

BitTorrent Has More Users Than Netflix and Hulu Combined--and Doubled - citizenkeys
http://www.fastcompany.com/1714001/bittorrent-swells-to-100-million-users

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eli
Forget about paid vs ads vs free for a moment. One is a technology that lets
people all over the world share many types of files, legal and illegal, versus
two US-only services with a limited selection of TV and movies.

I fail to see how this is a meaningful statistic in any way. How many "users"
does FTP have versus Netflix?

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citricsquid
I pay for video games and I pay for music (my entire library for both is all
paid for) but I pirate movies because it's impossible for me to watch them
with ease, I'm in England and don't know of any service that lets me pay to
stream movies on my PC :(

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SimonPStevens
I don't get it. Since when is "They don't provide it in the format I want it"
a valid excuse for piracy. (Ethical discussions of piracy aside)

If you want to download it because that is the format/medium you prefer then
download it (from bit torrent or whatever) and then afterwards _go and pay for
it_ by buying the DVD even if you never watch it.

(If you are going to pirate and claim it's ethical, you need a more reasoned
argument for it's validity)

(Perhaps technically a grey area yes, but you are saying you are willing to
pay, so why not pay?)

Perhaps even better would be to download it, and then send a letter + payment
to the studio and explain that you wanted to pay for their excellent film but
also wanted to download it for convenience. If enough people did this it might
encourage them to provide the service you want.

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citricsquid
oh it's not a valid excuse for piracy, piracy is always wrong but it's an
explanation of why I pirate. I do buy films and TV shows when I can (I paid
$80 for a boxset of The Wire last week (excellent show btw)) but often I can't
find the films I want in store so my choice is to either go without or pirate.
I have no problem paying, but the availability is a problem. If there were a
service that I could pay for and stream movies when I wanted to and they were
available I'd have no problem paying for and using.

For example, last week I wanted to watch the latest Season of Dexter which had
just finished, I'd have had no problem paying for it but I couldn't, it's not
available, so I pirated it.

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SimonPStevens
So you think piracy is wrong, but you still do it anyway.

As you seem to be willing to pay, why not pay? Just post a cheque to the
publisher, or by the DVD later when it comes out.

I'm guessing the answer is convenience. I suppose that makes sense.

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sfphotoarts
Because the price of the DVD reflects a whole different set of cost than
digital distribution, and doesn't provide any incentive to the movie industry
to do get with the programme and license their movies to digital media
distribution hubs like netflix. I;m tired of seeing the same old movies touted
on netflix streaming as 'new' simply because the movie industry cannot figure
out a licensing arrangement...

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jordanmessina
Users are deciding between all of these services? I think it's more like the
smart savy (and not so ethical/less well off, if you will) users use all of
these services while the better off don't care to shell out the money and not
deal with the hassle or just don't even know about the alternative.

This is a silly comparison in the first place, BitTorrent isn't just used for
television shows/mainstream movies. Of course it's going to have more users...

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hasenj
> and not so ethical

Sharing content hardly involves ethics. It's more about economy.

EDIT:

What I meant is, it's not ethically wrong per se; it's only considered bad
because it's bad for the economy in the long run.

I wanted to make a point. Defending that point would take essays, which I'm
not in the mood to write right now.

Refer to RMS's essays:

<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html>

<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyright.html>

The only 'questionable' act involved in sharing is violating copyright. I
don't think of that as a crime or even as an ethically questionable act.

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citricsquid
> _What I meant is, it's not ethically wrong per se; it's only considered bad
> because it's bad for the economy in the long run._

Not really. It's ethically wrong because the creators and distributors of the
content want to charge money for it and by pirating you're refusing to pay for
it. If they wanted you to dance for it, or send a photo of you wearing a hat,
it would still be ethically wrong to pirate it and there'd be no effect on the
economy.

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hasenj
You read my post and replied to it without my permission. I want you to send
me a photo of you wearing a hat, with a sign saying "I'm really sorry".

/sarcasm

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citricsquid
I don't see your point, sarcasm or otherwise.

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sp332
The creators / owners of copyright have only artificial, legal ways of making
you pay for the content. There is no moral or ethical reason to pay for the
content. It's equivalent to saying _You read my post and replied to it without
my permission. I want you to send me a photo of you wearing a hat, with a sign
saying "I'm really sorry"._ They have no real claim to that.

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aplusbi
This depends on how much you believe in moral-relativity. There is a concept
of ownership and rights (sometimes legally defined) associated with IP.
Disregarding those rights can be seen as unethical. There is no precedence in
our culture saying that you have the right to disallow comments on your IP,
which is why your example is not considered unethical.

To take your example to an extreme, is it unethical to trespass on someone's
property? Is it unethical to look at someone's property from the street? Our
concept of ownership would suggest that the former is unethical, the latter is
not, but is that just because we have artificial ideas of ownership?

My ethical system includes IP ownership. I think it is unethical to use GPL
code without releasing the source, for example.

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sp332
I have heard that it's different in other countries, but the system in the USA
is pretty clear that IP is a legal construct, and is only used as an
incentive, not an inherent right. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:
[http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_trans...](http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html)

James Madison, who wrote most of the Constitution, and Thomas Jefferson, who
wrote most of the Declaration of Independence (and who were both later elected
to the office of President), thought that IP had no basis in reality.
<http://classicliberal.tripod.com/madison/detached4.html> and [http://press-
pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12....](http://press-
pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html)

~~~
aplusbi
Just because US law defines IP as an incentive not an inherent right doesn't
mean that culturally it's only a incentive.

You have poorly defined what "ethical" means. So far the only clarification
you have made is that legal and ethical are too different things. Some people
disagree and define "ethical" as "law-abiding" which means that copyright
infringement is unethical.

To be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that there is a
degree of relativism to your statement. Just because you don't think that
copyright infringement is unethical doesn't mean that people who do are wrong.

I'm not really a proponent of moral-relativism but ultimately I have to
accepted that ethics are a human construct and as such disagreement will arise
over its precise definition. For example, I think eating meat is unethical but
most people don't. Does that make me wrong?

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sp332
I'm just using "ethical" to contrast things that would be wrong no matter what
the law says. Breaking the law is unethical - that's why we don't need a "Rule
1: Don't break the rules." Stealing would be unethical even if there were no
law. But copying something without the author's permission isn't unethical
except when the law says so.

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aplusbi
Ah, I see what you mean but I disagree with your premise - I think that IP is
an ethical gray area and that copyright infringement can be unethical absent
the law/economics. I think it would be unethical for a programmer in a country
that doesn't recognize the GPL to use GPL'd code in a proprietary product, for
example, because they would be going against the expressed [reasonable] wishes
of the content creator.

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trotsky
Global market vs. north american centric services. Also, there's obviously a
lot more going on in the entire bittorrent ecosystem than just video.
Considering the respective market sizes, i'm surprised bittorent's total reach
isn't 50x.

Bittorrent Inc. wasn't trying to make any of those points though, they were
just trying to say hey look at how huge our reach is! Except that reach will
be considerably diminished as soon as you're taking money (or charging it) to
promote some content to your users.

Personally, I think P2P is a non-issue in the future of content delivery.
Bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper and torrents provide a significantly
lower performance and less reliable channel than hosted servers. I am loathe
to use torrents even to pirate content, I'll be damned if I want to pay for it
and let you abuse my outbound too.

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jcl
And yet in the U.S. Netflix consumes over twice the bandwidth that Bittorrent
does. So either Netflix users use the service a lot more or they download
bigger files.

[http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/the-internet-belongs-
to...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/the-internet-belongs-to-
netflix/265)

Is Bittorrent perhaps including in its statistics all the programs that use
their protocol to distribute software updates? IIRC, both Steam and World of
Warcraft use Bittorrent behind the scenes.

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ryanwatkins
You're comparing Netflix US users against global Bittorrent users.

Netflix likely has a large chunk of _US_ users. And likely streams a larger
portion of the content in HD.

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ryanwatkins
"BitTorrent is available in 52 languages with 'clients checking in from over
220 countries every day.'"

Wow, a service available world wide, is twice the size of two that are US-
only, one of which is not free.

Big surprise.

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pilif
Speaking as a person not living in the US, I'd _gladly_ pay to get to this
content legally.

Unfortunately that's not possible. Most of the content isn't available and if
it is, it's usually only available in a crappy german translation.

These artificial barriers should probably be factored in before doing such
calculations.

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iwwr
In countries like Germany or France, films are simply doubled. Elsewhere, they
are subtitled. However, very few cinemas outside English-speaking countries
(none that I know of) actually show the film with no doubles or subtitles (as
it's meant to be watched if you speak the language).

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Goronmon
It's 'dubbed' not 'doubled'.

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nollidge
That's a completely useless statistic. What's the _trend_ here? Intuitively,
the fact that Netflix and Hulu have around half the users of BT seems like
_good_ news for streaming providers, since BT's been around for a lot longer.

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chadgeidel
I was kind of thinking the same thing. I would have figured the number would
have been more like 10:1 or 20:1 (in favor of bittorrent).

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norswap
Are we talking about BitTorrent.com or the protocol here ? I'm confused.

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iwwr
What is amazing is a service that has comparable numbers of users and
bandwidth to the bittorrent network. A river half the size of the Amazon is
still a mighty river.

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michaelty
Filesharing: It Just Works.

Someday, the content providers will understand this and focus on providing a
better, cheaper service to their customers.

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antareus
What specifically can Hulu do better? The only thing I can think of is
dropping ads for paid users.

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dagw
One specific thing off the top of my head is I can't copy videos from Hulu to
my mp3 player to watch offline at a later date.

