please, god, stop talking about where you do piracy on public forums. stop talking about specific sites. don't name services. don't link links. don't respond to shutdowns with recommendations on where to go next. stop airing this out publicly. you are not shepherding the masses. you are plattering cash for salivating IP lawyers if you do literally anything other than reply 'DMs' when talking publicly about anything that is even in a light-gray area.
the worst type of posting, all time, is when a piracy site is shut down and all of the absolute lemmings (not an insult I usually like to use!) immediately decide to pile into the thread of the news post reporting this and go "🙏 thank GOD they didn't get" and then practically post the entire WHOIS lookup for their favorite service alongside the specific products they love to consume on there with an appended "like where else would I watch [MEDIA PROPERTY] 😭"
look. I get it 
we grew up in the panopticon. chronic oversharing online is, IMO, the most prominent feature that gaps millenials and gen Z.
still, you fucking snitch-addicted neuron beasts need to learn discretion! you are skirting the law! your posts are public! you know what I would do if I was a corporate copyright lawyer? hitch a fucking RSS feed to every single news post about a piracy site shutdown and watch as hundreds of people tell on themselves for, what I assume, comes down to:
my site not mentioned in comments must confirm others share qualia with me
heh, theyre using that site? lmao, get with the program (my site)
ah, it seems the users of this service are lost sheep, allow me to recommend my own illicit service so they shall find their way
and compile the services they VOLUNTEER UP TO THE CHOPPING BLOCK FOR THE NEXT DOSSIER BECAUSE THE VERY CONCEPT OF PRIVACY AND DISCRETION HAS BEEN SKINNER-BOXXED OUT OF PEOPLE WHO REFUSE TO EVEN REDIRECT THEIR RECOMMENDATIONS TO DMs BECAUSE THEY ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO SAY SOMETHING BEFORE OTHER PEOPLE SAY IT! THEY HAVE TO CAPTURE THE ZEITGEIST! THEY HAVE TO BE TAPPED IN! THEY HAVE TO LET OTHERS KNOW THEY ARE TAPPED IN! THEY REQUIRE IMMEDIATE UNINTERRUPTED FEEDBACK ON EVERYTHING! EVEN WHEN THEY ARE SKIRTING THE LAW!
THEY JUST GIVE THE GAME AWAY! FOR NOTHING! THEY JUST SAY IT!
STOP FUCKING RATTING! OH MY GOD–
Do you think poor ip lawyers don’t know rutracker exists? For 20 years?
Sites closing is result of reaching jurisdiction, not absence of information
Yeah like it takes 5 seconds to find the top public torrent trackers everyone uses and many of them have been going for a very long time. They are aware of all the private sites too and have issued takedown requests to them in the past. Like how you can't upload any Harry Potter stuff (ick) to the big private eBook trackers because Rowling's lawyers went after them. But that was like 10 years ago and the sites are still running.
Edit: misremembered Rowling on the list but there's still a handful.
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There is legit thingy when like someone talks to millions, like if joe rogan or whoever mentioned them, that would light the fire under all lawyers asses. but small forums with hundreds of people are legit smaller than trackers themselves
shoulda added the disclaimer that I'm mainly talking about third-rate sites, like when an anime streaming service goes down and 50 more people pop up to recommend the new ones in the scene in the comments, like, ones that fold at the hint of a C&D
I don't agree with this. It's a bummer when your favorite piracy source goes down, but telling people is the only way other people find out. I want everyone, especially poor people, to know how to easily access pirated stuff.
The IP lawyers are always going to find it anyway, and new sources come pretty quick when the old ones die.
I read an article from a boomer IP lawyer for Nintendo and he does actually wait for normies to bring it up, particularly articles at bigger sites. They don't seek it out. Maybe others do.
That's gotta be outdated by this point, because Nintendo's notoriously started using AI powered scrapers to automate the process of hunting down ROMs and anything using their characters or assets so they can spam takedowns without regard for accuracy and sick their lawyers on bigger sites.
At least obfuscate the URL in some way. Its trivial to do. I've done this and had people literally deobfuscate my links. Such a crime should get posts removed for snitching.
- im a suburbanite cracker so im giving myself a pat on the back for the Sisyphean task of not invoking Rapp Snitch Knishes
i don't think IP lawyers are crawling tweets or public forum posts to figure out what piracy sites need to be shut down lol. 99% of the time, like you said, it is because these services are all owned by a handful of people and fold immediately when they sent a DMCA/threatening legal letter.
Things like Switch emulation/piracy, yeah - to a degree I agree with you, but I think 99% of the time, the reason 'popular emulator' or 'popular mod for game' gets shut down is because they wind up taking money for development or forming a goddamn LLC - I'm looking at you Yuzu/Citra.
To be fair, in the end, all this is easily solved by piracy sites/etc doing a simple registration test and/or requiring like a consistent ratio for seeding/downloading; which more should certainly do.
The companies the IP lawyers use are using ai to find links going by how Vimms got DMCA'd recently
I really doubt this to be anything other than hearsay. For over a decade, Vimm was one of the largest and most consistent sources of ROMs. It still is, in fact. Why would any anti-piracy association not be aware of it?
Just consider the words on this page if you think the problem was people sharing the site as a place to get ROMs. https://vimm.net/email
One of the things Nintendo cited in its lawsuit against Yuzu was that the developers knowingly developed Yuzu to enable piracy. How can such a claim be made? How could Nintendo possibly argue that Yuzu developers encouraged piracy, and not just people's legitimate backups of their own games?
Because the Yuzu devs, in a massive self-own, decided to implement telemetry. IIRC it was opt-out telemetry, but it doesn't even matter if it was opt in or out. Part of this telemetry data was to show what games users were playing, presumably to understand the popular games (as if this couldn't be determined from actual sales data) and possibly to focus on fixing up those titles.
Well wouldn't you know it, Tears of the Kingdom leaked like a whole two weeks in advance of its actual release date. And guess what showed up in big numbers on the Yuzu telemetry data? TOTK. Therefore, Yuzu developers knew it was used for piracy, because they had the data to prove it against themselves. Moronic.
This is why I think private torrent sites are the only long term hope for preservation. They have a barrier of entry that brings them less heat, hopefully they're keeping an index of all of their torrents constantly available to trusted users in the case of shutdowns, and p2p sharing is the only way to guarantee reasonable levels of data duplication (and why I'd actually like to see bonus point reductions for seedbox users, but I recognize that's a misaligned financial incentives problem in a space that's less ideologically driven than it should be).
Hosting in regions that aren't friendly to the country of origin's copyright infringement complaints of whatever content they host is also critical.
Yuzu was also an exceedingly stupid situation. Terrible opsec, terrible LLC formation, terrible operational separation (Citra main dying as collateral)
Naa. The incentives of these things are fucked. The one time I was on a private tracker I downloaded a bunch of sheet music (because it was a rare, interesting thing I couldn't find on public trackers). I got banned because I could not fix my ratio because nobody else was downloading this sheet music. Private trackers drive people to download and share popular slop to keep their ratios high. They don't do much to motivate people to download and seed rare shit. Good for sharing popular media, but if you go out of your way to download / seed rare files you will be punished. I have absolutely no faith in them as an archival solution, beyond the general rule that it never hurts to have more copies of anything.
Bonus point systems are largely the solution to that problem. On the trackers I'm on rare torrents (low seeds) generate higher bonus points that can be redeemed for upload credit. Additional multiplier for the size of the torrent as well. There are many sites that offer pittances of point solutions which is a serious misstep for preservation's sake and the seedbox referral incentive problem exacerbates issues for sites without good bonus point systems.
The largest movie, TV, anime, book, and game private trackers all have some form of bonus points. Not having them was supposed to be an incentive to actually upload and contribute because seeding is kind of the bare minimum of contributions.
Several of them are ratio free if you upload a certain number of torrents.
Its only really a problem still on music sites, which instead hand out tons of tokens and have easy public options for anyway.
Private trackers are absolutely awful. It's completely counterintuitive to the spirit of pirating in the first place. Hopefully torrenting over I2P becomes a thing in the future.
Never got this 'they're against the spirit' thing when they're the only people actively going out of their way to fill requests for the rare stuff people want. Nobody is traveling to their public library and hand scanning books for random people on pirate bay who won't even seed it. People on private trackers absolutely do that because there's a culture of reciprocation. I've done this several times because I know that my own requests will be fulfilled by someone else in the future.
I think you can attribute that phenomenon to community than private vs public tracker
Nah talking about media piracy like it's no big deal is rad actually. Get your movies on lookmovie2.to and your music on soulseek/nicotine, your books on libgen
oh thank god they didn't get ratemyhog.com, these hog rating sites keep going down!
First rule of committing cool crimes on the Internet:
- Do not talk about your cool crimes on the Internet.
spoiler
So how is Pigpoop Pirate Bay different from regular Pirate Bay?
absolute lemmings
Oh no, people share things that they enjoy and feel like would help their community. So weird and strange and dumb. Anyway, I haven't stopped torrenting and need more hard drive space. :/ I earnestly can't believe that IP lawyers have not heard of 1337x until they were browsing hexbo one day.
(Really though, I sort of understand the concern, and treating online spaces like you would treat a circle of couches with your best friends in person is something I'm personally working on. Apparently I also overshare in person as well, anyone who talks to me for a couple of weeks can rattle off what medications I'm on etc.)
This is like when I was 19 at a Evangelical Christian university and liked to brag about how I could get any drugs off of the silk road (I got expelled)
how the fuck am I supposed to find the sites if people don't talk about it
DMed my preferred resource, but also just kinda ask around in DMs of people who have talked about torrenting in the abstract. it's daunting but it's both more discrete and has had a much better track record for me in terms of getting the good stuff, anecdotally
It's simple! Just be in the know. Join a discord and then join another discord that splinters off of that discord because of drama, and then eventually get invited to another discord and then ask one of the users there for an invite to Sooper Sekret Private Tracker website and then you can watch your favorite shows there! Oh and make sure to seed everything popular otherwise you'll get banned for being a leech!!!
Join a discord and then join another discord that splinters off of that discord because of drama
this is so relateable
but i can get so many upvoterinos on the tweet site if i mention the site i read comic scans from in my maymay (actual thing that happened)The Content is no longer the point. All Content has become conspicuous consumption, so the point is that they are Seen being able to Access the Content. Watching/reading/playing is ancillary to possession, to access.
