
The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017) - uptown
https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2017/06/01/the-long-slow-decline-of-bittorrent/
======
jimmies
I can't read the article because the website is down. But I have something to
say about torrenting movies.

Late last year, my old parents who don't speak English came to visit me for a
couple of months in the US. I'm just a graduate student with a limited budget,
and my mom is car sick so we couldn't go out every night. I didn't want them
to waste time on Facebook after dinner until we went to bed, so I had to think
of something to do. We would spend time watching classic movies together every
night with the little projector I have. I would have to download the
Vietnamese subtitles from subscene and play the pirated movies with VLC.
Sometimes the timings were a bit off but VLC allowed me to fix it easily.

There was no streaming service offered at any price that allowed me to have
native language subtitles with those movies. I'm very happy for the time we
had together, it might have been the very last chance we had in our lives. I
am very thankful because BitTorrent and VLC allowed me to do what would be
otherwise impossible.

~~~
phil248
Torrenting for me has always been about convenience, not money. I recently
wanted to watch a new show called A.P. Bio. It's free on NBC's website. But
after struggling through one episode with lags and ads with no volume control,
I gave up and just torrented the show.

Until they master such exotic technologies as "streaming video" and "volume
control" they're going to keep driving people to torrenting. Netflix figured
this out a decade ago, and I wonder how many people have ever "given up" on
Netflix to go torrent a show? I can't imagine it's a lot.

~~~
8draco8
The law/studio deals have to change. Netflix offers great movies and they lock
it down to certain countries. For example I am big fan of Back To The Future.
I can watch may favourite movie every month when I'm in UK but when I am in
Poland then no luck. Same goes in other direction. While being in Poland I
downloaded via Netflix National Lampoon Animal House to watch on plane. I
watched half of it on plane then tried to watch rest in hotel and Netflix
refused to play it because I was in UK. Funny thing is that when I switched to
plane mode I could watch it. My question is what's the point? I as a person,
am going in to agreement with Netflix that they will provide me movie. Nothing
changes apart from my geographical location (I am paying the same amount of
money, I am paying the same taxes, everything stays the same) and yet I can't
watch the movie just because I am in different spot on the glob. I don't
understand what is the profit for movie companies in narrowing down their own
market.

~~~
icebraining
_I don 't understand what is the profit for movie companies in narrowing down
their own market._

The movie company sold the rights to show that movie in the UK to some other
company instead of Netflix, probably for more money than Netflix offered them.

Also, you're paying a fixed monthly fee, and unless you're part of the small
minority that travels a lot, you're not likely to drop Netflix over not being
able to watch certain movies in foreign countries, hence they didn't lose
anything.

~~~
ryandrake
Licensing a movie in such a way that it can be played in France but not Poland
seems as ridiculous as licensing it such that it can be played in Pennsylvania
but not Minnesota. When will this Stone Age practice go away?

~~~
mason55
Are you saying it shouldn’t be legal? Or that the business practice doesn’t
make sense?

Let’s say you’re a French movie distributor. You know the French market, you
know which movies will sell, you know how to market to French audiences.
Because of this you can bid more on the rights to distribute movies in France
than a global company that doesn’t have any specific knowledge about the
French market (your return is likely to be higher and you’re liekely to have
fewer failures). Same in the Czech, Romanian, etc markets.

But let’s say this movie conflicts with the release of some other movie you’re
distributing so you want to hold it back for three weeks.

What’s your proposed solution? Tell the studio they can only sign deals with
global distributors? Tell them to accept less money?

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> What’s your proposed solution? Tell the studio they can only sign deals with
> global distributors? Tell them to accept less money?

Stop signing _exclusive_ deals with regional distributors. If you're going to
put something on Netflix, put it on Netflix world-wide. That doesn't mean you
can't also put it on a streaming service based in France that concentrates on
French language movies -- do both. Let them each pay you for non-exclusive
global rights.

You get paid more per service for an exclusive deal, but you also get paid by
fewer services. Which is increasingly looking like a bad deal as the many
different services proliferate. Having a hundred buyers is more profitable
than having only one buyer that pays ten times as much.

It's the same game they're playing with regional exclusivity to begin with --
get more buyers by dividing up the rights. Rights in one country aren't worth
as much as rights world-wide but you can sell them to more people.

The difference is that regional exclusivity makes customers angry and non-
exclusive licensing makes customers happy.

~~~
tracker1
Distribution rights for huge back catalogs were sold to third party local to a
given country/region distributors long ago. There's a lot of entropy there,
and each has exclusivity to control distribution for the given region.

It's not that easy to work away from. Which is why Netflix has been paying
more to create or co-create content (most Netflix content isn't world-wide
exclusive it seems).

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Distribution rights for huge back catalogs were sold to third party local to
> a given country/region distributors long ago. There's a lot of entropy
> there, and each has exclusivity to control distribution for the given
> region.

Which is another reason not to use regional licensing going forward, and pass
laws to disfavor it in general. It increases transaction costs -- then when
Netflix or any of your hundred other buyers wants global rights to a
particular film, they have to negotiate with a hundred regional distributors
instead of just the original creator. The transaction costs go from "N" to "N
times M" where N and M are both large. And transaction costs make otherwise
profitable transactions either less profitable or not happen at all.

~~~
mason55
> _Which is another reason not to use regional licensing going forward, and
> pass laws to disfavor it in general_

I'm curious what your proposed legislation would be. Just outlaw exclusive
licensing? Would you prohibit vertical integration between content producers
and distributors or just force vertically integrated companies to license
content to competing distributors?

How about a distributor that has an inherent market advantage and so can bid
higher on the rights than other distributors? Would that be allowed? Or would
you require producers to charge some lowest common denominator fee so that you
can't create releases that are effectively exclusive?

I just can't imagine how you would ever effectively police this without taking
away a lot of free market rights from participants.

BTW, just so it's clear, I fully support the current EU Digital Single Market
rules that try to enforce the fact that you should be allowed to watch your
content while you are traveling. I think that's much easier on all sides of
the equation because you're not forcing anyone to make additional deals that
they don't want to make (i.e. distributing content to other companies when
they want it to be exclusive). I just think it's a big step from that to
actually legislating away exclusive distribution deals.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> I'm curious what your proposed legislation would be.

A big thing would be to just discontinue legislative _support_ for it. Get rid
of any law preventing third parties from circumventing region locks, so that
major companies can overtly thwart them.

Then you can get a "tell Netflix I'm in..." selector from your ISP or bank and
the problem gets solved by the market itself.

------
Semaphor
The reason why for me, someone with a netflix and amazon prime account in
Germany, bittorrent is neither dead nor declining (for movies and TV shows):

a) Being on time. If you want to take part in the online discussion about tv
shows, you have to watch them on time. For a ton of shows I can't even buy
episodes on the day they come out. Torrenting is still the far superior
choice.

b) Languages. Yes netflix, I know that I live in Germany. That does not mean
that I don't want to have the option of watching anime in Japanese with
English subtitles. And Amazon, it's great that I found out you are now showing
advertisements before every episode, but it's also in German. While everything
else on amazon.de is in English for me.

c) Quality. I don't care that your algorithm thinks my network is not fast
enough for HD. Just let me tell it that it's wrong. Or I could torrent and
download something in actual HD within just a few minutes.

The worst thing is that all of those are completely artificial. There is no
technological reason for any of those problems to exist. And ignoring if I
want to or not, in most cases I don't even have the option of throwing absurd
amounts of money at them to make them go away. Because of greed, laziness
and/or stupidity, torrenting is still the superior option in most cases. For
me.

PS: Mostly thanks to Bandcamp.com music torrenting is completely dead for me.

~~~
masklinn
> PS: Mostly thanks to Bandcamp.com music torrenting is completely dead for
> me.

Seconded. My music search these days is

    
    
        Find interesting band
                   +
                   |
                   v               not sure I can
            Is on bandcamp? +-no-> be arsed to even
                   +               check torrents
                   |
                  yes
                   |
                   v
               buy entire 
             discography on
                bandcamp

~~~
arximboldi
Torrents don't really work for music. Soulseek is your friend there, super
old-school but great community and it has basically everything.

I also buy almost everything I find on Bandcamp. Excepting those über-hipster
techno artists with 100-copies vinyl-only releases (but those you can usually
still find rips on Soulseek.)

~~~
Semaphor
Before there even was Bandcamp, there was Oink's Pink Palace [0], not only one
of the best sources for music (NiN's Trent Reznor was a member & user of the
site), some (lesser known) artists even released music exclusively on OiNK.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink's_Pink_Palace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink's_Pink_Palace)

~~~
adjagu
To add to your comment is the interview of Trent Reznor and Saul Williams from
2007 [1].

Begin excerpt from said interview:

What do you think about OiNK being shut down?

Trent: I'll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the
end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world's
greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was
there, and it was there in the format you wanted.

If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn't the
equivalent of that in the retail space right now. iTunes kind of feels like
Sam Goody to me. I don't feel cool when I go there. I'm tired of seeing John
Mayer's face pop up. I feel like I'm being hustled when I visit there, and I
don't think their product is that great. DRM, low bit rate, etc.

Amazon has potential, but none of them get around the issue of pre-release
leaks. And that's what's such a difficult puzzle at the moment. If your
favorite band in the world has a leaked record out, do you listen to it or do
you not listen to it?

People on those boards, they're grateful for the person that uploaded it —
they're the hero. They're not stealing it because they're going to make money
off of it; they're stealing it because they love the band. I'm not saying that
I think OiNK is morally correct, but I do know that it existed because it
filled a void of what people want.

Cease excerpt from said interview.

Flash forward 11 years and there still isn't a legal alternative to OiNK' Pink
Palace (OPP) that can hold a candle to it. I love music, but the music that I
love I can not find on any streaming service.

The bands I like are old enough that they are no longer touring or producing
music and since I can not find any of their "old" songs on any (legal)
streaming or downloading sites I am left with zero options to support the
bands I personally like.

[1]:
[https://www.vulture.com/2007/10/trent_reznor_and_saul_willia...](https://www.vulture.com/2007/10/trent_reznor_and_saul_williams.html)

------
remir
P2P forced the industry to adapt and now we have good streaming services, but
the content selection is nowhere as good as what you can find on torrent
sites.

What the Popcorn Time devs did was simply amazing. It had a Netflix-like
interface plus a huge selection of content that you could watch right away.
The industry should learn from these guys.

Just make your content available, easy to obtain and people will pay for it.
It's that simple. There's no reason, in 2018, that I cannot go online and
legally stream/download any movie/TV show I want. Classics, old movies, 90s
movies, whatever. Just make it available at a reasonable price, in a easy to
use UI and people will pay. How is that hard to understand?

~~~
wpietri
> Just make your content available, easy to obtain and people will pay for it.
> It's that simple.

No, that's just _easy_ from a consumer perspective. But it's not _simple_ at
all from the business perspective. Making movies and TV is expensive and
complicated. Getting them to break even means a lot of careful work to
maximize revenue and profit from a variety of revenue streams. It means
dealing with a lot of players that are trying to maximize their own revenue
and profit.

Things can and will get better. But not by ignoring the essential complexity
of the domain.

~~~
XorNot
Except people would happily accept variable pricing for content provided it
was centralised.

Steam gets this so right - games change price all the time, go on sale etc.

It's the same phenomenon you see with landlords - rental properties go
unoccupied for huge periods of time because they believe they'll get a better
deal just in the future - with media we've let absurd copyright durations do
the same damn thing, and probably at the expense of artists and content
creators who I _want_ to support.

~~~
aetimmes
Valve have absolutely nailed the consumer-centric business model. Gabe Newell
was the first person I heard the concept of "piracy is a service problem" from
and they've turned it into their core competency.

However, centralization of the marketplace, even from a publisher standpoint,
isn't a Good Thing. Steam's degree of control over the game publishing
platform market is pretty pathological from the view of developers.

A better solution from the content creators' standpoint is a marketplace with
competitors. In gaming, this doesn't really exist (maybe GoG/Humble?) but in
streaming media delivery, it does (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video).

------
bdz
At least where I live, Hungary, torrenting was decriminalized some years ago
as long as someone isn't doing it for profit. It's still illegal but they
stopped going after end users. The biggest private tracker has 770k users atm
with an exceptional 1452% seed to leech ratio. Basically almost everyone (ie
daily internet users) is using it in the country.

Also they introduced a "blank media" tax on everything (CD, DVD, SSD, HDD, USB
flash drive etc.) as a compensation for the presumed losses.

~~~
mattmanser
Until the EU want to do a new trade deal with the US, and the US decides it
wants to co-opt your legal framework to enforce its commercial appropriation
of European culture, history and stories through Disney and Hollywood. And
then you'll be getting lots of enforcement.

The whole copyright thing is just a US export thing, as soon as it becomes a
problem for them, they'll force the EU to make it a problem for you too.

~~~
make3
this might be an unpopular opinion, but I think copyright is a good thing, as
it allows for artists to actually get paid for their work

~~~
khedoros1
Problems:

\- Company hires a bunch of artists to make something, pays them one time,
keeps gathering checks decades after the artists are dead, and even longer
after they're getting any payment for the work.

\- Artist collects money from their work, dies, and the estate continues
collecting for decades.

The purpose of copyright should be to encourage artists to create works for
the enrichment of society as a whole, by giving them a monopoly on sale of
those works for a _limited_ time, followed by a release of the work into the
public domain.

Instead, we've got constantly-extending terms, slim-to-no chance of something
still being culturally relevant by the time its copyright expires, and people
besides the artists receiving the most benefit, in many cases.

Copyright itself can be a good thing, but the current U.S. implementation of
it sucks.

~~~
MarkMc
The time limit on copyright seems to be just an inefficient form of taxation.

If Disney keeps copyright of Snow White the government can tax Disney's extra
profit to pay for cancer research. Isn't that more socially useful than giving
everyone the right to watch Snow White on YouTube for free?

~~~
AlexandrB
> Isn't that more socially useful than giving everyone the right to watch Snow
> White on YouTube for free?

Why stop there. Wouldn't it be ever _more_ socially useful to hire vandals to
break windows and graffiti houses so the government can collect the taxes on
the repairs. See also: war.

Just because something generates economic activity, doesn't mean it's a net
benefit to society.

~~~
MarkMc
OK let me drop 'socially useful' from the question: Is it better to (a) allow
anyone to watch Snow White on YouTube for free; or (b) fund cancer research
with a tax on Disney's sales of Snow White?

With vandalism the costs clearly outweigh the benefits. With copyright
extension it seems to me the benefits outweigh the costs.

~~~
JimmyAustin
The alternative of course is that someone could use the Snow White IP to
create new media, in the same way that Sherlock Holmes has generated numerous
films. Guy Ritchie's two Holmes movies have netted over $1B USD at the box
office. That wouldn't have happened if the Doyle estate still held the
copyright.

Not to mention the fact that the Snow White character itself was pulled from
the public domain.

------
monksy
Putting Kodi under "Streaming Piracy" is pretty inflamitory. Kodi isn't there
to enable streaming piracy. (There are non-offical plugins that do that, but
they've made many announcements about Kodi's stance on Piracy)

~~~
jjeaff
But let's be honest, 99.99% of Kodi and Plex use is purely for pirated
content. Otherwise, I'm not sure where everyone is getting all these non DRM
digital downloads.

And most aren't using special plugins with Kodi, they just use Kodi to play
their content they get from torrents and Usenet.

~~~
empthought
I can't speak for anyone else, but I only use Plex for format-shifting DVDs
I've purchased. While this may be a violation of the DMCA's prohibition
against breaking copy protection, it is not piracy or even actionable
copyright infringement.

~~~
twothamendment
I knew I wasn't the only one. Once I have a disc in hand I'm going to handle
it once, get it on the NAS and watch it on any device in my house without
thinking about the media that it was purchased on. Throw an old laptop SSD, a
raspberry pi and a USB wifi into the mix and you can stream your collection
while driving across the country.

~~~
empthought
I have little kids who can't be trusted to keep physical media from being
damaged. :-D

------
asymmetric
Seems to be down. Their CDN (distil[0]), which bills itself as a "Bot
mitigation" company, shows a CAPTCHA to the Wayback Machine archiver[1],
effectively making it useless.

[0]: [https://www.distilnetworks.com/](https://www.distilnetworks.com/)

[1]:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20180212161645/https://www.plagi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180212161645/https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2017/06/01/the-
long-slow-decline-of-bittorrent/)

~~~
Robotbeat
Yeah, it's almost like they should use some sort of peer-to-peer distribution
system to allow scalable distribution of their content...

~~~
zingmars
Reminded me of the Coral CDN [1] project. Shame it's dead now.

[1] [http://www.coralcdn.org/](http://www.coralcdn.org/)

~~~
pmarreck
Wow, I had no idea this went away (although that would explain why I never see
that style of link anymore)

------
Robotbeat
What's more interesting to me is using BitTorrent not for pirated movies but
as a content distribution system enabling more free services like Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a super heavily visited website, so must pay a lot for hosting.
They manage to pay for it all with donations, but other sites can't.

For example: What if Open Access journals used peer to peer for nearly-free
content distribution? That'd allow the open access publication fee to be
basically eliminated, and what costs are left could be handled by donations.

~~~
grondilu
> What's more interesting to me is using BitTorrent not for pirated movies but
> as a content distribution system enabling more free services like Wikipedia.

That should be much higher in Wikimedia's TODO list, IMHO. There is a browser
extension called WikipediaP2P for chrome, but if I'm not mistaken the author
is not affiliated with the Wikimedia foundation and it's _only_ for chrome.

I donated money once to the foundation so now I receive emails from times to
times, asking for more money. It nags me when I read the claim that they need
money to pay for servers and yet they don't seem to make any effort to
distribute Wikipedia in a P2P way.

~~~
falcor84
But do note that hosting is actually only a very small percentage of where
money goes.

In 2017, Wikimedia received ~87M in donations while only ~2M were spent on
hosting.
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/da/Wikim...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/da/Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-
_FY16-17.pdf)

~~~
eximius
What the hell? Why do they need my money if they have 50 Million dollars in
cash or cash equivalents? Am I reading that right?

And who the hell are their employees that are getting paid 33 million dollars
a year? How many employees _are_ there?

EDIT: Reading a related comment's linked OP-ed, it appears that the Wikimedia
Foundation spends a lot of money on non-wikipedia things. That is disturbing
to me. I would like to donate to _Wikipedia_ , not Wikimedia. Wikimedia may or
may not be worthwile (I'm simply not familiar), but it isn't where I want my
money to go.

~~~
twohlix_
They have ~300 employees. So 33M is not a crazy price to pay. ~110k
USD/employee/year. Considering the industry they're in (information and tech)
this is totally reasonable.

Otherwise no big deal that it may or may not fit your values to donate to
Wikimedia.

~~~
eximius
Not crazy, no, but surprising that they have ~300 employees.

------
pmarreck
As long as channels like The CW will play 5 minutes of ads (half of them
_being for The CW_ ) for every 10 minutes of "The Flash," torrenting will
never die. Sorry, but that's fucking ridiculous.

As long as I learn that a show I wanted to watch today on Netflix was taken
away by Netflix yesterday, torrenting will never die.

Especially if you use a neat service like
[https://bitport.io/](https://bitport.io/) and/or a VPN like
[https://speedify.com/](https://speedify.com/)

------
shrimp_emoji
>Cause 5: VPN Usage

>The real problem here is that there’s no way to know just how much of VPN
traffic is growing or how much of it is BitTorrent. Though different traffic
studies look at the internet from different vantage points, some simply would
not be able to see VPN-obscured BitTorrent traffic.

I'm on a VPN all the time, and torrenting without a VPN, to me, is living on
the edge. I'd constantly wonder: how long before I receive a stern letter?
Every day would be a desperate roll of the dice. I'd turn to alcoholism to
dull my anxiety. That kind of life's not for me. So the hundreds of gigs in
shows and movies I torrent (can't purchase those anywhere without DRM, can
you? And paying for them indefinitely to get them [if the licensing doesn't
run out] with streaming compression seems silly instead of just downloading
them once) is obfuscated! Yay!

~~~
jjrh
> I'm on a VPN all the time, and torrenting without a VPN, to me, is living on
> the edge. I'd constantly wonder: how long before I receive a stern letter?

That's really a USA thing.

~~~
kqr
Yeah, I suspect something like that. I'd be much more worried about a
(relatively cheap) VPN provider ratting me out than my ISP.

------
samfriedman
While it's true that BitTorrent as a protocol has significantly fallen out of
favor as the go-to technology for John Q. Pirate's needs, there are still many
niche torrent sites that stay alive by differentiating on quality and
community.

Most of these sites are invite-only, and each tend to specialize in a specific
type of media. One site might accept only movies, another TV shows, a third
comic book scans, and a fourth might be the go-to repository for textbooks and
e-learning materials. Not all that into blockbuster movies? Just join a
tracker that specializes in older and more obscure films.

On many of these sites, the material uploaded often includes many more choices
in format and quality than is commercially available. A movie, for instance,
might offer the option to download a 1080p encode in various video and
container formats, or even a full bit-for-bit rip of the BluRay disc. This
level of detail and dedication to the pirate media also tends to spin up a
community within the site. After all, the people who dig through bargain bins
of comic books to scan and upload them (or who scan the big Marvel/DC releases
each week) are probably a lot more interested in sticking around and
discussing their favorite comics than the drive-by downloader who is only
interested in getting his hands on the latest Walking Dead issue.

It's an interesting ecosystem, and while commercial products have caught up
greatly on the convenience side I think there is a way to go still on baking
in quality, variety, and community.

~~~
tvanantwerp
> BitTorrent as a protocol has significantly fallen out of favor as the go-to
> technology for John Q. Pirate's needs...

Out of curiosity, what would you say is the go-to technology for pirates now?

~~~
drdeadringer
For me, at least, I still use torrent//magnet technology on The High Seas.

I'm not sure if this is because I am yet again unaware of What's Next until
it's too late, or yet again Simply Stubborn on what tech I use, or whatever
Option Three is this time.

------
anonu
The article claims that p2p traffic is dropping and quotes percentage numbers
which appear to be a percent of total web traffic. This doesn't actually tell
me if p2p traffic is dropping. It only tells me that its not growing with -
what I would expect is a growing pie of internet traffic.

Furthermore, I would consider the source (plagiarismtoday.com) when choosing
to trust some of the items in this article. I've never heard of them - but my
initial inclination is to believe they have an agenda.

------
muyuu
BitTorrent is going nowhere. Some uses are being - temporarily or not, we'll
see - less popular. It remains critical.

------
upofadown
So show actual decline the article would have to use some metric based on
absolute bitorrent bandwidth. Instead it uses percentages of total traffic. So
it could just be showing that Nefix has gotten popular, not anything about
bitorrent.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Especially since we know that Netflix has grown to be a ridiculous percentage
of all traffic

~~~
TremendousJudge
yeah I take issue with the way the stats are presented in this article, and I
hoped that more people would be saying it in the comments. a smaller share
doesn't directly mean smaller usage, it might as well mean bigger usage of
services (which we know increased) while p2p remained constant. the fact that
it hasn't grown with the rest of the internet doesn't mean that it isn't as
big as it used to be

------
koonsolo
I think the main takeway is that people not necessarily want it for free, they
just want it convenient.

Why would I buy a game in the store when I can just illegally download it? Why
would I pirate games when I can easily get them on Steam? Why would I download
a series when I can watch it on Netflix? Why would I try hard to pay for my
non-netflix series when I can just download it? Why would I go out and buy a
CD when I can just illegally download it. Why would I download MP3's when all
is available on Spotify anyway.

From this reasoning, I think the future might hold: why would I open a bank
account and do slow wire transfers when I can just use cryptocurrency?

~~~
atomical
Because if someone steals your money from a bank or you lose your PIN there is
still a way to get your money back. If you lose your private key or someone
steals it you can't get your money back with crypto.

------
azangru
The article concludes that:

> The internet is now dominated by legitimate choices for video streaming.

I really, really would love that to be the case, so that copyright holders
stop freaking out about their presumed losses due to pirated content, and
would just leave the pirates be.

~~~
falcor84
I absolutely agree.

I personally really love the patron model (e.g. Patreon) where people who have
the money and care about something can promote it for all of humanity.

As a (relatively) poor kid I pirated a lot because I didn't have a good
alternative. But now that I'm better off, I'm really happy to pay and support
content creators while allowing others who are not as lucky as me to get it
for free.

~~~
zanny
Patreon has been getting worse over time as people have explored what it is
capable of (both on the corporate and user side).

At first, it was just a recurring paypal where subscription got you access to
a private forum.

Then creators started putting development materials and bloopers on it.

Then extras and previews.

Now a lot of patreons are just turning into paysites. All the content is on
patreon, all of it behind tiered paywalls. Its no different than technology we
had in abundance in 2004.

The difference is that with paysites the owners of the site handled the
payment processor. Now those creators have forfeited their autonomy for the
(probably worthwhile as web centralization has shown) increased exposure and
convenience of being on THE recurring payments site. Now one corporate entity
can arbitrarily kill someones business on their own whims while taking a cut
of all their fans contributions.

------
dbg31415
Kim Dotcom on Twitter: "How to stop piracy: 1. Create great content 2. Make it
easy to buy 3. Same day global release 4. Works on any device 5. Fair price"
||
[https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/380757105298268160](https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/380757105298268160)

------
Digital-Citizen
From the article:

> The real problem here is that there’s no way to know just how much of VPN
> traffic is growing or how much of it is BitTorrent.

That's a show-stopper problem for the entire article. All of the claims made
in the article hinge on the idea that BitTorrent use is undergoing a "Long,
Slow Decline". But the author provides no way to back up that claim and buries
the lede suggesting why: they don't have the data to back up the claim in
their chosen title. The article is largely a joke, a collection of baseless
speculation, propaganda (including uncritical use of "piracy", "Legitimate
Alternatives")[1], no awareness of why people share data via BitTorrent, and
nothing that indicates an awareness of how laws differ around the world (an
American bias is unacceptable since the Internet, BitTorrent use, and alleged
activity are all global). Sadly some of the feedback on this group echoes the
same sentiment: claims about what most people do without posting any sources
to back up the claims.

On top of all that, the article is hosted on a service that could use a more
resilient underlying infrastructure. As one poster here pointed out, it's as
if the article should have been hosted on a service that lets people pass
around verbatim copies of the article.

[1] See [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-
avoid.html](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html) on how these
and other terms are unwise to use without explaining what you mean. One of the
giant risks is conveying an undisclosed viewpoint that colors your take on
everything else: "unauthorized copying" or "prohibited copying" could have
been used instead of "piracy", for example. I'd add "legitimate" to that list
of words for the same reason: the word implies that such copying is
illegitimate where it is illegal. But as that gnu.org article also points out,
"[L]aws don't define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to
implement justice. If the laws (the implementation) don't fit our ideas of
right and wrong (the spec), the laws are what should change.". If we're to
have a reasonable discussion of this, we ought to admit to our views and speak
of them clearly, not hide behind propaganda without ever explicitly coming to
terms with their implications.

------
sotojuan
I hope torrents stay strong. No way I could've cultivated my love for films
and music without Karagarga and What/Redacted, respectively.

~~~
whywhywhywhy
I have a theory that the current generation growing up with their young
artists only working through streaming platforms are going to have a tough
time in 20 years reliving songs they loved of their youth because the
streaming platforms they listened to them on will be long dead and no one
bothered pirating it and sharing it.

Case in point it's super easy for me to find discogs of even unusual artists I
grew up with on torrent sites. But if I search for artists mentioned a lot in
the indie music press today I really struggle to find anything on the torrent
sites.

I don't trust corporations to look after their own cultural artefacts.
Karagarga is a beautiful example, passionate individuals will mash together
video from one movie release, audio from another and subtitles from another to
create a competent release of a film because no perfect copy exists. They'll
do it purely for their love of the source material.

~~~
sedachv
> I have a theory that the current generation growing up with their young
> artists only working through streaming platforms are going to have a tough
> time in 20 years reliving songs they loved of their youth because the
> streaming platforms they listened to them on will be long dead and no one
> bothered pirating it and sharing it.

This is what happened to a lot of the songs by amateur musicians on mp3.com
when it shut down in 2001, and that was all downloadable. I still have a few
songs I downloaded from mp3.com that I have not seen hosted anywhere else. For
streaming this has been an ongoing problem with SoundCloud for a long time. A
lot of musicians delete their accounts or get blocked, move on with their
life, and there is not a download option so all that is left are "check out
this cool track" dead links.

This is ironic when you consider that a lot of mp3 blogs of the 2008-2011 era
were about "rediscovering" amateur cassette and little known vinyl releases
from the 1970s and 1980s.

------
qwerty456127
> Better Legitimate Alternatives

By no way can a vendor-locked, regionally-policied, DRMed thing be considered
a "better alternative", IMHO. I would rather pay twice (or even more) the
price of the legitimate alternatives to just legalize the usage of unlimited,
no-nonsence, DRM-free standard-format files exchange if only this was legally
possible.

------
IkmoIkmo
That having been said, torrenting in some ways seems healthier than ever. On a
median retail connection I can download an entire season in 30 minutes while
I'm getting ready some food, or the first episode in 5 minutes and get started
watching. When I was a kid and still used torrents regularly, it wasn't like
that. Much of that has to do with better connections and cheap bandwidth, but
it's a fact of use nonetheless.

In short, I'd have killed 5 or 10 or 15 years ago for the torrent
speed/quality/content that's available today. That says something.

------
allthenews
Site is down, but I noticed recently that the bit torrent client is looking
more and more like 90s malware every time I download it. It has been streaming
commercials for a while now. Ive decided to look for an alternative client
next time I need to install one

~~~
RankingMember
I suspect you're referring to μTorrent, which has been descending into awful
spam-infested garbage for a long time now. As another user suggested, give
qbittorrent a go.

~~~
leetcrew
qbittorrent is the best out there for windows imo. my only complaint is that
it seems to have no dpi awareness whatsoever.

~~~
floatboth
Check out PicoTorrent. It's very very lightweight and simple. And DPI aware.

[https://github.com/picotorrent/picotorrent](https://github.com/picotorrent/picotorrent)

~~~
leetcrew
that actually looks fantastic. thanks for the recommendation!

------
pooya13
It's interesting to me that all these people who don't use BitTorrent
themselves are commenting on how they've "over heard" how it is mostly being
used for this or that. It is easy to say people should pay for content when
you live in a high GDP country. When you earn 200-300$ per month you can't
afford to pay 10$ for a movie or thousands of dollars for software.

~~~
jotm
You're getting downvoted because HN.

I'd pay for entertainment, if it was quick (streamed) and maybe per episode.
Seems really easy to do. But no, it's either a whole season on outdated media
in English (that includes foreign movies, it's always dubbed) or nothing. If
it's geographically limited, I can't get it.

So, no, fuck you all, I'll torrent and more importantly, seed, as much as I
can.

Even with the government cracking down on the Internet, torrents are still
seemingly unscathed, so that's one good thing.

And if you can't afford it, well I'm of the opinion that you should still get
it. This is how Windows and Word became the most used software in the world.
Ultimately, brought more users than it lost.

------
chabes
This article fails to see the difference between streaming services and p2p
downloading.

If I want to watch content more than once, I contribute to increased traffic
every time I stream that content. In other words: Streaming = certain amount
of traffic, every time content is viewed.

P2p downloaded content is usually downloaded once, but can be watched
infinitely without touching the internet.

The article also fails to touch on the fact that the internet itself is now
much more mainstream (especially globally) than it was in 2006.

Of course there's less torrent traffic today than there was in 2006. Streaming
services are big for mainstream content that is being consumed by the
mainstream. The non-mainstream continue to fill their increasingly cheaper
storage devices with downloads. The difference being: they don't contribute to
internet traffic every time they consume media.

Kind of renders the article moot for me..

------
ArlenBales
It's still popular for anime. Sites like HorribleSubs or Nyaa make it a breeze
to download and watch anime, without having to deal with crappy Flash players
of anime streaming sites or having buffering hell because the site is having
traffic problems. _cough_ Crunchy Roll _cough_

------
kuon
I have a netflix subscription, but I download all movies from bittorrent, for
three reasons:

1\. Quality, especially audio, on many netflix movie I just cannot hear the
voices. VLC is much better at mixing 5.1 to stereo for my speakers (not
mentioning having multichannel when I watch on TV)

2\. Being able to apply filters. I don't use many filters, but when I watch
movie on my computers, I like to change the gamma of VLC, as my monitor is
calibrated for color accuracy. In the browser, the color balance is wrong, I
can adjust that in VLC without changing my monitor calibration.

3\. Subtitles, I want subtitles on the black borders when possible. What I
often do is applying a crop filter to have only one black border at the bottom
and I place the subtitles in it.

~~~
lbenes
Do you do this with VLC or another media player? I have a 16:10 monitor that
often has space in the letterboxes for subtitles. I took the time to do this
in VLC for a foreign TV series, but the next time I went to use subtitles it
was broken and I didn't bother to tweak it. This really ought to be a built-in
feature that just works™ without fiddling.

~~~
kuon
Actually, for subtitles, I use mpv.io with --video-align=-1 which is smart
enough to place the subtitles at the right place.

------
albedoa
This piece and its sources focus on the share of p2p and BitTorrent traffic as
a percentage of the whole, which doesn't tell us anything about its absolute
rise or decline. Of course its share is going to fall as other intensive types
of traffic become popular.

------
utellme
They do not understand that it's just protocol and service. It's useful while
it's handy in solving problems. Waiting for articles about HTTP declining in
favour of HTTPs and TCP over UDP.

------
eximius
Does anyone know if there exists an updateable torrent which lists other
torrents?

That is, a torrent using
[http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html](http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html)
to keep an up to date archive of magnet links or something?

If not, does anyone if any of the major trackers offer an API to scrape all
magnet links + tags? I don't want to take on the liability of publishing said
tracker-torrent, but I can certainly write the software to make it easy.

------
kazinator
In order to have torrents, someone has to buy the DVD or BluRay. If fewer
people are buying that stuff, there are fewer torrents. Could be a factor?
Only takes one person though for a given movie.

There is a trend now that the encodings are larger. A 110 minute movie can be
anywhere from 5 to 10 gigabytes or more in full high def. Sometimes you can
find newer movies in smaller sizes; sometimes not.

Downloading and storing that is inconvenient compared to streaming. It takes
longer; less powerful mobile devices don't decode the large stuff very well;
you may get skipping if you happen to view these huge downloads over shitty
Wi-Fi in a crammed airspace.

An 0.8 to 1.5 gig download is still a reasonable alternative to streaming.

I was traveling back in January and crammed 16 movies into as many gigs of
free space on the 32 gig SD card on my tablet for watching on planes and in
hotel rooms. I did that by running almost each one of them through ffmpeg to
get the bitrate down. In some cases I tweaked the resolution. In one or two of
them, I re-coded the audio to a lower bit rate (256 kbps to 128: it wasn't a
musical movie, WTF!) Almost no perceptible loss of quality; all perfectly
watchable.

Pain in the butt to do that, though!

Basically, I have this theorem that two hours of a perfectly watchable movie
with good sound do not require more than around 1.5 gigs of H265+AAC data.
When I see larger sizes, I tend to become kind of reluctant to pull the
download trigger.

------
ggg9990
BitTorrent serves a purpose even when unused, like nuclear weapons. All media
companies know that if they put ridiculous hurdles in front of content
consumption, piracy will pick back up.

------
allpratik
Claiming about BitTorrent usage just on declining bandwidth doesn't makes a
lot of sense. Since, now ISP has started caching things and using solutions
like Torbox to enable their customers to enjoy torrents on high speed.

This might be affecting overall bandwidth numbers of bitTorrent. But from
usage point of view, I absolutely do not see any decline. Programs like
Popcorn time are actually phenomenal in terms of their UI/UX, thus it's
getting adopted crazily.

------
foxfired
To me, torrenting has become the new SMS. When Hangout, whatsapp, imo, and
whatnot fail, I always resort to SMS which simply work.

I have access to netflix, amazon, and Youtube, but when they fail, in the most
ridiculous ways, there is always the guarantee of torrents in the highest
possible quality.

------
Karrot_Kream
I pay for access to these services but they all require in browser DRM to
watch. My media PC doesn't have any non-free stuff on it so I basically have
to torrent the stuff I already pay for. It's super annoying but oh well...

------
ponco
That is one of the most poorly written articles I've ever read. Aside from the
jarring punctuation marks littered throughout, why is there a Kodi logo next
to "Streaming Piracy?"

------
amriksohata
Decline? I don't know about bittorrent as a client, but torrent use in general
is very widespread and probably one the biggest sources of piracy

------
agumonkey
I still enjoy the integrated verification of bittorrent very much. No need for
post download md5 check and retries.. just coast along comfortably.

------
stuaxo
The fact that companies can connect and see the IP of all downloaders is an
issue.

A newer iteration needs better anonymity to become ubiquitous again.

~~~
sandov
It's only a problem in countries that enforce copyright laws fiercely, e.g.
USA.

------
snissn
Movies and TV shows are a lot less watchable now. I'm not really as excited
about the new block buster as I used to be. Maybe this is the perennial "I'm
getting old and don't realize it" but I also understand box office and movie
revenue to be down. Definitely steaming is a big source as well

------
crimsonalucard
Stremio with a popcorn time plugin is the new way to pirate movies.
Convenience and performance is roughly on par with legal services like
netflix. It's typically used under a vpn, so I'm curious about how popular it
is... who uses/ or knows about people who use it?

------
cup-of-tea
For most people, convenience is king. Netflix etc. didn't have to compete on
quality or catalogue size, only covenience. And they won. With that we lost
some of the greatest collections of human culture ever assembled. Those were
only available with BitTorrent.

------
hipaulshi
I am learning Japanese. Ever since d-addict took down their torrent section.
It was almost to impossible to find quality content with Japanese subtitles. I
now rely on Netflix Japan, but the content is still very limited.

------
jdlyga
I tried looking for the Olympics Opening Ceremonies, something I was 100%
certain would be up on torrent sites. Couldn't find a single one. Ended up
logging into the NBC Sports app and streaming it that way.

------
nfRfqX5n
more interested in seeing what the younger demographic is doing. the legal
alternatives are good, but with monthly services being offered by everything
and everyone, i wonder if there will be some eventual pullback

~~~
arbitrage
The legal alternatives are a start. I wouldn't say they are good.

Outages, exclusive availability, time-delayed availability, poor quality
transcodes and poor overall quality, and literally every damn service decided
that $10/month is a good price.

Which it might be, for any one service. I don't want to start paying $10/month
(or equivalant) for Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Disney, Sportify, etc.

------
KindOne
I'm not really a fan of torrents anymore, got a two DMCA's a few years back.

Now I just xdcc stuff from various IRC networks or I just search via Google
with "index of movie_name_here 720p mkv".

------
white-flame
The most obvious is that people are more on phones today than on full-featured
computers. You're not going to run p2p uploading on such a device. You're
going to be streaming.

------
PricelessValue
I hope bittorrent doesn't decline too much. A lot of open source software
offloads their downloads to torrents to save space/bandwidth/etc and lower
costs.

------
sandov
I'd gladly pay for a "Better Legitimate alternative" if there was one.
Executing proprietary software and DRM are deal-breakers for me.

------
gumby
Always wanted to augment http to use BT as a transport, but with the rise of
https I’m not sure that would even be possible any more.

------
zzzeek
the answer is, #1 and #5. the "enforcement" and "demographics" reasons are
bullshit. I've never heard of a "streaming pirate" site but keeping a long
term connection open to a pirate entity's site seems like a crazy thing to do
just from a browser exploit point of view.

------
krisives
Netflix stopped serving It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and now those
torrents are really really popular =)

------
jadedhacker
It would be nice if we had substantial public funding of the arts and the
results were free to copy.

------
whyage
P2P is alive and well on enterprise networks, with Kollective leading the
pack.

------
IntronExon
1,2,5 strike me as by far the most impactful. Legal alternatives are much more
prevalent and convenient than ever before. By the same token, people used to
streaming from YouTube or Netflix look for the same experience in their
piracy, and pirate streams offer that. For people who want a collection of
files to pore over, a VPN is a cheap and reasonable service most in that demo
will be familiar with.

Finally, a lot of piracy around the world took the form of downloading files
and burning them onto discs form physical distro, which has also changed for
the most part.

~~~
losteric
I think it's important to separate:

* People who just want to watch "something", often while multitasking

* People who like a show / movie, and want to own it for future re-watching

"Watch something" has vastly improved. There are huge collections of content
available online, TV/movies from all eras, Youtube's "amateur" video content,
Twitch streams, and of course social media as a passive entertaining time-
sink.

But the experience for fans, in my opinion, hasn't improved much.

The choices are: buy disks, or pay for multiple subscriptions to content
owners (eg HBO Go for Game of Thrones). Otherwise you depend on a subscription
that may drop content in the future, or a purchased stream (eg Amazon instant
video) with variable performance and online-only availability. I'd argue we
_regressed_ \- disks and disk players are more expensive, while streams are
added costs if you want to buy the disk. It's also getting harder to rip disks
for personal archival. I still regularly pirate movies, even _after_
purchasing the movie - stealing is sadly the easiest way to get a non-DRM
digital copy.

------
Quarrelsome
do we have a mirror? Its down for me.

~~~
fenwick67
How coincidental that a website about the decline of a P2P technology went
down under heavy load

------
Feniks
Bittorrent is declining because the big mainstream stuff that people want is
now after years available for convenient streaming. The industry has finally
adapted.

If you want to read Ever17 bittorrent will aways be there keeping it available
to mankind. Since I DO believe creators should be payed when possible I see
this a win. Piracy for me was always about being a library of Alexandria. Not
a way to steal the latest Hollywood trash.

------
blt
Saving movies to disk doesn't make much sense. The files are huge, and
rewatching is not that common. BitTorrent is great for music, sadly we lost
what.cd to law enforcement.

~~~
sotojuan
Saving movies to disk makes a lot of sense - I like not having to rely on
either a big company's services or library nor some sketchy, slow illegal
streaming site. Not to mention a vast number of movies are not available for
streaming illegally or legally in a convenient way.

If I download a movie I know it will always be available and work 100% of the
time regardless of internet connection or money. If I delete it after
watching, BitTorrent gives me a similar guarantee provided I can be online.

~~~
djsumdog
I don't use streaming, and it's interesting how when I go to someone else's
house, I'll be like "It should be on Netflix" and it's not .. but it was a few
years ago.

I recently met up with an old roommate who still keeps a NAS with TV shows and
movies and he had tons and tons of stuff on there that you simply can't find
anywhere. Lot's of old kids shows for his daughter, old stuff that you could
only get on MySpleen.

With everyone moving to streaming and not having the wall of DVDs/BluRays/VHS
tapes, we have lost something, but stuff isn't on streaming forever. Things
rotate out, and fewer people are actually buying media. Even with eBooks,
you're paying for a license to see that media for a limited use.

------
rjvir
This strikes me as an area where distributed apps on a blockchain could have a
big impact.

Currently, top piracy options like torrent websites and Kodi addons constantly
get taken down by the government (through methods described in this article).

But what happens if a distributed YouTube exists with every movie in pristine
1080p quality, that lives on a blockchain so the government can't shut it down
or issue DMCA takedown requests?

~~~
justrobert
The blockchain itself would be too expensive to store a large amount of data,
so they would only be storing magnet links much like most tracker sites
currently do.

~~~
toomanybeersies
Is anyone currently storing magnet links in a blockchain?

It seems like one of the more appropriate types of data to be storing on
blockchains.

