anon
12.01.11, 03:50
Four years ago, back in 2007, I had a 2Mbit connection and much less experience than I do now. I was slowly learning about private torrenting, and some of you may remember I was pretty lucky to be offered a TL invite back in those early days. Well, as expected, I leeched stuff from there, and one day I noticed I was almost maxing out my speed from a single peer connection.
"This guy must have a great upload speed", I thought. Then I learned what a seedbox was. And that you had to pay for it. Fair enough.
Then, some time after that, I learned about warez forums and the URL of some pretty massive ones.
I looked at the subforums and thought, "man, look at all the stuff people upload, just to share it with others and expecting nothing but a 'thank you' in return". Then I learned they were getting "points" or even money for each download, and that the thank yous they asked for were to keep the thread bumped, making it more visible and thus generating extra profit. That was pretty rough to find out about, but hey, I was getting my stuff anyway. So what?
Fast forward a lot, and some months ago, I was browsing through a tracker's torrent list, and upon loading the details page for some movies I was interested on, I noticed the same guy always first in the comments, posting screens of the videos the uploaders did not (as it was a Scene-only tracker, and they could only put untouched NFOs in the descriptions), so that we could check the quality before doing anything else. I said to myself, "hey, I'm not sure this guy's downloading every movie and taking screenshots, but wherever they're from, he's uploading them and always posting first".
Yeah, you probably already know how this ends. A bit after that I browsed that tracker's forums, just for fun, and I noticed a topic called "the image host for the screens sucks" or something similar. I opened it, and I read a nice comment from an administrator along the words of:
Maybe the hoster sucks for you, but bear with it. The screen poster is making money from that, so it's not going to change
So, everywhere I go, people appear to be somehow gaining something out of what looks like innocent sharing for the uninformed. Be it money, points to get stuff you have to buy "for free", you name it.
My question is the same one as in the title - what happened to "sharing"? Sharing a movie just because you want people to enjoy it, posting screens so that others don't have to waste time to see if the quality is good, and doing it because of that and nothing else? Is it OK for them to profit from that, even a bit, just because they're using their own bandwidth to upload someone else's work? Is it a "victimless crime" on its own world (they profit and no one is affected negatively)?
Discuss.
"This guy must have a great upload speed", I thought. Then I learned what a seedbox was. And that you had to pay for it. Fair enough.
Then, some time after that, I learned about warez forums and the URL of some pretty massive ones.
I looked at the subforums and thought, "man, look at all the stuff people upload, just to share it with others and expecting nothing but a 'thank you' in return". Then I learned they were getting "points" or even money for each download, and that the thank yous they asked for were to keep the thread bumped, making it more visible and thus generating extra profit. That was pretty rough to find out about, but hey, I was getting my stuff anyway. So what?
Fast forward a lot, and some months ago, I was browsing through a tracker's torrent list, and upon loading the details page for some movies I was interested on, I noticed the same guy always first in the comments, posting screens of the videos the uploaders did not (as it was a Scene-only tracker, and they could only put untouched NFOs in the descriptions), so that we could check the quality before doing anything else. I said to myself, "hey, I'm not sure this guy's downloading every movie and taking screenshots, but wherever they're from, he's uploading them and always posting first".
Yeah, you probably already know how this ends. A bit after that I browsed that tracker's forums, just for fun, and I noticed a topic called "the image host for the screens sucks" or something similar. I opened it, and I read a nice comment from an administrator along the words of:
Maybe the hoster sucks for you, but bear with it. The screen poster is making money from that, so it's not going to change
So, everywhere I go, people appear to be somehow gaining something out of what looks like innocent sharing for the uninformed. Be it money, points to get stuff you have to buy "for free", you name it.
My question is the same one as in the title - what happened to "sharing"? Sharing a movie just because you want people to enjoy it, posting screens so that others don't have to waste time to see if the quality is good, and doing it because of that and nothing else? Is it OK for them to profit from that, even a bit, just because they're using their own bandwidth to upload someone else's work? Is it a "victimless crime" on its own world (they profit and no one is affected negatively)?
Discuss.