[PN] Future of file sharing sites!

Safin

Safin

Skilled
As the news of the crackdown on Megaupload.com hit the internet, it became very clear that we don't need laws such as the SOPA and PIPA to crackdown on piracy and illegal content on the internet.

What started with Megaupload has had cascading effect with many major file hosting services acting swiftly to remove their affiliate programs and curtailing third party data sharing services, the very essence of their existence in the first place.

Earlier today, FileSonic disabled all sharing functionality on its site. "Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally," the company said in a note on its Web site.

Similarly, uploaded.to now has a message for U.S. visitors that says, "Our service is currently unavailable in your country. Sorry about that."

Fileserver, another big name in the cyberlocker market has mirrored the actions of Filesonic, telling its users that they can only download files they have uploaded themselves.

Many other web sites have done similar things including Videobb, Videozer, Filejungle, Uploadstation and Filepost. It gets worse, with some users' files being deleted and even accounts shut down

At the time of writing this story, the updated list of file sharing sites currently blocked are:

The following filehosts have completely turned off filesharing. No files can be downloaded from their sites:
  • Filesonic
  • Fileserve
  • Filejungle
  • UploadStation
  • UploadBox
  • x7.to

The following hosts are either down or have blocked all of USA:
  • Megaupload (permanently down)
  • Uploaded.to (blocked all of USA)

In the backdrop of what has happened, what do you think is the future of the industry? Could popular offerings like Dropbox, Box, or YouSendIt be targets? And is there a legitimate business that can be built out of a service whose maximum appeal lies with the pirates in the first place?

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Services like Dropbox are not built keeping the pirates in their view. Also their business model does not support the large bandwidths and Anonymity that pirates need. If we take Dropbox the only thing that anyone can earn is 250Mb space per Referral which is nothing compared to top file sharing sites like MU,RS,FS etc. They all have affiliate programs which encourages users to upload content which is more likely to be downloaded. The only content that is downloaded thousands of times is pirated content. MegaUpload Case definitely created ripples among the file sharing sites but i don't think this is the end they will find a solution to this and get back on their feet. Another opinion that is growing is that " If the companies can offer Legitimate stuff for reasonable prices there will be a drastic change in piracy levels". I agree with that , If i can get the whole FRIENDS series for Rs 1500 i would buy that but now it actually costs approx 25k .
 
Actually, one might think that in the view of the closure of MU without SOPA/PIPA, there would have been no need for the latter in the first place. But, the difference between the current laws and SOPA/PIPA is that under the latter, several newer restrictions like search engines removing links from their search queries and DNS redirects would become more prominent. So ensure that the death of SOPA/PIPA was needed.

By shutting down MU, the US thinks it will send out a strong anti piracy signal to the rest of the world. However, in most of the cases, it has tried to arm twist many of the governments into doing what it wants. By means of banning imports from those countries OR complete embargoes. An example in point is Spain. Another point is Russia.

But the fact is that cyber lockers could be used for legal purposes too! Many of the free apps for any OS are usually hosted on such sites so that there is no burden on the authors site. Ditto for custom ROM's for various phones, like Android, Windows Mobile etc.... And lets not forget drivers for our beloved Windows.....

In the case of the free apps and ROM's, I am sure many will agree that it would be downloaded several times, maybe not as much as copyright content, but a sizable figure none the less.

The first issue with piracy that the MAFIAA and others take into consideration is that each content pirated is both theft and a lost sale. There is no valid reasoning for this for several reasons. Firstly, in the age of digital content, in order to make the extra copy, there is no extra cost involved as in physical content. Secondly, the fact that it is a lost sale is of utmost stupidity! If anyone could not buy to the item, say books OR music, we would either lend it or not buy it at all, rather listen to it on the radio/TV in the case of music. Thirdly, pricing is another sore point. In case of digital downloads, pricing should be more down to earth and not similar to those of the CD's. Finally, in case of Movies/TV serials, there should not be any difference between local/regional availability and international availability.

IMO, the future of cyberlockers is very bleak as it is practically very difficult to monitor what content is uploaded to them each time.
 
They (the anti pirate lobbyist groups) will fall into more trouble. Piracy can never be stopped. The more they try the more people will want to do it. They should have just sold the digital print on their sites for $9 a copy. That would have got them more than what they spend running after sites like megaupload and whoever comes into their minds.

The only thing this will lead to is that some really good enterprising people might find a new way of sharing content without anyone being able to track it or which will make it harder for people to track it. The other change would be people will shift to torrents or usenet groups or will just do what they used to do when there was no high speed internet in the old days - rip dvd's or blurays after taking them on hire.
 
The mpaa or whatever group which is after piracy has the confidence that people are addicted to consuming media and the only thing that is standing between them and making billions out of that addiction is piracy . What they are not understanding is that people wont start buying because there is no other way. If such thing as a non pirated internet occurs people just stop consuming content. In order to create such fictional world, usa will destroy itself. As soon as restrictions start to fall on the companies they start to move out of the country. May be not this time but this eventually happen . But when that happens they will really see how a medium like internet can effect economies. Already the european countries are thinking of replacing dollar as base currency. I am telling all this because its about the money after all.
 
IMO, another point to be noted is that for each copy, they charge again. Case in example is that if you already own a VCD/DVD copy of a movie, you will need to pay again for a BD rip of the same. There should be a mechanism to make this free as you already own a copy of the movie.

Also, considering the returns the MAFIAA has made on sueing copyright violaters, AFAIK, they have not even recovered half the amount that was spent on lawyers
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I've read on many US sites about the main reason people dowload or torrent movies there. Its cause they pay 20 bucks for a movie and have to still watch anti piracy trailers which come one after the other without anyway to stop or fast forward them. You get the movie menu only after these trailers have played which is about 5 mins playing time. I bought some TV series and found this very same problem. It was like they were scolding me for buying their dvds and they had the idea that every person on the planet is a pirate. It became so irritating after a while that i felt like breaking the discs.

The other point is like @vivek said above. People are not allowed to rip their discs for playback on other media devices and need to shell out more for that. Add to that drm, hdcp etc.

So people just download from torrents since they get to see the movies as soon as they hit the play button.

And is there a legitimate business that can be built out of a service whose maximum appeal lies with the pirates in the first place?
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yes, there is. remove the copy protection crap and make content accessible to the whole world. right now, there are region and country restrictions on most goods. look at the anime industry in japan. its fallen into bad times cause of this regionalism. they sell most (around 80-90%) of stuff in japan only. the rest 10% in usa i guess. with rising costs companies are closing down and publications are finding it hard to earn money. so they end up increasing the prices of discs to insane amount of more than 40 bucks per dvd. some blurays cost around 500 dollars for the series. With such prices its hardly rocket science that people choose to get stuff for free rather than pay a premium. So the industry blames piracy for their downfall instead of pointing fingers at their own shortcomings.

They could have made it simple if they just opened a digital content safe and sell conent for cheap prices so that any person can buy files online and save it to his online account and access it from any device for one price. they could also use fansubs services to sub japanese manga and anime. but since such a service is not present there are scores of people pirating content. from manga to tv series. The greedy short sighted usa media companies are in the very same fast lane to closing down. In the end these companies have only themselves to blame for alienating themselves from people.
 
instead of spending all that money on the lawyers the best thing they could do is studios start a membership programme with a nominal amount where in he gets access to all studio releases on stream.

the number of hits alone would alone create enough money to keep their business going strong and also reduce piracy.

but with greedy upper brass of the companies will never understand this.
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The US companies are shooting themselves.First if they think they can stop piracy they are fools.Piracy can never be stopped even if SOPA and PIPA comes into being.I am sure that they will come into effect shortly.Its not that pirates are making them lose the business.The whole ecosystem ie downloading(revenues for ISPs),storing(revenues for harddisk companies)songs/movies(revenues for the brands)is supported by pirates.If a pirate is impressed with a song or a video he will go and buy the disk(ofcourse not all but majority of people do)thereby boosting their sales.People will not just pay for insane crap movies.They will download the movies see if it is crap and if it is good they might buy the disk or support the movie by word of mouth to their friends and just add to the revenue to the companies involved.The days of crap product being sold is gone.They should realise that and take this as an opportunity by making another model instead of adding region restrictions on to movie disks.

So the future of piracy is bright.New models of sharing will come into being.Right now private trackers in case of torrents cannot be touched.Its only the public trackers where they will try to track the users.

Countries like Iran,Cuba,Venezuela,North Korea,Russian Federation can make use of this opportunity to make billions instead of oil.

An Model which i propose is giving rating to private trackers so that users can safely download without the fear of a bustup.So surely alternative models will come into being.So nothing to be worried about.If google implements the dns takedown then pirate search engines will come into being.Google knows it will lose out so it will oppose SOPA and PIPA but can Google withstand govt pressure.Lets wait and watch.
 
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