All the people correcting my pronunciation of µTorrent because they didn't watch the video. 😍😍😍😍😍 Morning Brew has actually made the news interesting for me! ☕📰 Thanks Morning Brew for my daily news perk - sign up for free here cen.yt/mbnationsquid
"And the Lord did say unto them - "My children. It is important that you remember that it is always morally correct to pirate Adobe products." And it was good." - Fuckadobeus, 4:20.
Wtf is this creator on about? I don't watch tv series and how in the world could I download a software to edit music, using streaming services? Why should I pay it, since Only the artists should name the tools that helped created the thing they worked on? Music, sure. It was pirated before internet, from audio cassettes, nothing new. uTorrent stays, just delete this dumb video (and my comment, along with it).
@@Dad...... depends on the country you are in. In my country, everyone pirates stuff, to the point no one uses any VPN’s nothing. And ųTorrent is as popular as ever where i am.
@@zarabatanaproductions9240 I'd imagine his point is "lucky you". We have to pay for good VPNs with servers in countries like yours to not get threats sent to our ISPs.
Though obviously illegal, in business terms, some could actually be considered such, lol. There absolutely are single and groups of black hats offering their malware or work as service. Malware or hacking software being offered in exchange of a monthly payment isn't a new thing.
Actually, malware as a service has become a pretty big thing on the dark web, so yup they literally are providers of the malware it's up to the client to spread it 😅
Gabe Newell really said it best, “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
so that's why people can't play multiplayer on cracked steam games. (yes i understand that you can't play multiplayer because your game isn't connected to your steam account)
@@alduinfr some games have fixes, like ROR2 And look, I paid for Risk of Rain 2 in xbox, I bought to game with my money, I don't feel like I'm pirating when I cracked it to play with friends on PC, I did pay for the game once after all...
Gaben once said “Pirating is a service problem” He was completely right cause nobody wants to pay $50 a month for Adobe Edit: Looks like piracy is back on the menu now that stuff is getting too expensive again for an average/low quality product or even turning into a subscription service
We are talking about a genious mastermind who quitted his job at Miscrosoft to create his own gaming masterpiece and his own multi-millionaire company.
The full quote is that it's a service problem, NOT a price problem. Saying people don't want to pay $50/month for Adobe is about price, not service. (And for the record, Bacon Newell was wrong, it's most definitely about price before it's about service for most people, only rich people prioritize convenience over price.)
Streaming services caused a decline in pirating, but it's also going to cause a comeback. So many shows and movies are spread out over so many services. Everyone wants to set up their own streaming service. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney, Universal. I'm not subscribing to 20 fucking services to watch a show. Screw that.
@@TankEngine75 It's so annoying to find a show/movie you want to watch only to find out it's exclusively on some streaming service you're not subscribed to. I'm not getting my credit card out, I'm getting my pirate hat.
@@NordRageLevicus That's another reason. Shows come and go all the time. There's no guarantee they'll ever come back or won't appear on a different streaming service you'll have to subscribe to if you want to keep watching. When they took Star Wars and DIsney movies off of Netflix back when Disney+ came out, it didn't make me wanna subscribe to Disney+, it made me want to cancel my Netflix subscription and start torrenting again.
Until someone makes a single streaming platform for all movies/shows that comes at a reasoanble price, and where you know your favourite show or movie would never be removed, then I'd say piracy still has a place. I've seen a few instances recently of people losing access to shows (even ones they've directly bought digitally) just because of licencing agreements between the creator and provider. A shop won't break into your house and steal back the DVD, so why is it "okay" for a digital platform revoke something you've bought?
True. Here in post-Soviet countries games feel more expensive than in western countries, so people often pirate the game, check if it's worth buying, and when they have free money, they buy it just to support devs or to unlock content that isn't yet in the pirated version.
Years ago, uTorrent was known as "green steam" over here in Latin America lol. I see torrenting coming back, but not with games or software, but thanks to greedy streaming services.
If there's any medium that's the next big piracy target, it's TV and movies. So much stuff being bounced back and forth between different services or just not being available at all.
@@TsunaXZ But there are sometimes pre cracked softwares that have instructions and then when I tried to follow the instructions it didn't work like in the TXT file provided to insert key gen for example its frustrating sometimes when I try to do this with a paid software that has free 30 days but I don't want to make new account every months
Torrenting at a decline /= "piracy" at a decline. Plenty of people use "pirate streaming services", like those movie sites you mentioned earlier in the video. And good for them. ;)
I'm pretty sure torrenting is on the rise again as the streaming service market has fragmented into dozens of little pieces. Netflix used to have pretty much everything, now you need at least five streaming services because thay all have exclusive content you want to watch. F that. I canceled Netflix when they blocked account sharing. Why should I pay for four users when in reality only one user is allowed at a time? And no, I don't want the cheapest option with one user and crappy video and audio. These media corporations don't understand why Netflix became so popular in the first place. It had pretty much all the content and it was priced quite affordably, especially as you could share the account with three other people. But somehow these delusional idiots think they can charge the same amount of money for a fraction of the content on their own streaming platform. There needs to be one streaming service which has all the shows and movies and it can't cost more than 10€ per user per month if there is no account sharing. Then I'll stop torrenting again. How hard can it be to make one service which shares the revenue between different publishers based on each user's watch time? If the service costs 10€/mo and one month I watch 50% HBO content, 30% Disney content and 20% Netflix content, then HBO gets 5€, Disney 3€ and Netflix 2€. Right now I'm watching everything for free. It's their choice to provide people with a better service than what you get by torrenting.
Honestly, you get on a few private trackers and you'll be horrified at the time you wasted on "pirate streaming services" and all the malware, porn ads, and scams they present you with.
@Diamond Frieza “if you know how to avoid being tracked, anything’s legal” anything is not legal if you know how to get away from it By your logic, murder is legal if they don’t catch the person? 🫤
@Diamond Frieza there's not much to know. nobody is going after individuals nowadays, you are good as long you aren't making money off of it. your VPN is pretty meaningless.
@@holleey Not entirely true. Here in Germany some backward companies still prioritize dishing out fines to individuals whenever they detect that you downloaded copyrighted material (mostly music). They do this by shadowing some p2p protocols (i.e. participating in a swarm w/o actually transferring data, but in order to log your ip). Some lawyers make it their business to help the user in such cases, because the claims are more often than not ridiculously taxed and are often hard to provide legally binding evidence for. It is advisable for anyone who finds themselves in this situation to pay such a lawyer instead of trying to handle the claims themselves, because it's extremely easy to incriminate oneself due to the intricacies of the associated laws and amendments the lobbyists have been able to push through. Typically however, the lawyer handles the case by being accomodating yet clueless toward anything regarding the claims in question. Eventually the companies realize that they're unable to build a proper case, that the following ups on the claims are costing them more than they likely could bring in and give up.
I’ve seen a theory that the ammount of people who pirate content hasn’t lowered, but instead the ammount of people who dont pirate has increased. In ye olden days of the internet, most people online where computer nerds who knew what they where doing, but now everyone’s online. And with less of the internet’s population pirating, it’s harder for new people to find out how
exactly. ive only recently been serious about the internet but im honestly scared to pirate, not because i fear it's illegality (nobody really cares if you pirate nowadays) but because im not sure how to without getting 300 viruses
@@geoyt8321 Not always the case, I've seen viruses with stuff like 20~40k seeds before. They probably use bots or smth to fake seeds. Sadly that's not good advice to give to a layman bc he'll get caught if he doesn't know what he's doing. Best advice would probably be to only torrent inside a VM and use a virus scan service like virustotal on every file you DL.
@@junolysses Not that I would know anything about this, but I hear that you should always use a no-logs VPN so that the download is untraceable (and yes some countries absolutely do care), and apparently you can also check the file extensions to make sure that what you're downloading is not a .dll or .sys file. Basically if a file doesn't have a .txt, .mp4, .png, or .mkv extension, trash it. Or so they say. Bonus points if you're using a Linux distro.
Valve got it right. If people are going to the trouble of pirating your content, you aren't doing a good enough job of delivering that content legitimately.
@@andybullis1140 But to be fair, isn't Steam gaming on Linux a LOT better than it used to be, what with Proton, and Valve actively working with developers to help more games run on Linux? I mean it started when Gabe Newell wanted to have Steam Machines/Steam OS, I mean if 90%+ of Steam games don't work on a platform literally called Steam OS/Steam Machine, it kinda looks bad for you.
@@lmcgregoruk I was confused. It's the third party anti cheats that expect to see the Windows kernel that are the issue, not DRM. Fortunately I don't really play those games anyway.
In Germany, torrents never really took off in public. It wasn't the choice for pirates, either because lawyers acted as seeders, logging every IP address, and sued everyone in a fully automated process. So basically, if you started an illegal torrent download in like 2008, you could have been sure to get a friendly letter in the mail a few weeks later. Same went for P2P like eMule. So basically, pirates moved on to one click hosters. Torrent only became a thing for closed and trusted groups.
My mate's brother divides his work time between Derby in England and Berlin. He told me a few years back if I torrented at the rate I do here in Germany I would have been caught by the authorities long ago. I'm glad I live where I live.
@@abebuenodemesquita8111 There's no need really. German Piracy hit one click hosters really early and took off. I remember the time when you as a pirate could easily earn money just uploading annonymously on rapidshare. Although germans use torrents for pirating sometimes we have plenty alternatives.
Piracy isn't getting smaller, the internet is getting bigger as a whole, making piracy a smaller slice of the pie. Streaming services are dying of their own greed. piracy will always be there. because it's ultimately a service problem. when a service is bad piracy steps in and makes it good. Piracy's main appeal isn't price, it's convevience. Music piracy is on decline because all music streaming services carry all songs. Movie piracy is up because streaming services carry less and less of what you want. Worse service=more pirates
True. Music streaming is easy even with a bit ad here and there. The ad can still be blocked tho. Movie and TV series is in another leve. Hulu Netflix disney+?? I'm done with it. Just pirate it omegalul
@spaceace1288時間_日本語学生 I don't live in America. In some states collecting rainwater is illegal. And you get all of this of my comment? Kinda strange. Strange analogy
Piracy is something that will always be around due to 3rd world nations often times relying off of it just to make ends meet, see Brazil. However, I would imagine that the over-saturation of streaming services combined with more and more classic games either becoming highly scarce or outright becoming abandonware, I foresee that in the coming years many will sail the high seas once again.
yep, even those that are not really considered 3rd world. that's why countries like Ukraine, Russia and other close ones are so *KNOWN* for piracy. basically if you are not from US, UK and few other ones you just have to somehow *deal* with this boom of streaming services and their lack of localized pricing. like, yeah totally people who's country minimal wage is $85/month can afford a $10 services? right??? and that's not even the worst case scenario, because the worst is that some services simply not available (disney+, amazon) and you can't even use vpn to willingly pay for them, because your card s supposed to match the country. actual nightmare. sorry guys, if you don't even want to take my money I will pirate, who's losing here? def not me.
There are a lot of old games that I'm not afraid to admit that I pirate. Simply because of their abandonware status. Which in most cases, the original developers who made that game no longer exists, or just doesn't care anymore. And because these old games are nowhere to be found on a legal store platform (like Steam), and can only be found as used copies sold in flea markets, eBay, Facebook Marketplace etc, the developers and the publishers wouldn't be able to make money off of that game anyways. Since they're no longer manufacturing new copies, or selling those games in game store platforms where you have the ability to purchase it. So if a game is nowhere available on a legal platform where you can still purchase it, or can only be found as a used copy, I don't see anything wrong about pirating that game. I will though purchase a game legally if the game is still available on Steam, PlayStation/XBOX Stores, or any other game store platform. And if it's a physical copy, from a retailer! And I will buy a used game if it's really cheap, or that I really want it to my gaming collection. I normally don't support piracy, but if it's abandonware, just go nuts and do whatever you want. Even though Nintendo doesn't like when people download their old games, despite their abandonware status.
I never bought a game simply because i Can't even if i want to im from a 3rd world country and a game is half my monthly wage plus we don't even have cards that accept payement so even if we want too we cant , the only solution is options like game pass from xbox
As someone who grew up with 56k AOL Internet... I'll tell you that it was longer than 10 minutes. I remember setting WAV files to download and then leaving to get lunch, hoping they'd be done when i got home haha
WAVs. Wow, those were about 10MB a minute. I remember targeting 128 kbps MP3s because they were about 1MB per minute. I was also using the T1 line at my... educational facility... to DL and then used Winzip to make spanned archives on 3.5 floppy disks to get them home. WAV files would have murdered my productivity.
An MP3 song back in the dial-up days took at least 30 minutes. I think people have forgotten how bad dial-up actually was. Probably most people watching this video today weren't even alive back then. There was a time that if you had an ISDN line (a precursor to DSL), you could download a song in 10 minutes and you were one of the lucky ones.
Torrents will never die. There's a shitload of gamers/internet users from countries like India, East Europe and South America that just don't have the money to squander on games. And the current prices are absurd. I live in one and my gaming life's biggest wish was to play HOI4. I had to save up money and wait until a 75% discount AND I've passed my college admission exam. I had to wait 3 years to buy and play legit HOI4. And I'm probably better off than other countries. So yeah, pirating isn't going away any time soon
What completely threw me for a loop as an American was seeing how much more expensive technology is abroad. My friend in Chile had to pay TWICE as much for the same thing as I did. With that said, you guys have every right to pirate what you need. Prices are insane as it is.
Weirdly enough, in India, torrenting has become almost obsolete over the last 5-6 years. Anime fans are the last group of people who I've heard of that regularly use Torrents, tbh. Internet is cheaper than it ever was, and modern video games are more often than not multiplayer so you can't really pirate them to begin with. And for other games the people who can afford to own good enough PC's or a console can definitely afford to buy games that they have to anyways. Prime, Disney+ and even Netflix are now kinda cheap in India so most people have one or even all 3 of those, and they have a bit of everything from old af Indian movies to the newest Marvel shit, so most people (me included) very rarely go looking for specific movies anymore, if at all. Why bother searching the internet instead of watching what's on one of the streaming services and just waiting for what you want to eventually find its way to one of the streaming services. I have heard of people using telegram though, as a place to download new movies if you can't wait for the 1-2 months it takes for it to release digitally.
In a weird way I think that piracy has actually become an important and valuable component of the internet world. It is the anchor that keeps corporate greed in check, it keeps the digital free market in check. It has essentially become the "competition" that companies compete against for the consumer's attention. When a product becomes available, companies can decide how they want to market and sell it. If the people feel that what they offer is reasonable, they will willingly part with their money to purchase something 'the legal way'. But always having a free alternative there means that once corporations start getting greedy, charging unreasonable fees and reducing the quality of their products, people will not hesitate to ditch these companies and go back to pirating. We've already seen this happen. When itunes charged $1 per song, it _sounded_ reasonable, but when you consider that an album probably had 12 songs on it, and the average person might have had 300 albums that they wanted in their library, paying $3600 for music was not feasible, especially for children. Especially when you factor in that many people had already paid for this music once in vinyl, cassette or cd. Because of this people pirated music. Same thing with movies. Movies were too expensive, going to the theatre was no longer enjoyable when people felt like they were getting robbed just to get a drink and a popcorn, plus the ticket itself which cost as much or more than actually buying the dvd. So people pirated movies. Corporations saw a decline in sales because people would literally rather break the law than pay what these companies were demanding, so they had to change. They couldn't stop people from pirating (they tried), so they had to adapt. This led to the rise of streaming services. People were thrilled to see that they could listen to all the music they wanted for a flat monthly rate roughly equivalent to the cost of one music album. People were happy to ditch piracy for this because the price was reasonable and it was way easier. Likewise with movies, when Netflix started streaming movies people ditched piracy because this was way easier and the price was good. But now there are so many streaming services competing for attention and they are all poaching production studios, signing exclusivity deals, and raising prices. These anti-consumerist business practices are driving customers away and people are turning to piracy again. I guess we'll see how long it takes for the market to break again and force companies to make changes.
Actually, iTunes made a similar magnitude shift in the music industry. Seeing as the only way to get music was buying CDs, producers realized that all they actually needed was 2-3 great songs and the album would sell anyway, meaning they could just pad it out with 9 whatever-songs and 3 hits. As a good example, Adele was a hit singer back in the days of the last CDs I bought, and even though iTunes had been doing the big shift for a while, that album still felt like 3-4 amazing hits and the rest was padding - not bad enough to make me change CDs, not good enough that I can remember them at all. Once iTunes came around and you could buy a single song, you didn't need $10 for 12 songs, you could just pay $3 for the ones you wanted. Also, iTunes allowed you to import local music to it, that's how I got pirated music into my iphone back in the day, so if you had the album and a CD reader in your PC, you probably could make a backup of the songs in your PC, then send them to the phone. That is actually not pirating AFAIK (but I'm not a lawyer so don't quote me on that), which is why iTunes supported it. but the rest of your point with movies being expensive and netflix being nice, then all streaming services moving us back to piracy is still sound, I just wanted to share the cool tidbit
You don't understand that piracy is part of the marketing strategy of big software corps to gain market share. It's always been like this M$ and Adob€ are the perfect examples, still employing this tactics nowadays
@@billionai4871 you are correct, but then you got into the issue when artists would make multiple albums across several months like this. making 1 good song per cd, so that they could ensure tons of CD sales. when it became common place, many people immediately walked away from itunes for a while after that (thats when the who napster thing was going on). Beginning to pirate and copy their music to their devices. As while you could spend $12 on 12 songs, they would all fit on one cd and you could just rip that... so your getting ripped off. But by the time the first iphone was around, your talking long past the start of this cycle, iTunes predates the iPhone and iPod, by some degree. Sharing more in common with Winamp at one point then what it became. Music Piracy predates all of this, as 24bit cd ripping to wav was common before the MP3 format was availible, and people used to share 24bit wav's across several compressed archives that were split, even on message boards during the late BBS era. -- i remember getting 6 5-1/2 720k floppies, with a song on it once from a primary school friend as a joke. thats how rampant it was even still.
I remember these days. During this time, uTorrent and The Pirate Bay were both Swedish, so the US complained a looot to Sweden, making it a huge political debate here. Due to that The Pirate Party was started, which became quite popular for a while and also spread througout Europe (becoming one of the biggest parties in some countries). The goal of the party was to not crack down on piracy and not regulate the internet. Piracy even became a religion in Sweden, recognized by the Swedish state. It was of course a bit of a meme, but since the state can't reject religious beliefs they kind of had to recognize it officially as a religion. In the end, Spotify was created out of the ashes of the entire piracy controversy, using bittorrent technology. Spotify even brought in the uTorrent guy for that, so he owned parts of Spotify at one point.
I disagree with your conclusion at the end about the demise of piracy due to online streaming. For a brief period, there were decent alternatives, but right now? To get access to the content that sites like TPB offer at a hassle, you'd need to get 4 to 5 streaming subscriptions, each currently going up in price. The reasons for which piracy initially reared its head - lack of access - is returning. I suspect we'll likewise see torrent traffic rise a bit again. But at the same time, as average connection speed goes up, and applications take advantage of that (video teleconferencing for instance), legitimate traffic is going to grow faster then torrents will.
I agree with this point. It's also worth mentioning that now lots of movies are releasing concurrently with their theatrical releases so it's more reasonable to torrent movie than pay a subscription to a service you don't intent to use after that single use-case.
@@andrina118 "Uncrackable" is a joke. Any digital video media has to in the end convert the content back into unencrypted video format, to feed to a display. Capture the signal there in uncompressed, unencrypted form, along with the audio signal, and you can replicate the content. You may get slight loss of quality if you then re-encode it (compression usually incurs a small quality penalty) but I doubt anyone will complain. That however requires both IT and electronics knowhow.
Yup, he hit the nail on the head. It was one thing when Netflix was pretty much the only game in town for $9.99/mo. (currently double that). Now content is spread over a dozen streaming services, all at about the same price. All of a sudden, cord cutting is not be the cheap alternative that it once was, and piracy will be on the rise once again. Do I want to pay for a streaming service to watch ONE show...Star Trek Discovery as an example? Maybe, but not at the current pricing.
Exactly I'm not paying for all this streaming service to watch one or two series that's why I been torrenting for over 15 years idgaf 😂 even back then for psp and PS4 games
I have to disagree on one point. Piracy is still as rampant as ever, it's just quieter. Back in the 00s, it was common to hear, "Check out what I got from Limewire last night!!" But with lawsuits ramping up, especially targeting the individuals, people are getting sneakier and definitely quieter
Fair enough! Honestly I had a lot of fun making this video so I think I will do more videos on the history of online piracy! Perhaps I can investigate this further too and maybe discuss why it's gotten quieter. :)
I still remember downloading this for the 1st time. My mom’s friend’s son showed me that he had a lot of games and he paid nothing for them and I was so curious and he showed me. Changed my life forever.
I have always called it Micro-Torrent, because µ is the SI symbol for that. That the original dev didn't go with "micro", for you know, the SMALLEST most light weight client, is completely baffling to me.
@@overloader7900 If you really want to be this precise: The letter is actually called My, pronounced like the German Mü, but the English speaking world has trouble with that. The SI sign µ is actually distinct from the Greek letter µ, and it is used for a variety of scientific things besides denoting "micro". The latter still being its most known application, which is why I made my comment the way I did. But fear not. You were still technically correct, when looking at it in a particular way.
I always thought it was pronounced 'Micro Torrent' because the µ is an abbreviation for Micro, and one of the original goals of the program was to maintain a small file size.
*right* as the morning brew ad began I stumble across this and am immediately able to click on your chaptered index & skip it - YOU deserve some kind of humanity award. I’d even shell out a Nobel peace prize for that one… makes more sense than giving to Obama! 😆 hehehehehehehehehehehehehe
Torrents are historical digital archives of the future, that need to be kept alive. In some distant future, the emergence of torrenting would be considered as the watershed moment in the evolution of internet. Mark my words.
Minor correction: torrenting is still p2p technology, but simply distributed. P2P merely refers to the fact that you are not using a central hosting server (party A uploads for party B to download afterwards), but are circumventing that so that party A, one of the peers, is able to connect directly, just as you describe, with further *peers*. Even further: if A and B have different parts of the stream (which they could have received from C), they can become both up- and down-load peers to each other, while taking the load off C. Your video is also poignant, because when you posted it, you already mentioned that price increases, balkanisation and reducing of catalogues may lead to a return of pirating. Only 1 year later, and the streaming services are in a self-inflicted, dramatic free-fall. I wouldn't be surprised if torrent traffic is back on the rise!
Also .torrent files don't work the way he's describing. IIRC they point you to a torrent site where you find peers and if the site is down, you will not be able to download anything. For a truly decentralized network you need something like DHT or similar networks (Kademlia, etc)
I haven’t noticed a decline personally. I have yet to pay for a single subscription service or movie post early 2000s, yet never have a hard time finding a 1080p - 4K release of any given tv episode or new release. More than anything I’d just wager people would rather pay for 10 streaming services than spend 10 minutes learning how to torrent
Piracy has definitely gone down a lot, especially for songs. I don’t hear anyone pirating songs these days, with spotify and apple music being so affordable and everything. Valve does a really good job fighting against video games piracy too, with it’s frequent steam sales and community and achievements system for games which heavily disincentives pirating games. Gabe Newell really nailed it when he said that piracy is an issue of service, not price. People would willingly pay for better access to their favorite content faster.
@Kund you are in a minority there, the vast majority of people are happy paying subscribing for convinince sake. Piracy won't ever go away completely, hell i generally do a bit of both, with spotify being limited in what it has, and some media just not being accessible on legal streaming services, but as a general rule your average consumer will happily pay a small monthly fee or purchase media digitally from trusted suppliers to mitigate risks of malware, or allow the less technically literate just to click and go. To many the prospect of torrenting may be more convenient than streaming or digital purchasing, but most consumers have very little computer knowledge, so will opt for the more user friendly and newcomer accessible method.
@@bitchwormpuddin1499 Not at all. I personally hate piracy, but it doesn't bother me if someone else does it, since everyone else has their own reasons for piracy and it's their choice to make, not mine.
This past Christmas my family wanted to watch Home Alone, but for the first time ever it was not airing on linear TV and not available for streaming where I live. The only option was to rent it for an extra cost through a streaming platform we were already subscribed too... This is the kind of crap that is bringing piracy back, and I'm all for it
And now with freeve you also have to watch ads every 5 Minutes in many movies although you pay monthly. Man, why cant we have nice things without getting a criminal.
The problem with streaming services is the overwhelming amount of garbage content, content being removed, and too many services. So if I want to watch The Boys, Stranger Things, and Rick and Morty, I have to subscribe to 3 different streaming services. When South Park did their Panderverse episode, there was no "TV Guide" to tell me who was streaming it, so now it becomes a hunt to find the one streaming service offering the content I want to see. Now people "buy" shows and movies on streaming platforms without realizing that platform can lose the rights to host content that was purchased by customers; you don't own your purchases anymore, they can be taken away at any time. This dystopian, anti-consumer garbage needs to stop...but it won't because the majority of consumers keep giving these vampires their money.
I honestly still use µTorrent but that's mostly because I've been out of the piracy game for so long that I just don't know what the newer and more popular programs are.
I believe streaming companies are pushing the general audiences back to torrenting, and a major factor could be that some material gets pulled on said streaming network by the IP as it might not adhere to the "modern audiences" and forever can be lost unless the general audience can get their hands on the physical copy of said material.
not just that, but they might just put the ip on the safe just because they're a bunch of dickheads. Disney does that a lot, not everything Disney has made is available on Disney+, for literally no reason.
Physical copies can get worn out. Retail digital copies can disappear, or have DRM that doesn't work 20 years from now. Only piracy can really preserve media for good.
Yep, it used to be convenient 6-7 years ago when it was netflix that had pretty much all the movies and series, but then it became a hell with 10 different streaming apps each of which is different, requires its own subscription you will easily forget to cancel when you stop watching it, and now they implement things like no account sharing. It's no wonder why people think "why bother subscribing to yet another thing if I want just one series from each of these 5 services, if I can just pirate them more conveniently in one place"
GabeN is absolutely right, and the dramatic fall of video game piracy is thanks to, in a major way, to Steam. The reason why Steam got so dominatingly successful is its core concept: convenience. A lot people don't know this, but Steam *didn't* start out as an online game store. It began as a small utility to deliver automatic patches for Valve games (back when they still made actual games). This was so successful, that the service was extended to other third-party games. In the early 2000's, getting patches and updates for your games was a cumbersome process. IF you had internet (big IF) you had to find and download the patches which was easier said than done, or buy overpriced gaming magazines that came with a CD with patches for many popular games at the time, and pray yours was among them. But even when you had the patches, you had to apply them in a certain order or in some other special way or you'd brick your game. Steam cut through this arduous process by offering to download and install patches automatically for all your (applicable) games, saving you all that hassle, which was a *huge* accomplishment at the time. In short order Steam became a sort of virtual game library, a convenient hub to keep all your favorite games in one place (regardless if it was a Valve game or not), updated and ready to go whenever you wanted to game. Then they started adding even more features, like friend list, chat functionality, server browser for multiplayer games, in-game overlay, patch notes and news about your games, mod support, and so on. (The online store functionality came much later, which is what the platform is generally known for nowadays.) And this is where the piracy argument comes in. GabeN knew, that the only way to defeat piracy is to offer gamers a better service, better value than what they get from pirates. While pirating theoretically gets you a free game, you pay for it in other ways, mainly security and inconvenience. When pirating games you usually have to wade through lots of seedy websites and services, often chock full of dangerous malware, and even what you download you can never be sure if it's installing just your game or sneakily stuffs your computer full of viruses, spyware, trojans, cryptominers and dreck like that. Also, in most cases cracked games can't be patched/updated, can't use multiplayer or online features, etc, so you often end up with a vastly inferior product. What Steam offered is not just a game, but security that you indeed get a game and nothing else malicious, immediate automatic patches and updates, plus a whole truckload of added features and convenience, with the one caveat of needing to have a legal copy. Steam grew as a sort of stealth-DRM system, that indeed kept your games up to date and showered you with great features, but your game also wouldn't start if Steam detected any unauthorized changes to the game files and the VAC system would prevent most forms of cheating in online games. And surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, depending on your stance on the issue) to a lot of ex- and would-be pirates, this was a trade they were more than willing to take, because they were no longer just paying for a game, but for the peace of mind and the plethora of added benefits and convenience Steam offers, which just swung the scales wildly in the legal copy's favor. And even through all this Steam was and still remains a free program without any third party ads, paid premium features or other obnoxious monetization, focusing instead on making gaming as simple and convenient as possible, with tons of integration and quality-of-life stuff simply no other competing platform offers to this day. Steam is not successful because it's dominating the market. It's dominating the market because it's successful. Other huge companies tried to create their own version of Steam and failed miserably (Origin, UPlay, RSC, GoG Galaxy, EPIC, etc). No other competing platform ever even came close to measuring up to Steam in features, ease of use and sheer convenience. Granted, Valve has multiple decades of development on them, but that's not the reason competing platforms are usually DOA/non-starters. It's because of the aforementioned core concept: those platforms are all built around monetization from the start, while Steam is built around delivering QoL and convenience first and being a shop floor second.
It also didn't hurt that Steam was effectively a monopoly. Once they killed off physical releases, they were the only game in town until the huge publishers started wanting their own storefronts.
Or you can both use Steam and pirate. I like buying indie games properly since they are usually reasonably priced and the money goes to the people actually making the game. But if some big company thinks that I will be downloading their annoying private pop-up add or console, they can guess again.
I'm surprised he didn't mention the government's stand against internet piracy in the early 2010s, which directly affected the ease of torrenting. By partner with isps to detect torrent traffic. Isps would throttle and torrent traffic or send to warning emails for downloaded certain torrents which could ultimately lead to termination or internet service.
I used to use uTorrent back then during my high school era around 2012 i think, but some day it asked me to update to version 3 and i hate the new UI, so i reverted back to the previous version and never update it again for years, turns out that decision saved me from crypto mining issue
@@brutus3631 bingo - wasn’t the excuse something along the lines of “ohhh it helps us pay for the services so we don’t have to splash ads everywhere” or some bullshit they claimed when word spread? Seems I remember them trying to come up with something that they’d hope people unaware of what mining does to one’s rig would shrug off.
To spare you 24 minutes. uTorrent added ads and bloat to their software and made the software more unstable and worse to use. People migrated to better freeware.
@@summersmashhit9177 I do like this video format though, it's great for long trips, or long study/play sessions, I love listening to stuff when I do continous tasks
As much as I dislike gaben, he's right: piracy can go away if you offer better services. The problem is companies have started taking users for granted and in the endless search for a record quarterly report they have gotten, again, to the point where the worth of their service vs value becomes questionable; so yes, I do believe piracy will rise once again. Heck I've been questioning for months if netflix is worth it anymore. It's certainly been in decline for a few years now.
@@selimdogan8070 because unlike the rest of the valve fandom which I stopped being part of, I will not forgive or forget making microtransactions cool with tf2 hats and csgo skins. And that's ignoring his attempts to monetize mods. The more he aged the more greedy and out of touch he became. His interviews and most disliked reddit comment are just a few examples.
@Nam Gge And I'm the one misinformed? Lord I hate this reality. There's dozens of interviews of him saying what direction valve is heading towards; employees talking about their old freedom being abandoned in favor of gaben and friends wishes fulfilled. Take off the fanboy glasses and look these things up before commenting.
@Nam Gge Whatever dude, go read his reddit comments and watch his interviews as well as the articles regarding employees. He's probably retired now but since l4d2 until now he led valve on the path they are on today. I'm done arguing with the uninformed.
You know why I uninstalled it , the first time it shipped with malware and never looked back , deluge does the same thing, they ruined it with one release.
If you feel morally guilty after torrenting a fine then just seed the file for 10 mins in this way you'll help growing the files seed and helping other people.
Seeding for 10 minutes does like nothing at all. Either seed for a few days, or until you've seeded as much as you downloaded. My private tracker needs you to seed for 48h total or seed as much as you downloaded, or you will get a hit and run flag on your account. 3 hit and runs, and you're banned.
@@masnidebelicrnac Imagine PirateBay, but if it was locked to users who take torrenting serious. Private torrents and magnet links, if you want to download you have to seed. It's a big private group who downloads and seeds out of the reach of law firms and film-conglomerates.
I was a bit shocked when i Heard utorrent became a bitcoin miner, Like what the fuck was that all about? It was an amazing concept but damn you have to be that greedy to mine my asshole? Fuck na! gimme my stake of what you have mined, it is my time to lick the plate
I rarely get interested to watch videos that talk about past internet history/software history, but when it's NationSquid that's doing it, I 100% get interested and enjoy all the videos he drops. Great work man! Love your content!
I never considered uTorrent a "cultural icon" like Napster or Limewire, but rather, just the most used torrent client among a long list of choices. If anything, the Pirate Bay was more the "cultural icon" we associated with torrents than uTorrent.
and Pirate Bay was base on what beershere or maby dhl? PB was a icon of fight/resist of law made by corporations, bt is a technological icon thas survive PB colapse...and we will se how long...
Yes, second that! It was just the most used, but when it was popular there were always plenty of somewhat good alternatives also. Really not any big deal. The only thing that changed with time was people's interest in it, as alternatives in streaming and other just made it less interesting to continue with.
This is highly time/region specific. Limewire and Napster are both NA phenomenons, but almost nobody there even knew what DC++ was even before uT really reached its peak. uT was almost as ubiquitous as freaking winamp in central and eastern Europe.
Yup, and even when available, it's just not worth it for most. For example my country avarage income is 11 times lower than USA when converted from dollars. And even when a service is available with regional pricing, they do not directly account such a big difference. So a subscription service that would cost $10 in USA, might cost $3 here. So cheap right? But not really. It would be as if someone in USA paying over $30 for that service in comparison. How many would pay over $30 monthly for the basic Netflix option in USA i wonder? Oh, and this is with smaller library size, because you know, not all movies and shows are available in the region even if you do get Netflix.
... You can torrent the Pro version of µTorrent, in µTorrent. I first used µTorrent back in 2006-2007. The CPU usage was getting ridiculous, so I switched to qBittorrent, now I am back to µTorrent Pro. I do not mind spending money, but a game that's $50-$100 I want to make sure I like it before buying it, demo of games are hardly what the full game consists of. Also, a game that's 160 really isn't needed when I can get a repack of that game for 80 GBs. Same with music, movies, and software. 30 seconds of a song that's 2:30-3:25 isn't a good representation, especially on songs that have multiple styles, classical and metal songs for example. Movie trailers often are nothing like the movie, perfect example "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo", the trailer shows all the action that happens in the movie, than some software have a limited demo, that made me not want to buy the software because everything was behind a pay wall. Also, it gets ridiculous to know that IF I don't have internet access I can not get what I paid for... Cool.
I just came here to say that after watching only 2-3 videos, you quickly became on of my favorite content creators here in youtube. You make me feel incredible interested for a topic I never felt interested in before. Thank you so much for this amazing content and please never stop!
Man, when i was a kid i used ISP's talktime balance to use internet as data was expensive back then and so slow, I would usually use it download java or symbian mobile games that are just kb in size but took minutes to download. Those were the days but now when is see a kid get frustrated waiting to download a gb sized games in few minutes, man.
I remember pirating manga on dial-up. One volume was around 100MB, so took all night to download. And it was horrible compressed low res jpegs. Price for dial-up was per hour and wasn't cheap either. Then local network company appeared and introduced LAN p2p app. My small town was divided between two companies. Coolest time in using the net. Half a town connected in one LAN. LAN games, LAN file sharing. No social networks. Everyone just shared their photos on p2p app. Some people maintained large collections of movies and everyone downloaded them at LAN speeds. There was sense of community, as opposed to nowadays.
As someone who gets movie and gaming media from both legit and pirated services, I don't think it is indeed going away soon. People don't just pirate because they can get something for free but because so much media out there is still so hard to get or are gatekept in regions. And in terms of gaming, there are many like me who would mostly rather pirate for reasons like getting the good game without making certain publishers (who are usually greedy/scummy in context) profit, or trying if a game is even good without regretting to buy it later if it sucked. *I previously said devs but I had actually had things like EA and _that certain popular and infamous entity I don't wanna mention_ of Take Two on my mind so I was prompted to be corrected by a reply.
I used to pirate games just to see if they would work on my potato pc since a lot of developers stopped making game demos. A couple times I then purchased the game because I wanted to own it (a physical copy.)
@@stitchfinger7678 I mean there's definitely games that I pirated that I didn't buy afterwards. With a lot of games I also wanted to play the multiplayer which wasn't possible with the pirated versions. Games that I pirated that I later bought : Oblivion (Though I did pirate the stupid DLCs like Horse Armor), Bioshock (bought it twice), STALKER, Mass Effect 2 (though I did pirate all the DLCs). The Steam sales made it very easy to buy games cheap.
@@stitchfinger7678 same, i just wanted to play the game because it looks fun. But at the same time I don’t have the money to buy the games, so i use utorrent to download pirated games (ik, it’s very embarrassing to say that outloud).
pirating in game otuside of the access is motly because cpmoanies phasedo ut the usage of Demos. consdiering how much a game can cost today if done by a AAA studio n osane person is gonna chance it and either wont engage at all, or pirate it as their " demo"(knowig full well the game will miss features) if the latter group publishers should be tryig to reel in by giving thme what they want, a Demo as these people are likely already willing ot pay, just not without trying.
Used to be, back when we got physical copies of things, but nowadays all we get in many cases are digital copies that they could wipe off our machines if they wanted to. That isn't owning, despite our so-called "purchase." If they don't offer a physical copy, then they're the ones stealing from us. That's why I don't offer them my money until they've earned it.
I rarely torrent anymore...and when I do, it is exclusively stuff that you just plain can't get anywhere else...like old software, old versions of software, old archives, ROM goodsets, and unstreamable albums that have never had re-releases (I don't care how much I want an album...I am not paying $600 for an out-of-print CD on the secondary market).
Need of torrenting is actually rising. Mostly because every bob and their dog wants to make their own paid media streaming service. It is understandable that different media companies want to make more money but doing that they are alienating their content viewer base. Most people do not want to pay for 4+ different streaming services. Only one.
@@LilacMonarch exactly. Everyone wants a bite and now consumers are forced yet again to take multiple subscriptions because of how fragmented streaming has become. I canceled one of my subscriptions because I literally subbed for a single show. In hindsight it was probably better to just pirate the show than paying "for a whole library" in which 99% of the content I don't even consume.
@@NapoleonBonaparte5 The problem isn't competition, it's the way the service is divided. For example with ISPs there are a few different options with different speeds and reliability, but they all give access to the full internet. For streaming services to work, they need to be able to do something similar
The thing i love about torrenting and all these "could be used for piracy" programs is that im free to just not give a shit and get whatever for free. It doesnt get better than that. Dont want 5 streaming apps? Pirate. Dont want to pay for music? Guess what, pirate it in sometimes even better quality... Want to justify to yourself all of this? Just think about how absurdly much companies are earning and how little and insignificant YOU, a single human, are to them.
The reason Naspter was interesting was that you were able to find and very quickly listen so songs you simply can notnormally listen, like the stuff you last heard 10 or 20 years ago. The music you heard for free in the radio in the 80s was available in a heavy laptop. It was the only digital media service. Price or legality was totally irrelevant. Music industry was run by boomers so none of them bothered to provide this service, so people did.
Yeah, that's not exactly what happened to napster, it wasn't exactly going smooth before it ended, and it all started going downhill with Lars Ulrich serving as the face of the whole "Music industry vs Napster"
I'm just so glad we have Transmission nowadays. Also I think quite a bit of the reason why people stopped torrenting and moved to subscription services is because we as a generation grew up. Back in the day I was about 12-13yo, and it was pretty hard to ask my parents for their cards to a) buy something on the internet and b) buy something DIGITAL on the internet, like there was no package, no physical product they could verify and make sure I wasn't throwing money away or getting scammed. Then as I grew up I started to manage my own money and eventually got my own card so I could just spend it on whatever I wanted be it a digital copy of a game or a streaming service. This is something most kids nowadays will arguably never experience as well, we as their parent generation grew up in this environment and we understand what they're talking about when they want to get digital content on the internet.
this is only about he downfall of the uTorrent client - not about torrenting in general. torrenting is still going strong and there's nothing to replace it.
Transmission masterrace checking in. Headless torrenting is the way to go :D If you already have a VPN just throw it on a single-board computer like a Rasp Pi and have it going all the time.
My 2009 imac was able to hit speeds on transmission that my 2019 imac can't even come close to for whatever reason. Moved on from macs as i'm more game intensive now.
The fact that people call downloading files of media from the internet, without taking them from anyone else, piracy, is just absurd. Copyright law in general is absurd.
I love this argument, it literally obliterates the fallacy of stating that piracy is robbery/theft. How can you steal an infinite resource?? If law enforcement is your only justification for the reason you should/shouldn't do something, then both your law and your principles are immoral.
@@filiperodrigues97 I remember the "You wouldn't steal a car", well I bet if you could make a perfect copy of a car, for free, and the original owner of the car still had the original copy, everyone would. Just instead of 1 person having/being able to use car, 2 people can.(until you/someone else makes ANOTHER copy, then more people can use it.)
All that law really proves is how corporations have their foot in the door in the US government. I mean I can see a how that conversation started when they made that copyright law. "Yah not everyone is buying our product we made so we want to guarantee they do. Pass some kind of law that does away with this nonesense and I will pay out a happy sum to your wallets"
@@lmcgregoruk the question is, who is going to actually pay for all the hassle which comes with production of the car; all those little screws and drawboards to actually make it work. The effort which you have to exert to produce just single car is enormous. Producing more cars, when you actually worked out how to make it, it's not that hard. The situation here is, someone actually wants to build nice, very good car, and earn money back from it. All those engineers and welders ain't pay themselves. When he actually wants to sell more of those cars, it turns out everyone already have free copy of what he just did, and he earned big fucking nothing as a reward. This happens a lot with doujinshi artists. They draw short mangas, which is very hard work and the pay is going to be low for those small artists. If their work is then published left and right around internet, just stolen like that, how is it fair? If they wouldn't draw it, no one would see it in the first place. And yea, some of them stop drawing, just like that. Not worth it.
I don't mind piracy, because on the other hand, I would like to check out the product before buying it, especially if it's expensive. I just don't like "pirate everything" mentality. Video game industry is growing so fast because people are buying their games nowadays. A lot of changed in just 10 years, and especially indie sphere wouldn't exist in it's shape and form without responsible consumers.
22:58 "And now you can get access to pretty much every movie and tv show you've ever watched" Unless it's blocked in your country, for (monetary) reasons. Or some other streaming service hold the rights, so you now have to fork out 100 dollars a month to 10 different streaming services because they each hold the rights to a bit of the stuff you like.
You kind of oversell streaming services. It's more like "if you want to pay a monthly fee for half the movies you're looking for, or half the music you're looking for, or half the tv shows you're looking for". And spotify doesn't even properly pay the artists, so it's the same as piracy only it's not free. "Pay a fee to get access to Bob's music collection" doesn't sound that appealing when Bob doesn't listen to the same bands I do. Or does listen to the same bands but only has albums that came out on certain record labels (Aphex Twin for example has only half his stuff on spotify, and the division is along record company lines). Plus if you stream it instead of download it you're downloading it over and over again with every listen, instead of just downloading it once and that's it (but it's not costing you hard drive space, one of the only upsides).
Yea I’ll stick with my 30TB Seedbox & 50TB Hard Disks vs paying for a streaming service. The people who will pay for 10 streaming services & gripe about a show not being on one of them just seem “simple”.
@@FigmentForever In my experience, it's best to do a bit of both. I like the convenience of having my music library synced across my devices, using Netflix or Disney+ on each of my devices, or Xbox Gamepass. Once in a while there are shows or movies that I want to watch but aren't on the service I currently use, so piracy wins there, but I usually switch services every month anyway, as there's no reason to be subscribed to everything at once.
For me, the reason I stopped torrenting is because I lost interest in movies and others big sized media products, which I could stream anyway. I also lost interest in big AAA videogames, as opposed to indie games, plus I always lack time and resources to play these movies and games, even small ones, and most importantly video games demand increasingly more hardware requirements very fast, to which my hardware didn't and still hasn't catch up with.
I stopped torrenting because I got caught!! Downloaded a movie and a day later got an email from the studio/piracy police/whoever... freaked me out, I deleted it and deleted uTorrent, never have since ! 🤣 I know VPNs are the way to go but I don't have time for all that....
When I got the money to finally buy it I found out that it's subscription now. So it took another 3 years for me to finally buy subscription. It costs a lot, but I use it quite often for hobbies and university stuff, so it's fine. Their insistence that you pay for whole package, or for nothing, is quite stupid still.
Micro torrent is the right pronounciation in my opinion because it’s not an u it’s the Greek letter μ which is basically a m and is the physical SI system prefix for micro. I think people just call it utorrent because it’s shorter or maybe they don’t know what a μ is.
I also think torrenting will comeback to being popular, there’s too much exclusive tv shows with different streaming providers, makes more sense to torrent for free than to spend another 10$ a month to see the next exclusive tv show
Just to make it clear for everyone: Napster and uTorrent are both using the P2P protocol. It’s not like Torrenting is completely different. The big difference is that Napster is centralized meaning that you had central system managing the data. Abd if this central system is attacked and/or taken offline, the whole system fails. Torrenting on the other hand is decentralized. The is no central system, an attacker can’t do shit to stop the torrenting. That’s why to this day torrenting is still so huge. Because you would have to take down every single seeder/leecher to stop the protocol.
Title for this video should be "Poor memory of uTorrent user". User need good software, and uTorrent is that software now. Steam is bad example because it's completely different business model. Adobe software is more popular because been pirated for logng time, people know how to use it and more people create content.
P2P was a huge part of my early life, growing up in a lesser-privilaged area i knew how to use both utorrent and tpb flawlessly by the age of 5, thank you to everyone who helped make these technologies possible.
I think another reason for piracy being on the low is the rise of free to play games. Back then those of us who wanted to game were mostly pirating stuff, but today kids without money can still play Fortnite or CoD or Roblox etc etc. They can easily spend their whole childhood gaming without needing to spend a cent.
@@negirno Oh yeah, and Spotify. Back in the day the most common way of piracy was downloading songs for your portable device to listen on the go. Now you just use Spotify or any other similar service on your phone and you're good to go.
May need an update on the bit about streaming services at the end. The proliferation of different platforms resulted in fracturing of content so you ended up having to pay multiple services to get everything. And some people have gone back to piracy again.
Fun historical thing. In old days, even blizard used torrenting while downloading huge assets like world of warcraft. Their download program was a torrent from their own multiple server localizations. When downloading wow, you were connected to many many servers and getting little chunks of game archive from different servers.
@@GummyGruffi it’s been a few years but I tried it with my housemate at the time, we both had P2P enabled in the settings, one of us DL’d the newest patch, then the other. Had wireshark open, both of our computers only reached out to Blizz servers and not to each other (even though it would’ve been far quicker over the gigabit LAN to simply pull it from mine).
I just blocked their ad server on my router and U torrent doesnt show me any ads if I use it. I also have a older version that works better than the junk they offer today.
There's also been a move by AAA gaming companies (EA, Activision, etc...) to release unfinished or broken products for full price, making it morally correct to pirate and share far and wide since the only way to motivate these corporations to stop releasing unfinished products is to make it financially harmful to do so. Not to mention that pirated copies of games often run better than the legitimate copies due to copy protection software they insist on putting into those games, making a pirated copy the better choice to a legal alternative.
the irony is is that pirating games work often better then legal copies. i have seen that for my self multiple times. especially when crack teams crack the Denuvo crack. we all know that Denuvo is horrible. you will see FPS drops and things like that. so no pirating is still a good option.
@@metalvideos1961 DRM is a mistake, it's purpose was to prevent to copy or share it illegally. But people still know how to crack it, what's the points? Now it's just to slow the performance because DRM always run in the background
@@rekttt_7374 yap. i have pirated games that run better then with DRM protection. for example. i downloaded Rage 2 through torrents. one of a game reviewer i like to watch (angry joe). did a review about it. he talked about lots of bugs and unexpected game crashes where the game just shut down for no reason. no error or anything. i have finished that game in 1 night never saw bugs glitches or shutdowns. it ran perfectly fine. and so you have more examples of games who run better pirated then legal copies.
@@rekttt_7374 Devs know that. I believe that a DRM's true purpose is to prevent scaring off investors due to piracy concerns, rather than actually making an impact on said piracy. It doesn't have to work, it just has to be convincing.
I am really, and I say, really sorry, but I cannot agree with gaming being "oh so cheap and good and awesome and all the gamers being happy and holding hands, singing around the campfire with the acoustic guitar", therefore gaming piracy declining. While music and movies\series being debatable (not to mention a couple of bands such as Metallica for example, doing pre-order exclusives) a video game companies are well widely known for their shady practices. Things where you are better off with pirating the game, rather than actually buying it. And device-slowing DRM (that get cracked in one day and you get pirated version, much more improved and performance-friendly), day 1 DLCs, pre-order exclusives, microtransactions, game demanding being online all the time (too bad if you got awful connection), are just a couple of examples where game publishing companies end up screwing the legitimate paying users. I, for one, am not seeing video game piracy going away anytime soon. Especially considering all those AAA publishers and their games. I do know a lot of people that ended up purchasing the game for the sake of supporting the developers and all the people that put a lot of hard work to it, and thereafter pirating the same game. Just because it is more complete.
Well for me I use pirating as a demo because ppl don't fucking make demos these days. lol. If I like it I'll buy it after. But if you made a shit game then byebye.
I’ve been saying this for years, if you get a service that makes watching movies cheaper or playing video games cheaper people will want to be legal and pay for their services. Since the launch of Netflix and Spotify, we saw a decline in pirating. Ever since the launch of Disney + when I realized that the publishers would want in on the Netflix pie and that prices would skyrocket and that would lead to more people pirating again. Statistics now show that pirating has increased again. If corporations actually learned from their mistakes in the 80’s and 90’s when movies and music became too expensive, if they had been less greedy and let Netflix have most shows then people wouldn’t download. Corporations and corporate greed never learn.
exactly. Music, videos and games need to be cheap (and can be, as they are consumed by many, many people!). Also, using the legal service has to be more convenient than pirating the thing. Steam is a great example. Why bother wasting half a day to research for a good torrent, virus check and hassle with the unpacking/install of it when you can just download it in 15 Minutes from Steam. Quite a lot of commercial software vendors have yet to understand this.
Ah yes uTorrent. P2P sharing isn't that old now is it? My god it seems like just yesterday we had the ol' compaq Presario 5000 chugging away on uTorrent. The ads though, man I remember how annoying they were.
I have an old version that I blocked all the ads and annoying features on. It's still useful if, _hypothetically-speaking,_ you wanted to download a goodset
Well, a lot of this might be true for a lot of rich and well developed countries. In the majority of development countries, torrent is still going on, at least with other clients.
this is a VERY long video. TLDR: µTorrent added advertisements to the client. People asked them to stop They said no people moved on to other clients. The End
Damn.. Looking back at P2P reminds me of the great Web 1.0 times (before 2004-2006) when things really felt exciting rather than common, mundane or even utilitarian. The early days of Web 2.0 were vastly helped by faster connections and still held some of the excitement but now with Web 3.0 around the corner with AR/VR and other things becoming common place, I do like looking back at the old days and enjoying the fact that my browser history was looked at as rubbish that needed deleted as opposed to info the powers that be need to get into my mind, my soul, observe my patterns or use my CPU power.
Yup when you didn't want to let your internet idle, so you download a cad program that you have no intention of using but at least it's using your bandwidth.
I have the exact same feeling. Finding an interesting website on a topic you liked felt like an adventure to escape to, now it's something I am trying to escape from…
- Timestamps - 00:00 Introduction 02:12 Morning Brew Sponsor 03:22 The Cause Of The Fall Of µTorrent 04:47 The Beginning Of µTorrent | Piracy And Napster 05:56 The Comparison Of File Sizes From The Early 2000s 06:59 The Beginning Of The BitTorrent Protocol | The Fastest Way Of Downloading Files 07:30 The Peer-To-Peer (P2P) Method 08:11 How Torrenting Worked 09:35 The Efficiency Of Downloading Files | Having More People Join In 10:26 The Causes And Effects Of Taking Down The Peer-To-Peer (P2P) Network 11:29 The Use Of Torrenting Websites Taking Up Disk Space And Storage
Nah, torrents are always alive. A lot of copyrighted things can be downloaded only by using torrent trackers. Copyright is an evil thing that want to stop human technological progress - new startups have no chances against "huge monsters" who don't want to do anything new while there is no rivals. But I would prefer qBittorent client.
This is anecdotal but even in Greece I only hear it pronouned as uTorrent, only in the first few years that it got here did you hear it as mee-Torent. (μ is actually pronounced mee in Greek, not myu). Just a small note.
All these anti piracy techniques only seem to be affecting the legit users while pirated copies run without a care in the world. Activision is a great example for forcing it's always on DRM to save or play Crash Bandicoot 4 where many users have bought the legit game but out of pure protest would only play the pirated version which you do not have to worry about internet breaking up and losing your progress.
"You can get access to every movie and tv show you've ever watched for $10 a month?" No. Not anymore. If you want access you have to spend $10 each on at least 6+ streaming services. So you're paying over $60 per month for access. Also Adobe being subscription based is actually worse because you pay more money in the long run. Instead of paying a one time fee of $60 to have it for 10 years you're paying $20 per month FOREVER. In fact due to this new sub model MORE people are pirating photoshop now. Same with their being too many streaming services people hate it
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
All the people correcting my pronunciation of µTorrent because they didn't watch the video. 😍😍😍😍😍
Morning Brew has actually made the news interesting for me! ☕📰 Thanks Morning Brew for my daily news perk - sign up for free here cen.yt/mbnationsquid
video hasnt even premiered yet lmao
Ütorent
please tell them that I CANT SUBSCRIBE
@@arashm1911 well i translated that and it just turned into rental
I hate news
Remember guys, It's always morally correct to pirate Adobe products
You fucking bet it is
Fuck adobe products. I don't want to pay 50$ for just 1 month of use. I'd rather download a old version of it
"And the Lord did say unto them - "My children. It is important that you remember that it is always morally correct to pirate Adobe products." And it was good." - Fuckadobeus, 4:20.
@@GumSkyloard LMAO
its always morally correct to pirate
Just remember this: Torrenting is also a way to preserve content that will most likely dissapear from streaming services.
Ikr, what IF the internet goes down (i mean it probably won't but still) everyone who had downloaded content would still be able to access it.
Wtf is this creator on about? I don't watch tv series and how in the world could I download a software to edit music, using streaming services? Why should I pay it, since Only the artists should name the tools that helped created the thing they worked on?
Music, sure. It was pirated before internet, from audio cassettes, nothing new.
uTorrent stays, just delete this dumb video (and my comment, along with it).
@@outstanding1448 is english not your first language
@@user-bx9sg1qr9x , how can you tell?
@@outstanding1448 because you misunderstood the entire video
Torrenting isn't on the decline. I think it's on a parabolic trajectory. The rise of greedy streaming companies means it's gonna become normal again.
DDLs are good again tho
Stremio is filling the streaming service niche using torrent technology. If your ISP is snitchy, make sure you wear a VPN.
@@Dad...... depends on the country you are in. In my country, everyone pirates stuff, to the point no one uses any VPN’s nothing. And ųTorrent is as popular as ever where i am.
@meme man whats your point?
@@zarabatanaproductions9240 I'd imagine his point is "lucky you". We have to pay for good VPNs with servers in countries like yours to not get threats sent to our ISPs.
I like how you referred to malware companies as "malware providers" as if its a service lol
Though obviously illegal, in business terms, some could actually be considered such, lol. There absolutely are single and groups of black hats offering their malware or work as service. Malware or hacking software being offered in exchange of a monthly payment isn't a new thing.
MAaS. Malware as a service
Actually, malware as a service has become a pretty big thing on the dark web, so yup they literally are providers of the malware it's up to the client to spread it 😅
Windows 11 is a service and a malware 😄
@@tobznoobs lol
Gabe Newell really said it best, “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
And that's why they'll always be on top.
Disgaea theif pfp :D
so that's why people can't play multiplayer on cracked steam games.
(yes i understand that you can't play multiplayer because your game isn't connected to your steam account)
@@alduinfr some games have fixes, like ROR2
And look, I paid for Risk of Rain 2 in xbox, I bought to game with my money, I don't feel like I'm pirating when I cracked it to play with friends on PC, I did pay for the game once after all...
Gaben GOAT 🐐🐐
But honestly, ever since Steam expanded their payment method in my country, I never again pirated any games that's available on Steam.
Gaben once said “Pirating is a service problem”
He was completely right cause nobody wants to pay $50 a month for Adobe
Edit: Looks like piracy is back on the menu now that stuff is getting too expensive again for an average/low quality product or even turning into a subscription service
We are talking about a genious mastermind who quitted his job at Miscrosoft to create his own gaming masterpiece and his own multi-millionaire company.
Piracy is quite common in Antarctica
@@betorockmetal Unfortunately he still can't count to 3 though.
The full quote is that it's a service problem, NOT a price problem. Saying people don't want to pay $50/month for Adobe is about price, not service. (And for the record, Bacon Newell was wrong, it's most definitely about price before it's about service for most people, only rich people prioritize convenience over price.)
@@mindspank worse, i can't count to 2
Streaming services caused a decline in pirating, but it's also going to cause a comeback. So many shows and movies are spread out over so many services. Everyone wants to set up their own streaming service. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney, Universal. I'm not subscribing to 20 fucking services to watch a show. Screw that.
I can understand having 5 services but no one wants to have 40 services at the same time
Very much so!
Especially since I would put something on my list on netflix to watch later only for it to be removed when I go to watch it -_-
@@TankEngine75 It's so annoying to find a show/movie you want to watch only to find out it's exclusively on some streaming service you're not subscribed to. I'm not getting my credit card out, I'm getting my pirate hat.
@@NordRageLevicus That's another reason. Shows come and go all the time. There's no guarantee they'll ever come back or won't appear on a different streaming service you'll have to subscribe to if you want to keep watching. When they took Star Wars and DIsney movies off of Netflix back when Disney+ came out, it didn't make me wanna subscribe to Disney+, it made me want to cancel my Netflix subscription and start torrenting again.
No problem, just don't watch the show unless it's available on the streaming platform of yout choice.
Until someone makes a single streaming platform for all movies/shows that comes at a reasoanble price, and where you know your favourite show or movie would never be removed, then I'd say piracy still has a place. I've seen a few instances recently of people losing access to shows (even ones they've directly bought digitally) just because of licencing agreements between the creator and provider. A shop won't break into your house and steal back the DVD, so why is it "okay" for a digital platform revoke something you've bought?
So like Netflix before the Streaming-Balkanisation?
i miss the times when netflix was just that, i miss them so much
fun fact: people after pirating sometimes buy the actual program after pirating it to support the devs. but for adobe products, nothing changes.
True. Here in post-Soviet countries games feel more expensive than in western countries, so people often pirate the game, check if it's worth buying, and when they have free money, they buy it just to support devs or to unlock content that isn't yet in the pirated version.
@@thedoczekpl Yea in other country’s it does feel expensive ,
ps : ill never buy adobe products for 120$ per month
@@omzcore I'll teach my kid to crack Adobe programs before I teach him to walk
Bruh what the fuck are you pirating shit for if you're going to buy it anyway?
@@FreemanWelterweight lmao
Years ago, uTorrent was known as "green steam" over here in Latin America lol.
I see torrenting coming back, but not with games or software, but thanks to greedy streaming services.
i didnt know gordon freeman could talk
@@PythonWood its called typing
@@zherean42069 ive been under a rock for a decade and trust me, i have no fuckig clue what typing is
and yes i edited thsi comment
same dude, same
and yes i edited this comment
If there's any medium that's the next big piracy target, it's TV and movies. So much stuff being bounced back and forth between different services or just not being available at all.
Love the video. Pirating Adobe products is always morally correct
But most people don't know how. There are no actual instructions. I just go to torrent for movies and I wished I can download applications.
@@victoriannecastle just add crack.
@@d3vilmaycry25 Just a little over here and SNJOOOORT. That's the good stuff... Oh you meant software.
@@victoriannecastle pre-activated/pre-cracked software exist. I use some, and all of them are verified, so 100% safe.
@@TsunaXZ
But there are sometimes pre cracked softwares that have instructions and then when I tried to follow the instructions it didn't work like in the TXT file provided to insert key gen for example its frustrating sometimes when I try to do this with a paid software that has free 30 days but I don't want to make new account every months
Torrenting at a decline /= "piracy" at a decline. Plenty of people use "pirate streaming services", like those movie sites you mentioned earlier in the video. And good for them. ;)
I'm pretty sure torrenting is on the rise again as the streaming service market has fragmented into dozens of little pieces. Netflix used to have pretty much everything, now you need at least five streaming services because thay all have exclusive content you want to watch. F that. I canceled Netflix when they blocked account sharing. Why should I pay for four users when in reality only one user is allowed at a time? And no, I don't want the cheapest option with one user and crappy video and audio.
These media corporations don't understand why Netflix became so popular in the first place. It had pretty much all the content and it was priced quite affordably, especially as you could share the account with three other people. But somehow these delusional idiots think they can charge the same amount of money for a fraction of the content on their own streaming platform.
There needs to be one streaming service which has all the shows and movies and it can't cost more than 10€ per user per month if there is no account sharing. Then I'll stop torrenting again. How hard can it be to make one service which shares the revenue between different publishers based on each user's watch time? If the service costs 10€/mo and one month I watch 50% HBO content, 30% Disney content and 20% Netflix content, then HBO gets 5€, Disney 3€ and Netflix 2€. Right now I'm watching everything for free. It's their choice to provide people with a better service than what you get by torrenting.
Honestly, you get on a few private trackers and you'll be horrified at the time you wasted on "pirate streaming services" and all the malware, porn ads, and scams they present you with.
You should get real-debrid it's life changing fr
@@delusionnnnnYup. I see people recommending them all the time on TikTok. Like no. Get on a private tracker.
Actually, when uTorrent turned onto an ads-stained crap, I just changed to qbittorrent. It's open-source, meaning nobody can just ruin it.
"Torrenting itself is not illegal. Torrenting copyrighted content is illegal"
Short sentence that explained the problem
what problem
@Diamond Frieza that’s not how it works
@Diamond Frieza “if you know how to avoid being tracked, anything’s legal” anything is not legal if you know how to get away from it
By your logic, murder is legal if they don’t catch the person? 🫤
@Diamond Frieza there's not much to know. nobody is going after individuals nowadays, you are good as long you aren't making money off of it. your VPN is pretty meaningless.
@@holleey Not entirely true. Here in Germany some backward companies still prioritize dishing out fines to individuals whenever they detect that you downloaded copyrighted material (mostly music). They do this by shadowing some p2p protocols (i.e. participating in a swarm w/o actually transferring data, but in order to log your ip).
Some lawyers make it their business to help the user in such cases, because the claims are more often than not ridiculously taxed and are often hard to provide legally binding evidence for. It is advisable for anyone who finds themselves in this situation to pay such a lawyer instead of trying to handle the claims themselves, because it's extremely easy to incriminate oneself due to the intricacies of the associated laws and amendments the lobbyists have been able to push through.
Typically however, the lawyer handles the case by being accomodating yet clueless toward anything regarding the claims in question. Eventually the companies realize that they're unable to build a proper case, that the following ups on the claims are costing them more than they likely could bring in and give up.
I’ve seen a theory that the ammount of people who pirate content hasn’t lowered, but instead the ammount of people who dont pirate has increased. In ye olden days of the internet, most people online where computer nerds who knew what they where doing, but now everyone’s online.
And with less of the internet’s population pirating, it’s harder for new people to find out how
Agreed
exactly. ive only recently been serious about the internet but im honestly scared to pirate, not because i fear it's illegality (nobody really cares if you pirate nowadays) but because im not sure how to without getting 300 viruses
@@junolysses Just aim for the ones with more seeds, dodge the suspicious file extensions that don't really belong, and use trusted sitres/trackers
@@geoyt8321 Not always the case, I've seen viruses with stuff like 20~40k seeds before. They probably use bots or smth to fake seeds. Sadly that's not good advice to give to a layman bc he'll get caught if he doesn't know what he's doing. Best advice would probably be to only torrent inside a VM and use a virus scan service like virustotal on every file you DL.
@@junolysses Not that I would know anything about this, but I hear that you should always use a no-logs VPN so that the download is untraceable (and yes some countries absolutely do care), and apparently you can also check the file extensions to make sure that what you're downloading is not a .dll or .sys file. Basically if a file doesn't have a .txt, .mp4, .png, or .mkv extension, trash it. Or so they say. Bonus points if you're using a Linux distro.
Valve got it right. If people are going to the trouble of pirating your content, you aren't doing a good enough job of delivering that content legitimately.
oh yes
at least that was the initial sentiment.
today there's many reasons to go for repacks rather than to deal with steam DRM.
@@holleey As a Linux gamer DRM definitely limits the number of games that will run on my machine.
@@andybullis1140 But to be fair, isn't Steam gaming on Linux a LOT better than it used to be, what with Proton, and Valve actively working with developers to help more games run on Linux? I mean it started when Gabe Newell wanted to have Steam Machines/Steam OS, I mean if 90%+ of Steam games don't work on a platform literally called Steam OS/Steam Machine, it kinda looks bad for you.
@@lmcgregoruk I was confused. It's the third party anti cheats that expect to see the Windows kernel that are the issue, not DRM. Fortunately I don't really play those games anyway.
If buying isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t stealing.
I'm the 10th like of ur comment
Just borrowing :)
Exactly.
Enter Walter White. "You're goddamned right!"
In Germany, torrents never really took off in public. It wasn't the choice for pirates, either because lawyers acted as seeders, logging every IP address, and sued everyone in a fully automated process. So basically, if you started an illegal torrent download in like 2008, you could have been sure to get a friendly letter in the mail a few weeks later. Same went for P2P like eMule. So basically, pirates moved on to one click hosters. Torrent only became a thing for closed and trusted groups.
im pretty sure they still do that but people just use VPNs
My mate's brother divides his work time between Derby in England and Berlin. He told me a few years back if I torrented at the rate I do here in Germany I would have been caught by the authorities long ago. I'm glad I live where I live.
There's legal torrents. Like a Linux or BSD distro. Or massive encrypted files full of classified Chinese jet fighter research.
@@abebuenodemesquita8111 There's no need really. German Piracy hit one click hosters really early and took off. I remember the time when you as a pirate could easily earn money just uploading annonymously on rapidshare. Although germans use torrents for pirating sometimes we have plenty alternatives.
@@xDJxGNOMx remember megaupload? good times
Piracy isn't getting smaller, the internet is getting bigger as a whole, making piracy a smaller slice of the pie. Streaming services are dying of their own greed. piracy will always be there. because it's ultimately a service problem. when a service is bad piracy steps in and makes it good. Piracy's main appeal isn't price, it's convevience. Music piracy is on decline because all music streaming services carry all songs. Movie piracy is up because streaming services carry less and less of what you want. Worse service=more pirates
True. Music streaming is easy even with a bit ad here and there. The ad can still be blocked tho. Movie and TV series is in another leve. Hulu Netflix disney+?? I'm done with it. Just pirate it omegalul
Depends what music you listen to. i still donwload my music because the music i listen to is nowhere to be found on legal music streaming platforms.
It's hard to find all the music nowadays though...
@spaceace1288時間_日本語学生 I don't live in America. In some states collecting rainwater is illegal. And you get all of this of my comment? Kinda strange. Strange analogy
@@AndreasElf depends how you search and where you search
Piracy is something that will always be around due to 3rd world nations often times relying off of it just to make ends meet, see Brazil. However, I would imagine that the over-saturation of streaming services combined with more and more classic games either becoming highly scarce or outright becoming abandonware, I foresee that in the coming years many will sail the high seas once again.
yep, even those that are not really considered 3rd world. that's why countries like Ukraine, Russia and other close ones are so *KNOWN* for piracy. basically if you are not from US, UK and few other ones you just have to somehow *deal* with this boom of streaming services and their lack of localized pricing. like, yeah totally people who's country minimal wage is $85/month can afford a $10 services? right??? and that's not even the worst case scenario, because the worst is that some services simply not available (disney+, amazon) and you can't even use vpn to willingly pay for them, because your card s supposed to match the country. actual nightmare. sorry guys, if you don't even want to take my money I will pirate, who's losing here? def not me.
@@iamanti8367 even in these western countries like UK and US more and more people are returning to the high seas
There are a lot of old games that I'm not afraid to admit that I pirate. Simply because of their abandonware status. Which in most cases, the original developers who made that game no longer exists, or just doesn't care anymore. And because these old games are nowhere to be found on a legal store platform (like Steam), and can only be found as used copies sold in flea markets, eBay, Facebook Marketplace etc, the developers and the publishers wouldn't be able to make money off of that game anyways. Since they're no longer manufacturing new copies, or selling those games in game store platforms where you have the ability to purchase it.
So if a game is nowhere available on a legal platform where you can still purchase it, or can only be found as a used copy, I don't see anything wrong about pirating that game. I will though purchase a game legally if the game is still available on Steam, PlayStation/XBOX Stores, or any other game store platform. And if it's a physical copy, from a retailer! And I will buy a used game if it's really cheap, or that I really want it to my gaming collection. I normally don't support piracy, but if it's abandonware, just go nuts and do whatever you want. Even though Nintendo doesn't like when people download their old games, despite their abandonware status.
I never bought a game simply because i Can't even if i want to im from a 3rd world country and a game is half my monthly wage plus we don't even have cards that accept payement so even if we want too we cant , the only solution is options like game pass from xbox
The rebirth of piracy is already happening
As someone who grew up with 56k AOL Internet... I'll tell you that it was longer than 10 minutes. I remember setting WAV files to download and then leaving to get lunch, hoping they'd be done when i got home haha
Yeah that instantly stuck out to me as incorrect when I watched this haha
WAVs. Wow, those were about 10MB a minute. I remember targeting 128 kbps MP3s because they were about 1MB per minute.
I was also using the T1 line at my... educational facility... to DL and then used Winzip to make spanned archives on 3.5 floppy disks to get them home. WAV files would have murdered my productivity.
same, I remember leaving 10-15mb videos downloading over night
this is why mp3 is better
An MP3 song back in the dial-up days took at least 30 minutes. I think people have forgotten how bad dial-up actually was. Probably most people watching this video today weren't even alive back then. There was a time that if you had an ISDN line (a precursor to DSL), you could download a song in 10 minutes and you were one of the lucky ones.
him: *piracy is declining*
me who lives in brazil: this is the biggest lie of the century
lol
Anyone living in a third world country can tell you that it isn't declining at all lmao I hate it here
Exatamente
I'm in a 1st world country and I laugh when people say piracy is declining here
Lmao same in India
Torrents will never die. There's a shitload of gamers/internet users from countries like India, East Europe and South America that just don't have the money to squander on games.
And the current prices are absurd. I live in one and my gaming life's biggest wish was to play HOI4. I had to save up money and wait until a 75% discount AND I've passed my college admission exam.
I had to wait 3 years to buy and play legit HOI4. And I'm probably better off than other countries.
So yeah, pirating isn't going away any time soon
What completely threw me for a loop as an American was seeing how much more expensive technology is abroad. My friend in Chile had to pay TWICE as much for the same thing as I did.
With that said, you guys have every right to pirate what you need. Prices are insane as it is.
Weirdly enough, in India, torrenting has become almost obsolete over the last 5-6 years. Anime fans are the last group of people who I've heard of that regularly use Torrents, tbh.
Internet is cheaper than it ever was, and modern video games are more often than not multiplayer so you can't really pirate them to begin with. And for other games the people who can afford to own good enough PC's or a console can definitely afford to buy games that they have to anyways. Prime, Disney+ and even Netflix are now kinda cheap in India so most people have one or even all 3 of those, and they have a bit of everything from old af Indian movies to the newest Marvel shit, so most people (me included) very rarely go looking for specific movies anymore, if at all. Why bother searching the internet instead of watching what's on one of the streaming services and just waiting for what you want to eventually find its way to one of the streaming services.
I have heard of people using telegram though, as a place to download new movies if you can't wait for the 1-2 months it takes for it to release digitally.
i am one of those guys. I wish with all my heart i could support devs with more than praise but what can i do? I just cant afford it.
when your currency is 4x the price of a dollar a 20$ game becomes an 80$ game. not something worth paying for many people for a simple game
Especially with the bullshit DLC. Paradox deserves every bit of it.
In a weird way I think that piracy has actually become an important and valuable component of the internet world. It is the anchor that keeps corporate greed in check, it keeps the digital free market in check. It has essentially become the "competition" that companies compete against for the consumer's attention. When a product becomes available, companies can decide how they want to market and sell it. If the people feel that what they offer is reasonable, they will willingly part with their money to purchase something 'the legal way'. But always having a free alternative there means that once corporations start getting greedy, charging unreasonable fees and reducing the quality of their products, people will not hesitate to ditch these companies and go back to pirating.
We've already seen this happen. When itunes charged $1 per song, it _sounded_ reasonable, but when you consider that an album probably had 12 songs on it, and the average person might have had 300 albums that they wanted in their library, paying $3600 for music was not feasible, especially for children. Especially when you factor in that many people had already paid for this music once in vinyl, cassette or cd. Because of this people pirated music. Same thing with movies. Movies were too expensive, going to the theatre was no longer enjoyable when people felt like they were getting robbed just to get a drink and a popcorn, plus the ticket itself which cost as much or more than actually buying the dvd. So people pirated movies.
Corporations saw a decline in sales because people would literally rather break the law than pay what these companies were demanding, so they had to change. They couldn't stop people from pirating (they tried), so they had to adapt. This led to the rise of streaming services. People were thrilled to see that they could listen to all the music they wanted for a flat monthly rate roughly equivalent to the cost of one music album. People were happy to ditch piracy for this because the price was reasonable and it was way easier. Likewise with movies, when Netflix started streaming movies people ditched piracy because this was way easier and the price was good. But now there are so many streaming services competing for attention and they are all poaching production studios, signing exclusivity deals, and raising prices. These anti-consumerist business practices are driving customers away and people are turning to piracy again. I guess we'll see how long it takes for the market to break again and force companies to make changes.
Actually, iTunes made a similar magnitude shift in the music industry. Seeing as the only way to get music was buying CDs, producers realized that all they actually needed was 2-3 great songs and the album would sell anyway, meaning they could just pad it out with 9 whatever-songs and 3 hits. As a good example, Adele was a hit singer back in the days of the last CDs I bought, and even though iTunes had been doing the big shift for a while, that album still felt like 3-4 amazing hits and the rest was padding - not bad enough to make me change CDs, not good enough that I can remember them at all. Once iTunes came around and you could buy a single song, you didn't need $10 for 12 songs, you could just pay $3 for the ones you wanted.
Also, iTunes allowed you to import local music to it, that's how I got pirated music into my iphone back in the day, so if you had the album and a CD reader in your PC, you probably could make a backup of the songs in your PC, then send them to the phone. That is actually not pirating AFAIK (but I'm not a lawyer so don't quote me on that), which is why iTunes supported it.
but the rest of your point with movies being expensive and netflix being nice, then all streaming services moving us back to piracy is still sound, I just wanted to share the cool tidbit
@@billionai4871 You are correct, if you purchase the CD you are allowed to rip a backup to your PC and you are allowed to put it on your phone etc.
You don't understand that piracy is part of the marketing strategy of big software corps to gain market share. It's always been like this M$ and Adob€ are the perfect examples, still employing this tactics nowadays
@@billionai4871 you are correct, but then you got into the issue when artists would make multiple albums across several months like this. making 1 good song per cd, so that they could ensure tons of CD sales. when it became common place, many people immediately walked away from itunes for a while after that (thats when the who napster thing was going on). Beginning to pirate and copy their music to their devices. As while you could spend $12 on 12 songs, they would all fit on one cd and you could just rip that... so your getting ripped off.
But by the time the first iphone was around, your talking long past the start of this cycle, iTunes predates the iPhone and iPod, by some degree. Sharing more in common with Winamp at one point then what it became.
Music Piracy predates all of this, as 24bit cd ripping to wav was common before the MP3 format was availible, and people used to share 24bit wav's across several compressed archives that were split, even on message boards during the late BBS era. -- i remember getting 6 5-1/2 720k floppies, with a song on it once from a primary school friend as a joke. thats how rampant it was even still.
"Prices are too high for this product I pirate it"
"Price is okay but why pay when I get for free anyway"
Idk what fairytale you live in
I remember these days. During this time, uTorrent and The Pirate Bay were both Swedish, so the US complained a looot to Sweden, making it a huge political debate here. Due to that The Pirate Party was started, which became quite popular for a while and also spread througout Europe (becoming one of the biggest parties in some countries). The goal of the party was to not crack down on piracy and not regulate the internet. Piracy even became a religion in Sweden, recognized by the Swedish state. It was of course a bit of a meme, but since the state can't reject religious beliefs they kind of had to recognize it officially as a religion. In the end, Spotify was created out of the ashes of the entire piracy controversy, using bittorrent technology. Spotify even brought in the uTorrent guy for that, so he owned parts of Spotify at one point.
I disagree with your conclusion at the end about the demise of piracy due to online streaming. For a brief period, there were decent alternatives, but right now? To get access to the content that sites like TPB offer at a hassle, you'd need to get 4 to 5 streaming subscriptions, each currently going up in price. The reasons for which piracy initially reared its head - lack of access - is returning. I suspect we'll likewise see torrent traffic rise a bit again. But at the same time, as average connection speed goes up, and applications take advantage of that (video teleconferencing for instance), legitimate traffic is going to grow faster then torrents will.
I agree with this point. It's also worth mentioning that now lots of movies are releasing concurrently with their theatrical releases so it's more reasonable to torrent movie than pay a subscription to a service you don't intent to use after that single use-case.
you'll see more poorsaps getting funny viruses if they don't know how to yaaaaaaaaaarrrgggggghhh (pirate) properly
He... does address that point in the video, although briefly.
Definitely - I get 80 Mbit/s and it takes very little time to download a movie in 1080p.
Remember when they said Blu-ray was uncrackable haha
@@andrina118 "Uncrackable" is a joke. Any digital video media has to in the end convert the content back into unencrypted video format, to feed to a display. Capture the signal there in uncompressed, unencrypted form, along with the audio signal, and you can replicate the content. You may get slight loss of quality if you then re-encode it (compression usually incurs a small quality penalty) but I doubt anyone will complain.
That however requires both IT and electronics knowhow.
Yup, he hit the nail on the head. It was one thing when Netflix was pretty much the only game in town for $9.99/mo. (currently double that). Now content is spread over a dozen streaming services, all at about the same price. All of a sudden, cord cutting is not be the cheap alternative that it once was, and piracy will be on the rise once again. Do I want to pay for a streaming service to watch ONE show...Star Trek Discovery as an example? Maybe, but not at the current pricing.
That's the worst example i have ever seen in my life
.
Exactly I'm not paying for all this streaming service to watch one or two series that's why I been torrenting for over 15 years idgaf 😂 even back then for psp and PS4 games
noone even mention, like they mispronunce "utorrent" with an "U" ? i/o microTorrent xD
Many people subscribe to one (some two) streaming service, then pirate other contents that are not in the service they're subscribed.
I have to disagree on one point. Piracy is still as rampant as ever, it's just quieter. Back in the 00s, it was common to hear, "Check out what I got from Limewire last night!!"
But with lawsuits ramping up, especially targeting the individuals, people are getting sneakier and definitely quieter
Fair enough! Honestly I had a lot of fun making this video so I think I will do more videos on the history of online piracy! Perhaps I can investigate this further too and maybe discuss why it's gotten quieter. :)
fk yea i still pirate games and some movies/tv shows that arent on netflix lol
@@yo-bj1lj be careful, this comment could be used as confession if you are caught.
@@aadarshroy3216 oh no the rozzers are outside my house
@@nationsquid oh please do! I love your videos, man! Especially the virus ones
I still remember downloading this for the 1st time. My mom’s friend’s son showed me that he had a lot of games and he paid nothing for them and I was so curious and he showed me. Changed my life forever.
I have always called it Micro-Torrent, because µ is the SI symbol for that. That the original dev didn't go with "micro", for you know, the SMALLEST most light weight client, is completely baffling to me.
Because 'mu' is smaller than 'micro'
@@overloader7900 If you really want to be this precise: The letter is actually called My, pronounced like the German Mü, but the English speaking world has trouble with that. The SI sign µ is actually distinct from the Greek letter µ, and it is used for a variety of scientific things besides denoting "micro". The latter still being its most known application, which is why I made my comment the way I did. But fear not. You were still technically correct, when looking at it in a particular way.
Then why not nano or pico or ..........yocto?
@@roh5876 Because µ isn't used for these?
i just read it u torrent because it looks like a u
I always thought it was pronounced 'Micro Torrent' because the µ is an abbreviation for Micro, and one of the original goals of the program was to maintain a small file size.
never heard about U torrent too
*right* as the morning brew ad began I stumble across this and am immediately able to click on your chaptered index & skip it - YOU deserve some kind of humanity award. I’d even shell out a Nobel peace prize for that one… makes more sense than giving to Obama! 😆 hehehehehehehehehehehehehe
It is pronounced micro torrent.
@@PixelatedGypsy I am Obama, and I take offense to your comment
I always called it mu (mew) Torrent because that's what the letter is...
Torrents are historical digital archives of the future, that need to be kept alive. In some distant future, the emergence of torrenting would be considered as the
watershed moment in the evolution of internet. Mark my words.
I don't need to mark your words, because I already agree with you!
Facts! I love Flight of Dragons, but I can't find it anywhere, but piracy.
@@rocknrevolt938 Pirating things which are gone from the public store is morally correct!
@Player 1 very true. That is why roms are perfectly moral.
You can only get sims 2 and 1 from pirating nowadays
Minor correction: torrenting is still p2p technology, but simply distributed. P2P merely refers to the fact that you are not using a central hosting server (party A uploads for party B to download afterwards), but are circumventing that so that party A, one of the peers, is able to connect directly, just as you describe, with further *peers*. Even further: if A and B have different parts of the stream (which they could have received from C), they can become both up- and down-load peers to each other, while taking the load off C.
Your video is also poignant, because when you posted it, you already mentioned that price increases, balkanisation and reducing of catalogues may lead to a return of pirating. Only 1 year later, and the streaming services are in a self-inflicted, dramatic free-fall. I wouldn't be surprised if torrent traffic is back on the rise!
Also .torrent files don't work the way he's describing. IIRC they point you to a torrent site where you find peers and if the site is down, you will not be able to download anything. For a truly decentralized network you need something like DHT or similar networks (Kademlia, etc)
I don't know why he didn't mention Ed2k if you're going to journalise anything regarding p2p file sharing. This program seems like junk journalism.
Has piracy really declined that much or is it that the amount of internet traffic is infinitely greater than in bittorrents' hay day? Great video
I haven’t noticed a decline personally. I have yet to pay for a single subscription service or movie post early 2000s, yet never have a hard time finding a 1080p - 4K release of any given tv episode or new release. More than anything I’d just wager people would rather pay for 10 streaming services than spend 10 minutes learning how to torrent
Piracy has definitely gone down a lot, especially for songs. I don’t hear anyone pirating songs these days, with spotify and apple music being so affordable and everything. Valve does a really good job fighting against video games piracy too, with it’s frequent steam sales and community and achievements system for games which heavily disincentives pirating games. Gabe Newell really nailed it when he said that piracy is an issue of service, not price. People would willingly pay for better access to their favorite content faster.
@Kund you are in a minority there, the vast majority of people are happy paying subscribing for convinince sake. Piracy won't ever go away completely, hell i generally do a bit of both, with spotify being limited in what it has, and some media just not being accessible on legal streaming services, but as a general rule your average consumer will happily pay a small monthly fee or purchase media digitally from trusted suppliers to mitigate risks of malware, or allow the less technically literate just to click and go. To many the prospect of torrenting may be more convenient than streaming or digital purchasing, but most consumers have very little computer knowledge, so will opt for the more user friendly and newcomer accessible method.
@@danielzboy wait... its weird to just have a shit ton of mp3s downloaded directly to your phone? :(
@@bitchwormpuddin1499 Not at all. I personally hate piracy, but it doesn't bother me if someone else does it, since everyone else has their own reasons for piracy and it's their choice to make, not mine.
This past Christmas my family wanted to watch Home Alone, but for the first time ever it was not airing on linear TV and not available for streaming where I live. The only option was to rent it for an extra cost through a streaming platform we were already subscribed too... This is the kind of crap that is bringing piracy back, and I'm all for it
I *hate* that shite! I pay a premium for a streaming service only to find the movie I want to watch is another $6. B.S.!!
Which service?
And now with freeve you also have to watch ads every 5 Minutes in many movies although you pay monthly. Man, why cant we have nice things without getting a criminal.
@@alterbennet5420most probably Amazon Prime
The problem with streaming services is the overwhelming amount of garbage content, content being removed, and too many services. So if I want to watch The Boys, Stranger Things, and Rick and Morty, I have to subscribe to 3 different streaming services. When South Park did their Panderverse episode, there was no "TV Guide" to tell me who was streaming it, so now it becomes a hunt to find the one streaming service offering the content I want to see. Now people "buy" shows and movies on streaming platforms without realizing that platform can lose the rights to host content that was purchased by customers; you don't own your purchases anymore, they can be taken away at any time.
This dystopian, anti-consumer garbage needs to stop...but it won't because the majority of consumers keep giving these vampires their money.
I honestly still use µTorrent but that's mostly because I've been out of the piracy game for so long that I just don't know what the newer and more popular programs are.
qbittorrent 👍
Deluge is p decent
qbittorrent has been the gold standard for years.
i use deluge
Deluge is the way to go for me. It's open source, decent UI... In short a piece of software I can honestly recommend and one that I use myself.
I believe streaming companies are pushing the general audiences back to torrenting, and a major factor could be that some material gets pulled on said streaming network by the IP as it might not adhere to the "modern audiences" and forever can be lost unless the general audience can get their hands on the physical copy of said material.
lol bingo dont charge more then 1 download, 1 7 cent plastic disc..... why things die... greed
If you IP cuts you off for anything then simply get a VP. OPERA gives you a free one - and it works just fine.
not just that, but they might just put the ip on the safe just because they're a bunch of dickheads. Disney does that a lot, not everything Disney has made is available on Disney+, for literally no reason.
Physical copies can get worn out. Retail digital copies can disappear, or have DRM that doesn't work 20 years from now. Only piracy can really preserve media for good.
Yep, it used to be convenient 6-7 years ago when it was netflix that had pretty much all the movies and series, but then it became a hell with 10 different streaming apps each of which is different, requires its own subscription you will easily forget to cancel when you stop watching it, and now they implement things like no account sharing. It's no wonder why people think "why bother subscribing to yet another thing if I want just one series from each of these 5 services, if I can just pirate them more conveniently in one place"
GabeN is absolutely right, and the dramatic fall of video game piracy is thanks to, in a major way, to Steam. The reason why Steam got so dominatingly successful is its core concept: convenience.
A lot people don't know this, but Steam *didn't* start out as an online game store. It began as a small utility to deliver automatic patches for Valve games (back when they still made actual games). This was so successful, that the service was extended to other third-party games. In the early 2000's, getting patches and updates for your games was a cumbersome process. IF you had internet (big IF) you had to find and download the patches which was easier said than done, or buy overpriced gaming magazines that came with a CD with patches for many popular games at the time, and pray yours was among them. But even when you had the patches, you had to apply them in a certain order or in some other special way or you'd brick your game. Steam cut through this arduous process by offering to download and install patches automatically for all your (applicable) games, saving you all that hassle, which was a *huge* accomplishment at the time.
In short order Steam became a sort of virtual game library, a convenient hub to keep all your favorite games in one place (regardless if it was a Valve game or not), updated and ready to go whenever you wanted to game. Then they started adding even more features, like friend list, chat functionality, server browser for multiplayer games, in-game overlay, patch notes and news about your games, mod support, and so on. (The online store functionality came much later, which is what the platform is generally known for nowadays.)
And this is where the piracy argument comes in. GabeN knew, that the only way to defeat piracy is to offer gamers a better service, better value than what they get from pirates. While pirating theoretically gets you a free game, you pay for it in other ways, mainly security and inconvenience. When pirating games you usually have to wade through lots of seedy websites and services, often chock full of dangerous malware, and even what you download you can never be sure if it's installing just your game or sneakily stuffs your computer full of viruses, spyware, trojans, cryptominers and dreck like that. Also, in most cases cracked games can't be patched/updated, can't use multiplayer or online features, etc, so you often end up with a vastly inferior product.
What Steam offered is not just a game, but security that you indeed get a game and nothing else malicious, immediate automatic patches and updates, plus a whole truckload of added features and convenience, with the one caveat of needing to have a legal copy. Steam grew as a sort of stealth-DRM system, that indeed kept your games up to date and showered you with great features, but your game also wouldn't start if Steam detected any unauthorized changes to the game files and the VAC system would prevent most forms of cheating in online games.
And surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, depending on your stance on the issue) to a lot of ex- and would-be pirates, this was a trade they were more than willing to take, because they were no longer just paying for a game, but for the peace of mind and the plethora of added benefits and convenience Steam offers, which just swung the scales wildly in the legal copy's favor.
And even through all this Steam was and still remains a free program without any third party ads, paid premium features or other obnoxious monetization, focusing instead on making gaming as simple and convenient as possible, with tons of integration and quality-of-life stuff simply no other competing platform offers to this day.
Steam is not successful because it's dominating the market. It's dominating the market because it's successful. Other huge companies tried to create their own version of Steam and failed miserably (Origin, UPlay, RSC, GoG Galaxy, EPIC, etc). No other competing platform ever even came close to measuring up to Steam in features, ease of use and sheer convenience. Granted, Valve has multiple decades of development on them, but that's not the reason competing platforms are usually DOA/non-starters. It's because of the aforementioned core concept: those platforms are all built around monetization from the start, while Steam is built around delivering QoL and convenience first and being a shop floor second.
@Hank Richard Thanks. I know it's an infodump, I'm happy you learned something new :)
It also didn't hurt that Steam was effectively a monopoly. Once they killed off physical releases, they were the only game in town until the huge publishers started wanting their own storefronts.
I read it all, I liked your analysis about the matter, makes total sense
Or you can both use Steam and pirate. I like buying indie games properly since they are usually reasonably priced and the money goes to the people actually making the game. But if some big company thinks that I will be downloading their annoying private pop-up add or console, they can guess again.
@@randomv2. homie most people in some countries dont have the money to buy that many games (especially AAA titles)
I'm surprised he didn't mention the government's stand against internet piracy in the early 2010s, which directly affected the ease of torrenting. By partner with isps to detect torrent traffic. Isps would throttle and torrent traffic or send to warning emails for downloaded certain torrents which could ultimately lead to termination or internet service.
I used to use uTorrent back then during my high school era around 2012 i think, but some day it asked me to update to version 3 and i hate the new UI, so i reverted back to the previous version and never update it again for years, turns out that decision saved me from crypto mining issue
Cryptomining issue? Could you explain more about that?
@@flyingdutchman3755 don't mind me just commenting to see the explanation if it's posted lol
@@flyingdutchman3755 i think that version of utorrent turns ur computer
Into crypto miner
@@flyingdutchman3755 utorrent uses PCs to mine for crypto
@@brutus3631 bingo - wasn’t the excuse something along the lines of “ohhh it helps us pay for the services so we don’t have to splash ads everywhere” or some bullshit they claimed when word spread? Seems I remember them trying to come up with something that they’d hope people unaware of what mining does to one’s rig would shrug off.
To spare you 24 minutes. uTorrent added ads and bloat to their software and made the software more unstable and worse to use. People migrated to better freeware.
Thanks
Not to mention installed adware and tried to mine bitcoin on the user's computer
Thanks. Man, this video spent a lot of time padding things out without saying anything.
@@summersmashhit9177 I do like this video format though, it's great for long trips, or long study/play sessions, I love listening to stuff when I do continous tasks
Thanks, this guy did repeat himself a lot and go off topic quit a bit.
As much as I dislike gaben, he's right: piracy can go away if you offer better services. The problem is companies have started taking users for granted and in the endless search for a record quarterly report they have gotten, again, to the point where the worth of their service vs value becomes questionable; so yes, I do believe piracy will rise once again. Heck I've been questioning for months if netflix is worth it anymore. It's certainly been in decline for a few years now.
why would you dislike him?
@@selimdogan8070 because unlike the rest of the valve fandom which I stopped being part of, I will not forgive or forget making microtransactions cool with tf2 hats and csgo skins. And that's ignoring his attempts to monetize mods. The more he aged the more greedy and out of touch he became. His interviews and most disliked reddit comment are just a few examples.
that's not true at all... lmao
@Nam Gge And I'm the one misinformed? Lord I hate this reality. There's dozens of interviews of him saying what direction valve is heading towards; employees talking about their old freedom being abandoned in favor of gaben and friends wishes fulfilled. Take off the fanboy glasses and look these things up before commenting.
@Nam Gge Whatever dude, go read his reddit comments and watch his interviews as well as the articles regarding employees. He's probably retired now but since l4d2 until now he led valve on the path they are on today. I'm done arguing with the uninformed.
You know why I uninstalled it , the first time it shipped with malware and never looked back , deluge does the same thing, they ruined it with one release.
If you feel morally guilty after torrenting a fine then just seed the file for 10 mins in this way you'll help growing the files seed and helping other people.
bro 10 min is not enough at all....keep it at least a few days or when you are not using the computer
Seeding for 10 minutes does like nothing at all. Either seed for a few days, or until you've seeded as much as you downloaded.
My private tracker needs you to seed for 48h total or seed as much as you downloaded, or you will get a hit and run flag on your account. 3 hit and runs, and you're banned.
@@CIubDuck how??
@@CIubDuck private tracker? What's that?
@@masnidebelicrnac Imagine PirateBay, but if it was locked to users who take torrenting serious. Private torrents and magnet links, if you want to download you have to seed. It's a big private group who downloads and seeds out of the reach of law firms and film-conglomerates.
Not only torrenting can save some time and download speeds but it can also preserve many lost files and specially lost games
Me: *Sees the title*
Also me as Russian: ha-ha, funny joke. Oh, new repack of Forza Horizon 5 with online-fix? I'll take two!
1) closed source
2) ads
3) included a mining program in bundle
I was a bit shocked when i Heard utorrent became a bitcoin miner, Like what the fuck was that all about? It was an amazing concept but damn you have to be that greedy to mine my asshole? Fuck na! gimme my stake of what you have mined, it is my time to lick the plate
I rarely get interested to watch videos that talk about past internet history/software history, but when it's NationSquid that's doing it, I 100% get interested and enjoy all the videos he drops. Great work man! Love your content!
Thank you so much!!! I really appreciate that! I have more content coming your way very soon! :)
@@nationsquid Can't wait!!
cool
anyone member when squid used to make horror mystery vids?
Good for you.
I never considered uTorrent a "cultural icon" like Napster or Limewire, but rather, just the most used torrent client among a long list of choices.
If anything, the Pirate Bay was more the "cultural icon" we associated with torrents than uTorrent.
and Pirate Bay was base on what beershere or maby dhl? PB was a icon of fight/resist of law made by corporations, bt is a technological icon thas survive PB colapse...and we will se how long...
and pirate bay (mirrors) is still up too! best place for really old and rare content
Yes, second that! It was just the most used, but when it was popular there were always plenty of somewhat good alternatives also. Really not any big deal. The only thing that changed with time was people's interest in it, as alternatives in streaming and other just made it less interesting to continue with.
@@Bongwater33and porn. Because as that song said: "the internet is for porn, grab your dick and double click for porn" ♫
This is highly time/region specific. Limewire and Napster are both NA phenomenons, but almost nobody there even knew what DC++ was even before uT really reached its peak.
uT was almost as ubiquitous as freaking winamp in central and eastern Europe.
Piracy can be a tough thing to kill off, especially when not all forms of media are available to everyone
haha yar
"Piracy is a service problem" Gabe Newell
piracy is essentially rebelling against greedy fucks ruining neat concepts now that i think about it
Yup, and even when available, it's just not worth it for most. For example my country avarage income is 11 times lower than USA when converted from dollars. And even when a service is available with regional pricing, they do not directly account such a big difference. So a subscription service that would cost $10 in USA, might cost $3 here. So cheap right? But not really. It would be as if someone in USA paying over $30 for that service in comparison. How many would pay over $30 monthly for the basic Netflix option in USA i wonder? Oh, and this is with smaller library size, because you know, not all movies and shows are available in the region even if you do get Netflix.
Yeah i have to torrent wwe content because well they all arent available in sweden
... You can torrent the Pro version of µTorrent, in µTorrent.
I first used µTorrent back in 2006-2007. The CPU usage was getting ridiculous, so I switched to qBittorrent, now I am back to µTorrent Pro.
I do not mind spending money, but a game that's $50-$100 I want to make sure I like it before buying it, demo of games are hardly what the full game consists of. Also, a game that's 160 really isn't needed when I can get a repack of that game for 80 GBs.
Same with music, movies, and software. 30 seconds of a song that's 2:30-3:25 isn't a good representation, especially on songs that have multiple styles, classical and metal songs for example. Movie trailers often are nothing like the movie, perfect example "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo", the trailer shows all the action that happens in the movie, than some software have a limited demo, that made me not want to buy the software because everything was behind a pay wall.
Also, it gets ridiculous to know that IF I don't have internet access I can not get what I paid for... Cool.
I just came here to say that after watching only 2-3 videos, you quickly became on of my favorite content creators here in youtube. You make me feel incredible interested for a topic I never felt interested in before. Thank you so much for this amazing content and please never stop!
Thank you so much for your support!! More content to come!! :)
Yep, me 2! Such a good channel. Why does he not have millions apon millions of views!
Count me in too! your content got me hooked.
Me 2 your the best you should have at least 1mil
@@nationsquid Yeah, your content is great, well made and interesting.
It's crazy to think that 2mb used to take ~10 minutes, and 500mb took a day. I wonder how people then would react to speeds now
Man, when i was a kid i used ISP's talktime balance to use internet as data was expensive back then and so slow, I would usually use it download java or symbian mobile games that are just kb in size but took minutes to download. Those were the days but now when is see a kid get frustrated waiting to download a gb sized games in few minutes, man.
i remember back 10 years ago went exactly like that.
I remember pirating manga on dial-up. One volume was around 100MB, so took all night to download. And it was horrible compressed low res jpegs. Price for dial-up was per hour and wasn't cheap either. Then local network company appeared and introduced LAN p2p app. My small town was divided between two companies. Coolest time in using the net. Half a town connected in one LAN. LAN games, LAN file sharing. No social networks. Everyone just shared their photos on p2p app. Some people maintained large collections of movies and everyone downloaded them at LAN speeds. There was sense of community, as opposed to nowadays.
My first internet connection was 512k/s in the early 2000s.
@@LamerCorp for real? i have exactly that amount even to this day xD
As someone who gets movie and gaming media from both legit and pirated services, I don't think it is indeed going away soon. People don't just pirate because they can get something for free but because so much media out there is still so hard to get or are gatekept in regions. And in terms of gaming, there are many like me who would mostly rather pirate for reasons like getting the good game without making certain publishers (who are usually greedy/scummy in context) profit, or trying if a game is even good without regretting to buy it later if it sucked.
*I previously said devs but I had actually had things like EA and _that certain popular and infamous entity I don't wanna mention_ of Take Two on my mind so I was prompted to be corrected by a reply.
I used to pirate games just to see if they would work on my potato pc since a lot of developers stopped making game demos. A couple times I then purchased the game because I wanted to own it (a physical copy.)
@@Gatorade69 I'll admit, I sometimes straight up lifted games cuz I wanted them but couldn't afford them.
Had nothing to do with sampling it.
@@stitchfinger7678 I mean there's definitely games that I pirated that I didn't buy afterwards.
With a lot of games I also wanted to play the multiplayer which wasn't possible with the pirated versions.
Games that I pirated that I later bought : Oblivion (Though I did pirate the stupid DLCs like Horse Armor), Bioshock (bought it twice), STALKER, Mass Effect 2 (though I did pirate all the DLCs).
The Steam sales made it very easy to buy games cheap.
@@stitchfinger7678 same, i just wanted to play the game because it looks fun. But at the same time I don’t have the money to buy the games, so i use utorrent to download pirated games (ik, it’s very embarrassing to say that outloud).
pirating in game otuside of the access is motly because cpmoanies phasedo ut the usage of Demos.
consdiering how much a game can cost today if done by a AAA studio n osane person is gonna chance it and either wont engage at all, or pirate it as their " demo"(knowig full well the game will miss features)
if the latter group publishers should be tryig to reel in by giving thme what they want, a Demo as these people are likely already willing ot pay, just not without trying.
If purchasing isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
purchasing is buying a copy, piracy is making the copy
Used to be, back when we got physical copies of things, but nowadays all we get in many cases are digital copies that they could wipe off our machines if they wanted to. That isn't owning, despite our so-called "purchase." If they don't offer a physical copy, then they're the ones stealing from us. That's why I don't offer them my money until they've earned it.
@@curious_mitch nowadays, purchasing just gives you access to the service, not an actual copy
I rarely torrent anymore...and when I do, it is exclusively stuff that you just plain can't get anywhere else...like old software, old versions of software, old archives, ROM goodsets, and unstreamable albums that have never had re-releases (I don't care how much I want an album...I am not paying $600 for an out-of-print CD on the secondary market).
So basically Abadonware?
jokes on you, I get retro PCs from old fucks ...
Not the commodore stuff tho ...
Late 90s to XP era ...
When they wanted $25 for Led Zeppelin 1 I stopped buying new cd's.
The one that I had that was scratched cost $9.99.
µTorrent might have fallen down but torrenting is still strong as ever
Need of torrenting is actually rising.
Mostly because every bob and their dog wants to make their own paid media streaming service. It is understandable that different media companies want to make more money but doing that they are alienating their content viewer base.
Most people do not want to pay for 4+ different streaming services. Only one.
They found a solution to the piracy problem, but then these companies' greed caused them to throw it away and push people back to piracy
@@LilacMonarch exactly. Everyone wants a bite and now consumers are forced yet again to take multiple subscriptions because of how fragmented streaming has become. I canceled one of my subscriptions because I literally subbed for a single show. In hindsight it was probably better to just pirate the show than paying "for a whole library" in which 99% of the content I don't even consume.
@@LilacMonarch consumerism and captalism in a nutshell. They take money from consumers all the time
Well if there was only one people would complain about Netflix holding a monopoly
@@NapoleonBonaparte5 The problem isn't competition, it's the way the service is divided. For example with ISPs there are a few different options with different speeds and reliability, but they all give access to the full internet. For streaming services to work, they need to be able to do something similar
14:11 When they put ads in it I dropped it in a heart beat and never looked back.
The thing i love about torrenting and all these "could be used for piracy" programs is that im free to just not give a shit and get whatever for free. It doesnt get better than that. Dont want 5 streaming apps? Pirate. Dont want to pay for music? Guess what, pirate it in sometimes even better quality... Want to justify to yourself all of this? Just think about how absurdly much companies are earning and how little and insignificant YOU, a single human, are to them.
Msm and corporate monsters hand in hand
GigaChad mindset right here.
And how absurdly insane amount of commercials which waste our time they put everywhere.
Music is always better quality.
sesh
Piracy and torrenting is essential to the archival of files
The reason Naspter was interesting was that you were able to find and very quickly listen so songs you simply can notnormally listen, like the stuff you last heard 10 or 20 years ago. The music you heard for free in the radio in the 80s was available in a heavy laptop. It was the only digital media service. Price or legality was totally irrelevant. Music industry was run by boomers so none of them bothered to provide this service, so people did.
I also used it to find foreign music that you can't find locally. It was great and fast. lol
Yeah, that's not exactly what happened to napster, it wasn't exactly going smooth before it ended, and it all started going downhill with Lars Ulrich serving as the face of the whole "Music industry vs Napster"
I'm just so glad we have Transmission nowadays.
Also I think quite a bit of the reason why people stopped torrenting and moved to subscription services is because we as a generation grew up. Back in the day I was about 12-13yo, and it was pretty hard to ask my parents for their cards to a) buy something on the internet and b) buy something DIGITAL on the internet, like there was no package, no physical product they could verify and make sure I wasn't throwing money away or getting scammed. Then as I grew up I started to manage my own money and eventually got my own card so I could just spend it on whatever I wanted be it a digital copy of a game or a streaming service. This is something most kids nowadays will arguably never experience as well, we as their parent generation grew up in this environment and we understand what they're talking about when they want to get digital content on the internet.
this is only about he downfall of the uTorrent client - not about torrenting in general.
torrenting is still going strong and there's nothing to replace it.
@@holleey Agreed.
Transmission masterrace checking in. Headless torrenting is the way to go :D If you already have a VPN just throw it on a single-board computer like a Rasp Pi and have it going all the time.
My 2009 imac was able to hit speeds on transmission that my 2019 imac can't even come close to for whatever reason. Moved on from macs as i'm more game intensive now.
@@anythingoriginal Yeah, Macs are more for people who do music since our software makes way more use of CPU cores.
The fact that people call downloading files of media from the internet, without taking them from anyone else, piracy, is just absurd. Copyright law in general is absurd.
I love this argument, it literally obliterates the fallacy of stating that piracy is robbery/theft. How can you steal an infinite resource?? If law enforcement is your only justification for the reason you should/shouldn't do something, then both your law and your principles are immoral.
@@filiperodrigues97 I remember the "You wouldn't steal a car", well I bet if you could make a perfect copy of a car, for free, and the original owner of the car still had the original copy, everyone would. Just instead of 1 person having/being able to use car, 2 people can.(until you/someone else makes ANOTHER copy, then more people can use it.)
All that law really proves is how corporations have their foot in the door in the US government. I mean I can see a how that conversation started when they made that copyright law. "Yah not everyone is buying our product we made so we want to guarantee they do. Pass some kind of law that does away with this nonesense and I will pay out a happy sum to your wallets"
@@lmcgregoruk the question is, who is going to actually pay for all the hassle which comes with production of the car; all those little screws and drawboards to actually make it work. The effort which you have to exert to produce just single car is enormous. Producing more cars, when you actually worked out how to make it, it's not that hard.
The situation here is, someone actually wants to build nice, very good car, and earn money back from it. All those engineers and welders ain't pay themselves. When he actually wants to sell more of those cars, it turns out everyone already have free copy of what he just did, and he earned big fucking nothing as a reward.
This happens a lot with doujinshi artists. They draw short mangas, which is very hard work and the pay is going to be low for those small artists. If their work is then published left and right around internet, just stolen like that, how is it fair? If they wouldn't draw it, no one would see it in the first place. And yea, some of them stop drawing, just like that. Not worth it.
I don't mind piracy, because on the other hand, I would like to check out the product before buying it, especially if it's expensive. I just don't like "pirate everything" mentality. Video game industry is growing so fast because people are buying their games nowadays. A lot of changed in just 10 years, and especially indie sphere wouldn't exist in it's shape and form without responsible consumers.
22:58 "And now you can get access to pretty much every movie and tv show you've ever watched" Unless it's blocked in your country, for (monetary) reasons. Or some other streaming service hold the rights, so you now have to fork out 100 dollars a month to 10 different streaming services because they each hold the rights to a bit of the stuff you like.
funny how 2 years ago it was in decline but now it's very much the opposite
You kind of oversell streaming services. It's more like "if you want to pay a monthly fee for half the movies you're looking for, or half the music you're looking for, or half the tv shows you're looking for". And spotify doesn't even properly pay the artists, so it's the same as piracy only it's not free. "Pay a fee to get access to Bob's music collection" doesn't sound that appealing when Bob doesn't listen to the same bands I do. Or does listen to the same bands but only has albums that came out on certain record labels (Aphex Twin for example has only half his stuff on spotify, and the division is along record company lines). Plus if you stream it instead of download it you're downloading it over and over again with every listen, instead of just downloading it once and that's it (but it's not costing you hard drive space, one of the only upsides).
you can download playlists on streaming services so you can listen offline. have you used one before?
You forgot that streaming services dont have all songs so u either subscribe to a bunch of services or download it for free.
Yea I’ll stick with my 30TB Seedbox & 50TB Hard Disks vs paying for a streaming service. The people who will pay for 10 streaming services & gripe about a show not being on one of them just seem “simple”.
@@FigmentForever In my experience, it's best to do a bit of both. I like the convenience of having my music library synced across my devices, using Netflix or Disney+ on each of my devices, or Xbox Gamepass. Once in a while there are shows or movies that I want to watch but aren't on the service I currently use, so piracy wins there, but I usually switch services every month anyway, as there's no reason to be subscribed to everything at once.
That’s why you buy from itunes
For me, the reason I stopped torrenting is because I lost interest in movies and others big sized media products, which I could stream anyway.
I also lost interest in big AAA videogames, as opposed to indie games, plus I always lack time and resources to play these movies and games, even small ones, and most importantly video games demand increasingly more hardware requirements very fast, to which my hardware didn't and still hasn't catch up with.
that
F
This was exactly the same reason I stopped too
Now AAA are going live service and free2play would be bad thing due to monetization.
I stopped torrenting because I got caught!! Downloaded a movie and a day later got an email from the studio/piracy police/whoever... freaked me out, I deleted it and deleted uTorrent, never have since ! 🤣 I know VPNs are the way to go but I don't have time for all that....
Adobe becoming subscription base reduces piracy? I thought it is the opposite
it's still pretty easy to pirate new creative cloud software lol...
When I got the money to finally buy it I found out that it's subscription now. So it took another 3 years for me to finally buy subscription. It costs a lot, but I use it quite often for hobbies and university stuff, so it's fine. Their insistence that you pay for whole package, or for nothing, is quite stupid still.
leechers are not just people who own a copy of the file. Leechers are people who only Download, with no upload ratio. leeching bandwidth.
Fun fact: In my country we call it Micro Torrent, instead of 'U' Torrent
Micro torrent is the right pronounciation in my opinion because it’s not an u it’s the Greek letter μ which is basically a m and is the physical SI system prefix for micro.
I think people just call it utorrent because it’s shorter or maybe they don’t know what a μ is.
This thank you! ;)
Its Micro Torrent everywhere...
utorrent is just FASTER to say than myu or micro
@@MaximilianZ96 the greek letter μ is pronounced "Mi", I don't know where people got that "Micro" thing from, sounds fishy.
I also think torrenting will comeback to being popular, there’s too much exclusive tv shows with different streaming providers, makes more sense to torrent for free than to spend another 10$ a month to see the next exclusive tv show
Just to make it clear for everyone: Napster and uTorrent are both using the P2P protocol. It’s not like Torrenting is completely different. The big difference is that Napster is centralized meaning that you had central system managing the data. Abd if this central system is attacked and/or taken offline, the whole system fails. Torrenting on the other hand is decentralized. The is no central system, an attacker can’t do shit to stop the torrenting. That’s why to this day torrenting is still so huge. Because you would have to take down every single seeder/leecher to stop the protocol.
thanks fadais for this detailed forensic explanation. Now I understood what is centralized and decentralized
On a semi-related topic, that's why I like Bitcoin. It's also decentralized, so nobody can stop or censor the transactions on the network.
ISPs can easily block it or throttle it.
@@xorasanorgfor decentralized p2p it is harder and people can also use vpns
@@xorasanorg just as easy as they stopped thepiratebay... ohh wait its still running
Title for this video should be "Poor memory of uTorrent user".
User need good software, and uTorrent is that software now.
Steam is bad example because it's completely different business model. Adobe software is more popular because been pirated for logng time, people know how to use it and more people create content.
Today pirates be like:
*pirating Internet Download Manager to download cracked software without torrents*
P2P was a huge part of my early life, growing up in a lesser-privilaged area i knew how to use both utorrent and tpb flawlessly by the age of 5, thank you to everyone who helped make these technologies possible.
*THIS*
The same in Latin America :')
same in turkey :)
Eastern Europe salutes you ;)
the balkan finds you worthy
I think another reason for piracy being on the low is the rise of free to play games. Back then those of us who wanted to game were mostly pirating stuff, but today kids without money can still play Fortnite or CoD or Roblox etc etc. They can easily spend their whole childhood gaming without needing to spend a cent.
Also RUclips and SoundCloud. They let you watch/listen to stuff for free.
@@negirno Oh yeah, and Spotify. Back in the day the most common way of piracy was downloading songs for your portable device to listen on the go. Now you just use Spotify or any other similar service on your phone and you're good to go.
@@neoshenlong The problem of free spotify is the annoying ads but people usually pay spotify or uses a modified spotify
May need an update on the bit about streaming services at the end. The proliferation of different platforms resulted in fracturing of content so you ended up having to pay multiple services to get everything. And some people have gone back to piracy again.
There was a meme in the video explaining exactly that.
Fun historical thing. In old days, even blizard used torrenting while downloading huge assets like world of warcraft. Their download program was a torrent from their own multiple server localizations. When downloading wow, you were connected to many many servers and getting little chunks of game archive from different servers.
That's used in nearly every launcher today. P2P Downloads is literally what torrenting is
Konami did it with MGS4 back in the day.
And then you could seed it to other computers on your LAN. BBC iPlayer did this too in its first years.
They still do. When you download something from b.net client you download it both from other people and blizzard servers.
@@GummyGruffi it’s been a few years but I tried it with my housemate at the time, we both had P2P enabled in the settings, one of us DL’d the newest patch, then the other. Had wireshark open, both of our computers only reached out to Blizz servers and not to each other (even though it would’ve been far quicker over the gigabit LAN to simply pull it from mine).
My uncle still using it to download movies on his laptop: Well I don't see a problem here
Am using it for like 2-3 years to download movies
I use other torrent software
well my father use it to download movies sometimes on his laptop too
Here to say that pirating adobe products is always morally correct
open source alternatives ain't bad either
I just blocked their ad server on my router and U torrent doesnt show me any ads if I use it. I also have a older version that works better than the junk they offer today.
There's also been a move by AAA gaming companies (EA, Activision, etc...) to release unfinished or broken products for full price, making it morally correct to pirate and share far and wide since the only way to motivate these corporations to stop releasing unfinished products is to make it financially harmful to do so.
Not to mention that pirated copies of games often run better than the legitimate copies due to copy protection software they insist on putting into those games, making a pirated copy the better choice to a legal alternative.
the irony is is that pirating games work often better then legal copies. i have seen that for my self multiple times. especially when crack teams crack the Denuvo crack. we all know that Denuvo is horrible. you will see FPS drops and things like that. so no pirating is still a good option.
@@metalvideos1961 DRM is a mistake, it's purpose was to prevent to copy or share it illegally. But people still know how to crack it, what's the points?
Now it's just to slow the performance because DRM always run in the background
@@rekttt_7374 yap. i have pirated games that run better then with DRM protection. for example. i downloaded Rage 2 through torrents. one of a game reviewer i like to watch (angry joe). did a review about it. he talked about lots of bugs and unexpected game crashes where the game just shut down for no reason. no error or anything. i have finished that game in 1 night never saw bugs glitches or shutdowns. it ran perfectly fine. and so you have more examples of games who run better pirated then legal copies.
@@rekttt_7374 Devs know that. I believe that a DRM's true purpose is to prevent scaring off investors due to piracy concerns, rather than actually making an impact on said piracy.
It doesn't have to work, it just has to be convincing.
I am really, and I say, really sorry, but I cannot agree with gaming being "oh so cheap and good and awesome and all the gamers being happy and holding hands, singing around the campfire with the acoustic guitar", therefore gaming piracy declining. While music and movies\series being debatable (not to mention a couple of bands such as Metallica for example, doing pre-order exclusives) a video game companies are well widely known for their shady practices. Things where you are better off with pirating the game, rather than actually buying it. And device-slowing DRM (that get cracked in one day and you get pirated version, much more improved and performance-friendly), day 1 DLCs, pre-order exclusives, microtransactions, game demanding being online all the time (too bad if you got awful connection), are just a couple of examples where game publishing companies end up screwing the legitimate paying users.
I, for one, am not seeing video game piracy going away anytime soon. Especially considering all those AAA publishers and their games. I do know a lot of people that ended up purchasing the game for the sake of supporting the developers and all the people that put a lot of hard work to it, and thereafter pirating the same game. Just because it is more complete.
On top of that alot of companies are opposed to keeping old games avaible
seventy pissass bucks for a videogame is too much
Well for me I use pirating as a demo because ppl don't fucking make demos these days. lol. If I like it I'll buy it after. But if you made a shit game then byebye.
@@KryaDiere Yeah same.
I’ve been saying this for years, if you get a service that makes watching movies cheaper or playing video games cheaper people will want to be legal and pay for their services. Since the launch of Netflix and Spotify, we saw a decline in pirating. Ever since the launch of Disney + when I realized that the publishers would want in on the Netflix pie and that prices would skyrocket and that would lead to more people pirating again. Statistics now show that pirating has increased again. If corporations actually learned from their mistakes in the 80’s and 90’s when movies and music became too expensive, if they had been less greedy and let Netflix have most shows then people wouldn’t download. Corporations and corporate greed never learn.
exactly. Music, videos and games need to be cheap (and can be, as they are consumed by many, many people!). Also, using the legal service has to be more convenient than pirating the thing. Steam is a great example. Why bother wasting half a day to research for a good torrent, virus check and hassle with the unpacking/install of it when you can just download it in 15 Minutes from Steam. Quite a lot of commercial software vendors have yet to understand this.
Now that Spotify has decided to charge us users for even selecting or seeking or looping songs, many people will happily go back to pirating music.
References to The Who and Twiggy in the same video. This is a man of culture.
I love old tech being explained, I wasn’t around then so I find it very interesting to see old versions of todays things!
Same here, it's pretty cool!
Same bro. This is my favourite channel after marquee Brownlee Retro Tech
same
woah utorrent was still around when I first use the internet (probably aroun 2010 ish ) it's amazing to see how it just suddenly goes disappear
same
Ah yes uTorrent. P2P sharing isn't that old now is it? My god it seems like just yesterday we had the ol' compaq Presario 5000 chugging away on uTorrent. The ads though, man I remember how annoying they were.
I sure was a uTorrent fanatic growing up too!! There was such a charm to the tech of that era. Thanks for watching!!
I have an old version that I blocked all the ads and annoying features on. It's still useful if, _hypothetically-speaking,_ you wanted to download a goodset
@@Thatonedude917 why you didn't switch to anything else instead of manually blocking parts of program?
@@VORASTRA Safer and easier
@@Thatonedude917 i wouldn't say it's safer than opensource analogues, and nothing is hard in most of them
Well, a lot of this might be true for a lot of rich and well developed countries. In the majority of development countries, torrent is still going on, at least with other clients.
I am Dutch and download 1TB at least every single month.
True. Torrenting literally changed my life.
this is a VERY long video.
TLDR:
µTorrent added advertisements to the client.
People asked them to stop
They said no
people moved on to other clients.
The End
Yep I remember that. Saw the ads, didnt like, and then immediately uninstalled lol
Damn.. Looking back at P2P reminds me of the great Web 1.0 times (before 2004-2006) when things really felt exciting rather than common, mundane or even utilitarian. The early days of Web 2.0 were vastly helped by faster connections and still held some of the excitement but now with Web 3.0 around the corner with AR/VR and other things becoming common place, I do like looking back at the old days and enjoying the fact that my browser history was looked at as rubbish that needed deleted as opposed to info the powers that be need to get into my mind, my soul, observe my patterns or use my CPU power.
Yup when you didn't want to let your internet idle, so you download a cad program that you have no intention of using but at least it's using your bandwidth.
I have the exact same feeling. Finding an interesting website on a topic you liked felt like an adventure to escape to, now it's something I am trying to escape from…
- Timestamps -
00:00 Introduction
02:12 Morning Brew Sponsor
03:22 The Cause Of The Fall Of µTorrent
04:47 The Beginning Of µTorrent | Piracy And Napster
05:56 The Comparison Of File Sizes From The Early 2000s
06:59 The Beginning Of The BitTorrent Protocol | The Fastest Way Of Downloading Files
07:30 The Peer-To-Peer (P2P) Method
08:11 How Torrenting Worked
09:35 The Efficiency Of Downloading Files | Having More People Join In
10:26 The Causes And Effects Of Taking Down The Peer-To-Peer (P2P) Network
11:29 The Use Of Torrenting Websites Taking Up Disk Space And Storage
thanks
Thats pretty useless dont you think?
@@bentheman69 How?
@@cameron_j40 you just watch the entire video anyway. Under a compilation or a long video yes, but this is a 10 min video.
@@bentheman69 Bro it's not that serious
I remember when everyone uTorrent was at it's peak.. sad to hear they let that legacy fall due to bad ads...
Nah, torrents are always alive. A lot of copyrighted things can be downloaded only by using torrent trackers. Copyright is an evil thing that want to stop human technological progress - new startups have no chances against "huge monsters" who don't want to do anything new while there is no rivals. But I would prefer qBittorent client.
This is anecdotal but even in Greece I only hear it pronouned as uTorrent, only in the first few years that it got here did you hear it as mee-Torent. (μ is actually pronounced mee in Greek, not myu).
Just a small note.
That's pretty clever actually. You could pronounce it either as "me (μ) torrent" or "you (u) torrent".
I used to call it micro-torrent
@@Ignas_ It IS MicroTorrent.
μF - Micro Farad as in the measure of charge a capacitor can hold.
@@Mrshoujo THIS!
_> Insert Michael Scott "Thank you!" GIF_
It is pronounced "micro torrent". Not mee or U torrent
All these anti piracy techniques only seem to be affecting the legit users while pirated copies run without a care in the world. Activision is a great example for forcing it's always on DRM to save or play Crash Bandicoot 4 where many users have bought the legit game but out of pure protest would only play the pirated version which you do not have to worry about internet breaking up and losing your progress.
"You can get access to every movie and tv show you've ever watched for $10 a month?" No. Not anymore. If you want access you have to spend $10 each on at least 6+ streaming services. So you're paying over $60 per month for access.
Also Adobe being subscription based is actually worse because you pay more money in the long run. Instead of paying a one time fee of $60 to have it for 10 years you're paying $20 per month FOREVER. In fact due to this new sub model MORE people are pirating photoshop now. Same with their being too many streaming services people hate it
Yep, and now that there are a billion streaming services where all the movies and series are scattered I'm dusting off the good ol' pirate hat.