this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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First, a massive amount of content is removed. You won't find a lot of popular, unencrypted content these days on usenet. It's all encrypted and obfuscated now to avoid the bots
Speaking of bots, I don't think you realize how much of this process is automated, or how wide of a net is being used. The media corporations all have enormous collected libraries of material. It gets posted constantly to all sorts of places. This includes public torrents, public usenet, YouTube, PornHub (yes, really, even for non-porn), Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr, GNUtella, DDL sites....
The list goes on and on. Each one gets scanned for millions of potentially infringing items, often daily. No actual people are doing those steps.
Now, throw in things like private torrents, encrypted usenet posts, invite-only DDL, listings that use '3' instead 'e' or those other character subscriptions..... These require actual humans to process. Humans that cost money, and a considerable amount of it. As a business, you have to show a return on investment. Fighting piracy, even at its theoretical best, doesn't increase revenues by a lot.
You mention revenue and breaking even, but you left out an important detail. Your time is free. They don't have to pay $10/month, they have to pay $10/month + $20/hour for someone to deal with it. And most pirates of that level will just find another method.
I remember spesifically game of thrones. If you didn't download the episode within a day or so of being released it was DMCAed and gone from most popular usenets
Not seen that with anything else tho
HBO used to be bad. Going back to the Deadwood or True Blood days... the show would air, within 20 minutes of the end credits, it'd be up on Usenet. You had to start grabbing it ASAP, HBO's sniffers would be on the look out within an hour. And they'd take down just enough parts to make the PARS useless. I don't miss the UUEncode days and the refreshing a newsgroup every few minutes to see if my show got posted (or re-posted) days.