Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I find them significantly within the spirit. Private trackers have robust request-filling communities that create tools to automate and upload them. A big part of file sharing is reciprocity. You need to seed torrents for other people to be able to access them, if you use torrents at all. If I'm going to personally spend money on an ebook (or a physical book), rip the DRM/scan the book, and spend my personal time improving the formatting, I expect something in return. Not directly, but in a community sense, where all that time I spent delivering the book to someone who requested it is returned by someone else when I make a request for something I can't access. And I frequently see a return, which motivates me to keep uploading more. Ideally, the file makes its way to public trackers, but I'm not doing all that for random people on Piratebay who don't even seed their torrents. Without people in private tracker communities, public trackers would never get anything but the most popular content. Nobody on public trackers is going to dig out a dusty 1970s tome from their university library and spend 8 hours scanning and fixing it for the masses.

Public trackers are shit because of freeloaders and Stremio. This is why we can't have nice things.

This is how I feel about people on soulseek who lock files, even more so the cunts that want things like bandcamp vouchers in return for accessing something they have. Cunts.

I guess you never heard of what.cd

Being open to all and then shut down by police after 6 months doesn't help piracy either. The upside to closed trackers is that stuff can be archived for years.

Single point of failure also. What.CD was the best vaccine against them: those naive idealists had hosting in France…