this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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First, a massive amount of content is removed. You won't find a lot of popular, unencrypted content these days on usenet. It's all encrypted and obfuscated now to avoid the bots
Speaking of bots, I don't think you realize how much of this process is automated, or how wide of a net is being used. The media corporations all have enormous collected libraries of material. It gets posted constantly to all sorts of places. This includes public torrents, public usenet, YouTube, PornHub (yes, really, even for non-porn), Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr, GNUtella, DDL sites....
The list goes on and on. Each one gets scanned for millions of potentially infringing items, often daily. No actual people are doing those steps.
Now, throw in things like private torrents, encrypted usenet posts, invite-only DDL, listings that use '3' instead 'e' or those other character subscriptions..... These require actual humans to process. Humans that cost money, and a considerable amount of it. As a business, you have to show a return on investment. Fighting piracy, even at its theoretical best, doesn't increase revenues by a lot.
You mention revenue and breaking even, but you left out an important detail. Your time is free. They don't have to pay $10/month, they have to pay $10/month + $20/hour for someone to deal with it. And most pirates of that level will just find another method.
That's not been my experience at all. Pretty much everything I've looked for has been available and I rarely come across encrypted files. I do regularly have to try 2 or 3 nzbs before I find a complete one, but I almost always find one.
Are they obfuscated in any way? Depending on your client, you may not be able to see the names and subjects. But if you didn't have the NZB, is there any real chance you could find it otherwise?
No, but that's just the nature of NZB file sharing. The individual articles aren't typically tagged/named with the actual file names, that info is pulled from the NZB and the de-compressed + stitched together articles.
I'm not using any special indexers, just open public registration ones. The NZBs aren't hard to find, for me or for IP claimants.