Külföldi torrent oldalak Conversation I Had "irl" About Filesharing

Do you guys ever have conversations with your friends about torrenting/filesharing, especially if they are non-filesharers or casual filesharers? As I wrote in a previous blog article, I refrain from discussing my "little hobby" with people until I am sure I can trust talking with them. A few people I know fileshare, but I know no one who uses private trackers in real life except for that guy at work who first told me about them, and he moved away years ago.

But every once in awhile, the topic comes up with people who don't know much about it, or very little at most. Now obviously I'm very careful if the people I talk to work in the entertainment businesses, since they have been told many times that filesharing will directly hurt them economically and they believe it. But anyway, I was having a lunch meeting with some business associates and after we finished talking business we were just talking about random stuff, and then Napster came up. One guy just said "Oh Napster. Back in college my friends and I used to use that a lot, but they shut it down." So just to get his opinion on filesharing, I let him talk. He had no qualms admitting that he downloaded music during Napster and knew it wasn't illegal back in the day. I mentioned the DMCA law had not passed so it wasn't illegal. The guy said he stopped downloading music when he heard of some lady who got in huge trouble doing it, and he said "the Feds had a way of looking into her computer and knew exactly what she was doing." Well I had to set his facts straight. I think he was talking about the Jammie Thomas case, and Thomas wasn't prosecuted by the "Feds" but was sued, and the reason the people suing knew what she was doing was because she openly shared her music collection her computer. (I believe she used some sort of Direct Connect Hub which does expose a public folder on your computer to the world.) Another guy at lunch had this frightened look on his face and said "I just download from iTunes. $1.29 isn't too much to pay and getting caught like that sounds scary." So that's when I decided to open up a bit. I flat out told them I was not against peer-to-peer filesharing for personal use and that the laws are wrong to ban it. They actually didn't disagree with me, and both seemed more afraid of filesharing because of the consequences of "getting caught" rather than be against it out of principle.

The guy talking about Napster then went on to say after Napster died, he heard of something called an "FTP Server" where if you get invited to access one, you can get all sorts of stuff and never get caught. I played dumb and asked why the authorities just don't shut the server down, and he said the owners of those servers use proxies to prevent the server from being found. (So this guy wasn't so naive about filesharing as I thought. ) I think he must have been talking about a scene dump site or something similar. Since I have private trackers, I have no need to access any FTP servers.

Then the guy who was afraid of filesharing opened up and said he knew a guy who bragged about his 1 TB external hard drive with "every movie you can think of." (Must not be HD movies if it is only 1 TB worth of data ) He also talked about the ready availability of DVD screeners of movies still in theaters. He said those who have them (and there are quite a few in Los Angeles) openly share them with their close friends and relatives. I mentioned those screeners have codes so if they leak to the internet the person who possessed the original disk can get caught, and the guy said that's why those who own screeners are careful who they share their disks with. (Again, there was no moralistic objection to these people sharing DVD screeners of movies still showing in theaters!)

Anyway, what's my whole point of this? It's that my experience in talking to the "general public" about this is that there aren't any huge objections to filesharing. The only ones that do object either work in entertainment or are the kind of guys who believe in following the law to the letter and would not want you driving 70 mph on a freeway with a 65 mph speed limit.