Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes. Usually some kind of ADR, like someone talking off camera. There's an episode where Reese rents an apartment and there's a recurring bit of him talking to his depressed neighbour through the wall. But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio, so it's just Reese having a one-sided conversation with a wall. We saw multiple episodes where something like this happened, and when I looked online there were reports of it dating back years.
Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. No one providing official routes to this media seems to care. You have AI-upscaled "4k" movies where the actors don't even look like themselves and there are hallucinated artifacts and things that aren't there. Images cropped to widescreen, like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. TV series with edits or entire episodes removed because they were deemed too offensive. Movies and shows randomly appearing and disappearing so you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Just a nightmare.
I am happy to speak with my wallet and tell the services to get lost and I'd be heading back to TPB if I were still in a phase of my life where discussing the latest Battlestar Galactica, Lost or Game of Thrones was a central focus of my socialization - as it is though, the cost to follow the Intended Method™ is simply too expensive in money, discovery time, and platform bugs for me to give a damn.
Maybe they'll learn their lesson again and sanity will reign - but the current media pricing is too expensive (in a myriad of ways) for the value it's providing.
Are our institutions this incapable?
On the other hand Microsoft is very much leading with OpenAI in vacuuming any content, stripping effectively copyright claims.
That being said, nowadays the only use case for me to use Pirate Bay is when I cannot get a movie elsewhere. I'd pay for it but it's not possible - because of copyright...
edit: I'm very sorry for making a relevant comment that extrapolate on the content of the shared article.
> TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse.
> As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. At least then you can quit while you’re on top. I think I left TPB just a little bit after that top, and not when it’s as shitty as it was when it was closed today. It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160712155638/http://blog.broke...
Entire generations of people have no idea something exists
So the real pirates was the swedish government. It's time to completely change the whole government. Back in 2006 they thought they targeted only few individuals. I am sure there are many more people who don't support what the swedish government did. Did they ever apologize for serving US corporations here? How much financial kickback did they get there?
Google had been asked to remove Pirate Bay in results. They didn't. On Google, and I don't really know how it changed over the years, but there'd be a notice about links removed due to DMCA, if it came to that, basically. (Okay, Youtube, which they own, has always been a bit aggressive, and that isn't nothing)
Facebook? Facebook wouldn't let you SEND a link to PB in private messages. It still deletes your post now if you link Anna's Archive. This after apparently heavily scraping LibGen
I don't love Google for a lot of reasons but I damn well feel better using it compared to Mr. "Dumb Fucks"
Obligatory classic joke:
Have you seen the new show? It's on Tubu. It's literally on Heebee. It's on Poodee with ads. It's literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it's on Gumpy. It's a Pheebo original. It's on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log onto Poob right now. Go to Poob. Dive into Poob. You can Poob it. It's on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you.
I'm vaguely aware that other people than the original group are running it now.
Also, I don't torrent much, but it seems pretty stagnant and dead. It's been occasionally useful to me to find older stuff that doesn't seem to be well represented on newer (public) sites.
>... like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons.
My collection of The Simpsons, seasons 1-13, are all TV rips from waaaaayyyyy back in the 00's. Sure, it's not super high-quality, but at least they don't look like the ugly remasters (on some of the ones I've tried watching on Disney+, they look like someone's drawn over the old cells), the aspect ratio is the original so nothing's missing and, as a personal bonus, they've got the old Q13 logo in the bottom (I grew up in western WA). They still look great on my newer TV.
Edit: Oh, and the Michael Jackson episode never suddenly disappeared from my library.
This sounds pretty unlikely. It's more likely that there's an issue with your surround system, and that audio "should" be coming from your rear speakers but for some reason it's not.
1. buy movie on iTunes 2. have kids that can't do long distance drives 3. obtain dvd players for car 4. realized I can't play films that I "bought" on DVD players
It feels like the "Buy" button on iTunes/Apple TV is misleading, and should be renamed to "License to watch on Apple devices". Obvious in hindsight, but this type of DRM severely restricts use cases.
It's not particularly strange; the rationale for organizations like Microsoft and OpenAI is to be immune to any and all rules that could possibly foreseeably impact shareholder value. If you're not paying for their wares, you're impacting shareholder value. If you're asking them to actually license out content that they're training an AI on, you're impacting shareholder value.
Rules for thee, not for me, especially when it makes me - the special person who charitably graces society with my presence - a rich person.
We (the users) have to concern ourselves with how big the file is. And TPB tends to surface the most popular stuff first.
Usually a 1080p re-encode is good enough quality for me. And a lot of the time if I'm looking for a movie to watch right away I'd rather just get it fast so I can start watching.
For anyone who doesn't know, the KLF took a million pounds in cash, and set it on fire. For no obvious reason.
A show like The Simpsons is both. The viewers care about the art, and we tolerate the product to get it. The creators are creating art, compromising with the corporation and broadcaster to make it enough of a product. But the corp/broadcaster only care about the product. The art is the chocolate around the advertising pill.
So when the product-minded people control preservation and resharing of the product, the art always gets compromised. Jokes are clipped. Audio is broken. Episodes are pulled. For all the wrong reasons.
Even the music industry (of all of them!) mostly gave up.
Only Hollywood and the wider film/TV industry is so stubborn.
I torrent TPB because it's what people know. I don't care for private trackers, I just want to support the common torrenters.
Of course buying a movie on itunes means you can only watch it on capable devices. You can't play a youtube video on a VHS player either.
2. Usenet is still alive and thriving for this.
3. Libraries still exist and you can rent and rip media there
4.Internet Archive is a great resource for old stuff
5. Just buy physical copies and rip em. Can check eBay etc.
People I know watch less and less each year. I don't think it's because they're getting older, as the reasons they cite usually revolves around how the source material has been butchered.
And if subscriber numbers were still going up, I sincerely doubt that the producers kept increasing the subscription cost over the last few years.
Honestly, I think that soft power has been massively damaged too, with people looking for less virtue signalling and less asinine gender swaps along with contrived homosexuality in their media
Not to mention you can just open the download page from within qBittorrent.
Not a single Utaban episode is there, even though there's many on youtube.
In some Netflix shows, they say words in the english audio that are translated in French with different words with a similar meaning, and with english close-caption words that are also different from the original english audio.
Quite amazing.
Why can’t I get the file and put it on another device? Why can’t I burn it to a dvd? It makes sense that Apple aren’t required to make more software for random devices, but why can’t I have the file and do what I want with it?
People can say what they want about piracy, but it continues to be what I consider a necessity against culturally important media being further tainted by rent seekers looking to make another buck in any way they can.
Also just Google "malcolm in the middle missing audio" and you'll find a ton of people with the issue
https://www.reddit.com/r/malcolminthemiddle/comments/1kggg7d...
This also reminded me of another issue - the show was filmed to be broadcast in 4:3 but apparently someone along the line decided 16:9 is inherently better, so they put out the show in widescreen and now there's a ton of shots where you can see things you're not supposed to see. Someone else standing in for an actor that wasn't there when they filmed, or a toy doll in place of a real baby because they filmed on a day the baby actor wasn't there.
Also, IIRC, there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes.
edit: turns out music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free!
To me content often implies a kind of volume of work. Always be posting. Don’t miss a few days or your viewers go elsewhere. Lots and lots of content!
The concerns of a product are the salability. Is has to fit perfectly into a 22 mins slot. It can’t upset the wrong people. It has to fit the mood and culture that our advertisers want. Etc.
I would never underestimate the lengths people are willing to go to to 'crack' games. Countless online-only games have been cracked with users reverse engineering the network protocol and writing their own servers. LLMs will probably greatly ease that process as well.
this era is well and truly over. you've got pre-release hypervisor bypasses and then a conventional crack a couple weeks later.
edit: i might've misinterpreted your comment, i expect some older denovo titles might never get the modern treatment
I used to do this kind of things decades ago, but there was also still a few things not ripped and uploaded you had _some_ chance of participating.
Nowadays I imagine ~everything under the sun is already ripped, so how can you contribute to seed ratio? (or is that not even a thing anymore?)
- Normal User, no special status (No Skull) - Trusted (Pink Skull) - VIP (Green Skull) - Helper (Blue Skull, Legacy) - Moderator (Black MOD Tag) - Super Moderator (Red MOD Tag) - Administrator (Black ADMIN Tag)
https://pirates-forum.org/Thread-ThePirateBay-Want-Trusted-V...
A lot of mainstream stuff is ripped already, the “ratio” on some is more if you download a torrent, they want you to seed it for x amount of time or seed it back x amount to the community. I don’t know of any that expect you to be ripping and uploading that way, it’s recommended but a lot have groups for mainstream content.
There are a few “elitist” private trackers that require “interviews” and stuff, but don’t let that scare you off 99% of them are all just grab and invite or sign up and seed back to community for the week or so minimum (preferably longer) and your good to go!
hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate bay (and then looks for dvd's on ebay / libraries)
Music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free, so you can definitely burn CDs with them.

There are a handful of traditions we have at TorrentFreak, and remembering the first raid on The Pirate Bay is one of them.
It was not only the first major story we covered, it also shaped how the piracy ecosystem evolved over the years. And it changed the lives of the site’s co-founders, who were eventually convicted.
What many people may not realize, however, is that without a few keystrokes in the site’s early days, it would be a distant memory today.
This is what happened.
On May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. They had instructions to take the site’s servers offline as part of a criminal probe, following pressure from the US government.
As the police were about to enter, Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij knew something wasn’t quite right. Both men said they had noticed being tailed by private investigators. This time, however, their servers were the target.
At around 10:00 in the morning, Gottfrid told Fredrik that there were police officers at their office. He asked his colleague to head down to the co-location facility and get rid of the ‘incriminating evidence’, although none of it, whatever it was, related to The Pirate Bay.
As Fredrik was leaving, he suddenly realized the problems might be linked to their torrent tracker. Just in case, he decided to make a full backup of the site.
When he arrived at the co-location facility, those concerns turned out to be justified. Dozens of police officers were floating around, taking away dozens of servers, most of which belonged to clients unrelated to The Pirate Bay.
Footage from The Pirate Bay raid
In the days that followed, it became clear that Fredrik’s decision to back up the site was probably the most pivotal moment in its history. Because of that backup, the Pirate Bay team managed to resurrect the site within three days.
The entire situation was handled with the mockery TPB had become known for.
Unimpressed, the operators renamed the site “The Police Bay”, complete with a new logo shooting cannonballs at Hollywood. A few days later the logo was replaced by a Phoenix, a reference to the site rising from its digital ashes.
Logos after the raid

Instead of shutting it down, the raid propelled The Pirate Bay into the mainstream press, not least due to its swift resurrection. The publicity also triggered a huge traffic spike, exactly the opposite of what Hollywood had hoped for.
Although the raid and the subsequent criminal investigation were carried out in Sweden, the US Government played a major role behind the scenes. For many years the scale of that involvement was unknown. However, information obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request in 2017 helped to fill in some blanks.
The trail started with a cable sent from the US Embassy in Sweden to Washington in November 2005, roughly six months before the raid. The Embassy wrote that Hollywood’s MPA met with US Ambassador Bivins and, separately, with the Swedish State Secretary of Justice. The Pirate Bay was one of the top agenda items.
“The MPA is particularly concerned about PirateBay, the world’s largest Torrent file-sharing tracker. According to the MPA and based on Embassy’s follow-up discussions, the Justice Ministry is very interested in a constructive dialogue with the US. on these concerns,” the cable read.
From the US Embassy Cable

The Embassy explained that Hollywood would like Sweden to take action against a big player such as The Pirate Bay.
“We have yet to see a ‘big fish’ tried, something the MPA badly wants to see, particularly in light of the fact that Sweden hosts the largest Bit Torrent file-sharing tracker in the world, ‘Pirate-Bay’, which openly flaunts IPR,” the cable writer commented.
Fast forward half a year and, indeed, 65 police officers were ready to take The Pirate Bay’s servers offline. While there is no written evidence that US officials were actively involved in planning the investigation or raid, indirectly they played a major role.
This is backed up by further evidence. In a cable sent in April 2007, the Embassy nominated one of its employees, whose name is redacted, for the State Department’s Foreign Service National (FSN) of the year award. Again, The Pirate Bay case was cited.
“REDACTED skillful outreach directly led to a bold decision by Swedish law enforcement authorities to raid Pirate Bay and shut it down. This was recognized as a major achievement in Washington in furthering U.S. efforts to combat Internet piracy worldwide.”
We don’t know if the employee in question received the award. In hindsight, however, the raid did very little to deter piracy.
The swift comeback turned the site’s founders into heroes for many. The story made headline news around the world, and in Stockholm people waved pirate flags in the streets, a sentiment that benefited the newly founded Pirate Party as well.
The raid eventually resulted in negative consequences for the founders. It was the start of a criminal investigation, which led to a trial, and prison sentences for several of the site’s key players.
This became another turning point. Many of the people involved from the early days decided to cut their ties with the site, which was handed over to a more anonymous group, ostensibly located in the Seychelles.
The outspokenness of the early years was replaced by the silent treatment. While some moderators have spoken out, the anonymous operator nicknamed ‘Winston’ remains behind the scenes at all times.
This was made obvious in 2014, when the site disappeared for weeks following another raid at a Stockholm data center. At the time, even the site’s staffers had no idea what was going on.
The Pirate Bay recovered from that second raid too, and remains seen as a piracy icon by many. These days the site bills itself as ‘the galaxy’s most resilient torrent site’, a title it arguably earned on May 31, 2006.
For now, the site remains online, twenty years after Hollywood thought it had seen the last of it. And whoever is in charge today, will likely do everything possible to keep it that way.
Also worth noting that we switched the audio track to Spanish and you can hear it just fine.
For really obscure content, internet archive, your library, usenet or even eBay are the go to!
Personally I do not feel guilty pirating a decades old TV show or movie. And I really doubt the industry cares much either.
> hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate ba
Private sites do things like this, archival efforts and have request systems.