this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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What stops Usenet from being attacked legally in the same way, aren't they straight up hosting copyrighted content? I've always stuck to torrents because it seemed more decentralized, especially if you use DHT instead of an indexer.
Usenet often uses obfuscation to hide the contents of the files, which defeats most of the bots which are only matching filenames to their protected content.
I also prefer Usenet since I can encrypt my connection, whereas torrents require a bit more faith in your VPN provider than I'm comfortable with.
I see, but couldn't they just sign up for a provider and then hook up their bots to the same search that you use? Or is the search obfuscated for you too? In other words how do they obfuscate it for the bots but not for the customers? That's what I never really understood - if the answer is just that the people running the bots are just too lazy to hook them up through the same unobfuscated search that paying customers use then that makes sense, but I always assumed there was more of a barrier since Usenet seems to have evaded legal action since forever.
Usenet is almost always split rar files, and not all Usenet providers are in the same DMCA covered jurisdictions so instead of sending a takedown to one site you need to send a takedown for 100s of files and to dozens of providers. The takedown requests can often be rejected on the grounds that fjdjwofhxzzoajfnq.r01 isn't actually the offending copyright material claimed by the notice.
Its possible to do manually but that costs more money and a lot more time, almost all of the requests these days are automated using bots with very little human oversight.