

BTJunkie shuts down: Are the Feds winning the war? - mrsebastian
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/117147-btjunkie-shuts-down-are-the-feds-winning-the-war

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kokey
These things come in waves. I remember in the early 90s when organised piracy
was rife. There were courier groups transferring data between BBS systems,
between countries, usually committing various kinds of telephone and bank
fraud in their activities either to make long distance phone calls to transfer
data on by modem, or to purchase hardware to store the data on. These were
people who often did it for the love or status, and not for money. However, at
the same time, these large boards would make money from selling tapes of the
software, and others would sell floppy disks and CDs with the software on. The
end consumer would end up having easy access to pirated software through
friends, markets and other means. Then a crackdown happened, and it was an
international effort.

People weren't all taken down directly for piracy, others were taken for fraud
or anything else related to their activities in the piracy scene. Some of it
would fail in court, but it would be after a year of not having access to
their computer equipment.

Several years later we had Napster, and easy access to pirated music was in
the hands of the normal user again, until Napster had to give up.

Now with torrents, we had something that resembled the scene of the early 90s
closer. The crackdown is also similar.

After Napster we ended up with services like iTunes, last.fm and Spotify, and
I think post torrent crackdown we should hopefully end up with similar video
services giving us a choice between buying or renting videos for cheap or for
free.

I'm optimistic that we'll see some improvement in the video delivery business
over the coming years. It won't be as cheap as using btjunkie etc. and it
won't have as wide a selection, but hopefully not too far from it for the bulk
of consumers.

------
alecco
How is this not spam?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mrsebastian>

The site rips a story already on front page adding nothing. User works for
Ziff Davis.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mrsebastian>

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senthilnayagam
You can make it illegal but you cannot make it unpopular. In the last decade
torrent, emule, kazaa made p2p downloading easier and popular, but search was
not very good so people did use websites to search the files.

But before that we used to have warez ftp sites with upload download ratio and
other checks.

there is tamil proverb which means "Thief would be always ahead of the Cop"

these things would go underground and mutate into a system which will fix
vulnerabilities and would become impossible to detect and penetrate

------
nodata
No. Something even more difficult to shut down will be created.

~~~
mrsebastian
There are lots of things that are hard to shut down -- but generally they stay
small because they're harder to use.

If there was _only_ harder-to-use, decentralized stuff, though... I wonder if
consumers (as opposed to power users) would still pirate.

~~~
dspillett
_> I wonder if consumers (as opposed to power users) would still pirate._

The practise will just move back into the physical world more. The people in a
social group who have the know-how and access will pass the resulting content
further into the group. Once it is a file on a local disk it can spread by the
old fashioned methods rather easily. The base consumers that want to won't
obtain the material directly, but they'll get access easily enough indirectly
and after that they'll be able to pass it on the low-tech way too.

It'll be less convenient for them, but far from impractical. It might reduce
casual/opportunistic piracy (oh, it's free?, go on then) but not anything that
affects bottom lines: those that want the content but don't want to pay will
still find a way not to pay.

~~~
vidarh
Less technical people pass around USB keys with pirated movies even today.

~~~
dspillett
Aye but with many people having nice speedy connections transferring copies
directly over networks or less directly via P2P options is often more
convenient even for non technical people. Sometimes the USB stick or written
DVDs is still more convenient now of course, even for technical types. If the
online options get more complex the physical option will increasingly become
the more common choice.

------
nevinera
Did the church win the inquisition?

~~~
rbanffy
Did the heretics win?

~~~
nevinera
No, because it isn't the kind of war that can be won.

That was my point.

~~~
rbanffy
And, yet, one of the sides is very determined to play last man standing.

