Matrix Posted July 22, 2019 Share Posted July 22, 2019 Piracy used to be geeky, then it got easy, then it broke. That's according to an opinion piece penned by the chief of the MPA in Europe this week. The article, which raises a number of interesting points, also leads us to a couple of controversial questions. Are casual pirates becoming less knowledgeable due to advances in technology and if so, where does that leave tomorrow's generation of would-be swashbucklers? Anyone with a technically-minded older relative happy to reminisce over their particular ‘golden age’ of motoring is likely to dwell for a moment on a particular train of thought. Cars today are oversized computers, ones that are designed to be mechanically inaccessible to the regular Joe. Unlike their predecessors, elders argue, they often require specialist tools for repairs, adding that today’s vehicles are not made like they used to be. Whether one agrees with these points is an individual matter, but it’s difficult to argue that in the face of rising technology, regular motorists are now less likely than ever to tackle even a basic oil change, previously the most simple of maintenance tasks. In many respects, the same can be said of today’s consumer computing environments. Enthusiasts of yesteryear had to be well-versed in languages like MS-DOS or BASIC simply to get by, which helped them to understand a great deal more about how their machines actually worked. Today’s graphical interfaces have all but demolished those barriers to entry, meaning there are now millions of people who class clicking icons as the height of ‘programming’ expertise. For today’s casual pirates, this could be a ticking timebomb. This week, Stan McCoy, President and Managing Director of the MPA in Europe, published an interesting piece titled “Piracy Went from Geeky to Easy. What’s Next?” “[W]hile the makers innovate, so do the takers,” McCoy wrote. “In the last 15 years, piracy went from geeky to easy. Transmission technologies improved with the advent of streaming, and delivery via new apps and devices bridged the divide between the PC and the living room. “Today’s piracy has become a very different type of organized crime: more sophisticated, tech intensive, very elusive, and massive in scale. Where will it go next? Increasingly, industry antipiracy efforts are bending the trajectory from geeky, to easy, to … broken.” McCoy’s argument goes as follows; Piracy was once the realm of the technically minded but as technologies developed – pirate streaming sites, Kodi add-ons, dedicated apps, IPTV – it became very easy and more accessible to the masses. However, with numerous anti-piracy initiatives underway, piracy is more easily broken. Add-ons suddenly fail, app creators and their tools ‘mysteriously’ disappear, IPTV platforms become less reliable. In this new and somewhat dumbed-down piracy world, access can be switched off in an instant, sometimes by hitting just one component in a system. At this point, the more seasoned pirate will argue that none of these things present a problem for them. Add-ons can be reconfigured, new sites pop up to replace the last, new app makers fill in the gaps, and so on and so forth. Which, generally speaking, is correct. However, for the less well informed, these things are much more of a headache. Casual pirates – the friend or colleague who bought a “loaded Firestick” off Craigslist or eBay – make up a huge proportion of today’s pirating masses. And the vast majority haven’t a clue how anything really works. To cite McCoy, “95 percent of TV piracy is driven by purpose-built set-top boxes.” Of course, this doesn’t mean that 100% of these boxes are owned by tech-illiterates, far from it. However, it seems very likely that the screaming majority have little to no idea how their device works, or what to do when it all goes wrong. The ‘blame’ for this can be placed squarely at the feet of technology and plug-and-play culture. As piracy has grown more sophisticated, partly due to evolution and partly due to anti-piracy measures, much of the brainpower has become entrenched behind the scenes. Like the people who fix modern cars using a laptop and a ‘black magic’ cable, many pirates rely completely on the wizardry of a tiny minority to get them out of a jam. To put it another way, Joe Public’s ability to carry out the equivalent of a simple oil change is being lost, largely due to pirated content being presented to them as a sophisticated pre-cooked meal on a plate, made using a recipe that few know about or even care to understand. To an extent, piracy has always been like this. In general terms, the brains have always been at the top while those at the bottom take what’s available. That said, today’s prevalence of “click-and-get” apps and services means that few have the motivation to learn anything technical while those that do can run into trouble. Thanks to pirate sites and apps being downranking and removed from search results (sometimes after a lawsuit), combined with the opportunism of the malicious-minded, it’s now harder than ever for the novice to separate the wheat from the chaff. “Try looking for alternatives on a search engine and you’re more likely than ever to get malware and clickbait sites posing as pirates. Are you feeling lucky?” McCoy asked this week. While the more technically advanced will dismiss the above paragraph as scare tactics, McCoy’s comments can hold true for the casual user. It’s becoming a minefield out there for novices and unless people take the time to study and do their own research, bad things always have the potential to happen. It will probably take many more years for the piracy ‘brain drain’ to show its full effects but the popularity and ease of today’s ultra-simple and feature-rich pirate apps and services could potentially end up as a positive for entertainment companies. Will the casual pirating masses spend days, months or years learning how to do piracy the ‘old school’ way when things go pear-shaped, or dump a few dollars a month into a couple of legal services and get the headaches over and done with? As usual, time will tell. VIEW: Original Article. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Piracy used to be geeky, then it got easy, then it broke. That's according to an opinion piece penned by the chief of the MPA in Europe this week. The article, which raises a number of interesting points, also leads us to a couple of controversial questions. Are casual pirates becoming less knowledgeable due to advances in technology and if so, where does that leave tomorrow's generation of would-be swashbucklers? Anyone with a technically-minded older relative happy to reminisce over their particular ‘golden age’ of motoring is likely to dwell for a moment on a particular train of thought. Cars today are oversized computers, ones that are designed to be mechanically inaccessible to the regular Joe. Unlike their predecessors, elders argue, they often require specialist tools for repairs, adding that today’s vehicles are not made like they used to be. Whether one agrees with these points is an individual matter, but it’s difficult to argue that in the face of rising technology, regular motorists are now less likely than ever to tackle even a basic oil change, previously the most simple of maintenance tasks. In many respects, the same can be said of today’s consumer computing environments. Enthusiasts of yesteryear had to be well-versed in languages like MS-DOS or BASIC simply to get by, which helped them to understand a great deal more about how their machines actually worked. Today’s graphical interfaces have all but demolished those barriers to entry, meaning there are now millions of people who class clicking icons as the height of ‘programming’ expertise. For today’s casual pirates, this could be a ticking timebomb. This week, Stan McCoy, President and Managing Director of the MPA in Europe, published an interesting piece titled “Piracy Went from Geeky to Easy. What’s Next?” “[W]hile the makers innovate, so do the takers,” McCoy wrote. “In the last 15 years, piracy went from geeky to easy. Transmission technologies improved with the advent of streaming, and delivery via new apps and devices bridged the divide between the PC and the living room. “Today’s piracy has become a very different type of organized crime: more sophisticated, tech intensive, very elusive, and massive in scale. Where will it go next? Increasingly, industry antipiracy efforts are bending the trajectory from geeky, to easy, to … broken.” McCoy’s argument goes as follows; Piracy was once the realm of the technically minded but as technologies developed – pirate streaming sites, Kodi add-ons, dedicated apps, IPTV – it became very easy and more accessible to the masses. However, with numerous anti-piracy initiatives underway, piracy is more easily broken. Add-ons suddenly fail, app creators and their tools ‘mysteriously’ disappear, IPTV platforms become less reliable. In this new and somewhat dumbed-down piracy world, access can be switched off in an instant, sometimes by hitting just one component in a system. At this point, the more seasoned pirate will argue that none of these things present a problem for them. Add-ons can be reconfigured, new sites pop up to replace the last, new app makers fill in the gaps, and so on and so forth. Which, generally speaking, is correct. However, for the less well informed, these things are much more of a headache. Casual pirates – the friend or colleague who bought a “loaded Firestick” off Craigslist or eBay – make up a huge proportion of today’s pirating masses. And the vast majority haven’t a clue how anything really works. To cite McCoy, “95 percent of TV piracy is driven by purpose-built set-top boxes.” Of course, this doesn’t mean that 100% of these boxes are owned by tech-illiterates, far from it. However, it seems very likely that the screaming majority have little to no idea how their device works, or what to do when it all goes wrong. The ‘blame’ for this can be placed squarely at the feet of technology and plug-and-play culture. As piracy has grown more sophisticated, partly due to evolution and partly due to anti-piracy measures, much of the brainpower has become entrenched behind the scenes. Like the people who fix modern cars using a laptop and a ‘black magic’ cable, many pirates rely completely on the wizardry of a tiny minority to get them out of a jam. To put it another way, Joe Public’s ability to carry out the equivalent of a simple oil change is being lost, largely due to pirated content being presented to them as a sophisticated pre-cooked meal on a plate, made using a recipe that few know about or even care to understand. To an extent, piracy has always been like this. In general terms, the brains have always been at the top while those at the bottom take what’s available. That said, today’s prevalence of “click-and-get” apps and services means that few have the motivation to learn anything technical while those that do can run into trouble. Thanks to pirate sites and apps being downranking and removed from search results (sometimes after a lawsuit), combined with the opportunism of the malicious-minded, it’s now harder than ever for the novice to separate the wheat from the chaff. “Try looking for alternatives on a search engine and you’re more likely than ever to get malware and clickbait sites posing as pirates. Are you feeling lucky?” McCoy asked this week. While the more technically advanced will dismiss the above paragraph as scare tactics, McCoy’s comments can hold true for the casual user. It’s becoming a minefield out there for novices and unless people take the time to study and do their own research, bad things always have the potential to happen. It will probably take many more years for the piracy ‘brain drain’ to show its full effects but the popularity and ease of today’s ultra-simple and feature-rich pirate apps and services could potentially end up as a positive for entertainment companies. Will the casual pirating masses spend days, months or years learning how to do piracy the ‘old school’ way when things go pear-shaped, or dump a few dollars a month into a couple of legal services and get the headaches over and done with? As usual, time will tell.
xpkRAKE Posted July 22, 2019 Share Posted July 22, 2019 When it's no longer easy - they will pay. The majority of people don't even know the minimal basics of maintaining the computer they use...and critically, they don't care so there's little chance they'll waste time figuring out anything more taxing than logging into a social media account. There's nothing wrong with making things easier but a basic understanding how to fix things, or find alternative options, when they do fail certainly helps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steven36 Posted July 22, 2019 Share Posted July 22, 2019 To many out there , that have blocking ads on legal sites mixed up with piracy , People are so silly instead of going to another site that have working links they ask for reuploads on sites that never reupload when you can get it somewhere else , and all piracy is not free some you need to buy a filehoster or download service to download . But now that I think of it causal pirates never had much knowledge to begin with . Back when i was uploading they was very few of us that uploaded and even less of us that explained how to use it. People who offer warez support get burned out quick . Too much you have to deal with with Trolls and ungrateful users that you are bringing them stuff for free. . I use to tech people how to activate software I made many old fixes that no longer work keep working over the years and worked with Reverse Engineers the ones i liked to help them fix there stuff . There people too, they don't like being on or bugged to death ether . The real scene was never helpful no way. They give you a NFO and it's up to the user to figure it out. In the last few years I figured out pirating Windows software is a big waste of time and there a whole other world of software out there that are open source and don't cost a dime , no crack needed. Even some of it will help you pirate other media. Old School Piracy has been dead for years . People making money off of it killed it , they are some Reverse Engineers who sell there work even , Warez blogs and uploaders profiting off there work , people ripping off there work drove many of them out of the game , or they just do it private now . Also laws don't allow us to be in the open with it like we once was , VPNs , Proxies are all part of the game were before they really didn't matter. The biggest thing is people don't want to help them no more . That spoon feeding era is over just about . Its nothing new it's just history repeating itself before we had warez forums we had file sharing sites like Torrent Freak with forums some of those sites still exist and some them don't . We didn't talk about the actual stuff we downloaded we only told you how to find the programs needed to download it. nsane , Lite and all them guys are members of those forums they started there before they made there own site . Warez blogs use to only be news sites when they 1st started out they would say such and such was available then they got brave and started posting links at 1st it may of been 2 weeks latter to get some RS links. None of the old school pirates are involved in it in public no more like the use to be .It became too much like a job to them so they got out of it. Torrent Freak is like the only Filesharing site still left that still updates the news and they never had a real community like the others did , the forums are still there but mostly dead, when they try to post the news on social media and use that instead of forums in the last few years they get threaten with bans and have to delete there members post. So much rules just so they can exist instead of making a forum like they use too .It's just a big dead circle jerk on social media. there rules want allow you to help anyone so i no longer login there . What does Torrent Freak do to help out the warez community? Nothing , I stop posting there news a long time ago , They just spy on us and tip off the police there staff lives on r/piracy so stupidity is mostly all they see ,they rank up there with the RiAA and MPAA as far as being nosy but they can't see the deep web places were you have to sign in too to see.. While software piracy is not really needed like it use too be , the scene is as strong as ever and they evolved with the times every kind of DRM is being cracked .Kodi addons are still being made many even faced legal issues over it. They just want share there methods of cracking with the general public ,and that's the way its always been . People can stream TV stations with pirate iptv, If you tell too much rights holders will kill it and piracy want be so easy no more it never was that hard anyway. Tell me how hard is it too put in the best torrent sites or kodi addons into a search engine and go to a blog with a list and download or stream what ever you want? Causal Pirates were no smarter in 2004 than they are today!! by nebin333 » Sat Jun 05, 2004 12:01 pm I think a lot of people are forgetting that most of the people that use kazaa have little or no understanding of what's going on besides that there's that teeny chance of getting sued. I'm talking about people that don't even realize they're being uploaded off of, the ones who share corrupt files because they don't know it deteriorates the network, etc. These people make up a sizeable chunk of the network and they won't go anytime soon. Not all p2pers are geeks ya know. by Anonymous » Sat Jun 05, 2004 12:13 pm most of them use kmd and that's all there is to them. a few others may have heard of ed2k or torrent... heck!just recently i told this guy i know not to go around installing p2p progs blindly cause of spyware. he didn't know what it was...after i explained him the essence of the scum he just replied:"and what's wrong with that?i'm not planting bombs or anything!" *sigh* there's too many sheep and not enough shepperd dogs... by DaBlade » Sat Jun 05, 2004 1:00 pm Most ppl are complete noobs. "Hey, I've got a computer! It's got AMD Athlon 64 2.4 gigaherts, 1 gigabyte of ram...yada...yada...yada..." and when you ask do you know what it means? they respond..."That it's good I guess.". And there's those: Hey, I just downloaded the latest Avril Lavigne single off Kazaa Media Desktop, I'm contributing to file-sharing.... by Anonymous » Sun Jun 06, 2004 12:52 am Not all p2pers are geeks ya know. That is important to remember. It's also obvious that the most popular, and "easy-to-use" network would have less tech literate people. Tech literacy means a better managed share, especially in quality and safety (viral safety). Less virus laden executables, less fakes, better quality files (better than 128kbps CBR MP3 files). by M3wThr33 » Tue Jun 08, 2004 6:43 am An alternate thought from me: Right now the most discussed network is dominated by compute illiterate people and mainly 1 single client on a network with 2 other ones and numerous other hack-ons. The company controlling it is greedy, overbearing and has no care for the people's computers. How much different would it be if eDonkey, Gnutella or Overnet became the dominating one? They're fairly open and the clients are updated often for FREE without crapware. As the technology changes, so will the clients. The reason fake mp3s and other junk work so well on KaZaa is the flawed network that Sharman couldn't care less about fixing. I can go on Shareaza, look at a list of a crapload of mp3s, filter out authentic ones at desired bitrates then browse the reviews of each file. I think there'd be less doom if an "honest" network was the dominating one. They still never been a honest one and people didn't even see Gnutella was going to be the next dominating one coming .The RIAA has since sued both of them and led to there demise so people started using BitTorrent more and filehost and nether one of them is what it was . Something new needs to come out to take it's place .File sharing is still the same in 2019 that it was in 2007 basically after all , all you needed was a web browser for years now so it should be easy . But if you want to find thee good info you need to visit the deep web sites . deep web is sites you have to sign in too it's not the same as the dark web that uses tor . The deep web is huge ,the dark web is small. You have users in Torrent Freak comments and even on this site that take being easy for granted and say they no need to explore closed sites and public ones are good enough and they will the ones left behind when it goes back underground. I will be using some program ,, some deepweb or darknet site getting mine, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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