hook that up to a TV.
Finally, if you do stick with a torrent client, you could try using one that supports "torrent streaming", where the initial parts of the file are downloaded first and the file can be played before it finishes downloading. I think one of the first clients to do that was uTorrent, with VLC for the incomplete file streaming. Something basic like Deluge doesn't support streaming, but WebTorrent [webtorrent.io] does (supports Linux and has a desktop/non-browser version according to the FAQ).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 09 2018, @07:22PM (5 children)
I would never pirate copyrighted works or advocate their piracy! I am shocked—shocked—to find that gambling is going on in here!
I do think it's interesting that kodi (formerly XBox Media Center or XBMC for short) is once again being developed for the XBox (One) after having dropped it as a build target long ago.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 09 2018, @08:03PM (3 children)
It's a little surprising Microsoft allows it [microsoft.com]. Although it's not "fully loaded" with add-ons, I assume most users end up adding them (what's that, 30-60 minutes of work?).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 09 2018, @08:20PM (2 children)
I wouldn't think addons would be necessary if you had anything else on the network sharing some directories over NFS or SMB. Maybe if you just had to start watching something ASAFP instead of waiting on a torrent to finish.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 09 2018, @10:07PM (1 child)
I don't think you understand how convenient "fully loaded" Kodi can be. The best add-ons present a Netflix-esque browsing interface, except without the artificial catalog limitations [engadget.com].
I'll admit that it can have its bad moments (movies without any working stream sources, buffering issues, or lower quality stuff than you can torrent), but when it works, it works pretty well. There are also add-ons for stuff like live streaming TV.
I don't have any Kodi box right now (gave it to a friend and I just watch stuff on laptop most of the time), but I would probably set it up again in 2020 or so when devices start shipping with AV1 [wikipedia.org] hardware decoding support. I want to future proof for streams/files that are smaller than H.265 encoded equivalents.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 09 2018, @10:57PM
Depends on your priorities, I guess. I'd rather go do something else for a little while so a download of a much better than Internet streaming quality copy can forever sit upon a media server. That way I can watch it in good quality whenever I like from now on, stick it on a thumb drive, phone, or tablet, or watch it when the cable is out because a limb fell across a line somewhere.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Webweasel on Friday August 10 2018, @10:31AM
Your winnings sir....
Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @01:54AM (1 child)
What if I don't want to fucking stream, I want a copy of the warez to watch when I'm offline?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 10 2018, @02:27AM
Torrent streaming still downloads the complete file(s) to your computer. If you don't want to watch it the moment you start downloading it, then you don't need to check any options that prioritize the initial parts and play it automatically.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @06:07PM (1 child)
never been the same
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @06:23PM
And it only cost ONE... DOLLAR!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @06:40PM (2 children)
Knowledge and information will be free. By hook or by crook the people will not be repressed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @09:38PM
This requires a massive rejiggering of our economic systems.
The easiest and least troublesome method would be to calculate costs and have creators cap their revenue at something like 5-10x the cost of production. I suggest a higher limit than the cost of production since creative works are not on the same level as factory lines, but this corporate money grab for 99+ years + forever is really fucking dumb.
Want something in the public domain? Pay off the artist! Don't want people appropriating your artistic work? Keep it to yourself :P
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 09 2018, @10:59PM
What planet have you been living on? People not only don't oppose oppression around here, they fucking clamor for it. Even their own.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Thursday August 09 2018, @06:41PM (1 child)
From a company that derives its value from the fiction that online piracy is a huge and pricey problem, a desperate bid to remain relevant...
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @04:41AM
Buggy Whip Manufacturer: Horse Drawn Carriages Still Relevant
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