For instance, say I search for “The Dark Knight” on my Usenet indexer. It returns to me a list of uploads and where to get them via my Usenet provider. I can then download them, stitch them together, and verify that it is, indeed, The Dark Knight. All of this costs only a few dollars a month for me.
My question is, why can’t copyright holders do this as well? They could follow the same process, and then send takedown requests for each individual article which comprises the movie. We already know they try to catch people torrenting so why don’t they do this as well?
I can think of a few reasons, but they all seem pretty shaky.
- The content is hosted in countries where they don’t have to comply with takedown requests.
It seems unlikely to me that literally all of it is hosted in places like this. Plus, the providers wouldn’t be able to operate at all in countries like the US without facing legal repercussions.
- The copyright holders feel the upfront cost of indexer and provider access is greater than the cost of people pirating their content.
This also seems fishy. It’s cheap enough for me as an individual to do this, and if Usenet weren’t an option, I’d have to pay for 3+ streaming services to be able to watch everything I do currently. They’d literally break even with this scheme if they could only remove access to me.
- They do actually do this, but it’s on a scale small enough for me not to care.
The whole point of doing this would be to make Usenet a non-viable option for piracy. If I don’t care about it because it happens so rarely, then what’s the point of doing it at all?
I mean, how does usenet compare to just pulling torrents from public trackers?
Is there a good way of searching to find out if something is available before diving in?
I don’t really know how usenet compares - and private trackers seem quite a pain and haven’t ever really had anything I couldn’t find on public trackers anyways.
If what you want is recent within the last 10-20 years or older but popular, Usenet is far superior, if it’s available it will always download as fast as your connection will allow Vs torrents which also needs seeders in addition to simply being available, and then ofc you’re beholden to those seeder’s upload bandwidths.
If what you want is obscure and/or old, torrenting is probably your best bet, especially since you can just leave the download “open” and download it byte by byte over months if you so choose. But even then, it’s still worth checking Usenet since you never really know what people will upload and when. If someone reuploads something obscure/ancient and then is never seen again it doesn’t matter, you’ll still be able to download it fast until it’s removed or until it’s retention expires (about 10 years for the good providers)
2 main advantages:
no hosting liability. Unlike torrents; you’re not seeding ie hosting the files yourself. You’re purely downloading. This moves you out of the crosshairs of copyright holders as they are only interested in the hosts (providers). This also means a VPN is not necessary for usenet downloading. (providers don’t log who downloads what either)
speed. As long as the content is available (hasn’t been removed due to dmca/ntd), you are always downloading at the maximum connection speed between you and your provider. No waiting/hoping for seeds and whatever their connections can provide. I’m usually at around 70mb/s. Where as torrents very very rarely broke 10mb/s for me, usually struggling to reach 1mb/s.
As far as availability goes, stats from my usenet client: of 17m articles requested this month, 78% were available. I’m only using a single usenet provider. That availability percentage can be improved by using more than one in different jurisdictions (content is difficult to remove from multiple servers across different regions).