For instance, say I search for “The Dark Knight” on my Usenet indexer. It returns to me a list of uploads and where to get them via my Usenet provider. I can then download them, stitch them together, and verify that it is, indeed, The Dark Knight. All of this costs only a few dollars a month for me.
My question is, why can’t copyright holders do this as well? They could follow the same process, and then send takedown requests for each individual article which comprises the movie. We already know they try to catch people torrenting so why don’t they do this as well?
I can think of a few reasons, but they all seem pretty shaky.
- The content is hosted in countries where they don’t have to comply with takedown requests.
It seems unlikely to me that literally all of it is hosted in places like this. Plus, the providers wouldn’t be able to operate at all in countries like the US without facing legal repercussions.
- The copyright holders feel the upfront cost of indexer and provider access is greater than the cost of people pirating their content.
This also seems fishy. It’s cheap enough for me as an individual to do this, and if Usenet weren’t an option, I’d have to pay for 3+ streaming services to be able to watch everything I do currently. They’d literally break even with this scheme if they could only remove access to me.
- They do actually do this, but it’s on a scale small enough for me not to care.
The whole point of doing this would be to make Usenet a non-viable option for piracy. If I don’t care about it because it happens so rarely, then what’s the point of doing it at all?
First, a massive amount of content is removed. You won’t find a lot of popular, unencrypted content these days on usenet. It’s all encrypted and obfuscated now to avoid the bots
Speaking of bots, I don’t think you realize how much of this process is automated, or how wide of a net is being used. The media corporations all have enormous collected libraries of material. It gets posted constantly to all sorts of places. This includes public torrents, public usenet, YouTube, PornHub (yes, really, even for non-porn), Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr, GNUtella, DDL sites…
The list goes on and on. Each one gets scanned for millions of potentially infringing items, often daily. No actual people are doing those steps.
Now, throw in things like private torrents, encrypted usenet posts, invite-only DDL, listings that use ‘3’ instead ‘e’ or those other character subscriptions… These require actual humans to process. Humans that cost money, and a considerable amount of it. As a business, you have to show a return on investment. Fighting piracy, even at its theoretical best, doesn’t increase revenues by a lot.
You mention revenue and breaking even, but you left out an important detail. Your time is free. They don’t have to pay $10/month, they have to pay $10/month + $20/hour for someone to deal with it. And most pirates of that level will just find another method.
Off topic, but is there any tutorial on how to do this Usenet thing? Feel free to contact me on Matrix, it’s on my profile.
You’ll need 3 things:
A usenet client such as SABnzbd. This is equivalent to a torrent client like qbittorrent.
An NZB indexer such as NZBGeek, again equivalent to torrent indexers, but for nzb files.
And finally a usenet provider such as FrugalUsenet. This is where you’re actually downloading articles from. (there are other providers listed in the photo in my other comment here)
Articles are individual posts on usenet servers. NZB files contain lists of articles that together result in the desired files. There are also additional articles included so if some are lost (taken down due to dmca/ntd) they can be rebuilt from the remaining data. Your nzb client handles the process of reading nzb files, trying to download the articles from each of your configured usenet providers, then decompressing, rebuilding lost data, and finally stitching it all together into the files you wanted.
There’s about 100 tutorials that’ll come up in a Google search.
They do receive takedown notices, however files uploaded to usenet are mirrored across many providers across many jurisdictions while also split into many parts as you noted. Usenets implementation of file sharing is quite robust; being able to rebuild a file that’s missing a significant portion of it’s data. To successfully take down a file, you need to remove many of these parts across almost all of the usenet backbones which requires cooperation across many nations/jurisdictions that are governed by varying laws. It’s not an easy task.
Here’s a somewhat limited map of usenet providers:
So it’s basically the fediverse 30+ years before?
This makes perfect sense. Thank you!
why is the DMCA the one fucking law that actually gets enforced at a high rate when there are literally billions of things more important that we could spend money on
Because violating the DMCA is copyright infringement, and § 501 (b) of the Copyright Act gives copyright holders a private right of action to file a civil lawsuit to enforce it. Copyright holders tend to be motivated in a way that the State very often isn’t.
it’s not generally law enforcement enforcing it, it’s the copyright holders threatening civil action against things like internet service providers, who in turn will cut off your internet or some such. they have a lot of money, so they get law enforcement to do their bidding when they want, but the majority of DMCA action is civil action. this is, my very uneducated opinion looking from the outside
Tom Cruise loves DMCA
