What stuck with me was his disappointment that the wider torrent community simply relied on the pirate bay always making a return. There was no real effort to go beyond resilient hosting. No producing facts by superior technology. It was just a bunch of copy-cats playing whac-a-mole with the copyright industry. To paraphrase: "I went to jail for this stuff, and you don't even care enough about it to follow up on it in earnest?" At least that's how it read to me. As I said, it's been a while.
Hosting torrent platforms and such on namecheap, cloudflare (no really!) and all the other mainstream platforms seems like such an obviously, deeply stupid choice. There's only very few projects (that I know of) that are really addressing resilient, organized, curated content dissemination, and they're essentially divorced from the pirate scene. Too bad I guess.
Maybe because people understand that it's security model is flawed: the peers in the mesh treat all the other peers as not trusted, that's okay; but the network design doesn't seem to take into account potential hostility of the physical medium itself.
Say, your ISP can tarpit packets or shape traffic, or shut down the power or cell tower in your block temporarily, and then measure how the mesh congestion changed. At the same time the mesh relies on building hop chains with TTL of 10 minutes iirc, which I think makes a peer a sitting duck. It is (was) all documented/leaked.
Why would someone trying to build something like PeerTube Or IPFS want to explicitly support piracy? All that does is bring negative pressure down on them and we see in this very discussion, the MAFIAA is more than happy to abuse laws they wrote to bring pressure. Just because someone is interested in or supportive of peer to peer communication doesn't automatically mean they support piracy.
I'm not trying to say piracy is bad, it is just illegal. As shitty as those laws might be they're still on the books and people face penalties for breaking them.
It should come to no surprise that notable torrenting sites have many low-effort imitators. If anyone could copy stuff already out there, why spend the extra effort to innovate?
I'm all for open-source, but I recognize the value of copyright (and how it protects FOSS-licensed material) and healthy competition and innovation.
Most torrent sites do seem to have an own code base. It's not like they run the same software (or at least they have different themes, I never actually checked).
It is also neither surprising nor bad that the sites still have the same goals/design basics. They all solve the same problem, so they will end up looking similar overall. No problem with that.
What is being criticized here (by me, I don't wanna put words into Warg's mouth since it's an old, probably misremembered interview) is that the way that they deliver that "product" (in this context: the torrent website itself, not the hosted torrents' contents!) in an unimaginative way without taking into account the changing battlefield.
Fully i2p torrent sites? Niche.
Local DHT scraping with an overlay net of torrent index exchange à la yacy or magnetico? Niche.
And apparently: hosting anywhere that is not immediately susceptible to direct US influence, i.e. NOT on namecheap+cloudflare? Still kind of niche. Wtf?
No, it's not. The US is the one pushing other countries to implement US-like copyright laws, as it has a huge music and television entertainment industry and exports entertainment and propaganda to other countries. For most countries if they implement everything the US wants it will only hurt them economically, as they would have to pay more for disproportionally imported entertainment, and politically, as with that much control more propaganda will come from the US and generally forcing people to pay more for something is unpopular. Probably the only countries where local entertainment industries can potentially increase profits from such copyright laws are the countries that have huge music and tv entertainment industries to begin with, i.e. huge countries with large middle class. But those are few.
Well, I guess it's a good thing : now we'll have to campaign to let content creators know how terrible their choice of platform is.
This battle has been going on since audio tape recorders and VCRs became a thing, and at some point various industries will have to accept copying as part of reality, and that it is incumbent on them to have a business model that aligns with reality. A farmer doesn't serve a legal notice to the sun because its setting every day hurts productivity.
The platform owners can and will tighten the noose gradually. End users and hackers have much less power than they like to imagine, especially the latter segment.
The pop music industry has seen at least three disruptions to its controlling gatekeepers since the 1950s (1956-60, ~2000 with Napster, and presently with Spotify and YouTube), but each time a dominant hegenomy re-emerges. I doubt this time will be different, though the brief renaissance will doubtless be appreciated. Charles Perrow wrote of this in the mid-1980s:
After the critical period from about 1956 to 1960, when tastes were unfrozen, competition was intense, and demand soared, consolidation appeared. The number of firms stabilized at about forty. New corporate entries appeared, such as MGM and Warner Brothers, sensing, one supposes, the opportunity that vastly expanding sales indicated. Some independents grew large. The eight-firm concentration ratio also stabilized (though not yet the four-firm ratio). The market became sluggish, however, as the early stars died, were forced into retirement because of legal problems, or in the notable case of Elvis Presley, were drafted by an impinging environment. Near the end of this period the majors decided that the new sounds were not a fad and began to buy up the contracts of established artists and successfully picked and promoted new ones, notably The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan. A new generation (e.g., The Beatles) appeared from 1964 to 1969, and sales again soared.
But now the concentration ratios soared also. From 1962 to 1973, the four-firm ratio went from 25 to 51 percent; the eight-firm ratio from 46 to 81 percent, almost back to the pre-1955 levels. The number of different firms having hits declined from forty-six to only sixteen. Six of the eight giants were diversified conglomerates, some of which led in the earlier period; one was a new independent, the other a product of of mergers.
How did they do it? The major companies asserted “increasing central control over the creative process”[352] through deliberate creation and extensive promotion of new groups, long-range contracts for groups, and reduced autonomy for producers. In addition, legal and illegal promotion costs (drug payola to disc jockeys, for example) rose in the competitive race and now exceeded the resources of small independents. Finally, the majors “have also moved to regain a controlling position in record distribution by buying chains of retail stores.”[353] The diversity is still greater than it had been in the past, and may remain high, but it is ominous that the majors have all the segments covered. As an executive said, “Columbia Records will have a major entry into whatever new area is broached by the vagaries of public tastes.” But for a concentrated industry, the “vagaries of public tastes” are not economical; it is preferable to stabilize and consolidate them. This would be possible through further control over the creative process and marketing.
Charles Perrow, Complex organizations : a critical essay, 1972, 1985. pp. 186--187.
The dynamics, actors, and economics remind me strongly of the software / high-tech industry, though with much weaker coupling and different lock-in mechanics.
I do the same thing before a flight or train ride (Canada has $5-$10/gb wireless pricing) so I can catch up with my favourite subs on-the-move.
Well, if you are counting overage charges I guess.
My (national) provider has an all-in, bring-your-own-device plan with 9GB of data (recently with a 2GB bonus, for a total of 11GB) for under $60/month. I'm sure the competitors are similar. So, while not perfect, it's not as onerous as you describe.
[0] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/wiki/Invidious-Instances
And like all self-fulfilling prophecies, those claims are now largely true.
cat > youtube-dl-webui.Dockerfile <<EOF
FROM d0u9/youtube-dl-webui
RUN pip3 install --upgrade youtube_dl
EOF
cat > conf.json <<EOCONF
{ "general": {"download_dir": "/tmp/ytdui/download","db_path": "/tmp/ytdui/webui.db","log_size": 10},
"server": {"host": "0.0.0.0","port": 5000} }
EOCONF
docker build \
-f youtube-dl-webui.Dockerfile \
-t youtube-dl-webui:latest \
.
mkdir ytdui && chmod 777 ytdui
docker run \
--rm -it \
--name youtube_dl_webui \
-p 5000:5000 \
-e FLASK_DEBUG=1 \
-e CONF_FILE=/conf.json \
-v `pwd`/conf.json:/conf.json \
-v `pwd`/ytdui:/tmp/ytdui \
youtube-dl-webui:latest
firefox http://localhost:5000/
On the other hand, a little history shows how many things can be lawful (even "patriotic"!) and extremely inhuman (aberrant, whatever). Not so long ago.
How about right now? See Guantanamo Bay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp
Generating the training data would be easy. Play audio files through a speaker and record the speaker with a microphone. Then you have the original and the analog recording. Train the machine to reverse the process. Now you can grab high quality audio from any source. Same could be done for video, but would require a more elaborate setup.
Kind of off topic, but I hate the idea of not being able to own any actual copies of media in the future.
Also, I've made it part of my moral code, nearly a religion of mine, to see all advertisements as a reminder I maybe should be doing something else. Since this is my rant, I'll add that to the pile.
Machine learning isn't this magic thing that can defeat math. The digital to analog process is lossy, and you're asking machine learning to reverse that lossy process. This is very similar to saying "If I train my machine learning model that 10 + 10 = 20, and 3 * 40 = 120, if I ask it x + y = 42 it should be able to tell me x and y". It's obviously impossible, mathematically so.
You could train it to reduce some predictable sources of analog interference, sure, but you absolutely can't "grab high quality audio from any source".
Well, actually, there is an exception! For data you train on, assuming you train the neural net enough, it will eventually encode a fingerprint of input audio and an output of the original digital training data, at which point your neural net has encoded copyrighted training data... effectively it's a form of compression (or maybe just obfuscation) now, and contains copyrighted material. Oops.
Disregarding the fact that this process would be mathematically impossible, let's say you do produce this program. So, does it circumvent copyright law? Does it actually improve anything?
No, it turns out what you have is even more obviously a circumvention device than youtube-dl or anything else. Under the DMCAA, the neural network would be an illegal copyright circumvention device, and all the audio it produces would not be legal copies, and could not legally be owned. I'll reference "what color are your bits"[0], since it's an excellent description of one of the problems here. You're proposing a technical solution, but there is no technical solution here, it's a legal problem. Whether you torrent an album or whether you reverse an analog source through magic, either way the bits are colored with copyright infringement.
>you're proposing a technical solution, but there is no technical solution here, it's a legal problem.
Yep. P2P community tried to play this game and lost every single time. The Bitcoin and crypto-currency are trying to play this game as well when the advocates propose that bitcoin is a technical workaround to things like AML regulations - and they will lose as well.
The device itself is just an "audio enhancer" - it could just as easily be used to spruce up the sound on old vinyl (pre-vinyl even) as it could to defeat copyright law.
The real issue with using it as OP intends is it's wholly unnecessary: the value in tools like youtube-dl is being asynchronous - you get the audio file without listening to the entire song first. OP's suggestion involving a speaker and a microphone is intrinsically synchronous, and it's a lot more work for lower quality than e.g. using Audacity to record the lossless digital audio off your sound bus.
Video is harder, mostly because of the bandwidth.
I suggest to also click on all possible advertisements then not purchase anything (just ignore whatever tab was opened by your click).
If millions of people did this daily, it would break the web advertising model very fast since advertisers pay per click.
I don’t know what would replace it, but maybe something better than what we have now. Maybe not.
The unconverted sound may be crisper and has more details but, there's no guarantee that they're the original details so, it won't be the original recording itself.
Perhaps you have to play the media a few dozen times and do the media equivalent of frame stacking to see through the noise.
It's also quite possible no ML would be needed. I don't think frame stacking uses ML.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could play a song on repeat from the other side of your house and extract a very good copy of it, so long as you knew exactly when the song began and looped. You might only need to know the length of the song, not even when it began.
It might not be practical, but it would be a cool blog post.
(I’m sure there are other examples, perhaps inheritances, but the only non-leadership billionaire I can think of in any field off the top of my head is Rowling).
The article mentions targetted tracks by Beyonce and The Killers. Are these artists speaking out against the RIAA, or are they onboard? If it's the latter, it will be hard to fix.
A lot of artists are totally in favour of internet censorship if it means they will make more money.
See the recent "surprise" when a FlwMac song became "viral" again on Tiktok since they had been doing all they could to keep it off youtube even when they had the choice of being paid for it Well no crap Sherlock
20 years of losing the battle and RIAA makes a point of reminding people how petty they are
https://web.archive.org/web/20201029112247/https://torrentfr...
Edit: they’re CC BY NC 3.0
https://torrentfreak.com/copyright/
I think HN qualifies as non-commercial, and I’m definitely not profiting off my post, so here it is:
The RIAA is ramping up the pressure on a wide range of platforms allegedly involved in music piracy. Two DMCA subpoenas obtained against Cloudflare and Namecheap require the companies to hand over all information they hold on more than 40 torrent sites, streaming portals and YouTube-ripping services. Also included in the mix are several file-hosting platforms.
Even erring on the side of caution with conservative estimates, there are at least hundreds of piracy-related sites on the Internet today that the RIAA would like to shut down.
To have any chance of doing that, however, early work has to be done to collect various pieces of information. This can include the owners of the platforms’ domains, the IP addresses of their servers and where that hardware is physically hosted, plus any other specifics that may help to build a case or back site operators into a corner.
As reported on a number of occasions here on TorrentFreak, one of the tools in the box of the RIAA and other rightsholders is the DMCA subpoena. Easily obtained from US courts without any oversight needed from a judge, DMCA subpoenas can be served on various companies, requiring them to hand over information on their allegedly-infringing clients.
RIAA Obtains DMCA Subpoenas Targeting More Than 40 Domains
When it comes to gaining access to information on sites and their operators, DMCA subpoenas aimed at Cloudflare are a popular choice. The company not only has access to the customer information handed over as part of the account creation and maintenance process but in some instances can also identify the true server locations/IP address of ‘pirate’ site servers.
The same can be said of domain registrar companies such as Namecheap. Information on who bought the domain, when and how, plus how it has been used since can yield valuable information for many anti-piracy investigations. The RIAA recently decided to take advantage of both possibilities.
Following two separate applications at a California court, the music industry group obtained DMCA subpoenas requiring both Cloudflare and Namecheap to hand over information on a large number of their allegedly-infringing customers. The Cloudflare subpoena contains 35 domains and the Namecheap subpoena 15 domains. However, due to a considerable overlap, when combined they target 41 domains.
Targeting YouTube-Rippers Including the Giant Y2Mate.com
Since the RIAA appears to have slowly but surely declared war on YouTube-ripping platforms and tools, it will come as no surprise that the subpoenas partially continue along that theme.
Y2Mate.com, an insanely popular YouTube-ripping platform with more than 113 million visits per month according to SimilarWeb, features in both subpoenas. A notable element here is that the RIAA went through this exact process with both Cloudflare and Namecheap last May but is now back for a second bite of the cherry.
One of the irritants here is that despite RIAA pressure, Y2Mate appears to have almost doubled its traffic, from 62 million visits per month last year to the current extraordinary levels. Like YouTube-DL recently, Y2Mate was also accused by the RIAA of circumventing YouTube’s “rolling cipher”.
Next up is Notube.net, which bills itself simply as a YouTube converter. Back in April the site was enjoying around 24 million visits per month, traffic that has now steadied to around 16 million according to SimilarWeb. YouTubeConverter.io, which claims to offer a similar service, has around three million visitors while Ontiva.com and ListentoYouTube.online are relative minnows with around 350K visits each.
Torrent Indexes and File-Hosting Platforms
While the RIAA and the music industry as a whole consider YouTube-ripping sites and tools to be the number one piracy threat, the DMCA subpoenas also include more traditional targets.
Major torrent site 1337x.to makes an appearance in the Cloudflare application which puts the RIAA in good company. As recently reported, anti-piracy group ACE has just obtained a similar subpoena requiring the Tonic domain registry to hand over details relating to the torrent site.
Both of the subpoenas obtained by the RIAA also list TorrentDownloads.me, another popular torrent site. In these instances, the site is accused of participating in the infringement of tracks released by Ed Sheeran, Drake, and One Direction.
Since music files are relatively small and can be squirreled away on file-hosting platforms, it’s no surprise that these also make the list. Anonfiles.com, which currently enjoys more than 7.5 million visits per month, is accused of hosting tracks by The Killers and Beyoncé. Ddownload.com, a site with around five million visitors and most popular in Germany, also makes an appearance along with Hexupload.net and DoUploads.net
An Interesting Addition – A Platform for Buying & Selling Leaked Music
Thesource.to appears to be something of an outlier in the RIAA’s list of targets. While most other platforms clearly offer direct access to music in the form of a download or stream, this platform claims to act as a marketplace for people to buy and sell unreleased music.
“On THE SOURCE legit sellers can sell real exclusive unreleased music and serious buyers can purchase them. Everything in a secure and verified environment. You are a serious seller and you are sick of having to be online 24/7 hours and doing everything manually? Then we can make your life easier,” its advertising reads.
“You are a serious buyer and you are sick of having to wait for every seller or middleman for hours or even for days? Then we can also make your life easier. THE SOURCE has game-changing systems which both serve sellers and buyers, just for example the integrated automated Satoshi system.”
The site is paid-entry, currently for the sum of $10, but according to the RIAA’s subpoena application, someone posted the track Warlords by Childish Gambino there. The listed URL tends to suggest that someone was only offering to sell their “vault” but nevertheless, the subpoena was granted.
The full list of all domains targeted in both subpoenas can be viewed below. Any domain marked with an asterisk appears in both subpoenas. The subpoenas themselves are also available for download.
Domains Targeted in Cloudflare Subpoena
1337x.to pluspremieres.to thesource.to ddownload.com hiphopde.com* ontiva.com* anonfiles.com audioz.download dirrtyremix.es discografiaspormega.com douploads.net ghanamotion.com hd24bit.com hexupload.net intmusic.net iplusfree.org listentoyoutube.online mp3global.org musiconworldoffmx.com muzobzor.ru naijaonpoint.com* newalbumreleases.net ngleakers.co* rlsbb.ru rnbxclusive.vip sanet.ws songslover.cam* torrentdownloads.me* xclusivejams.nl zoop.su notube.net alegemuzica.top topmusic.uno* y2mate.com* youtubeconverter.io*
Domains Targeted in Namecheap Subpoena
getrockmusic.net hiphopde.com* hiphoptrendsnow.com ontiva.com* songslover.com* stannova.com toryextra.com vevosongs.com ddownload.com torrentdownloads.me* ngleakers.co* naijaonpoint.com* topmusic.uno* y2mate.com* youtubeconverter.io*
The DMCA subpoenas can be found here and here (pdf) https://torrentfreak.com/images/4-20-mc-80172-RIAA-v-Nameche...
https://torrentfreak.com/images/4-20-mc-80174-RIAA-v-Cloudfl...
We're less than a week from a hotly contested election and social media is an absolute battle ground.
Someone with more PR experience please help me understand why now is the most advantageous moment for the RIAA to launch these strikes. I'm not saying it's a bad time necessarily, but this clearly could have been done months (years) ago.
I imagine a lot of major artists make good money off youtube too. They don't if someone just downloads their videos. In times where musicians can't make money off concert, it's even more meaningful. Google does work directly with all these music labels (VEVO and co...).
Done. With pleasure.
This simply cannot match e.g. the P2P scale...
But if there will be some place where, for some fee, you can watch all that old movies... Fuck, for years I'm looking for Toy Story (1) to learn what are that Debian names ! But no... 2, 3 but no 1. Ice age 1 ? Rambo ? THX 1138 ? <- everyone need to see how leftists are naive and what they planning for human genetic modifications.
Interesting movies on Netflix and HBOGO ends in like... 2 days of watching ? Why the fuck i need to pay for a whole month ????
Movie/music industry is double stupid: they do not know how to sell what they already have (century+ amount of movies/recordings) and they create such brain-dead organizations like RIAA and many, many others.
This is were a decentralized internet would shine, but youtube-dl is already not so friendly to use for the average joe, so I'm not expecting him to be able to browse IFPS any time soon.
The internet is not centralized. The RIAA cannot say "this should go" and make it magically disappear. There is no single point of failure / influence on the internet.
Millions of people have the skills to build an easily distributed .zip file with a barebones youtube downloader website. Everybody with an internet connection can set up a webserver that runs it.
And the RIAA will have to go after each individual, one at a time.
They couldn't keep TPB down, at best they managed to annoy it for a little while.
here is one such approach:
https://www.wikihow.com/Save-Streaming-Video
here is my search string just as a knee jerk, but a deliberately crafted string will pop some real gems.
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=save%20video%20from%20buf...
enjoy the safari and have pride in any subsequent craftsmanship that comes from it.
You're doubling the transfer size. Why not just encrypt with a random passcode?
I still don't see the point though. For discoverability/longevity you need seeders. If every transfer has a different hash, then that can't happen.