Reply #18: The greatest and most sickening irony about this: [View All]

Here's the deal. Bittorrent is a way for people to share files with one another, without central servers (with DHC and Magnet links you don't need a tracker). Toward the middle of the oughts (2000s) I started noticing something. For most people Bittorrent started to not be used. What replaced it? Direct download sites. These are websites that allow you to "upload files" to "share" with other people. They have heavy advertizing, and generally offer "pay for" download services. Examples might be Rapidshare, Megaupload, Fileserve, and others. The reason these sites came into being is very simple: P2P users (Bittorrent, Emule, etc) were being sued.

So while the community mostly grew on non-profit Bittorrent trackers and people sharing their own bandwidth that they paid for themselves, it moved into a for-profit direct download services. The lawsuits created a market for open for-profit piracy. This goes against the original idea of P2P to begin with, people sharing files with one another freely and openly.

What's worse: corporations are exempt from these blatant copyright violations. If an individual shares a file with someone, it is considered "copyright infringement" but if a direct download site allows hundreds of people to download a file it is merely "a violation of their terms of service." Basically, they are allowed to violate copyright while an individual is automatically presumed guilty. All they have to do is "respect a takedown request." So of course, those files shared on direct download sites are all taken down after hundreds if not thousands of people retrieve them. They make profit from people signing up for "unlimited" service and for others giving referral links, and of course from advertising. The direct download sites are effectively bootleggers of this century, and it's all perfectly legal.