<story><title>Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell</title><url>https://torrentfreak.com/torrentz-shuts-down-largest-torrent-meta-search-engine-says-farewell-160805/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dineshp2</author><text>The reason piracy is so popular is because it is free and because it&amp;#x27;s incredibly convenient, in that order.&lt;p&gt;The convenience factor is basically, if you want some content (movie, game) it&amp;#x27;s a simple search and download away (streaming torrents seem to be gaining traction). No legal alternative offers this level of convenience.&lt;p&gt;I suspect piracy will become harder for the average user due to three letter agencies making life harder for pirates, but it won&amp;#x27;t stop the determined  ones.&lt;p&gt;Speaking of determined torrenters, Peter Sunde, the founder of TPB had something interesting to say about torrent aggregators being shut down [1]. The idea is that even though downloading torrents itself is p2p, finding the magnet links is still centralized and that is an area that needs to be decentralized.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;torrentfreak.com&amp;#x2F;pirate-bay-founder-piracy-scene-needs-innovation-160726&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;torrentfreak.com&amp;#x2F;pirate-bay-founder-piracy-scene-nee...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anexprogrammer</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s much, much more than that.  It&amp;#x27;s the only way to get an acceptable product.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;I have ALSO pirated everything I ever bought until very recently.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;DVDs included region forcing, and forced, unskippable adverts and copyright notices. Netflix, .mkvs and .mp4s just have the programme and titles.&lt;p&gt;Usually someone, somewhere, has put effort into making a good quality rip saving me the time doing so, along with synchronised and corrected subtitles.&lt;p&gt;For games, the major studios still feel annoying and restrictive copy protection is the way to go.  I don&amp;#x27;t want a £30 game that requires me juggling collections of plastic disks, or an always on net connection to a licensing server they may turn off in a year or two anyway.  So the noCD, no licensing server release is a &lt;i&gt;necessary&lt;/i&gt; download for me.  I tend to mostly buy GOG and independent studios putting out DRM free things these days.  EU IV being about the only exception I can think of in the last 2 years.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not a fan of being data mined on how often and how far I read ebooks, listen to audiobooks.  So first thing on buying a new ebook from Amazon is rip the protection to read it on my non-amazon reader.  First thing to do with an audible book is convert to mp3.  If either of those became unfeasible or impossible &lt;i&gt;I would stop buying.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally for music, we&amp;#x27;ve had attempts with copy protections and Sony rootkits, but mostly my music collection is complete and they gave up on silly DRM attempts.  I only need to rip new stuff that&amp;#x27;s not available in FLAC.</text></comment>
<story><title>Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell</title><url>https://torrentfreak.com/torrentz-shuts-down-largest-torrent-meta-search-engine-says-farewell-160805/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dineshp2</author><text>The reason piracy is so popular is because it is free and because it&amp;#x27;s incredibly convenient, in that order.&lt;p&gt;The convenience factor is basically, if you want some content (movie, game) it&amp;#x27;s a simple search and download away (streaming torrents seem to be gaining traction). No legal alternative offers this level of convenience.&lt;p&gt;I suspect piracy will become harder for the average user due to three letter agencies making life harder for pirates, but it won&amp;#x27;t stop the determined  ones.&lt;p&gt;Speaking of determined torrenters, Peter Sunde, the founder of TPB had something interesting to say about torrent aggregators being shut down [1]. The idea is that even though downloading torrents itself is p2p, finding the magnet links is still centralized and that is an area that needs to be decentralized.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;torrentfreak.com&amp;#x2F;pirate-bay-founder-piracy-scene-needs-innovation-160726&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;torrentfreak.com&amp;#x2F;pirate-bay-founder-piracy-scene-nee...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adrianN</author><text>The legal alternatives just don&amp;#x27;t have the content I&amp;#x27;d like to see. The Netflix catalog for example contains maybe one out of ten movies I&amp;#x27;m looking for, whereas it is easy to find even obscure movies using torrents. If you like older or less popular movies you&amp;#x27;re generally out of luck. At best you can find a DVD, but that won&amp;#x27;t work for movies that weren&amp;#x27;t even released in your region.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t understand why it is so hard for the studios to offer their whole catalog online and let me download a movie for a buck or two. Add the possibility for user-submitted subtitles and you have an excellent competitor to piracy.</text></comment>