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Comment by tux1968 | Hacker News Reader

tux1968

Sure, but a slim fraction of people who currently download content with bittorrent will resort to this. This will dramatically decrease the number of seeders and thus reduce the effectiveness of torrents even for those willing to pay for a seedbox. In any case, it will increase the cost of downloading pirated content and make legal options more attractive.

Once the vast majority of casual piracy is curtailed, more more focused enforcement against people on private trackers / seedbox providers etc can begin.

Sure there will be loopholes and ways for determined pirates to slip through the cracks, but the days where everyone and their brother can grab pirated content without worry are numbered.

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> This will dramatically decrease the number of seeders and thus reduce the effectiveness of torrents even for those willing to pay for a seedbox.

Not on any of the private trackers that I use. The speed of the downloads has never been an issue because there are already a few people with seedboxes on every torrent, ensuring that downloads are always fast.

Moreover, this program is only in the US, where people have super shitty Internet speeds anyway - most of the times I'm downloading and there are no seedbox peers, it's someone in Europe with a fast connection who's sending me the bulk of the data. Those people will keep downloading regardless of what happens in the US.

Finally, the types of people who frequent private trackers are exactly those who would be willing to rent a seedbox. Ultimately, this will only hurt the ISPs. Right now I pay for the fastest U-Verse connection I can get. If AT&T starts sending me these notices, I'll just downgrade my speed and use the leftover money to rent a seedbox.

What legal options?

Actually watching things on a physical tv?

Sure, or Hulu or whatever. Remember this enforcement isn't world-wide, it's only in the USA for now.

Yeah, this enforcement will likely expand beyond the US as they are pressing very hard in every trade negotiation. But legal options will expand over time as well.

It's only a matter of time until the US media organizations starts putting political pressure on others to implement the same thing. The only difference is we have no legal way at all to obtain the content.

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