Piracy in Germany often uses direct downloads via one click hosters(you get an url and download from there, people use services like rapidgator.net). These often get hit with copy right strikes and are slow to unusable for free users. Would downloading for example a TV show via this route and then creating a public torrent "good piracy"? (If anyone has a guide on how to create a torrent, pls share)

Reasons why I think it might be not so good:

the groups/people need a motivation to provide the content. Distributing it without their consent might reduce their motivation. They also probably paid for some subscription to get the content
in german context direct download links are often considered safer for people who just want to download, torrenting done wrong can get you pretty high legal fees (500+ €)
it feels like stealing somebody elses effort

Why I think about doing it:

this gives people another way to get the content
torrents are free to use and way faster than those one click hosters (which often give you less than 100kB/s)
the uploader usually profits via affiliate programs, so when someone buys a premium subscription of a one click hoster, they get a share. I think piracy shouldnt be done for profit
people (especially outside germany) might have it easier to access torrents instead oneclick hoster solutions
torrents have no captchas lol

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[–] woodenghost@hexbear.net 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Piracy in Germany often uses direct downloads

Just in case someone doesn't know why that's the case: Torrenting is still used less then in the rest of the world, because of the unique legal situation. There are big law firms specializing in tracking IP addresses and real identities of torrent users and sending very costly cease and desist letters, even for just torrenting a single movie. I'm sure, people who know what they are doing can find ways to torrent safely. But for everyone who's just come to Germany, it's important to check their online habits and make sure you're still safe.

Concerning morality: What's the worst case? Imagine file sharing actually completely kills the movie, music, gaming and software industry (it won't). All that'd be left would be paying creators in advance to make content people actually want to see and use. As well as collaborative open source projects. All the best stuff comes from those anyway.

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Archive everything. A torrent isn’t perfect but it is far more resilient than a shitty site like rapidgator or mega. If all the seeds drop off they may hop back on someday, if the link is dmcad or otherwise deleted it’s gone forever.

Fuck their e-cred. It’s all stolen. The only time you don’t spread something around is when someone posts something special to a private community to only be shared within that community because leaking it outside of that community could cause them grief or even serious consequences (eg someone leaking content to a private tracker community that they fear could be traced back to them so they specifically ask to keep it within x community). Though tbh I’ve seen this happen at least 4-5x over the years and it always leaks out to the wider internet, people will always share (as they should)

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 hours ago

Even then. My general experience is that all of those "please don't share this outside of our private tracker" style stuff is the same crap as everywhere else: They just want to feel special or encourage people to pay for ultra premium and so forth.

As for the actual truly sensitive stuff: If you are posting that to a "community" you are already the equivalent of a War Thunder player. And, quite frankly, there is zero reason that stuff like that should only be shared with a select few randos. Either it is evil shit (at which point I hope they DO get caught) or it is something that should be given to responsible journalists to share to the world at large.

[–] BlueEther@no.lastname.nz 22 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

um...
"it feels like stealing somebody elses effort"
They have stolen somebody else's effort already - I hate people that righteous about 'stealing' of content that they have 'stolen'

[–] onesixone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Imo there is a reasonable difference between copying a product of a huge (and exploitative) company and taking the effort of hobbyist and just sharing it in ways they didnt intend.

For me* its the same when I shoplift, I dont steal from the local self-owned shop, I steal from the big multibillion company.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 hours ago

And said multibillion dollar company doesn't give a shit. It is just the local store that has to deal with shrinkage. Which mostly just equates to profit numbers, likelihood to get their share of hot items, and so forth. Which, medium term, leads to even more shit going behind the locked doors and said store shutting down because nobody wants to find a sales associate so that they can buy toothpaste.

Like almost all things, the "I am morally righteous because I target this" just ignores that you are still fucking with individuals. Which is one of the biggest "strengths" of capitalism: The people taking the abuse aren't the oligarchs. It is your neighbors. And they are also the face of inconvenience when they actually try to advocate for their own rights.

So... how about you drop the "Doing X to A is righteous but doing it to B is bad" and consider growing up a bit and understanding that you are fucking people over either way. And decide how you feel about that. And, to be clear, nobody cares: You do you. Just understand what you are doing rather than focusing your energy on mental gymnastics because you can't stand to think you might do a bad/"bad".

[–] theskyisfalling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 7 hours ago

Not exactly the same as your example but I love getting hard to find stuff and then putting it out there for the public to get.

I'm mainly talking soulseek here but within my preferred music genre there is a lot of elitism and manufactured rareness of tracks what with a lot of vinyl only releases with minimal pressings or digital downloads that are only available for x amount of hours, that kind of bullshit.

This then promotes this culture on soulseek of people locking all their files out to everyone so you need to either trade things or a lot of them will ask you to buy specific releases or send them bandcamp gift cards and the like, to me this goes against the very nature of piracy and really boils my piss.

I love to get access to these people files and getting as much as I can, or ripping vinyl only tracks where I can for myself or buying these "limited" digital tracks when they come up and I have the money (less often these days) and then just sharing them with no locks or trading bullshit.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is it is really satisfying (for me at least) to share this harder to get stuff that people aren't going to find anywhere else and even better a massive fuck you to the elitism and manufactured scarcity within the genre. If you are a soulseek user with locked files reading this, fuck you!

Also torrents are pretty easy to make. I use deluge and qbittorrent and there are options in both of those to create a torrent. You will need a tracker to link to, free ones can be found, then it is just a case of pointing to the files on your computer and it'll create the torrent file for you.

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 7 hours ago

Yes. Especially in this case where the distribution system is so unreliable. Your own list of "pro" easily beats the "cons".

If anyone has a guide on how to create a torrent, pls share

If you're on a private tracker, usually they should have a detailed guide. I would guess public ones have it too, idk for sure tho.

[–] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 7 hours ago

German releases by OCH groups are already shared widely through Usenet and private torrent sites, as OCH is such a big source of pirated content in Germany.

So yes, you're free to share OCH releases to public sites. ZeroTwo releases usually include subtitles for all available languages so they might've a wider appeal than german-speaking countries.

Make sure you're VPN & torrent client is properly set up, i.e. you're torrent client is bound to the VPN interface.

I personally stick to private torrent sites as there's less eyes on them given them being relatively small [1]. With so few people torrenting in Germany the speeds aren't always great though. That's why I mainly use Usenet.

[1] https://www.sb-innovation.de/showthread.php?35824-Liste-aktueller-deutscher-Torrent-Tracker-V2