Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested

Re:Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distributio... by nikdaheratik on Thursday July 21, 2016 @12:31AM (#12134667)

As an American living in Australia, I'd say your perspective is kind of skewed by the American market. A large number of torrenters aren't cheapskates or thieves but are from outside the U.S. and unable to even get ahold of this stuff due to the way licensing overseas works. Or if they do, it's at 1.5x-2.5x the price.

We have a 21st century distribution model tied to a mid-20th century legal framework and business model. It's hard to say what is fair in every case. What I feel is not fair is throwing the book at all of these site owners, especially when the laws are written in the U.S. but are somehow stretched to where they apply to people who never set foot there.

In 5-10 years, they could still be in jail while technology remakes itself to the point where either distribution and payment has finally started working gain, or torrenting has gotten to the point where it's nearly impossible to trace the activity to any one person. Neither option seems unlikely, and punishing people now for something that doesn't hurt anyone too much does not seem like it's worth it.

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Re:Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distributio... by blowski on Thursday July 21, 2016 @02:58AM (#12135225)

I'll give some more examples of use cases where the torrent system serves users better than the legal distribution, but has nothing to do with money.

My wife is Brazilian and I'm British, so we're trying to bring our son up as bilingual. Trying to find legally distributed mainstream kids films dubbed in Portuguese is incredibly hard. Sure, you can buy them in Brazil... and then they don't play on hardware in the UK. Neither Netflix nor Amazon Prime have them. Meanwhile, a quick search on a torrent download site gives me access to hundreds of mainstream films dubbed in Portuguese.

Torrents allow me to watch anything, anywhere, with minimal hardware. I don't need to buy DVDs or DVD players. I don't have to work out which subscription I need to use to watch the latest episode of a program. I have downloaded torrents for which I already own the Blu-ray DVD, but it's in a box somewhere and I can't be bothered to find it.

So yeah, there are lots more use cases for torrents than just wanting to be a cheapskate.

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Re:Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distributio... by pbhjpbhj on Thursday July 21, 2016 @03:17PM (#12139310)

Similarly in the UK - if [!] our DVD player broke, someone might torrent the content we've paid for when we bought the DVDs on our shelf here.

Of course that may be a tortuous infringement. In the UK we briefly had a right to format shift but the media corps managed to kill that breakout of common sense pretty quickly.

We're in a pretty ridiculous legal situation again now, https://torrentfreak.com/itunes-is-illegal-under-uk-copyrigh... - ripping a CD you own is considered copyright infringement. It's moronic, there's no way the public would ever vote for this situation.

If such format shifting were to happen, I don't see what could possibly considered morally wrong about it?

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Re:Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distributio... by c4n4rd on Thursday July 21, 2016 @03:15AM (#12135281)

Note: You can find some shows on youtube.

Cheers and abraços

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Re:Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distributio... by blacksmith_tb on Thursday July 21, 2016 @07:49PM (#12140867)

My son liked Fishtronaut / Peixonauta [1] which was made in Brazil and released in Portuguese, Spanish, and English simultaneously, I think (it's on Netflix in the US).

1: http://tvpinguim.com/peixonauta/

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Re:Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distributio... by blowski on Thursday July 21, 2016 @03:21AM (#12135302)

Obrigado! We found a few kids shows - Palavra Cantada has a great channel on there, and there are a few Turma da Monica episodes.

But not films like Toy Story.

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Re:Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distributio... by biot on Thursday July 21, 2016 @06:22PM (#12140475)

That was my point though -- excluding people who are in different markets, have special language needs, etc. etc. you're left with 95+% of the US market who have very efficient ways of legally licensing all but the very latest unreleased or specialty content. Yet still a huge number of those people pirate that content. So I just don't buy the argument that it's a lack of efficient systems that leads people in the US to pirate stuff. I suspect they do it because it's become socially acceptable and they'd just rather not pay for stuff they can get for free.

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