Never looking back, once you have a few sites that provide good stuff and arent getting taken down every week you are set. Scrap the p2p, its a waste of time.

There is no point getting upset at warez traders being criminals. Most folks are anyway,how many people had sex, drank alochol or smoked before they were old enough, support people engaging in these activites before they are old enough, smoke weed or other illegal drugs and support other people who do? Yeah… everyone is a criminal.

First of all, i salute you for being a p2p user, but good copies of software are hard to come by, and perfect copies of music are just as hard

While this is undoubtedly true, I think that the point the Wired article was trying to make was that this duplication and distribution heirarchy is respinsible for seeding the P2P networks with many sources for identical files.

If young Joe Schmoe decided to rip his latest DVD purchase into an AVI and stuck it into his shared folder. It would most likely sit there doing sod all because only a very few of those ‘millions’ of other P2P’ers would in actual fact find his file in a search conducted via their native P2P search function. And with only one source for this file (which, assuming it’s a decent quality rip, will be approx 700Mb) it’s gonna take quite a while for anyone else to complete the download. Compund this with the fact that there will doubtless be other sources of the same film (NOT the same file as the hash value would be different) which may have upwards of 200 sources per file. ie those which have been filtered down through the ‘l33t’ pirate network (sic). Consequently poor little Schmoe esq. will not recieve the infinite pirate kudos from his friends and peers (pun intended) which he so desperately seeks.

This is where websites like the now defunct ShareConnector and long lamented ShareReactor came into play. They are home to groups of users (those release groups that were mentioned in the previous article) who will all get the same copy of a file via whatever means (DC, newsgroups, FTP, etc. NOT P2P!!). ie all having an identical copy of the film. They will then post this as a release in one or many P2P indexing websites for consumption by the general public.

Ha, looking back over this post i’ve realised that i’ve merely been re-iterating most of what was mentioned in the Wired article but I feel that the point was somehow missed in the previous comment and felt an unsurmountable urge to correct it! lol

Anyone else see the flaw there?

LONG LIVE PIRACY!!! WOO-HOO!

“Without this duplication and distribution structure providing content, the P2P networks would run dry. ”

The only area where the distribution structure makes a difference anymore is 0-day releases for unreleased movies and games.. Anything else can be ripped by any kid with commonly available programs and shared with millions of others….

Err…no it doesnt – comparing hackers to warez traders is ridiculous – hackers need brains and ingenuity, to be a warez trader you just need to be able to copy files, and have access to an internet connection, what skills are required to do this? how many warez traders have spent years learning their trade, studying books and manuals, scouring the web for information? come on….

“…In the process, all warez traders are labeled as criminals.”

well according to the definition of what warez is, at the top of this article, all warez traders *ARE* criminals.

The P2P food chain

Another noticeable error was in stating that the files get transferred directly from ftp dump sites to Kazaa/Morpheus users. There are really several additional transport points along the way. IRC and newsgroups – which were not even mentioned in the Wired article – play a major role as the first publicly-available access points for newly released files. Next in line would be BitTorrent, eDonkey, then last in line, the favorite of the unwashed masses: Kazaa.

Many released files that do not have broad demand simply do not make it all the way to the n00b P2P networks such as FastTrack. The ’scene’ might be highly organized and enthusiastic at the top and mid levels, but that’s about where it ends. No self-respecting insider gives a flip about Kazaa users.

In addition, there are also other types of distribution that may tap into the stream somewhere along the way: Private independent FTP and HTTP sites. Public websites. DC hubs.

I beg to differ about the quality of the movies on the net. I am now looking at alt.binaries.ftn in usenet and I see the movie Cellular (2004) DVD. Total size is 5,268.5 MB. It’s sitting there on my ISP’s server just waiting for me to download it. That’s the same quality I get when I buy or rent the movie. If I download it, I am sure not going to rent or buy it. There are many more just like it from the same place.

The ease which people are able to download movies from the net will not inhibit the production of movies in the future . On the contrary more movies will be made than ever before. For there is an insatiable desire to tell stories and become famous.

With the downward spiral of prices for broadcast quality movie making equipment, many people can now make a low budget movies and distribute them on the net if they run into a wall with the established distributors. I see many in alt.binaries.documentaries right now. The distribution costs are pennies.

The established production houses will still be making movies, though you will not see as many big budget ones. The 30 million dollar per movie stars will have to except 3 million per movie. With more competition from from the little people we may even see price reductions in the movie houses. Oh! poor MPAA.

NO SHIT!