There's the extremely annoying tendency at least at German streaming providers (iTunes, Amazon/Google Video) to remove rental access to movies about nine months after DVD release or when a second movie of a series is about to arrive at the theatres. Only buy access remains accessible. Now that physical video rental stores are on terminal decline, online stores have an effective oligopoly without real competition and push customers towards paying a maximum. The only alternative in this case remains thepiratebay.

There is also the issue that movies in Germany and such only have the German Audio track in 5.1, but the English one is in 2.0. How ridiculous.

To be fair this has gotten somewhat better, at least with TV series and newer releases on Amazon. Newer shows releasing with proper audio quality, language choice and often even CC subtitles in both languages.

I was pleasantly surprised that my Prime subscription might actually still be useful for something.

But most Germans don't care for the english track in the first place, being used to subbed dialogue.

There are a lot of immigrants, like me, who can speak and understand German but miss a lot when watching movies.

Subtitles would help a lot but even that is missing with a lot of providers (I wonder what people with hearing disabilities do).

At least Netflix has always German subtitles. For series, English subtitles too most of the time, but practically none of the movies have those in English which I find quite weird.

But there is no technical reason not to include other languages in 5.1? I would get the argument for DVDs and maybe live TV, but not for streaming...

It's changing. I'm seeing movies in English a lot more often in cinemas than I did 10 years ago.

Are you saying it isn't ridiculous? It's always ridiculous to not have the original language track in the best quality/format. It would be ridiculous for Japanese films distributed in the US to have the Japanese track in 2.0 and the dubbed English in 5.1

> It would be ridiculous for Japanese films distributed in the US to have the Japanese track in 2.0 and the dubbed English in 5.1

A far worse offender, for me at least, are Blu-Rays in that regard. During their introduction, they were hailed as allowing distributors to pack dozens of high-quality different language tracks and different subtitle options on the disc.

While the reality these days looks like this: Most Blu-Ray releases are still regionalized, very often with limited audio language options (in 2.0 quality) and sometimes not even subtitle support for one language.

I think a lot of that has to do with distributors pretty much forming cartels by region, thus having only rights to distribute only specific versions in specific regions.

Abstinence is not an alternative?

I've never understood why so many people feel that they have to see every superhero movie or every Blockbuster.

Becomes more difficult the more social your life becomes. Ordinarily I wouldn't care about the new Star Wars movie, but because everyone else cares, I pretty much have to go see it, if only so I can talk about it.

I don't mind going to see movies in the theater, but TV shows are a different animal. Hollywood refuses to allow me to buy the kind of access I want, digital, unencrypted copies that I can store on a disk drive, or failing that a streaming service that allows access to everything, so pirating is the only way to go.

You pretty much have to see it? I think Hollywood sucks and all, but geez, if you think you have to pirate a TV show at a certain level of sociality, you're probably not really socializing in a healthy way. You may not be giving them a lot of money, but you're definitely giving them a lot of power over your self.

That's an... interesting... way of looking at it.

I'm not sure what having a social life has to do with anything. I haven't sat down to watch a TV show for over a decade, but by some great miracle, I have a robust social life with friends and plenty of activities to do. When a friend asks, "hey, did you see the latest Star Wars movie" or "how 'bout that great Sportsball game last night??" I just say no, didn't see it, and we talk about something else. I know, it sounds crazy.

Or they just start talking with your other friends about it and leave you out.

You have an unusual definition of "friend" then... But I'm not gonna tell you who to hang out with.

You really want me to tell my friends what they should be watching and talking about?

For Germans: Create a US iTunes account, buy USD iTunes gift cards on eBay Germany, put in the account. Rent from the US store.

This proves the exact point that customers who wish to legally pay for content have to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops.

Register an account in a different country, pay for a gift card in another currency, suffer international transaction fees + currency conversion rates, then manage multiple accounts with different balances depending on when iTunes has juggled around it's regional stores.

Or just visit pirate bay.

Isn't that as bad as downloading via torrent? In many countries the sole consumption is not considered illegal (only sharing is), so violating iTunes terms could be even worse theoretically.

And as a side note it could open you up to getting your main account blocked by Apple if they start cracking down on that.

Aren't you afraid of receiving a 'Abmahnung' for torrenting?

I'm still dumbfounded that the practise of setting up torrent honeypots by agencies like waldorf&frommer is actually legal

That's why you use a VPN when downloading Torrents.

I subscribed to Amazon Prime, thinking that I can stream series and movies that I was interested in, only to find, that only things that I could watch were shows produced by Amazon itself(Man in the High Castle etc), channels and movies were restricted content because of my location. I don't understand why it's still an issue.

You can blame that on the studios, they make licensing content extremely complex.

Streaming services (Amazon, Netflix, etc) would love for you to be able to access their catalog from anywhere (as you can see since Amazon allows you to watch their own content from anywhere) but are limited by contractual clauses and/or exorbitant fees, which make this sort of deal not worth it.

Studios are used to a territory-based model instead of a globalised market, since that's pretty much how cable works, so when you negotiate content with a studio the contract will tell exactly which territories you're allowed to stream the content from.

It is still an issue because of the way the market is structured. Movies exclusive distribution rights are sold separately to distributors in each country to maximize revenues, in advance if possible. (Or once the movie has toured festivals for independent movies, making it impossible sometimes for years or forever to buy a digital download in one’s country)

Yup, and now we're getting into an even worse situation. We're going from bundled cable packages to numerous walled garden streaming platforms that, were one to subscribe to them all to get most of the content they'd get from cable, it would surpass whatever the monthly cable bill was by a large amount.

Does anyone have any insight on how TPB has managed to stay online this long?

IIRC it was sold / transferred to an unknown party and hosted outside of any jurisdictions. The mistake the original owners made was that their names could be traced back from the website.

> hosted outside of any jurisdictions

I'm curious about this - does it mean hosting in a country that "doesn't care", or is there some other option that I'm unaware of?

There are shady hosting companies who don't ask a lot of questions. Some of them even accept BTC. At the end of the day TPB is just ones and zeros in a basement somewhere.

You could host on 2 servers and combine at the client (one server has even bits, the other odd) - that technically wouldn't be hosted anywhere only existing transiently at the client location?

"We towed it outside of the environment!"

There's some info on their 2014 set up -

>At the time of writing the site uses 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) hosted at different providers.

>All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers.

https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proo...

May I ask what measures you take to stay safe?

I am new to the US, got Netflix and Amazon Video but soon realized they hardly have what I am interested in. So I got myself a Vpn (BlackVPN, if that matters) and started using Popcorn Time. I am still a bit wary to download torrents, something I used to do a lot back home.

So, any suggestions on what more I can do before starting torrenting?

https://app.put.io/ Put.io is absolutely the best way to download torrents. I am not affiliated with them in anyway except that I am a massively happy user, and assume you will use this service only to download legal torrents, like me :)

So I see that you run https://eggerapps.at/ , where you sell various pieces of software that I'm sure you've spent a lot of time creating and perfecting.

How would you like it if I set up a mirror with cracked versions of all of your apps, and then successfully diverted all of your sales to it?

And then when you sue me, how would you like it if I openly mocked you? I'll post your takedown letters on a section of my site where I call you a fool, do the digital equivalent of spitting in your face, and continue to flagrantly violate your rights.

That's exactly what the Pirate Bay does and I don’t understand how someone who sells their painstakingly created intellectual property could support that, let alone admit to participating in it.

Edit: na85, and what if I only divert 10% of the sales? Why should I now be totally innocent?

Given that he himself is a creator and someone directly affected by piracy (in this case software cracking) I assume he knows what he's talking about.

As a creator as well, I am aware that my software is out in the wild and people are using it for free and so far I've yet to notice any harm coming from it, quite the contrary. Even if we live in a connected world, we still don't live in a fair world, having a credit card or a PayPal account is still a hard thing to obtain in quite a bit of countries and so it happens that from time to time I receive emails of users that are using cracked version of my software offering to snail mail me checks or asking me for alternative payment methods, in these cases me knowing that they get enough joy of my apps is payment enough.

In my case I do believe this is free marketing, in the end a good chunk of users come back and buy the apps if it's truly useful for them and counting the others that wont buy it as lost sales is stupid as they would not spend the money anyway.

>and then successfully diverted all of your sales to it?

No doubt you can back up this assertion that the pirate Bay diverted all or at least the majority of movie sales.

It'd be awesome if you did this: expected net result, he gets more sales and at the low cost of 10% of revenue, much less than other distribution channels!

I hope TPB will teach copyright owners a lesson that there's no point and no way to fight piracy.

There is, just make it easier (and in some cases, even possible) for people to pay for content (see the comment above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15920913)

There are always people who are ready to pay and people who will go to every length to not to. Instead of focusing on giving a good experience to the first crowd, companies end up screwing it up and then waste time on trying to force the second crowd to pay.

I read a great article years ago where a Disney executive argued that they had to view pirating as a competing business model, and provide a better experience instead of just trying to shut it down.

Disney and pirates compete on price, quality, availability, ease of use, and so on. Price is going to be hard to compete with since pirated stuff is free, and I guess they are attacking the availability of pirated material to increase their own by comparison, but what I wish they would focus on is to make it easier for the user to find the stuff they want. If I knew I could go somewhere for all of Disney's catalog of shorts and feature films, I'd be happy to pay a small amount per movie or subscribe for continuous access. Instead it's spread across multiple services, or you have to buy individual DVD boxes and try to assemble your own collection which is a lot of work. They could make it a lot easier for me to watch that specific short (now I go to YouTube and hope it's there) or movie (I check if it's on Netflix or another streaming service, and if not, I skip it).

My (limited) experience of NFL.com is that they've done great when it comes to making it easy to watch current and older games, with options to subscribe to all games or just one team. The English Premier League doesn't have the same centralized streaming service I know of and instead depends on selling the rights to TV channels to show games, which leads to consuming a lot of pirated material if you want to follow a specific team all season or want to watch all concurrent games.

If the content providers just compete in the areas they can affect, most people will pay to use it it's more convenient than the alternative.

> I read a great article years ago where a Disney executive argued that they had to view pirating as a competing business model, and provide a better experience instead of just trying to shut it down.

This is exactly how Spotify get my money. It's so much easier than trying to manage a pirated collection.

Disney is building their own streaming service, so you may get your wish. Not sure about the "small amount", tough.

That reminds me of the fanfare up in the cold north when Netflix expanded their offerings those shores. Only that once one checked the catalog on offer, it was downright anemic. Several TV series lagged by multiple seasons for example.

Never mind that since then Netflix have lost the right to distribute quite a few movie catalogs that may hold hidden classics, as they shift their focus onto producing their own content and the copyright holders wants to keep the percentages that Netflix got for themselves.

This however leads to market balkanization and drive people to once more consider alternative sources.

For the one TPB that has survived, there are several file sharing websites (decent ones that are actually usable) and torrent sites that have been pulled down and the copyright owners have prevailed. I think this more points to the technical acumen of the ppl behind TPB.

I am not taking strong sides against or for fighting piracy. I do hope the greater share of the profits do end up with the original authors and not the content distributors.

These days TPB is little more than a indexer of magnet links.

I think there was a claim floating around that one could offer all the TPB magnet links in a simple text file that would be a maybe a MB in size.

It's more but not even 100MB: https://archive.org/details/pirate-bay-torrent-dumps-2004-20...

This does not include the descriptions though.

Also check out https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo

I downloaded it once. The entire catalog of TPB in magnet link form worked out to 63mb zipped IIRC.

It's really cool that many torrents that are over 10 years old are still seeded.