59 replies
1d2h
I'm really surprised this list doesn't contain any of the big names I'm using. In fact I've never heard of any of these sites.
I'm using many of the book sites and general torrent ones (I won't name them here), but none of these are on the list.
I also think the point is kinda moot because everyone doing torrents in Germany will already use VPN because it's only a matter of time before you get serious letters from lawyers there, demanding about 400 euro per move they've seen you download. ISPs always cooperate in giving subscriber info for each IP. Some lawyer firms actually specialise in this and go after downloaders on their own.
I wonder if they leave the big torrent sites out to provide income for these lawyers?
Ot of curiosity, how does this work? If a site is over https, then the only information I would think the ISP would have is the subscriber downloaded from randompiratesite.xyz what seems to be a single X GiB file. They could see that the size roughly corresponds to FooBar.mp4 on that site (plus some HTTP headers). But this seems pretty unreliable. (Like what if someone was using a download manager to get multiple large files at once, using multiple download streams per file?)
I'm sure that you can get in plenty of trouble for downloading a ton of data from randompiratesite.xyz or whatever, but how the ISP determine the number of movies they've seen you download?
That isn't how torrent sites work. You visit site.xyz and download a .torrent file in the realm of 10s-100s (typically) of kB and that contains some metadata that a dedicated torrent client consumes. The torrent client connects to (1) some tracker via http (or https, but usually http) which may or may not be associated with the site the .torrent came from, to register as part of the swarm, and (2) any number of peer torrent clients. The actual data (X GiB) transfer comes from those peers; not the original site.xyz nor the tracker.
ISPs can observe DNS lookups / connections to site.xyz; tracker "announces" (that's (1) above), especially if they are http. And even the peer-to-peer traffic has a distinct protocol which is recognizable with packet inspection. But the main avenue for finding offenders, I believe, is just downloading the same .torrents for some specific copyrighted content and using the torrents' associated tracker(s) to enumerate swarm peer IP addresses.
Thats not how piracy in germany works. Torrenting for german content is quite uncommon. Normally the pages either point to sites hosting a streamabale version of the video content or point to a external file hoster (e.g. Rapidgator).
Obviously, because, as the chain of comments above your shows, torrent users are easily caught and get fined to hundreds of euros per downloaded movie. Then they stop using torrent and tell all their friends about the experience. This has been going on for more than a decade, maybe two. So by now, German culture has adapted and people don't use torrents.
You don't get fined for downloading, you get cease-and-desist with a fine (?) from a lawyer representing the copyright owner for uploading.
Downloading copyrighted is not illegal, offering is.
You could try to argue technicalities in court, but that'll probably exceed the hundreds of Euro the copyright owner demands.
Downloading via torrents by default implies distribution (from technical point of view).
My understanding is that one can download without seeding/uploading; is this inaccurate?
Since the whole system relies on people seeding, even if this may be possible technically, clients don't tend to support it as a feature.
There are some services where you send a torrent file/magnet link and it’ll download the file for you, so you can download over HTTPS. I believe those particular services intentionally don’t reseed.
You are correct.
Years ago I did exactly this by modifying my client to never seed/share, and also to fake my reported sharing stats so the private trackers wouldn’t boot me for failing to share.
Those were the days.
Now, I no longer fear the ISP or copyright holder chasing me (seems ISPS and laws moved on where I am) and don’t bother with modifications any more.
Correct. E.g., https://github.com/pmoor/bitthief .
The cease and desist fine (about 900 euros these days) is what the lawyer wants. Max return on investment for a single letter. You don’t have to react to this letter which will bring about the second letter with the generous offer to pay less, this repeats until around 340 Euro are reached.
Then you may get a court order that states what the lawyer accuses you of and this you have to react to. The court just states this and gives you 2 checkboxes. If you check the one saying “I reject the accusation completely” the lawyer needs to decide. He invested some 40 euros into the court order but going to court is a different ballgame and not his main business model so they have to weigh the chances.
The owner of the router that the file went through is responsible for access to the router. Since the owner has so far not said anything to his Defence there is a possibility that multiple people including family members had access to the router and the lawyer might, in court, be presented with a list of people and their addresses which satisfies the defendants task to erschütter the accusation for the court and leave the lawyer with the option to figure out whodunnit or rather who in the list is going to fold and pay.
This is really not his business model. That said they do go to court and people get sentenced to pay the fine.
You are downvoted, but from my experience, you are pretty correct. Most people I know will use a streaming site, then sharehosters (good old boerse comes to mind - Megaupload, Rapidshare and Uploaded were the big hosters I remember)
I even know of more people using Usenet then torrents! The amount of work to use torrents safely just isn't worth it for most people.
They are downvoted because it was an obvious and low-quality statement, as another comment outlined. Torrents publicly expose IPs and thus can be seen by copyright Nazis, but streaming/direct downloading has so far been safe.
This thread[1] is talking about torrents in particular.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41330098
It's not the sites, it's torrenting. Without a VPN, they get your IP, and you are on the hook for "commercial distribution" (as clients also upload) unless you pay X00 euros.
Private torrenting is certainly not commercial distribution.
Commercial distribution isn't the only way you can violate copyrights
Just violating copyright wouldn't really matter. Damages would be tiny, and so would be what the lawyers can blackmail you for. It's being on the hook for the damages of distribution that gets the high fees.
Please tell me what's wrong about my comment instead of blindly downvoting, thank you.
It's simply not true, from my personal experience. Who cares it's tiny when it's still more than I want or can pay.
You have personal experience with being sued for downloading without distribution in Germany?
I wasn't sued at the end of it, but nearly. Had to pay few hundred euro. Still sucked.
Tell that to our courts ;)
If they're also downloading or seeding the torrent, the learn the IPs of their peers, so they know you were downloading that particular file.
Yeah you can use peerblock/peerguardian, but in general there's no point. It's much less risky to simply use a VPN because there's always a risk that new IPs are not on the blocklist.
Sci-Hub domains are listed, that is big.
What is that? I've never heard of it.
It's where we go to get peer reviewed scientific journal articles.
It's also run by a Putin and Stalin worshipping crazy lady
What are you basing that on?
Her own words: https://www.sci-hub.ru/alexandra
Still.... you go, girl.
I don't see anything about Putin on that page
Read the expanded version in russian[0]. Page 71, 3rd paragraph, explicitly saying “I was a patriot and supported Putin.”
And here is the source claiming she was attempting to join the Comminist Party of Russia[1] (though she ended up not being able to, because she wasn’t a russian citizen, which is a requirement)
0. https://www.sci-hub.ru/misc/alexandra/bio.pdf
1. http://bilimveaydinlanma.org/a-robin-hood-in-the-world-of-sc...
Her argument that Stalin is the Christian God is rather, intriguing – https://www.sci-hub.ru/why-stalin-is-god
Not convinced myself, but to each their own.
It's an argument ... it may also be an inside joke and more than a bit of a leg pull <shrug>.
Soviet and post Soviet literature tends to be layered and full of oblique messages, many of these suffer in translation.
Idrc who she worships, she thinks information should be free. The parasitic corporations in the west don't. Rich people are more of a threat to the well-being of society than foreigners who see the world differently
It's not an either or choice.
It's not a surprise at all that people doing extraordinary things aren't quite the same as regular people. The average same-belief-having person isn't going to do anything like make sci-hub because fitting in is their priority.
More like it requires protection from one of the few blocks of nations resistant to extradition to the US.
She technically identifies as a communist. Besides, she needs some protector to prevent being extradited to the Land of The Free & Home of The Brave. You saw what happened to Kim Dotcom.
At least she respects scientific freedom.
Starting a panegyric to JV Stalin with words from IE Aleshkovsky is an editorial choice which shows AA Elbakyan takes CE Shannon seriously; I for one am looking forward to a future essay equating pirate site shutdowns with the 7 June (415 BC) early morning mutilation of the herms.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu6oziDE5wc
Ah for that I tend to go to Z-Library. But to be honest i don't have much need for that kinda stuff
Sci-hub is an OG source of journal papers and the source that Z-lib | anna's archive copy from.
Love it | Hate it, either way the Alexandra Elbakyan story is worth a read: https://sci-hub.se/alexandra
As a general rule pirate sites tend to not go in for founder bio's.
I'm no Data Scientist, but would be willing to bet a small round that were we to look, presence of founder bio's and their domicile's extradition policies are not uncorrelated.
[AFAICT there was a lot of paranoia on the Soviet side, and as a basis for that paranoia they pointed to all the Capitalist forces active in russia during the revolution, but in retrospect some part of all that foreign intervention had been due to a problem of their own making: they believed world revolution was only a few years off (and just maybe they didn't want to look inconsistent with their own ideology?), so instead of doing what any reasonable mafia would've done and kept on paying dividends on imperial paper (perhaps even after negotiating an acceptable haircut?) and maybe even paying lip service to IP rights, on both fronts they rather rudely essentially told all the now-former investors to "go to wood"]
Lagniappe: somewhere in Abai's қара сөздері, he says something similar to "you know, it wouldn't do us Kazakhs much harm if once in a while we were to think of something other than how to grift more cows"; with that in mind: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/life-3
An alternative that often works being annas-archive.org.
You haven't heard of the biggest source of paywalled research papers on the planet? It's a fantastic resource for when you don't want to pay 40 Euros for a single paper and you don't happen to be part of a university that happens to be subscribed to the right journal.
It wouldn't surprise me if not having access to Sci-hub is about as bad for research and academiaishnesshood as ... dunno... like really bad.
And libgen?
They've been blocked because they became too popular.
I've heard from kinox from people I would have never suspected to be even capable of finding such a site.
Guess those people have been the marker.
Probably been told about it by friends. Whenever I find a decent site, I pass it on to anybody I know who needs it. kinox used to be one of those sites.
700€ per movie is a current rate, plus a couple of hundreds as legal fees.
Yeah ridiculous. Only in Germany...
This might be more a proof for this whole blocking-business actually working. kinox, serienjunkies and similar named domains were very famous and huge 5-10 years ago. Since then, they have been raided, sued, blocked, etc. So it seems they've been fallen in grace and awareness with their target-group.
I actually kind of appreciate the laws there. It's sort of weird because it's one of those things where -- if you just use a VPN it totally negates the problem. Like somehow it's just "common knowledge" that you can do any of that with a VPN and you're risk free. It's this loophole that... you can't really close as a government without being completely authoritarian.
So it's not shocking that some might want to shut down VPNs or make using a VPN illegal (like, uh, North Korea, Belarus, Iraq, Oman, Turkmenistan... oof).
Yeah I didn’t know about this when coming to Germany and downloaded something without a VPN. Thankfully I was spared. But now I always use one with a reasonable good kill switch setup and forcing the torrent client to use the vpns network device
nsw2u is something I've used when I wanted to look at the current state of switch emulation
I use and have used a large number of these. Many of them are primarily German streaming sites. Ziperto is a file hosting site, which you'd only come into contact with through certain kinds of direct download piracy sites. I'm not surprised you haven't heard of any of them, even though they are actually quite popular in some circles.