It's 2016. Why Do You Torrent?

[BlastGT1]

The title could be misinterpreted, and if so, my apologies. However, the question still stands. Why do you torrent?

What is the major motivator behind your filesharing activity? What is it about torrenting that keeps you engaged? Of all the ways that you could acquire your content, why do you choose this way? Don't freak out, this isn't an attempt to bust anyone, or any kind of suspicious post. It is a genuine question posed to facilitate conversation, and perhaps a deeper understanding of the what, how, and why we participate in this often-criticized practice.

Some people have graduated to using Bittorrent to share files, often coming from a predecessor platform of some kind (filesharing ancestors, if you will). Others have known nothing else. Some use it because they have not found an option that is better or more preferable. However, that is only part of the equation. The other part of this is asking yourself what you get out of it. Is it the thrill of the hunt? Do you download as a way of "sticking it to the man"? Perhaps it's the access to things you are unable to get due to where you live? Could it be the sheer joy of finding something you had and lost years ago? Maybe you're searching for that last piece to complete your collection? Are you obsessed with filling up as many hard drives as possible with your pirate booty? How much of a digital god are you to your friends and family for being able to deliver content they can't or won't get themselves? Do you get the feels from the community, like being part of a family or a brotherhood/sisterhood?

If you are a part of this community here at TPS, this brotherhood/sisterhood of like-minded people, don't just skim over this post and move on. Take a few minutes and share your opinions, feelings, and stories in this thread. Be the awesome pirate and leave your mark here!

 

[WitherSlick]

I torrent because I believe it's my duty to seed. I feel that private trackers as a whole, have developed an extremely varied, but interesting culture. I torrent because I do like to stick it to the man, because I think that all 1's and 0's should be free. I don't believe you should be held captive to "intellectual property", because I think the idea of such a thing is ludicrous. The biggest reason I torrent, is because I feel like it's the right thing to do.

I torrent because I'd never have discovered as much cool music as I have during what/waffles staff picks. I torrent because of the thrill of the hunt of getting rare/obscure content. The filesharing community really does feel like a home once you've been here long enough. You see old friends all over in various IRC's and sometimes even chat.

I remember the very first time I ever pirated anything. It was a copy of Civilization 4, I had bought civ 3 and played it an insane amount. (I'd actually like to get that working on linux if it's possible..) But anyway, I was a broke 13 year old and I had no other way to get the game. My parents specifically said if I wanted the game I'd have to earn the money myself. Little did they know they started me on a lifelong journey of being a pirate that day. I sailed away on the black sails of the pirate bay and I never came back. I felt like I had cheated the system, I felt like everyone was getting ripped off paying for something that obviously has no real actual value, unless you choose to give it value. A few years later I bought civ 4, because it was a great game, and I did really enjoy it.

I first joined TPS after I had joined demonoid. A very very kind user invited me in, and I loved it. I loved the idea of trackers you had to register for, trackers that actually valued long term seeding. I remember the first time I looked at what.cd's home page nearly seven years ago. I loved the little "you've stumbled upon a door where your mind is key" thing they have posted. I knew I had to get into that site.

I'd say the second biggest reason I pirate is because I love feeling like a cyberpunk. I love the IRC's the contacts etc. Some of my fondest memories since 2009 have been online.

 

[Lost Prodigy]

Let's see... I torrent to save money, because I enjoy sharing with others (even online strangers), and because it just seems like the best way to acquire content when other legal options such as streaming aren't viable. I'll also admit that being part of a secret, tech-savvy, "in-crowd" of illegal file sharing is more than a little bit appealing.

 

[688]

I torrent to get my stuff easily and without paying money.Further,there is some stuff on torrent that is unlikely to find in anywhere i.e. you can't get it even with money. Torrent 4 life

 

[AbeSimpson]

My main reason for torrenting is because I'm a cheapskate. I got tired of paying 20$ for every BluRay. Some of the other reasons I do it are the community, the great organization and quantity on the big trackers, the lack of a good one stop shop for content anywhere and the thrill of the hunt.

 

[Deikun]

I torrent because I just wouldn't be able to afford the amount of content I get through my trackers even if I wanted to, I love that aspect of it, the fact that the internet has allowed to share our files all over the world for someone else to enjoy. I love the internet and technology, and the community and organization on private trackers has helped me discover new music, movies, software and so on. Being a pirate it's simply one of my favourite hobbies.

 

[dieNal]

I torrent, because here were i live, we occasionally get restricted access to some stuff, sadly,Things here sadly get pricey too, and i also feel always welcomed in most of the community here in general

 

[The_Cob]

Torrenting will always be superior to streaming for me because I prefer high quality stuff, so I don't even bother with streaming accounts for music and movies. As for torrents vs. bought media, it's just not in my budget anymore. It's amazing how much money can be sapped from your account when you buy content on a weekly basis (I still buy stuff, but no where near as much as I download). Also, it's cool to chit chat with the torrenting community; for the most part, much of the torrenting community are down to earth and cool people.

 

[BarnicleBob]

I have to say I torrent for all the reason's BLAST initially said. Have loved the friendships, community, getting to see and acquire schhhtuff I don't want to wait forever for or have to throw money at to feed the big cigar smoking, big diamond pinky ring wearing multi-zillionaire. Have always tried to also find and help eliminate the UL'r that jumps on to UL virus or now that you DL this torrent, come here or do this and that and spend money to get suckered by someone outside of our group. "Sorry about the sentence written as a book".
LONG LIVE THE PIRATES !!!!!

 

[oklahomaboy]

First and foremost the lack of availability here, very very closely followed because I'm a cheapskate. In other words, even IF all that I want was available for purchase here, I'd still not buy all, but at least some. I'm a cheapskate hypocrite. Also, over time I've discovered which release groups are putting out the highest quality stuff and original blurays just can't compete in my book. The sheer comfort of just downloading heaps of stuff onto a HD and being able to watch it all from there saves discs lying all over the place, not to mention they can be lost/damaged (so can HDs but hasn't happened yet, and episodes can skip but almost never happens....). It's a win-win-win.

An unexpected but pleasant byproduct of this private torrenting so far has been some awesome forums and the people on them.
I even made some friends. Enemies too, I reckon, but hopefully not too many.
I'd be lying through my teeth if I said that was my initial reason for pirating though, it just happened later on.

 

[alexskc]

I definitely don't do it to "stick it to the man."

I actually agree with the man. I agree that piracy probably does rob content creators of some potential sales, even if that effect is hard-to-measure. And I agree that content creators should be compensated for their work. I certainly don't think the "they're billionaires anyway!" argument holds any water.

In fact, from a moral perspective, I think not buying or pirating anything at all is better than pirating, even if you never would've bought anything in the first place.

Nonetheless, I pirate anyway. I torrent anyway. Why? Because I've got no moral fiber. Because I'm a hypocrite. Because I'm selfish.

I torrent content because I enjoy that content. I love to watch movies and TV shows and anime. I love to listen to music and audiobooks. I love to read books and comics. I love to play games. I'm vaguely aware that I consume and get pleasure from that content, I'm not compensating the people responsible for making it. But the idea that "some guy out there isn't making as much money as he potentially would be otherwise" is abstract enough for me to not feel genuine guilt about it.

Moreover, society normalizes and accepts it. Most of the people I know pirate content in some way, and that makes it even harder to feel guilt. Plenty of people (including myself) feel it's immoral to eat meat, but they eat it anyway, because the social repercussions are basically none. If everyone shunned meat eating, it'd be much rarer.

To compound that: It's basically impossible to get caught. If I wanna keep making shallow comparisons: Lying and stealing are considered immoral, and liars are looked down upon, but virtually everyone has lied or stolen something at some point, because they knew (or thought) they wouldn't get caught.

That makes piracy the easiest crime to commit in the world. The societal harm is hard to measure, it's socially acceptable, and it's very very hard to get caught. I don't think it's surprising at all that I'd throw my moral principles out the window, knowing how much stuff there is out there to download.

As for why Bittorrent in particular, and not some other method? Why private trackers? Because it's the best. It's the easiest way for me to get the most content in the highest quality. I'm not going to go to some streaming site for my movies. Have seen how bitstarved those are? And the content! Apparently if it doesn't have a budget of $40 million+ it's not a movie worth watching. I could use Soulseek and queue to download my music, but why bother when I can get a high speed download of every FLAC ever on WCD?

 

[texteditor]

Two reasons:

1. I'm an archivist. I like collecting high-quality music in many formats, even for the same release, and I like to sort and tag it extensively

2. The bigger reason: there is just a lot of stuff I would never have if it wasn't for torrents -here's a recent and egregious example:

A music artist I like had a recent release of a liveset on a label that presses cassettes. The cassettes only cost $10 on each of the three webshops they were on - a reasonable price. The problem was, the label was committed to limiting the release to only 125 copies, divided amongst the three webshops selling them. Even if I had been able to grab one before they sold out in under two hours, I'll still need to get a cassette deck. Even worse, only one copy made it to discogs, and the seller wants $50 for it.

So I figured, 'what the hell, I'll shoot the label an email and see if they plan on selling a digital copy, or might privately sell me one since I asked". Welp, 36 hours later, the label tells me that they will never be selling it as digital. At this point I'd pretty much resigned to never hearing the album, until three days later when I got a notification on what telling me that someone on what managed to beat the rush, get a copy, and make a FLAC rip of it for the site.

 

[alexskc]

The problem was, the label was committed to limiting the release to only 125 copies

Dumbest hipster bullshit ever.

Can I ask what the release was?

 

[texteditor]

Dumbest hipster bullshit ever.

Can I ask what the release was?

In Aeternam Vale - Live At Berlin Atonal 2014


Once I get a Vinyl setup, it will be worse I'm sure - Vinyl labels are notorius for this too, like Petre Inspirescu's label doing one-time 300-copy presses, meaning my only purchase options are paying the vultures at discogs prices starting at $86 to $365 for one single damn album

One of my favorites from last year was on a label that typically does digital releases of everything but decided to limit a release to 999 Vinyl pressings

 

[ChopperYoHo]

I believe that the main reason I torrent is a feeling of entitlement I've developed over the last 10 years or so.
You know how people very quickly get used to something and then struggle to go back, that's how I feel about torrenting.

It started for me like 10 years ago in Australia when I first moved there and missed UK TV. Once I found how to get this, I then started looking into how to get access to American TV which would air in the US and then take like 6 months to 18 months to get to Australia.

I believe that for TV and Movies, the studios have ultimately created me as a pirate. Back then, I would have paid for access to TV and Movies. However, their licensing agreements and inability to understand where the market was going meant that they put all their effort trying to stop piracy, rather than give different options for viewing their content. So fuck them.

I don't tend to pirate many books or audiobooks as I know authors have it pretty hard in the first place. Games neither really. But TV, Movies and now Music are open season entirely due to how I feel the studios have acted in the past.

 

[trefla]

That is a good question.
I got Amazon Prime and Netflix subscriptions, my Steam and Origin libraries are impressive and my audio CDs collection is not bad either. With all this I still torrent. I will tell you why:
1. Amazon does not allow me to steam HD on my PC
2. I have to use a paid VPN to access US Netflix and it's slow as fuck
3. 95% of the games I have bought I have played tor maximum of 3 days and never gone back to them as they stink
4. Even thought we got many TV stations I hate the fact I am being forced to watch commercials while watching my favorite shows
5. It's so much more convenient to listen to music on my PC rather than my music player
6. I am following a couple of TV shows that do not run on our cable TV or Netflix yet.

If they will start offering us better quality services and availability I will surely stop using illegal means to reach for the data I need.

There is a downside to torrenting I was discussing with my brother yesterday: we stoped appreciating things to their real value because of the quantity of games, shows and music we can reach. When we were little we used to love sitting in front of out back and white TV watching any kind of cartoons and we were over the moon for that. Now we are playing the most expensive games and going at the best concerts but because we got used to have it all everything is so common and nothing excites us anymore. I will try to keep my kids away from BT and teach them to enjoy the road and not only the destination.

 

[oklahomaboy]

That is a good question.

There is a downside to torrenting I was discussing with my brother yesterday: we stoped appreciating things to their real value because of the quantity of games, shows and music we can reach. When we were little we used to love sitting in front of out back and white TV watching any kind of cartoons and we were over the moon for that. Now we are playing the most expensive games and going at the best concerts but because we got used to have it all everything is so common and nothing excites us anymore. I will try to keep my kids away from BT and teach them to learn to enjoy the road and not only the destination.

This is a very good point. It applies to music for me. During my paperboy-days I saved up all my hard-earned cash and once or twice a month went to the record store to select some of the hottest vinyls out there. It took a lot of papers, a lot of crate-digging and a lot of bus trips to assemble the collection I now have. Prior to having enough cash to buy the originals, I used to copy cassette tapes, hundreds of them, but whereas now we can download hundreds of movies in a day or maybe a bit longer for some, those tapes took me years. The amount of 'work' and 'time' invested in the gains seemed to increase my enjoyment of the product. One new tape per week ensured I would play THAT tape over and over, now I download a gazillion MP3s and might not even be bothered playing them today. Collecting isn't just about trackers, it's about tracks too

 

[Alastor]

I loathe the System and all that it stands for, simple.

 

[tplove]

I prefer to have audio and video locally in the highest quality possible, and downloading it is quicker and easier than buying the CD or Bluray and then ripping a FLAC or Remux out, not to mention its cheaper.

 

[QW1620]

The pursuit of happiness is the reason I torrent I believe it's my right.