please, god, stop talking about where you do piracy on public forums. stop talking about specific sites. don’t name services. don’t link links. don’t respond to shutdowns with recommendations on where to go next. stop airing this out publicly. you are not shepherding the masses. you are plattering cash for salivating IP lawyers if you do literally anything other than reply ‘DMs’ when talking publicly about anything that is even in a light-gray area.
the worst type of posting, all time, is when a piracy site is shut down and all of the absolute lemmings (not an insult I usually like to use!) immediately decide to pile into the thread of the news post reporting this and go “🙏 thank GOD they didn’t get” and then practically post the entire WHOIS lookup for their favorite service alongside the specific products they love to consume on there with an appended “like where else would I watch [MEDIA PROPERTY] 😭”
look. I get it 
we grew up in the panopticon. chronic oversharing online is, IMO, the most prominent feature that gaps millenials and gen Z.
still, you fucking snitch-addicted neuron beasts need to learn discretion! you are skirting the law! your posts are public! you know what I would do if I was a corporate copyright lawyer? hitch a fucking RSS feed to every single news post about a piracy site shutdown and watch as hundreds of people tell on themselves for, what I assume, comes down to:
my site not mentioned in comments must confirm others share qualia with me
heh, theyre using that site? lmao, get with the program (my site)
ah, it seems the users of this service are lost sheep, allow me to recommend my own illicit service so they shall find their way
and compile the services they VOLUNTEER UP TO THE CHOPPING BLOCK FOR THE NEXT DOSSIER BECAUSE THE VERY CONCEPT OF PRIVACY AND DISCRETION HAS BEEN SKINNER-BOXXED OUT OF PEOPLE WHO REFUSE TO EVEN REDIRECT THEIR RECOMMENDATIONS TO DMs BECAUSE THEY ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO SAY SOMETHING BEFORE OTHER PEOPLE SAY IT! THEY HAVE TO CAPTURE THE ZEITGEIST! THEY HAVE TO BE TAPPED IN! THEY HAVE TO LET OTHERS KNOW THEY ARE TAPPED IN! THEY REQUIRE IMMEDIATE UNINTERRUPTED FEEDBACK ON EVERYTHING! EVEN WHEN THEY ARE SKIRTING THE LAW!
i don’t think IP lawyers are crawling tweets or public forum posts to figure out what piracy sites need to be shut down lol. 99% of the time, like you said, it is because these services are all owned by a handful of people and fold immediately when they sent a DMCA/threatening legal letter.
Things like Switch emulation/piracy, yeah - to a degree I agree with you, but I think 99% of the time, the reason ‘popular emulator’ or ‘popular mod for game’ gets shut down is because they wind up taking money for development or forming a goddamn LLC - I’m looking at you Yuzu/Citra.
To be fair, in the end, all this is easily solved by piracy sites/etc doing a simple registration test and/or requiring like a consistent ratio for seeding/downloading; which more should certainly do.
The companies the IP lawyers use are using ai to find links going by how Vimms got DMCA’d recently
I really doubt this to be anything other than hearsay. For over a decade, Vimm was one of the largest and most consistent sources of ROMs. It still is, in fact. Why would any anti-piracy association not be aware of it?
Just consider the words on this page if you think the problem was people sharing the site as a place to get ROMs. https://vimm.net/email
One of the companies that issued some of the DMCA’s was MarkMonitor
One of the things Nintendo cited in its lawsuit against Yuzu was that the developers knowingly developed Yuzu to enable piracy. How can such a claim be made? How could Nintendo possibly argue that Yuzu developers encouraged piracy, and not just people’s legitimate backups of their own games?
Because the Yuzu devs, in a massive self-own, decided to implement telemetry. IIRC it was opt-out telemetry, but it doesn’t even matter if it was opt in or out. Part of this telemetry data was to show what games users were playing, presumably to understand the popular games (as if this couldn’t be determined from actual sales data) and possibly to focus on fixing up those titles.
Well wouldn’t you know it, Tears of the Kingdom leaked like a whole two weeks in advance of its actual release date. And guess what showed up in big numbers on the Yuzu telemetry data? TOTK. Therefore, Yuzu developers knew it was used for piracy, because they had the data to prove it against themselves. Moronic.
This is why I think private torrent sites are the only long term hope for preservation. They have a barrier of entry that brings them less heat, hopefully they’re keeping an index of all of their torrents constantly available to trusted users in the case of shutdowns, and p2p sharing is the only way to guarantee reasonable levels of data duplication (and why I’d actually like to see bonus point reductions for seedbox users, but I recognize that’s a misaligned financial incentives problem in a space that’s less ideologically driven than it should be).
Hosting in regions that aren’t friendly to the country of origin’s copyright infringement complaints of whatever content they host is also critical.
Yuzu was also an exceedingly stupid situation. Terrible opsec, terrible LLC formation, terrible operational separation (Citra main dying as collateral)
Naa. The incentives of these things are fucked. The one time I was on a private tracker I downloaded a bunch of sheet music (because it was a rare, interesting thing I couldn’t find on public trackers). I got banned because I could not fix my ratio because nobody else was downloading this sheet music. Private trackers drive people to download and share popular slop to keep their ratios high. They don’t do much to motivate people to download and seed rare shit. Good for sharing popular media, but if you go out of your way to download / seed rare files you will be punished. I have absolutely no faith in them as an archival solution, beyond the general rule that it never hurts to have more copies of anything.
Bonus point systems are largely the solution to that problem. On the trackers I’m on rare torrents (low seeds) generate higher bonus points that can be redeemed for upload credit. Additional multiplier for the size of the torrent as well. There are many sites that offer pittances of point solutions which is a serious misstep for preservation’s sake and the seedbox referral incentive problem exacerbates issues for sites without good bonus point systems.
The largest movie, TV, anime, book, and game private trackers all have some form of bonus points. Not having them was supposed to be an incentive to actually upload and contribute because seeding is kind of the bare minimum of contributions.
Several of them are ratio free if you upload a certain number of torrents.
Its only really a problem still on music sites, which instead hand out tons of tokens and have easy public options for anyway.
Private trackers are absolutely awful. It’s completely counterintuitive to the spirit of pirating in the first place. Hopefully torrenting over I2P becomes a thing in the future.
Never got this ‘they’re against the spirit’ thing when they’re the only people actively going out of their way to fill requests for the rare stuff people want. Nobody is traveling to their public library and hand scanning books for random people on pirate bay who won’t even seed it. People on private trackers absolutely do that because there’s a culture of reciprocation. I’ve done this several times because I know that my own requests will be fulfilled by someone else in the future.
I think you can attribute that phenomenon to community than private vs public tracker