cross-posted from: https://yiffit.net/post/1072752
For a moment, it seemed like the streaming apps were the things that could save us from the hegemony of cable TV—a system where you had to pay for a ton of stuff you didn’t want to watch so you could see the handful of things you were actually interested in.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/K4EIh
I’m honestly not trying to be difficult. I live in the UK and used to live in the Netherlands so my concerns are largely with European jurisdictions. In both countries the government has taken steps to prevent piracy and the UK recently changed its laws to ensure 10 years prison time, though that’s for “commercial” piracy only. They’ve also brought in Draconian new surveillance laws explicitly to combat piracy.
I bring all this up because I’m honestly confused. A lot of the seedboxes I see are based in the Netherlands (fantastic bandwidth there!) but I know that people living there are generally quite fearful of being caught torrenting (newsgroups are more popular for this reason). It seems reasonable to me that given that the authorities across Europe generally play well together that they’d share enforcement of this sort of thing, so I don’t understand how feralhosting manages to function then.
I mention WIPO just because it’s an international agreement that all signatories would make efforts to prevent IP violations, so I assume that this means that most countries would at least share information on this stuff.
It just seems weird is all. A seedbox in Egypt, sure, they’re not likely to care about American copyrights all that much, but the Netherlands? Germany? How does that even work?
Idk I think it’s just not worth those countries time to waste resources on individual piracy, just to enforce American copyright. The Netherlands is probably worried about protecting their own content, and regardless, it’s the seedbox company taking most of the risk. You lived there so you’d probably know better but I haven’t heard of anyone in the Netherlands being prosecuted, and definitely not anyone in North America being prosecuted for what’s on a NL server. Idk its always risky I guess but seedboxes seem to minimize the risk similar to a VPN and come with other benefits if you’re into private trackers etc.