It’s a solid defense, since the lawsuit’s about the sharing of the books. The metadata of the torrents isn’t part of the relevant IP, and how they used the content they downloaded is a separate issue.

That’s what I thought. I don’t think their defense succeeding here really gets us anything new.

Has anyone in the US ever been busted for downloading from a direct download portal? Or usenet?

I think any progress here is mostly in principle, as I don’t think there’s a big practical risk to downloading only as it stands today, though I don’t follow things as closely as I used to and could be mistaken.

Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, admitted in court that he downloaded and distributed 30 songs.

Your example is exactly why meta didn’t seed.

Tidal-DL could rip Tidal tracks pretty reliably when I last used it. I ditched my Tidal sub when they split with Plex, so haven’t used it in 6 months or so. I know Spotify has lower quality, but I’ve got a .edu email so was able to subscribe for cheap. I mostly use it for music discovery, so actually listening to and ripping music from it is fairly rare.

Spotify rippers (they come and go like waves on a beach)

Real ones? Seems like most of them use Spotify to identify music then rip from elsewhere like youtube.

I use Zotify when I get to the “rip from Spotify” level, but would be happy to add another couple options if there’s more solid ones out there.

What are the odds there’s at least one reddit employee’s IP on the list?

To add to this, Bitwarden integrates with a few of them so you can automatically generate a unique email on the fly when creating an entry for a site. (docs link)

I use Fastmail and use my own domain for about 90% of stuff. Sites I don’t even want to have my domain get a random.gibberish@fastmail.com email autogenerated from the BW extension. It’s pretty convenient once all setup.

For literal one-time use, I’ve generally had good luck with 10minutemail. I’m not sure how much it gets flagged as spam right away these days, but the nice thing about it being free is you can always try and find out for a particular site.

I use Fastmail with my own domain. Not free, but worth it given how much I rely on my email/calendar. There’s a 30-day free trial before committing though, so you can kick the tires before deciding.

Specifically, try searching by ISBN (0684839563)

I agree, but software piracy isn’t stealing from anyone.

Stealing definitively requires depriving someone of their own stuff. Piracy is more akin to a massive crowdsourced library. We’re all just helping to share the burden of hosting costs.

How is this a legitimate question?

It’s not.

No.

You don’t get salty emails from your ISP for downloading torrents, you get them because (due to the nature of how torrenting works) you’re also uploading the torrent to other users at the same time.

Usenet users download from the data providers. Because it’s not crowdsourcing the hosting like torrenting, it’s generally not free (hence this post about deals). The trade-off for having to pay is that you don’t have to share that risk with the data providers. It’s more akin to watching a pirate streaming site than torrenting: you’ll never get an email about consuming it, but you might visit one day and realize the site’s been taken down or had the domain changed because the owners got the email instead.

They were bought by Kape Technologies in 2019. This drove away a lot of folks because of prior security concerns with another product of theirs. I don’t recall the specifics, but here’s a reddit thread from the time with comments that likely shed some light on the worries from then if you’re curious.

As a practical response, I’ve been with them since years prior to that and didn’t change because I renew 3 years at a time and had 2 years left when they were bought. Figured I’d give them that time to see how things changed. Best I could tell, they didn’t in any way that pisses off my ISP, so I still haven’t bothered switching.

Fair enough, but it’s a good value for the price. Mullvad’s €5/month, and while it’s fallen out of favor I know people who still use PIA and get it for close to $2/month by prepaying for a few years at a time. You could probably pay for it by turning off the laptop a few hours a day to save on electricity.

Worth the price, imo.

What’s the argument for doing this? It looks like media stack includes a vpn, so the effort level isn’t going to be all that different.

Echoing everyone else: definitely use a vpn if you’re torrenting. Strongly consider using a seedbox if you’re on starlink or anything else with poor upload speeds.

I hate that social media business news qualifies as “technology” these days.

I’ll pitch Bandcamp as an option, especially if/when they bring back Bandcamp Fridays next year (where they don’t take a cut on specific days). Not everyone’s on it, but it’s generally a reasonable, legal option for those artists that are.