
Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers - jacquesm
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/repository_torrent/
======
michaelbuckbee
Not being in a scientific field, one of the previous times this came up I
asked if any of the working scientists felt like SciHub had positively
impacted their work: exposing them to more papers than they would have read,
guiding them in different ways, etc. and the answer was a pretty overwhelming
"ohmygodyes".

From the outside, it's very difficult to see this as anything but a public
good. It certainly seems like literally the entire world is benefitting from
this (including the scientists involved in the publishing) and its being held
back by a handful of publishers.

~~~
Kognito
As an undergraduate in the UK whose university doesn’t have the greatest
subscription collection, Sci-Hub has literally enabled me to write my
dissertation as there is no way I could have afforded the individual cost of
the papers I’ve needed to reference.

I can only imagine what it is like in poorer parts of the world in terms of
access to subscriptions, or lack thereof.

~~~
ComodoHacker
Let me ask you a provocative question. When you build credibility in your
field, will you be reviewing papers for free for open access journals?

~~~
namirez
Paid journals had a point 20 years ago, but not anymore. Most studies are
funded by the tax-payers or collaboration with the industries. The authors are
not paid. The reviewers are not paid either. Finally the publisher comes along
and claims royalty. It doesn't make sense.

~~~
otherme1
Just a reminder that authors have to pay around $800-1000 to publish an
article. Then readers have to pay to read the article.

And you have to submit your work edited and almost ready to print, it's not
like they are doing heavy work there either. I remember one time I submitted
an image as SVG but they wanted EPS and asked me to do the conversion. Yes,
that oneliner with "convert" was enough.

------
nneonneo
The total collection is 54.54 TiB, with 690 torrents as of writing. For
preservation purposes, I put magnet links to all the torrents here:
[https://pastebin.com/zTAqS7wz](https://pastebin.com/zTAqS7wz)

So, even if the torrents go away, the magnet links should still be usable.

(Edited: fixed link)

~~~
phyzome
Downloading all the torrent files:

    
    
      mkdir torrents
      for i in {000..689}; do curl -sS "http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/repository_torrent/sm_${i}00000-${i}99999.torrent" -o "torrents/sm_${i}00000-${i}99999.torrent" -m 30; done
    

...which themselves take up about 75 MB, so here is the full collection of
torrent files for your convenience:

[https://lab.brainonfire.net/drop/delete-
after/20180630/torre...](https://lab.brainonfire.net/drop/delete-
after/20180630/torrents-20180520.tar.bz) (please use the next link if
possible, though!)

And a torrent that is basically equivalent to that file, thanks to the below
commenter:

[https://lab.brainonfire.net/drop/delete-
after/20180630/scihu...](https://lab.brainonfire.net/drop/delete-
after/20180630/scihub-torrents-20180520.torrent)

Each torrent appears to index 100 zip files (about 800 MB each), each of which
presumably contains 1000... journal articles? I don't know. The seed isn't
blazing fast, so it will be a bit before I can pull out a random zip file from
this randomly selected torrent and inspect it.

~~~
nneonneo
I base64'd a torrent file containing the HTML index and all 690 current
torrent files and stuck it here:
[https://pastebin.com/p1nN6veK](https://pastebin.com/p1nN6veK). Would
appreciate if you could upload that in a binary format somewhere.

Magnet link for simplicity:

    
    
      magnet:?xt=urn%3Abtih%3A97fc8218775e3a1e5b90607435c0581f839e0f1d&dn=repository_torrent&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.open-internet.nl%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.skyts.net%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.piratepublic.com%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F9.rarbg.to%3A2710%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fpublic.popcorn-tracker.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker1.wasabii.com.tw%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.zer0day.to%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.xku.tv%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.vanitycore.co%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.mg64.net%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.tiny-vps.com%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fp4p.arenabg.com%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Foscar.reyesleon.xyz%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.stealth.si%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.facedatabg.net%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fmgtracker.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fipv4.tracker.harry.lu%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Finferno.demonoid.pw%3A3418%2Fannounce
    

I am currently seeding this small file and will do so for as long as I am
able.

(Edit: updated magnet link and torrent to include trackers)

~~~
Faaak
I can't manage to load this magnet link in transmission:

    
    
      Error adding "magnet:?xt=urn%3Abtih%3A97fc8218775e3a1e5b90607435c0581f839e0f1d&dn=repository_torrent&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.open-internet.nl%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.skyts.net%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.piratepublic.com%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F9.rarbg.to%3A2710%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fpublic.popcorn-tracker.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker1.wasabii.com.tw%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.zer0day.to%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.xku.tv%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.vanitycore.co%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.mg64.net%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.tiny-vps.com%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fp4p.arenabg.com%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Foscar.reyesleon.xyz%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.stealth.si%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.facedatabg.net%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fmgtracker.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fipv4.tracker.harry.lu%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Finferno.demonoid.pw%3A3418%2Fannounce": invalid or corrupt torrent file

~~~
nneonneo
Sorry, just tried this and apparently Transmission isn't a fan of the encoded
colons (despite that being very valid URL syntax).

Try this one instead:

    
    
      magnet:?xt=urn:btih:97fc8218775e3a1e5b90607435c0581f839e0f1d&dn=repository_torrent&tr=udp:%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk:6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Ftracker.open-internet.nl:6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Ftracker.skyts.net:6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Ftracker.piratepublic.com:1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org:1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2F9.rarbg.to:2710%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Fpublic.popcorn-tracker.org:6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Ftracker1.wasabii.com.tw:6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Ftracker.zer0day.to:1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Ftracker.xku.tv:6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Ftracker.vanitycore.co:6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Ftracker.mg64.net:6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Ftracker.tiny-vps.com:6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Fp4p.arenabg.com:1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Foscar.reyesleon.xyz:6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Fopen.stealth.si:80%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Fopen.facedatabg.net:6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Fmgtracker.org:6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Fipv4.tracker.harry.lu:80%2Fannounce&tr=udp:%2F%2Finferno.demonoid.pw:3418%2Fannounce

~~~
mdaniel
I'll try to remember to do it when I get home, but if you beat me to it can
you please check and see if that's a known issue with Transmission? Because
that seems easy to fix, and in my mind it's bad news to need "vendor specific"
magnet links

~~~
nneonneo
It sounds like their URL handling might just be terribly broken; see for
example
[https://github.com/transmission/transmission/issues/608](https://github.com/transmission/transmission/issues/608).

------
Gatsky
This is a magnificent cultural artifact, a modern day library of Alexandria.
That it had to be 'stolen' is disappointing.

Wonder how it must feel for Elsevier to have their entire business up on a
torrent. Zero sympathy here.

~~~
wolfgke
> This is a magnificent cultural artifact, a modern day library of Alexandria.
> That it had to be 'stolen' is disappointing.

Many of the books in the library of Alexandria were really stolen (not just
infringed copyright):

>
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Library_of_Alexan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Library_of_Alexandria&oldid=842053287#History)

"The Library at Alexandria was in charge of collecting all the world's
knowledge, and most of the staff was occupied with the task of translating
works onto papyrus paper. It did so through an aggressive and well-funded
royal mandate involving trips to the book fairs of Rhodes and Athens.
According to Galen, any books found on ships that came into port were taken to
the library, and were listed as "books of the ships". Official scribes then
copied these writings; the originals were kept in the library, and the copies
delivered to the owners."

------
sktrdie
This is awesome. If only we could share this huge dump of PDF files as a more
structured format, perhaps using SQLite [1, 2], we could search through the
torrents without having to wait for all of them to download beforehand.

Although I guess the fact of having to "download them all beforehand" forces
the data to be spread across various computers, hence increases availability
of the data.

One idea I had regarding this is perhaps structuring the contents of torrents
as "append-only binary trees". So as new dumps are released every month, one
can simply start downloading the torrent and has "search capabilities" for new
data as well.

1\. [https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-
net](https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-net)

2\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKttt8PYu5M&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKttt8PYu5M&feature=youtu.be)

~~~
rocqua
Maybe someone could compute and host an index of this stuff?

~~~
sktrdie
Yes and those are effectively "torrent sites" which carry with them all the
baggage of ads and being easily shuttable.

~~~
Fnoord
Not if the index runs on Tor, such as ZeroNet.

------
jancsika
So now I'm curious--

What happens if you take the intersection of Wikipedia references with Sci-Hub
content? Is it substantially less than the total 54Tb content on Sci-Hub?

Also, has anyone made a browser extension that hyperlinks Wikipedia references
with articles available over Sci-Hub?

~~~
Vinnl
Just 1.1% of Elsevier items are cited on Wikipedia:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/rmounce/status/994923093901676545](https://mobile.twitter.com/rmounce/status/994923093901676545)

(Data here: [https://github.com/rossmounce/DOIs-in-
Wikipedias/blob/master...](https://github.com/rossmounce/DOIs-in-
Wikipedias/blob/master/ghwikidois.tsv) )

------
Iv
Tonight Aaron Swartz is finally at peace.

~~~
3131s
This torrent page has been around for a long time.

------
kriro
What I don't get is...why don't governments simply declare that all research
at publicly funded universities must be made available to the public. It's
seems so trivial. You pay the researchers, you get the research results, you
make it available for all citizens (or the world).

Companies do this, they keep the research results of their employees.

~~~
Vinnl
A major reason, unfortunately, is that they don't want to be interfering with
the distribution of scientific articles. For example, if there's a very well-
read journal in a specific discipline, but whose contents are only visible
with a subscription, then if one countries prevents its researchers from
publishing in those journals, research by that country's researchers will be
less read. And the reason they do not want to do that, is because they by all
means want to avoid being able to suppress the reach of research whose
conclusions they might not like, to prevent situations like when the Catholic
church was able to do so.

(That is, if they are actually actively aware of and see it as a problem. Lots
of governments/funders also don't have an active Open Access policy, although
this is starting to change.)

~~~
WhompingWindows
Eh, I think you're stretching in your interpretation of the causes of our
current science publishing climate. As a current researcher, and former
scientific publisher, I think most authors are interested in hitting certain
"target" journals, it's a discussion that comes up early on in the research
process. They want the right topic audience to read their work, and they want
to publish in the highest impact factor journal they can. Some university
departments requiore that researchers publish in multiple high impact, or many
more low impact, journals before they get tenure. So, I believe countries are
mostly unaware of this problem, except for UK and now others, as the UK has
been demanding their publicly funded research be open source for a few years.

To me, the problem is that scientists are highly motivated to achieve
successes in publishing and prestige and impact, and they are less likely to
stand in front of governments and demand open-access and freely circulated
articles. This is not in their best interest, I would argue, however they are
EXTREMELY busy people, researchers work 60-70 hours with a multitude of
different duties. It's not at all surprising they don't have the time to lobby
congress vociferously on behalf of the commons.

~~~
Vinnl
> I believe countries are mostly unaware of this problem

Yes, that's what I was referring to in my ellipsis.

> To me, the problem is that scientists are highly motivated to achieve
> successes in publishing and prestige and impact, and they are less likely to
> stand in front of governments and demand open-access and freely circulated
> articles. This is not in their best interest

I agree that that is a crucial link in the vicious cycle that upholds the
current system - I was merely giving a view in the motivations of why even the
funders who _are_ aware of the problem are not mandating Open Access without
extra costs.

------
Aelius
Scihub would strongly benefit from moving to ipfs, shocked that hasn't
happened yet.

------
atrexler
[https://www.ascb.org/newsletter/novemberdecember-2016-newsle...](https://www.ascb.org/newsletter/novemberdecember-2016-newsletter/on-
publishing-and-the-sneetches-a-wake-up-call-november-
december-2016-newsletter/)

"This money is effectively a surcharge, or tax, on scientific research imposed
not by a government but by a for-profit industry. Imagine for a moment how
much research could be carried out using these resources if they were
channeled back into our academic enterprise."

------
anon400232
How are the torrents grouped or organized? What are some good ways to locally
recreate the SciHub front-end search functionality?

------
ddtaylor
Wow! Any idea how much data is there all together? I'm on a work network right
now and can't fiddle with it.

~~~
toomuchtodo
At least 26TB.

~~~
ddtaylor
Wow! Did you wget all the torrents and run rtorrent or something on them?

~~~
toomuchtodo
See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14868033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14868033)
for details.

~~~
jacquesm
That's 9 months behind the times.

~~~
toomuchtodo
It contains all of the information about the Sci Hub torrents without me
linking directly to them.

~~~
jacquesm
Except the answer to the question that was asked.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I appreciate you posting the most up to date corpus size.

------
DrBazza
As a former scientist, and researching during the 90s, the publishing system
that has arisen where a company can monopolise it, and by that, prevent
access, is very unfortunate.

No scientist wants their work to be unseen and hidden behind a paywall, but
that is what has happened.

Worse still, in some fields amateurs can make a reasonable contribution to the
field (my experience is observation astronomy), and the current system hinders
that.

So many comments along the lines of I can't find the paper I want without
going to SciHub tells you just how broken the current publishing system is.

~~~
godelski
Researcher at a small company here (eg: SBIR work). I can't even tell you how
many hours I've wasted looking for access to papers. Can't exactly use
something like Sci Hub at work. But once I do find articles, usually with the
help of a local university, I am able to do a lot more work. But combine the
normal problem of having to run through many papers and add the inability to
see beyond an abstract easily.

Open access _greatly_ helps the small researchers. The big guys can already
buy access.

~~~
Vinnl
You're probably aware of this already, but to be sure and to help potential
other readers, Unpaywall can help you legally find gratis versions of
articles: [https://unpaywall.org/](https://unpaywall.org/)

~~~
godelski
I haven't actually seen this before. Thanks! Looks like it just does what I do
manually. Great idea.

Also can you explain more what you do? With Flockademic.

~~~
Vinnl
Yeah, it's a great project :)

Flockademic attempts to help researchers promote their work without relying on
publishing it in "prestigious" (and often paywalled) journals. I'm hoping to
have quality research get its authors known as sources of credible research,
rather than its journal.

I'm also currently in the process of applying for a grant for some exciting
work that aims to solve the same problem in collaboration with preprint
servers, but whether that materialises depends on the success of those
applications. If you're interested and don't mind the occasional Flockademic
spam, you can sign up for updates here:
[https://tinyletter.com/Flockademic](https://tinyletter.com/Flockademic) (Or
to the RSS feed here:
[https://medium.com/feed/flockademic](https://medium.com/feed/flockademic))

------
raister
Is this legal?

~~~
mapt
Of course not. Copyright law is extraordinarily restrictive, and you, me, and
everybody you know is guilty of violation after violation, easily enough to
bankrupt hundreds of millions of people if strict enforcement were applied.

SciHub is all normal copyrighted published work; The publishers claim the same
commercial status as an album or novel. The fact that there are currently 69
million works bundled means that willful copyright infringement of them has
statutory damages in excess of 10 trillion dollars, perhaps multiplied by the
torrent seed ratio if the judge is feeling generous.

Plainly, our present copyright system is ridiculous, and ridiculously
disproportionate. It's also (separately) morally outrageous to restrict
scientific inquiry to institutional subscriptions, for work that was submitted
for review for free. This is commonly acknowledged in academia however, where
every other person is willing to help you get access to that paper or this
preprint to help out.

The law of the land and the feelings of its population have an enormous
disconnect here. The only thing preventing the two from colliding head-on and
something reasonable coming out of that contact, are the fact that copyright
infringement is litigated less than one time in a billion, and the vaguely
defined, legally vulnerable principle of fair use.

~~~
facetube
You wouldn't be fined. You'd be arrested and charged criminally, and likely
spend the rest of your life in jail. The public does not understand and would
happily hang you for being one of those evil hackers. The person who tells
them you belong there would be a $1000/hour professional witness.

Infinite-term copyright builds dynasties. They do not take kindly to
competition. Stay safe.

~~~
namlem
In most counties you would not go to prison at all. Even in the US, you
wouldn't get more than 10 years max.

~~~
aldanor
Ironic, isn’t it - taxpayers money first goes towards funding a major fraction
of the research, and then towards “hanging the evil hackers” to ensure the
taxpaying public (the evil hackers included) never accesses what they paid
for.

------
xamuel
Anyone know why this is done as so many tiny torrents? Torrent users can
already choose which files to download from a torrent, so why not do this as a
smaller number of larger torrents?

~~~
nneonneo
The torrents each weigh in at 80.9 GiB on average, so they are _not_ small.
Each torrent contains 100 .zip files, which each in turn contain 1000
publications (averaging just under 1 MiB per publication). There's a total of
69 million publications here - it's a _very_ hefty collection.

------
kanzure
Does anyone have a complete copy? The seeds are very slow. I know someone
willing to pay for this data. Shoot me an email.

~~~
nneonneo
The _whole_ thing? It's 54 TB, how do you plan on receiving it?

~~~
userbinator
I think tape would probably be the best choice --- a single LTO-7 tape
cartridge holds 6TB and costs <$100USD. Of course the drive is quite
expensive, but HDDs are less reliable and more expensive per GB.

~~~
progval
Tapes are only good for offline storage.

If you want online storage, you'll need one drive per tape, and you would get
huge lookup times.

~~~
paulmd
> Tapes are only good for offline storage.

> If you want online storage, you'll need one drive per tape,

No, tape libraries exist, and would be considered 'nearline' storage.

[https://www.ibm.com/it-
infrastructure/storage/tape/library](https://www.ibm.com/it-
infrastructure/storage/tape/library)

> and you would get huge lookup times

Yes. This is not a good system for random access.

~~~
progval
Indeed. But the initial investment is very expensive.

~~~
paulmd
It depends on your financial scale. A fancy tape library, sure, but if your
company is in-sourcing hundreds of TBs of backups surely you are not
destitute. Glacier is always cheaper.

On the other hand I paid $185 for a LTO-5 drive a year or two ago (no library,
manually operated). 1.5 TB on a $20 tape is still pretty good in my book.

------
mr_overalls
For those of you who use SciHub: do you take any special precautions against
malware?

PDFs are a convenient vector for viruses, trojans, etc. And the users
downloading these papers tend to work for academic/research institutions that
could be ripe targets for hacking & IP theft.

~~~
aloisamae
Because I'm mostly using this from school, I'm usually in a disposable VM
behind a proxy. Those are the precautions I personally take.

------
jancsika
Has anyone with uni lib credentials done random hash checks on some of the
PDFs from sci-hub?

~~~
rasmusei
Not sure that would work, since pdfs are usually marked or prepended with some
metadata about download time and the library upon download. At least that's
the case with my uni library.

~~~
kanzure
you can remove that
[https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia](https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia)

------
mpfundstein
We need more sci-hub

------
ReedJessen
Is possession of these simple torrent files a copyright violation or does one
have to actively download them to create the copyright violation?

------
amaccuish
My uni doesn't have access to some language journals, and sometimes I just
want to check a single paper to see if it's worth it. Also many paywalls don't
allowed to you get one paper, or if they do the price is extortionate.

------
F_r_k
How can you search effectively for a specific article ? Is there an index with
all the files in all the zip files of every torrent ?

~~~
Vinnl
Regular Sci-Hub allows you to search: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-
Hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub)

------
netsec_burn
Are the files compressed at all? I can see that helping in terms of sharing
this

~~~
IronBacon
Opened one randomly, as someone else has reported, it contains one hundred
files with zip extension of various sizes, 118 GB total.

------
ksk
Why are people breaking copyright law, instead of questioning the researchers
who voluntarily approach the journals? Why not ask the researchers if they'd
consider sharing their work? Or convince them of an alternative means of
publication.

There is no one-handed clap.

~~~
s0rce
It can take days to weeks to hear back from a busy researcher to get a copy of
their paper. Half the time you skim it and determine that its not useful. Sci-
hub is instant.

~~~
ksk
Right, and that sort of delay can slow down the academic process. I agree with
you that the current situation sucks. I'm not seeing how torrenting
publications is a viable solution to this problem. This sends the signal to
the publications that they're important and that their product is valuable
enough to break the law. Naturally, no person wants to be out of a job, and
the first course of action they're going to seek is to stop the torrenting in
any way possible.

------
drageth
Is there any way to download a specific journal?

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, sci-hub itself.

~~~
Kliment
I believe they meant all articles of a given journal, rather than a specific
article.

~~~
jacquesm
Ah I see, no that isn't possible right now as far as I can see, it would
require some meta data. Also, for some unspecified reason I have no problem
with downloading a paper but I _do_ have a problem with downloading a journal.
If I try to pin it down it is related to the act of curation, the articles
themselves imo should not be copyrighted but the curation is original work so
the list of articles in a given journal should have some protection.

This might even point to a possible resolution of this whole conflict:
journals get paid by submitters to have their article listed in the journal's
index (which takes care of the pedigree part), the public has free access to
the articles themselves.

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keeptrying
Sucks you can’t index torrents?

~~~
jacquesm
Download them and index them locally?

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throwaway47861
I believe it's a good time for the publishing of a high-quality article
detailing on how to build such mirroring servers with minimal budget.

Usually such machines don't need best CPUs around but they definitely do need
ECC memory and serious NAS-like capabilities. So maybe older-gen Xeons? I am
no expert though. Hopefully somebody publishes a blog post about it.

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sigfubar
If we all got to seeding, surely we’d have the oppressors bent over a filthy
toilet in no time at all.

~~~
facetube
Until the cops kick your door in on copyright infringement charges to "make an
example" of someone. Don't think it can't happen.

~~~
DmenshunlAnlsis
In over twenty years of piracy, I’ve never actually met someone online who got
something more than a pissy email from an ISP. It’s possible to be made an
example of, but if you’re not profiting from the piracy it’s vanishingly
unlikely. The only people I know of who got more than a token fine were
involved in some other criminal enterprise besides just downloading something.

~~~
kevingrahl
I can tell that you’re not from Germany or know anyone from here that pirates.
There are special law firms (Waldorf Frommer comes to mind) specializing only
on sending out cease and desist letters carrying fines of around 1.000€ per
infringement (mostly movies and tv shows). ISP’s willingly hand over any
customer data to those firms. Of course the only one benefiting from this is
the law firms not the copyright holder who never sees any decent payout.
Torrenting in Germany can get very expensive very fast if you don’t know what
you’re doing. I got big folders full of letters from Waldorf Frommer & Co from
before I learned about VPN’s and I still get the occasional letter when my VPN
fails or I’m being stupid. They can/will freeze your bank accounts if you
don’t pay, it’s no joke.

~~~
acqq
So what did you do after you received such letters? It seems you haven't paid.
How?

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kevingrahl
I paid a small number of those, appealed others in court (sometimes going
through multiple instances) and the last years just kept ignoring the few
letters that still come from time to time until they sue me or try to freeze
my accounts. I think they have me tagged in their system because they give up
pretty quickly as soon as I actively communicate with them. Might have to do
with some small won cases against them. Maybe I’m not worth the risk to them
anymore. Plus my VPN-fu is strong now.

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Froyoh
No one is talking about piracy? Hmmm

