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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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?

    • ikidd@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Appreciate the post, but damn, that’s still cryptic. “Find a quality private usenet indexer”… I don’t even know where to begin to do this.

    • Briguy@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Honest question. Are there any advantages to usenet if I’m already deep into torrenting and on many private trackers? I’ve never used usenet but have been torrenting for 20+ years so I’m not sure if I’m missing out on anything

        • Briguy@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Thank you for the answer. It sounds more legit than I had always thought. My current setup is just all private trackers with a VPN so I’m not sure I’d want to pay to set this up. I have PTP and BHD for movies. BHD and MTV for TV shows, RED for music and MAM for books. I generally always find what I’m looking for but I was always curious about usenet

      • DemSpud@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        10 months ago

        Hey, yes there is. I was 100% torrents up until recently, also using multiple torrent sites including private trackers. The thing I struggled with was getting all the episodes of TV shows. Like if I added a niche or old TV show to Sonarr, it would be a constant struggle to find missing episodes or seasons (for some reason Southpark was a misery). This was pretty much completely eliminated with usenets. So now I have usenets as a primary and torrenting as a fallback if something cant be found. This config gives me almost full coverage. The downside is that usenets typically aren’t free whilst torrenting is (although they are very cheap)

      • Whirlybird
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        10 months ago

        Usenet will download much faster and is generally much more “private” and secure (your ISP can never see what you download).