Has it become cool to cash in on piracy?

Here's one for you,and am not talking about the chinese silvers,theirs is a complex story that is more along the lines of organised crime.

Of late i've noticed an evolution of thoughts amongst some pirates and if anything,i think this paradigm shift appears to have left me behind.There used to be a time when the general concencus was that as pirates we were doing it for the love of it and because intellectual property was too much of a dickhole concept to grasp.

I know that these OG pirates are still around no doubt.Any press distributor who wakes up at devilish hours to scan magazines and newspapers just that they are made available for the sleeping reading masses the next morning for free definitely deserves a little more respect,there are other countless examples that you can compare to this.

Now that's the supplier's side of things.The guy who does all the hardwork,possibly even spent some of his money in the process and as pissed as his kind may be his hardwork eventually trickles down to P2P.

Some of these P2P sites are great,some have been around for a while now and i have no doubt that it takes more than just hardwork to build a successful site but perhaps what i don't get is upto what extent this success should be allowed to reach.

Like are we cool with the idea that its ok to cash in on piracy?i mean,these people deserve something for all the hardwork they put in building their empires,right?but isn't this exactly the type of thing that separates piracy from theft?
Have we lost the difference between the two?do we even care?is the donate function a facade for other things,specifically in sites that are more than self sufficient to get rid of it for at least sometime?

discuss/answer any that you feel comfortable with.

pm me if you'z looking for a fight.

how about one of the big sites send you their server bill?

I sure you would want some help the community also

i understand what you're saying and about which site.
can't pm you here as you have disabled pms.

name me some tracker where u are so i can send u a message, or go to xtremesystems.org and pm me, i have the same nick as here.

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Originally Posted by Cabalo

i understand what you're saying and about which site.
can't pm you here as you have disabled pms.

name me some tracker where u are so i can send u a message, or go to xtremesystems.org and pm me, i have the same nick as here.

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link me to your demonoid:P

I've seen discussions about this. Basically if a site has a lottery and the winner gets an xbox 360 that theree tells you that they're earning something by doing it. And that something is not a little.

there are still people that do it for the fun of it, the filesharing spirit etc.. It might be hard to track them down, though as they stay away from these huge 0day torrent sites.

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Originally Posted by sez

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Originally Posted by Cabalo

i understand what you're saying and about which site.
can't pm you here as you have disabled pms.

name me some tracker where u are so i can send u a message, or go to xtremesystems.org and pm me, i have the same nick as here.

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link me to your demonoid:P

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good idea :happy:

The simple fact is though, it is getting harder and harder to get the donations in, that is why darkside went down.

I made a post the other day with regards of % of people in TL going down a list of trackers and how many in those trackers are in TL as well. (TL s just an example btw)

Lets say you have 2 trackers.

1 offers 200gig for £10 and promotes you to VIP for 3 months, and lets you hit and run (so you keep paying the £10 every 3 months).

or another where you get a poxy star for your donation.

Where will the vast majority donate to? it wont be the only star one thats for sure.

I do not like P2L, but we have to offer something, and with the recession atm, its even harder to get the donations.

Now I am not saying I am going to close BCG any time soon, we are pretty much OK because we have a good community that do donate, even if most is 50p each it all adds up everntually. But if we never offered anyything, we would be dead in the water, I should know, i tried it.

Ads brought in about $60 a month
0 benefits about the same. (different months btw, I stopped taking donations to try the ads).

If you think it is easy to keep a tracker running, then by all means start one off, but it pisses me off when members that do not know what they are talking about, get on their high horse and complain about shit they know very little about, just to stir the waters so to speak.

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Originally Posted by stoi

If you think it is easy to keep a tracker running, then by all means start one off, but it pisses me off when members that do not know what they are talking about, get on their high horse and complain about shit they know very little about, just to stir the waters so to speak.

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Was this aimed at me? Because I never said it was easy to run a tracker.

I merely said that there are trackers out there that are being managed as if they were firms. They have one goal: profit=max. The cause justifies the means.

no you didnt, you said that if they have a prize draw, they are making money.

maybe they have a prize draw as a way of saying thanks to the donators that did donate, and to give something back, even if its just to 1 of them.

PS: this is what makes me laugh though.

TPB, Mininova, BTJunkie, ISOhunt 3 of these have not even got trackers associated with them.

They have a ton of ads, they get millions of hits a day, 2 cents per impression = a shit load of cash every day, never mind a month or a year.

2 million hits a day 50% use adblock = 1million views of ads, * 2cents each = $20,000 a day just off 1 ad, have 5 ads and thats $100.000 a day.

and they are lorded as gods.

A private tracker only has a donation button, and a few benefits here and there, and maybe a prize draw, and a few mass PMs, and they are the scum of the earth.

doesnt make sense.

Its like users see a donation button and think, making a fortune, they see ads and think, eww ads, not making even more cash than a donation button.

Only way we can keep these trackers going is through donations, page views dont do us any good, but those trackers i just mentioned, they dont need donations, as long as people keep coming to the site, which they will, they will keep on making money. Honestly some people are just thick as 2 short planks. (not mentioning any names though lol)

$I don't care whether people make money off of piracy$

As for the "no one will donate if they don't give you an incentive other than a donor star" argument... out of all the trackers I've donated to the main reason I did it was for the donor star. GFT is the only site where I donated for something (an invite). A few of them did have other benefits but they were either negligible or something I didn't need in the first place. I disapprove of the "Pay2Leech" philosophy and would never donate for that purpose.

very pleased for you, but for every 1 of you (or members like you) there are 100 that are the complete opposite, self self self, I dont get anything, stuff yous.

My point from above still stands though, If i wanted to make a fortune off this, I would have made a public link site when Suprnova went down, not a private site.

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Originally Posted by stoi

no you didnt, you said that if they have a prize draw, they are making money.

maybe they have a prize draw as a way of saying thanks to the donators that did donate, and to give something back, even if its just to 1 of them.

PS: this is what makes me laugh though.

TPB, Mininova, BTJunkie, ISOhunt 3 of these have not even got trackers associated with them.

They have a ton of ads, they get millions of hits a day, 2 cents per impression = a shit load of cash every day, never mind a month or a year.

2 million hits a day 50% use adblock = 1million views of ads, * 2cents each = $20,000 a day just off 1 ad, have 5 ads and thats $100.000 a day.

and they are lorded as gods.

A private tracker only has a donation button, and a few benefits here and there, and maybe a prize draw, and a few mass PMs, and they are the scum of the earth.

doesnt make sense.

Its like users see a donation button and think, making a fortune, they see ads and think, eww ads, not making even more cash than a donation button.

Only way we can keep these trackers going is through donations, page views dont do us any good, but those trackers i just mentioned, they dont need donations, as long as people keep coming to the site, which they will, they will keep on making money. Honestly some people are just thick as 2 short planks. (not mentioning any names though lol)

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Well of course public trackers make even more. I thought that was taken for granted by everyone.

Maybe I was speaking in general too much, though.

In my defense, I have no experience in running a tracker, but I do know this: some trackers do make lots of profit. These are what the OP is refering to IMO. Maybe he wanted to bring public ones into the discussion also, but it didn't seem that way to me.

yes but how come all i hear is, they make a profit its wrong, when lets be honest, no one knows which private trackers make silly money. they believe a tracker with 30,000 members must make more than a tracker with 3,000, but that tracker with 3,000 can have a better "community" (whatever the hell that is) and actually take more donations than the one with 30,000 members, because most of the 30,000 members think, ah well thee have 30,000 members, so they make enough, they dont need my cash. (if you get me lol)

But the sun shone out of TPB asses until they sold out, they had already sold out, years ago. (or at least making a small fortune) they were going to buy sealand after all. and they didnt, so where did all that cash go.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,242351,00.html

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The world's smallest "country" is going on the chopping block.

The self-proclaimed sovereign principality of Sealand, built atop a World War II artillery platform in the North Sea, is for sale for the whopping price tag of $977 million.

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Just pisses me off how public trackers never ever get tarred with the same brush as a private one, its always the private ones that are monsters, and doing it for the money, but the public ones are doing it for the principle, if anything its the other way around.

They were trying to raise donations to buy sealand so I don't think there was any cash that went anywhere. I'm skeptical about the rumors of profitability of many sites.

well for $977 million i would have to sell my soul to the devil never mind just ask for donations (and even then i would be $976,999,999 short lol)

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Originally Posted by stoi

well for $977 million i would have to sell my soul to the devil never mind just ask for donations (and even then i would be $976,999,999 short lol)

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I don't think i meant to attack any site.Am talking about things like usenet(which if am not wrong you are an avid fan of :P),places like downloadmoviesfree.com that exploit on n00bs,and of course torrent sites that are clearly beyond self sufficient but still take money from members under the guise of server bills<--mind you,bills that were postpaid sometime in january.One would expect them to at least (even if its for one month)just say ok folks,you've given us more than enough to cover the bills for this and the next 30days and during that period we won't be asking you for anything<--i think they call it a show of gratitude.

I personally made a conscious decision to not give any money to torrent sites that aren't making any effort at showing accountability,the least a site would do is at least give me a donation meter<---whether its moving or not.

As for Ads,i honestly don't care,let them milk those advertisers for all they got.just that the site owners aren't lying to members for the sake of their own get rich ambitions and this is exactly why the RIAA/MPAA are ever getting closer to filing their first criminal case against us.

And i'd bet you for it stoi that you being a niche tracker,you barely come close to what a serious closed general tracker would pull in member donations in a month.

Something else that i forgot to mention,some sites that am on are still accepting donations for invites nvm the fact that the donations meter started reading 100% nearly 2 weeks ago and yet when august comes the meter is going to be pulled back to 0 notwithstanding the donations that were made this and last week.

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Originally Posted by realityhd

They were trying to raise donations to buy sealand so I don't think there was any cash that went anywhere. I'm skeptical about the rumors of profitability of many sites.

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Lmao...TPB was gonna raise nearly a billion $$...:rolleyes:

How do you think trackers get all those scene releases shortly after pre? Credits? Maybe sometimes, but most of them simply pay for them. Even the ones who claim to be strictly against P2L do exactly what they critisize. Behind the curtain they P2L to get the warez on their trackers.

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I personally made a conscious decision to not give any money to torrent sites that aren't making any effort at showing accountability,the least a site would do is at least give me a donation meter<---whether its moving or not.

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Well funnily enough, we could never get ours to work properly, and then when we did members were saying they hate trackers with donation target bars as they never believed them anyway lol so ours is just there for any prize draw we have (which is seldom as they are failiures).

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How do you think trackers get all those scene releases shortly after pre? Credits? Maybe sometimes, but most of them simply pay for them. Even the ones who claim to be strictly against P2L do exactly what they critisize. Behind the curtain they P2L to get the warez on their trackers.

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From personal experience, I do not have scene axx, i have never had scene axx, so i do not pay for scene axx, yes i do pay for usenet, which used to get games on the site first, now i am to slow as my members have scene axx, that they pay out of their own pocket, i just use usenet now for me and what i want.

and the reason i use Usenet, is i am the biggest leech going, I hate seeding back, unless its my own torrent, also my asymetric ISP is a nightmare, 20meg down 256k up (supposed to be 700+k up but hardly ever get that), and i also do not have a seedbox either, it feels like cheating to me, especially when i do not get 0 day releases fast anymore.

I am not saying other trackers do not have that, i am just sayig i dont.

And regarding the ads argument, why do you think most private trackers dont have them.

Ugly
People block them
Not enough unique visitors per day to justify having them.

It is not worth the bother having an ad on a private site, and the only other way is donations, but like i said, if I and i bet a lot of other owners of private trackers, wanted to make a mint off this, they would have started up a public link site 5 years ago when Suprnova went down.

To me it doesnt matter how they get their cash, either way they are still profiting from P2P, whether thats right or wrong is for you to decide, but i bet if those public trackers had to accept donations to survive, they would and they would be a lot more scrupulous than private trackers about doing it. OK some Private trackers are alledgedally in it for the cash, but lets be honest here, the average donation from a single user is between 25p and £10, it very very rarely sites will get £100 donations from just 1 user or a number of users.

So to me you are donating, of your own free will (we dont hold a gun to your head) to the tracker of a sum probably no more than £10 a month, so even if that tacker has 1000 donors that have donated that in a month, so £10,000 a month, so what, its not like they have taken £10,000 off 1 member, or £10,000 of each member, they have taken £10 of someone that wanted to donate, for whatever reason they wanted to donate, and that person got giving what they donated for.

Honestly i cant see a problem with that at all, and the fact is members will never know anyway, so how do you know they can do what you suggest, like i said, just because a tracker has 30,000-150,000 members, it does not mean a lot of them donate.

This month we have 200 donators, now £5 gets you full benefits, so you may be thinking, 200*5 = £1,000, very nice, the problem is, a lot of those donate 50p or less, which paypal takes a vast chunk of it as well.

and to work it out 30,000 members 200 donors is 1.5% of my memberbase donate, luckily it does cover the cost, but its still pitiful lol (and when i had 100,000 members, it was no better).

If sysops are making lots of cash from this, then i am doing something seriosly wrong, and if anyone starts a private tracker just to make cash, then they wont last very long.

PS: Honestly, when i tried the ads on the site, if they did bring in the cash to pay for the servers (never mind anything extra) i would have stopped taking donations full time, but they did not by a long way.

PPS: I am going to bed now, but i like the way that i am the only sysop thats gets involved in these types of converstations lol even though i said i would not anymore, I just cant help myself when i see threads like this on here, I had someone on my forum saying i made more money than TPB, I just laghed at them and explianed what I posted here, Not everyone gets it, they see no donations link, and think that site must not be making anything at all, well if they have ads its bullshit.

PPPS: to me its the same as, you buy a counterfeight DVD for $3 on the market, you dont ask to see their profit and loss statements for the last 4 years do you. You have got what you wanted (the DVD) and they have got what they wanted (your cash). A family has just been sentanced in London for 6 years for 2 brothers and 4 years for the Father for counterfeighting DVDs, but they had 5 Factories set up in houses and made £7mil over 4 years. Now that to me is wrong, very bloody wrong, I have never ever sold a copyright anything to anyone, but the law if i was ever caught, would probably treat me, like them or even worse than them. Most racker owners dont have to do this, we do it because its what we believe in, stop releasing so much crap/bring the prices way down and we wont have many members left, keep charging an arm and a leg for crap, and we will just keep getting bigger and bigger, its not rocket science.

in 1st place no one pointed a pistol to a person to create a tracker. so, if some1 is going to open a tracker, he should think that it is he who will pay for it, and eventually in the future some users might donate. many ppl just open trackers to be bosses and brag, and then dont expect to pay price for that. so many trackers open and close lately bcoz no1 is willing to spend the cash on the servers, they just want other people to pay for their power trips. i could open the tracker on a small server, put some €€€€ aside to pay for some months, make it very hard to enter, and then i would be a "staffer" and very important in the bt world, and demand like some do to be invite to other super 1337 trackers. cabalo (i think was him) wrote somewhere that bt is mostly ruled by power hungry kids. i was too new to this to understand his words, but more i read more i understand how correkt this statement is.

Just to clarify, I was talking more about trackers with 100,000+ members. One in particular.

-If you don't believe in P2L the best and only real way to protest it is to not give them your money, or not to involve yourself with their site. The system obviously works and I don't feel so self-important as to start a rant about how they are in the wrong and are horrible people etc etc for profiteering off of the coattails of their tracker's success.

-Instead choose to donate to the trackers you enjoy that are struggling for donations and are honest about your money.

-If you don't donate money to any trackers then why are you bitching about this? Donations are obviously none of your concern and if you didn't already know it is every donor's choice that they donate.

(This is speaking in generalities, not directed towards anybody)

isn't having a seedbox kind of like P2L?or is it for a bragging rights.

also donations is a good thing helps keep the site going and also hardware upgrades ect ect.

I guess i P2D then (usenet)

double post

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Originally Posted by Hombre

in 1st place no one pointed a pistol to a person to create a tracker. so, if some1 is going to open a tracker, he should think that it is he who will pay for it, and eventually in the future some users might donate. many ppl just open trackers to be bosses and brag, and then dont expect to pay price for that.

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To a certain point maybe, but i think you'll find its very difficult for a single person to continue paying server costs on their own, its just not sustainable, especially when sites upgrade servers or add more. It can quickly get to the point where its essential to get donations - you could argue a site should stay at a size which is reasonable to sustain without donations, but then we wouldnt be where we are today without increased building up of sites.

In most cases, the owner(s) will pay towards the costs most of the time, shortfalls etc have to come from somewhere, along with certain other aspects of private torrent sites these days (which dont get added onto the donation target, or at least i dont think they should).

Some of the biggest trackers, its hard to see that they're not making money from it (which i dont agree with), but as others have said, users on those sites arent being forced into donating and i think most people would have an idea what sites can command the large amount of donations that they possibly wouldnt need more.

There arent many of these "big" private trackers around though and the majority of site owners barely cover costs and/or pay alot towards them themselves. Its getting much more difficult to reach the target amounts with people being less able to donate, aswell as the increase in sites (which is great), which spreads donators out even more thinly.

As has been said, private torrent sites are definitly not a way of making money in all but a few "rare" cases, most owners over the course of running a site will be putting alot of their own money into it and will "lose" money, not make it.

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..users on those sites arent being forced into donating...

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Good point, but there are ways to 'force' members to donate. Ever heard of 'the very hard to seed and get a ratio of 1:1 trackers.'

Private trackers are not forcing you to pay a penny, so bitching for what ?
I have never donated but i never complaint !

They are releasing latest releases / keeping the site online / taking care of servers to be online 24/7 hours and still you bitches complaining.

If a site goes down like " TL ", then you are shouting like an A-hole why the tracker is down.

There are good people who donates and keeping private trackers online and people like you leeching like an a-hole and still coming from nowhere and complaining like a super a-hole.

If you can't thank them, at least don't complain like a f**kin stupid.

Don't forget, you are getting your daily needs from Private trackers mostly. so thank them and always support them !

I have high Respect for " TL - IPT - ScT - SCC " and i will always support them somehow, if not by donating, i will support them by seeding their torrents to keep the torrents alive for others to get it.

All life you been Negative, sometimes think positively and be positive !

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Don't forget, you are getting your daily needs from Private trackers mostly. so thank them and always support them !

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If you are referring to my post:

Most of my download come from TPB and Demonoid

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Originally Posted by TP635

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Don't forget, you are getting your daily needs from Private trackers mostly. so thank them and always support them !

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If you are referring to my post:

Most of my download come from TPB and Demonoid

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and very very soon there will be no TPB. indeed 17th of august!

and Demonoid is a private tracker like TL. so stop complaining. they are not forcing you to donate or whateva. they deserve respect !

Did i even sound like I was complaining?
Demonoid is not a private tracker; you don't need to have account to use it.

stoi that was very smart/ absolute truth and that's how it works and whenevr i can i will help by donating ?? it takes time of your life and nothing is free in this life not even water which is sad but we all have choices to make and you should pick the right 1 gn all

The thing everyone seems to forget is that for the most part this shit is illegal. They are risking going to prison by having the site up. So if they make some money while risking their own ass, and I get to enjoy a kick ass site for free. More power to them.

Some people act like these sites are charging to register or something.

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The thing everyone seems to forget is that for the most part this shit is illegal. They are risking going to prison by having the site up. So if they make some money while risking their own ass, and I get to enjoy a kick ass site for free. More power to them.

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And I think that's exactly what I had asked,whether it had become iight to cash in on piracy and whether this paradigm shift had left me behind.The majority seem to agree that its ok and seeing that you've been around since this thing started i think you pretty much seal it for me.
However be aware that most cases against pirates are usually civil and that's why the sentences if any are usually light.But once its determined that money was made out of it then you increase your chances of facing a criminal trial just like any other rapist would.So i'll have to disagree with you,money actually makes things worse and increases your chances of going to prison if shit decides to spin out of control.

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some people act like these sites are charging to register or something.

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There's something wrong with that sentence.