Where Have All the Pirates Gone?
Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day, matey.
Well, good luck finding anybody to talk to.
Long-time readers will recall that I followed the file-sharing subculture closely back when it was a Rilly Big Thing. So when I saw Talk Like a Pirate Day mentioned, I had to stop and think: Wow, I haven't thought about that stuff for awhile. So I took a look around. Here are some bullets to duck:
- Whoever currently owns The Pirate Bay has put two domains up for auction: piratebay.org and thepiratebay.com. (The site is currently at thepiratebay.org, but as followers of file sharing know, it bounces around a lot.)
- There may be a method to this madness: Go to piratebay.org and you'll see a funding pitch for The Torrent Man, an indie film about the file sharing phenomenon and the people behind it. Hey, I'd pay five bucks to see that. Or at least stream it on Prime Video.
- Two of the file sharing news aggregator sites I used to check are now defunct: zeropaid.com and slyck.com. Torrentfreak.com is still out there, and maybe one such site is enough.
- LAN parties, at which gamers played networked games locally to eliminate latency, are gone. (And that article is itself over five years old.) Several people have told me that purely local LAN parties were at least in part an opportunity to swap files around without worrying about the copyright cops. Modern games built on the progression model are constantly phoning home, so isolating yourself from the greater Internet is no longer possible.
- Wikipedia has a list of file-sharing utilities, few of which I've even heard of. The page includes a list of defunct apps, which contains most of those I had heard of. So non-torrent peer-to-peer is still out there, though I wonder how many people are actually using it.
- Torrenting is now the dominant file-sharing method. A great deal of torrenting has gone underground to private trackers, making me wonder how many casual users there still are. Government busts have gotten much more aggressive recently, greatly reducing the number of newly released files, especially games and ebooks.
- I canceled my Usenet service provider account several years ago after not using it much since 2012 or so. I realized I was monitoring one or two groups and not much else. The binaries groups were all spam, most of it unrelated to the groups in which they were posted, and largely malware or porn. Shortly before I canceled my account people had begun posting large encrypted multipart files which were never adequately explained and may have been a clever backup scheme. There's probably still pirated stuff on Usenet, but bring a big shovel to find it.
There may be more to it than that, of course, but I'm only willing to explore such fringe topics for an hour or so.
Ok. Where did all the pirates go? I think a lot of them simply went legit. You can get spectacular classical music tracks on Amazon for only 99 cents, with no DRM. We rent videos on Prime for a couple of bucks, and there's plenty of good stuff on Netflix, like STTOS with improved effects. If getting media is cheap and easy, there's not a lot of reason to go through technical and sometimes hazardous contortions to steal it. I also think that most of what piracy remains is concentrated among far fewer users who hide really well.
I guess if there's no stopping it entirely, I'm good with that.