

Fetch.io Downloads Your Torrents For You Insanely Fast, Then Streams Them to You - dotpot
http://lifehacker.com/5803740/fetchio-downloads-your-torrents-for-you-then-streams-them-to-you-and-your-friends

======
bambax
Am I missing something or is this the exact opposite of what torrenting is
supposed to do? Torrents are decentralized so that there is no single
bottleneck and no single point of attack. Re-centralizing torrents re-creates
the problem torrents were supposed to solve...?

~~~
swah
It may also be a solution against providers that do "traffic shaping" on
torrents (pretty common in Brazil at least).

~~~
hyperbovine
Ha! I've been in Rio for a week wondering why the traffic graph in uTorrent
looks like a saw blade. Obrigado!

------
ansy
Does anyone know if fetch.io or put.io caches requests across accounts? It
seems like a pretty obvious optimization, but neither services advertises this
ability.

Find appropriate torrent, it already exists on the server, start streaming
immediately. With enough users it would be like a shady version of Netflix. At
least until the MPAA catches on and floods them with DMCA requests.

------
nphase
How is this different than <http://put.io> ?

~~~
helium
It's free

~~~
hafif
the free part will be totally useless. we've seen so many sites trying to do
this for free. none of them work. imageshack closed it down, put.io didn't
even try, torrific is so slow, you can write data faster by hand

------
StavrosK
How will these guys make money? This sounds insanely expensive.

~~~
tomjen3
Not really, it is essentially rapidshare except they don't need to store as
much data and they are backwards compatible with torrents. A pretty smart way
to seed their service.

FWIW Rapidshare is about $6/month.

~~~
swombat
The recording industry would be making $6/m more from at least one person if
they offered this service directly themselves.

------
bshep
Sounds like a great idea, but how liable are they for copyright infringement?

~~~
scorpion032
If you download a copyrighted file, it is your fault. Not of the tool you use
for downloading it.

~~~
mseebach
Yeah, let's call Sean Parker and tell him that. He'll be delighted.

~~~
mseebach
Enough with the upvotes. It's not _that_ insightful.

------
fsniper
First service doing this is <http://put.io> . This seems to be a direct clone
of put.io

------
loki99
Most probably a honeypot of the RIAA. :P

------
foob
I read through the terms, privacy policy, and dmca information because this
site will obviously be used for piracy and where there's piracy there's
lawsuits. It was kind of long so here's a tl;dr for anyone wondering about
them.

The terms prohibit using the service for any illegal purposes including
copyright infringement. They then waive any liability for damages but also
state that doing this is prohibited in some jurisdictions so this might not
apply. Then finally under Indemnification they state that a user agrees to be
monetarily responsible for any liabilities, claims, and expenses, including
attorneys fees, that arise from misuse of the service.

The privacy policy states that personal information will only be shared with
the consent of the user or if required by law.

The dmca page states that they will comply with requests but asks for them to
be snail mailed to Hong Kong.

I wonder if there are any jurisdiction issues with them being located in Hong
Kong. Maybe this was a carefully chosen location for legal reasons; does
anybody know anything about this? My other initial thought after reading this
is that they're going to have a hard time tracking down the users responsible
for submitting torrents in some cases. I can submit a torrent for a movie
while at a coffee shop using a fake email address, post the link online
somewhere, and then go home and watch it. Then the only crime that I've
provably committed is downloading copyrighted material which is less of an
offense then uploading. If the site were to get sued for uploading while
downloading the torrent then they have nobody to pass that blame on to.

------
erikabele
Oh, maybe helpful to law enforcement since fetch.io will probably save your
history of illegaly downloaded content...

------
d0m
Also, when lots of people will start to use it, it will be possible for them
to _cache_ files.. so you don't even have to wait for them to download the
torrent.

~~~
spindritf
That's exactly what btaccel used to do — <http://www.btaccel.com/> . They seem
to be gone now though.

~~~
madh
I think btaccel became Torrific (<http://www.torrific.com>).

------
7952
It would be interesting to see what the IP of their BT client looks like.
Maybe it would be possible to distribute the client across lots of machine and
hide the fact that it was fetch.io. It would make it extremely difficult to
actually prove that any infringement had occurred. Alternatively they could
expose the IP of the end user in the headers and just claim to be a safe
harbour.

------
codenerdz
This does seem like a dangerous proposition if you dont want authorities to
track your downloading habits from a single point of "privacy" failure

P.S. I posted a direct link(didnt care to bring traffic to lifehacker)
yesterday, but it never got any traction

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2565861>

------
Siwy_
How would this compare to Newsgroups? Pretty much anything worthwhile that is
on BitTorrent can be found on Newsgroup servers and leeched (or in case of
videos streamed) at your connection’s maximum download speed. The only
advantage I can think of is when ISPs block access to Newsgroups ~ am I
missing something?

~~~
owenmarshall
The first rule of Usenet: don't talk about Usenet.

But seriously, a comparison:

* This service appears to do a full download, unpackaging, and will even transcode. If you download binaries from Usenet, you've got to deal with sometimes incomplete NZBs, hunt down the PAR2 files that are never included in the download, ...

* There is a free offering here. Decent binary Usenet service costs money.

* Subjective: I always have a hard time finding good solid NZBs on Usenet -- this isn't bad because I can leech much faster, but it's still annoying to get a passworded download.

>The only advantage I can think of is when ISPs block access to Newsgroups

This isn't really a huge worry for most -- you don't use your ISPs news
server, because the retention is terrible. If you are using Usenet for
binaries, you are paying for a high-retention service.

In the end I'd personally still prefer Usenet, because the average seedbox --
and let's be honest, that's _all this is_ \-- gets very slow, unreliable, and
eventually dies under the weight of DMCA hits.

------
wccrawford
There's some numbers at the top that I -assume- are storage and transfer
limits... But they aren't labeled, so I can't be sure.

I'm also a little worried about the lack of privacy policy or TOS.

~~~
martey
The privacy policy and terms of service seem to be linked on the website:

<http://fetch.io/privacy/>

<http://fetch.io/terms/>

I think their DMCA policy seems interesting, as it seems to ask copyright
holder to _mail_ notice of infringement to their address in Hong Kong:

<http://fetch.io/dmca/>

~~~
wccrawford
Ah, I see. They disappear once you log in. My fault for signing up before I
checked the terms.

------
prez
Doesn't seem very practical for torrents, but it looks like it works great for
downloading rapidshare files - especially the annoying ones, divided into 20 x
100mb files.

~~~
chaosfox
you should take a look at jdownloader.org

------
vog
While downloading, do they also upload to other clients? That is, do they only
take from the Torrent network or are they giving back some bandwidth to the
network?

~~~
alvarosm
I guess not much, because they're heavily overloaded and they can't/won't
spare the bandwidth. But that's not an issue, really, I guess they will
eventually allow themselves to have a 1:1 up/down ratio at least, that should
be nothing compared to the amount of clients they're serving.

------
emp_
Subtitles support planned? Uploading my own SRT and do some Subtler-like merge
in the backend or picking one from the torrent files.

------
locusm
Wont this be a one stop shop for the RIAA?

------
cmars
Nice, a liability lightning rod.

