this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
128 points (99.2% liked)

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

54746 readers
222 users here now

⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

Rules • Full Version

1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy

2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote

3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others



Loot, Pillage, & Plunder

📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):


💰 Please help cover server costs.

Ko-Fi Liberapay
Ko-fi Liberapay

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Asking mostly because I have fuckloads of video courses, plus a number of movies, that I have yet to even check if the content is as good as their titles imply and I really feel like I'm mostly hoarding this stuff because I have no fucking clue.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I just watch and delete because I don't ever really watch anything more than a few times anyways.

The only kind of stuff I've ever made backups of is dev software and old keygens because . well - that kind of stuff disappears too easily with the new&shiny fad.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Aside from using the word 'consume'...

I don't like hoarding. I become so isolated from choice that I can't enjoy anything I've ever acquired. I've always gotten what I wanted because I wanted it, not because everyone else has gotten it and not because it's just to take up data on my drives. What I have now currently anyways, will sustain me for days to months and getting more of it will not make it better. It'll just bring oversaturation and I'll be too isolated again to bother.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I do not avoid hoarding.

I'm like a dragon with a media treasure stored in high capacity industrial HDDs.

Someday the age of pirates may come to an end, and I want to be prepared.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Same. I'm a Doctor Who fan. I don't need to learn lessons twice. My grandchildren will be able to watch the dumb shit I grew up with one way or another!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Like others here, I tend to only download when I find (or remember) something I like. Most of the stuff I have was either downloaded to watch or listen to right away. Others are things I watched at some point, or that I just finished and really liked. Especially anything exclusive from the current services since they don't bother to release physical copies (or even legal digital purchases for that matter). When they do release a disc they fuck up getting any money from me by virtue of a HD/4k being only released on DVD.

After seeing the more and more open statements and updated TOS's about losing things if they just decide to ditch an outlet. I finally got around to getting a BDXL drive for my PC and flashed the unlock firmware. So I plan to rip my discs to have all the access I can give myself. Sadly I really really need to commit to getting some actual capacity drives, and move my server to a dedicated PC and not just keep running off my daily PC (though it can handle double duty pretty easy after a couple of years of big upgrades).

Weirdly enough my legal digital libraries tend to have more of an issue with "hoarding" if there are like "Steam sales" on whatever service. Also tend to get things that are part of Movies Anywhere since it is basically the closest thing to having a bit of protection of not losing stuff if any one service closes. Helpful for my current lacking of proper drive space. And I plan to rip those streams once the other PC gets built (or until I build a new main PC and setup the current as dedicated).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

I only dl shit i'm interested in. After watching if it's gonna be rewatched, it goes on the fserve. If not, delete

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm concerned that crackdowns on pirating will come sooner or later. At some point it may become too much of a hassle. So I'm hoarding a lifetime of old movies and games to hold me over.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Just keep seeding the torrents. As long as the torrents for stuff is healthy, how could it be cracked down?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Enough countries ban torrenting so you cannot even uses vpn to get around it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Why would any country ban torrenting? Torrenting isn't illegal, downloading and distributing copyrighted works is

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

What I mean is what is already happening in some countries, that is having laws that makes extra easy for copyright lawers to sue anyone using torrent for sharing their IP.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Ask Germany. Torrenting without VPN is almost imposible, you'll get sued by copyright lawyers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Exactly, so you can use a VPN to get around that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

You use a vpn to other country without that ban. Once enough countries apply that ban. Where are you going to VPN to?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (4 children)

I sort of regretted downloading massive rom packs for retro consoles because I never actually get round to playing them. it's so hard to settle on one when there's so much choice. But now with the recent crack downs on ROM sites I'm really glad I've preserved them. Hoard away friend!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I've done that with the Sharp X68000, I've downloaded the entire collection it has (~18GB). Do I know Japanese? No. Have I even checked if an emulator works with them? Also no. But it's there

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

18gb is nothing at the end of the day. Roms are small. It's the same thing with my 50gib font collection, its a lot of fonts, but little file size

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I downloaded the entire SNES catalogue when I was overseas; so glad I did that then as it’s become much more difficult over the past few years.

II recently tried to download ISOs of my PS1 & 2 collections so that I could play them on my Steam Deck, and found out that at it’s actually a lot faster and easier just to to them myself - as whatever sources I can find are either dead links, or download so slowly that the connection is likely to time out before the download completes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Roms don't count!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

No issue hoarding if you're seeding

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Use a 256 GB ssd Good luck hoarding on that rice grain

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

And this is why I consider SSDs to be a downgrade compared to HDDs lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I only download what I plan to consume shortly, then delete.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I do almost that, but I don't delete so that I can seed

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I seed until the ratio is 2.0 which I think is fine for popular torrents. I keep seeding obscure stuff that I struggled to download myself, but that's quite rare, so it doesn't lead to 'hoarding'.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm mostly hoarding this stuff because I have no fucking clue.

what is the problem?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I feel like I'm being wasteful, saving up a lot to probably never actually use. Can't even seed some of the stuff because there are no torrents, so I have to resort to direct download sites way more often than I'd like, no less.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I format my drives once every couple years. Makes me think real hard about what to keep.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago

Avoid hoarding? I don't understand. My 30 TB file server can be expanded further still.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

I only pirate what I'm about to consume? How is this a problem? Lol

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I have a lot of ebooks that I download for university research, hobby learning and friends who ask for help sourcing books. I put everything in my calibre library, which is great for metadata management (tip: I have it set so new books that I've just imported get a tag of "new", which I remove when I have processed their metadata. This allows me to chip away at ensuring the metadata is correct and good, even if I don't do it at time of import).

Anyway, at one point I found myself at risk of becoming overwhelmed by books, because if I'm wanting to learn some category theory, for example, I'd have multiple books that seem to be relevant. Some of them were recommended by programmers, some of them assume a higher level of maths background knowledge, some of them are more fun to read — once upon a time I might've known which was which, but if there's a significant gap between me downloading stuff and using it (which is often the case, I'm quite opportunistic with book recommendations), I may forget. Making a note of why I downloaded a particular book is something I've been trying to do more, so I can identify the useful things at the right time — the calibre notes field can work for that, but I'm still figuring out how to manage this in a wider sense because I do a lot of reading and it's easy to forget why I'm reading a particular thing. I think I have a calibre plugin to show which things I've read also.

Another related thing is that I will take a cursory look over a book when I download it, and I may delete it and not put it into my calibre library. This feels significant because downloading a book doesn't make it one of my books, 'taking it home' and putting it away on my 'bookshelf' makes it mine. In short, I try to be mindful in my curation activities, recognising that doing it in big clumps with my whole collection doesn't really work and that pruning little and often helps more.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

hey you mentioned category theory, any math community on the fediverse? r/math is sometimes gold but most of the time cringe, because... reddit

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Sorry to reply to this so late, I procrastinated because unfortunately my answer is that I don't know of any communities, perhaps because I'm a scientist who loves maths rather than a mathematician.

However, I will use this opportunity to share some fun stuff from people I like.

https://youtu.be/H0Ek86IH-3Y by Oliver Lugg on Youtube is great. His channel is very eclectic though, and there isn't much pure maths. I love his shitposting tone though, and he has a discord community that were pretty mathsy when I was in it.

A blog-type site that I enjoy is Tai-Danae Bradley's https://www.math3ma.com/about, largely because I've discovered many other cool researchers through her site.

I also really enjoy Eugenia Cheng's books, especially as someone who is interested in understanding how to write good scientific communication that is accessible without "dumbing things down". I recently finished "The Joy of Abstraction".

Apologies that this isn't what you actually were looking for. I share your distaste at Reddit: I have used Reddit occasionally for those niche communities that aren't available elsewhere (yet!), but the atmosphere is increasingly toxic. I fear that smaller communities that flee are congealing in harder to discover places, like Discord.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

thank you

Sorry to reply to this so late, I procrastinated because unfortunately my answer is that I don’t know

relatable lool, "I can't do it rn cuz I still don't know how to perfectly"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I usually just pirate ebooks, rarely videos or games, so my piracy doesnt take up much space. For videos I just keep em around since I have the space, and if i need to clear space I can just delete something I've already watched. And tbh I don't remember the last time I pirated a game, I don't play games a lot and the ones I do play I own legally lol

Oh I do pirate music too. It's currently not taking up much disk space so I'm not bothered. I would probably just buy another drive if i ran out if music space.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I purposefully leave a lot of movies/shows on my hard drive that I don't watch. I seed them and if I need more space I'll just delete them. But otherwise I'm just wasting space on the drive

load more comments
view more: next ›