Twenty years ago, a group of friends shot a Matrix fan film on a limited budget. Sharing their creation with the rest of the word initially appeared to be too expensive, but then they discovered a new technology called BitTorrent. Fast forward two decades and their “Fanimatrix” release is the oldest active torrent that’s still widely shared today.
That’s amazing. When reading the headline, I assumed it’d be some copyrighted blockbuster – not something the creators actually wanted to share via BitTorrent.
Thom Holwerda,
At least in the US P2P sharing was drastically curtailed by way of copyright takedown notices. ISPs that don’t comply with cutting off sharers are responsible for paying legal damages. Consequently much of the copyrighted material being shared has gotten taken down.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/1-billion-piracy-ruling-could-force-isps-to-disconnect-more-internet-users/
This prevents blockbusters from holding this record.
Lol no.
First of all, torrents cannot really be “taken down”, as long as someone has the original torrent file (or a magnet link to it) and a copy of the data the torrent corresponds to, it’s still up. And they can re-upload it to any torrent-hosting site without changing the creation date of the torrent or the data. So, it’s entirely possible the first copyright-infringing torrent is alive out there.
Also, in practice there is a clear distinction between sites that play by the rules of the DMCA (either we are talking minimum compliance or going above and beyond to appease advertisers like YouTube does) and sites that completely ignore the DMCA (I can name 3 such sites off the top of my head, all of them torrent sites, but won’t because I don’t know if Thom allows it). For the second category, they host some really old torrents (15+ years) that are still active, because they don’t take anything down and even host older torrents from sites that have shut down. Thing is, early releases would be unacceptable today in terms of quality, and that’s the real reason they tend to die off.
kurkosdr,
Unequivocally yes actually. Tons of content that used to be on bittorrent is gone. Have you ever searched for something that’s still indexed but not downloadable? That’s because none of the sources for it remain online anymore.
You aren’t wrong that there are other reasons as well. But the takedown notices have punished those who were the backbone of P2P sharing. The migration to subscription services has been driven by a combination of stick and carrot.
Who exactly? I concede there are wack-a-mole cases with illegal sources evading the law by changing jurisdictions.
P2P worked great when people didn’t fear consequences for sharing but in countries where copyright laws are enforced the disconnection of sources has rendered P2P networks far less reliable than they used to be.
BTW the effect of legal action against users and ISPs is that they make it harder for Average Joe to access the copyright-infringing content that’s out there. Trying to take all that copyright-infringing content down when there are sites that don’t even play by the DMCA rules and host 15+ year-old popular copyright-infringing torrents is a lost game, and the content owners know it.
So what do the content-owners do instead? They make it harder for average users to access those torrents. You need a VPN just to avoid getting sued, which is a subscription that could buy you access to a streaming service instead, and then you need a VPN with port-forwarding functionality to be able to share/seed properly and not being a net drag on the torrent (which affects your own download speed too), and most people don’t even know what port-forwarding is (I use ProtonVPN btw, one or the few VPN services that offers port-forwarding).
But this doesn’t change the fact that the first copyright-infringing torrent could still be out there.
Reminds me the first Matrix fanfilm I watched, Lope Prod from France : http://web.archive.org/web/20070829185926/http://www.lopeprod.com/ -> “The Matrix 1” / “The Matrix 2” in “Les films de série B”. I still have all the files 🙂