Yeah like it takes 5 seconds to find the top public torrent trackers everyone uses and many of them have been going for a very long time. They are aware of all the private sites too and have issued takedown requests to them in the past. Like how you can't upload any Harry Potter stuff (ick) to the big private eBook trackers because Rowling's lawyers went after them. But that was like 10 years ago and the sites are still running.

Edit: misremembered Rowling on the list but there's still a handful.

shoulda added the disclaimer that I'm mainly talking about third-rate sites, like when an anime streaming service goes down and 50 more people pop up to recommend the new ones in the scene in the comments, like, ones that fold at the hint of a C&D

while dry snitching is a negative, I think you are correct.

I read an article from a boomer IP lawyer for Nintendo and he does actually wait for normies to bring it up, particularly articles at bigger sites. They don't seek it out. Maybe others do.

At least obfuscate the URL in some way. Its trivial to do. I've done this and had people literally deobfuscate my links. Such a crime should get posts removed for snitching.

The companies the IP lawyers use are using ai to find links going by how Vimms got DMCA'd recently

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)

We can’t connect to the server at ratemyhog.com.

Me when I emerge from cryosleep

DMed my preferred resource, but also just kinda ask around in DMs of people who have talked about torrenting in the abstract. it's daunting but it's both more discrete and has had a much better track record for me in terms of getting the good stuff, anecdotally

It's simple! Just be in the know. Join a discord and then join another discord that splinters off of that discord because of drama, and then eventually get invited to another discord and then ask one of the users there for an invite to Sooper Sekret Private Tracker website and then you can watch your favorite shows there! Oh and make sure to seed everything popular otherwise you'll get banned for being a leech!!!

And if you want to pirate chinese shows go on youtube

millennials just go to the pirate bay as is tradition

gen x still buy physical media

boomers watch cable tv 24/7

source: I made it up

honestly one of my weaker points tbh and I kinda am receding from it as I let it simmer. got jumbled up with me trying to do the "gen z is trying to cancel eminem" bit. it's an internet culture shift that coincides with Gen Z dominating social media but it's not a clear "zoomers are doing x millenials are doing y" thing, it's more "Zoomers are the dominant force online rn, also everyone forgot what privacy is rn"

obvious fed barrier, weeds out the ones who cannot hack it in terms of basic social engineering and thus mitigates the issue, though doesn't fully solve it. difference between 75% of IP lawyers being able to report back to their bosses about the scene vs 100%, which means the scene is dismantled at 3/4ths rate, allowing for it to become more robust. it's the difference between password123 and spouse123, both are insecure but one is going to be cracked in nanoseconds and the other takes bare-minimum commitment

DMs

I get what you're saying but you could walk up to a lawyer or a police officer and tell them you pirated the new Marvel movie and they would not care in the slightest or be able to do anything about it. It's a civil crime in most places that requires someone to sue you specifically and that doesn't really happen since the Limewire days unless you're a site operator or big uploader yourself.

Oh who's that knocking on my door?

Go away, don't come 'round here no more.
Can't you see that it's late at night?
I'm very tired, and I'm not feelin' right.