I don’t know about your piracy tax specifically, but there’s also a tax on any storage media, printers etc. in Germany.

The “Urheberrechtsabgabe” (copyright duty) is not about paying for pirate copies, but it’s a compensation for the loss due to the right to a private copy. A private copy is e.g. a copy of a CD I own in case the original gets destroyed. It’s explicitly not allowed to share them.

Sadly the right to a private copy gets canceled as soon as it’s necessary to break a “working” copy protection. CD copy protection has been broken for decades, but it still counts as a “working” copy protection. Thus a private copy is practically not possible legally, but we still pay this tax on any storage media… I really hate the copyright lobby.

A “great” thing about copyright infringement in Germany is that the statue of limitations only starts after the copyright holder learns from the copyright infringement.

This means, even if I torrented a movie 5 years ago, and the copyright holder finds out my name only now, they’d still have another 3 years to sue me.

Anyway, there’re private torrent sites in Germany. It’s only public sites that don’t exist.

DDL and streaming sites are really big in Germany. Usenet too, but until a few years ago I don’t think there were Indexers with API’s, so it’s been either manual downloading or streaming.

TorrentLeech is easy enough without a seedbox, especially if you’ve enough storage to seed lots of content and collect bonus points. On other sites I do agree though.

But if you’re gonna do public trackers you should most definitely get a seedbox.

I misread and wrote the sentence above thinking you wrote “private trackers”. Did you mistype? I’d say a VPN + binding to the network interface is enough for public trackers.

Yes, ~/.local/share/flatpak includes all user installed flatpaks, while /var/lib/flatpak includes all system wide installed flatpaks. Both include repository information and required runtimes (i.e. dependencies).

This does not include user data, which is stored in ~/.var/app.

Make sure to test your backup just in case on another system/VM.

Piracy is a large community on Reddit, and it is one of the few subreddits which officially created a community on Lemmy. So it does make sense that it’s also gotten big in terms of subscribers.

But I think monthly active users is a way more ueful metric than total subscribers. Creating new accounts is easy, so total subscribers tends to only go up, compared to the fluctuating MAU.

Also, it seems there’re communities with more subscribers, altough they aren’t listed on Lemmy Explorer. E.g. Lemmy World’s Technology has nearly 60k subs.

Lemmy Explorer for context: https://lemmyverse.net/communities

Pirate groups generally try to optimize for the minimum they themselves actually need.

For example most specialized trackers only allow for english audio and some even restrict subtitles, which makes it difficult to find torrents for other languages. The only option is finding BluRay disks and then doing the remuxing.

Good point. Setting up shadowsocks and tunneling wireguard through is on my to-do list. I believe ss also works over TCP so it should work reliably in filtered networks.

Protections of consumers and regulating ISPs is the job of the FCC. If consumer protection gets reduced and things like net neutrality get worse, pirating will get more difficult and/or risky.

E.g. until recently ISP’s didn’t have to really do anything if a user was caught infringing on someones copyright (e.g. through torrenting). This has now changed and the risk of getting disconnected massively increased. [1]

An example of the worst case might be Germany, where copyright owners can demand the information of a user who was caught infringing on someones copyright. This allows them to sue users directly for damages of sharing copyrighted material.

tl;dr
It is important for us pirates who decides what the FCC focuses on.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/record-labels-win-again-court-says-isp-must-terminate-users-accused-of-piracy/

I’m regularly using ChatGPT to find the name of movies and books based on the few things I remember about them. It’s almost impossible with a regular web search, as I often lack the exact term used in a movie.

Wireguard uses UDP which results in better latency and power usage (e.g. mobile). This does not mean Wireguard can’t tunnel TCP packets, just like OpenVPN also supports tunneling UDP.

I’m using Wireguard succesfully for torrenting.

For newcomers I’d recommend docker and images like gluetun for setting up the VPN. It makes it easy to forward ports (for remote access) while keeping the torrent client behind the VPN.

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Yeah, OLG Hamburg is known for making bad judgements. There’s a reason many companies choose to file a lawsuit at this court.

Thanks to image-based distros like Fedora Atomic, I skipped the asking to update step. They download and apply updates in the background, and then the new image gets selected on next boot.

Given Fedora doesn’t do major changes in point releases, nothing breaks (until I do a manual upgrade to a new (half-)yearly major release).

Not having a terminal does not make sense (unless in a business context). For some people (my mum) it’s as if it doesn’t exist anyway, so why remove it.

Real-debrid does filtering based on the torrent name. Media uploaded to usenet is already obfuscated and split into many tiny pieces, the location of which are stored in a .nzb file.

This means eweka can’t filter downloads based on the title. Once media companies get a .nzb file, they can use copyright infringement notices to make usenet providers delete the files, but that does not work preemptively (like filtering based on torrent name).

I remember taking my first selfhosting/Linux steps a year or so after the launch of Let’s Encrypt with a Pi 3. At the time, most tutorials didn’t set up https at all, and if they did, they were self signed certificates (resulting in browser warnings).

Self-signed certificates are annoying and creating them was a series of copy pasting long, weird commands, usually using long exspiration dates (manual renewing sucks).

Not long after, guides started recommending certbot. Nowadays reverse proxys like caddy set up TLS automatically.

At least that’s how I remember it, given my complete lack of knowledge about Linux at the time.

Yes, the restriction to a single VPN client is annoying.

Blocking ad/telemetry domains can be done by adding Adguards DNS servers in the OS settings. Sadly blocking apps Internet permissions completely is not possible (except on OS like LineageOS, CalyxOS or GrapheneOS).

Symphonium is a great Android music player which connects to a Subsonic or Jellyfin server (or any other protocol like SMB).

Navidrome is a music server which implements the Subsonic protocol. This means apps like Symphonium can connect to it.

Any old PC is enough, even a Raspberry Pi is fast enough for a music server.

1. Install Navidrome on the server/pc
2. Configure Navidrome (open ports, add your music library/folder)
3. Connect a subsonic-compatible music app to to the server (I.e. type in IP or domain as well as the port).

Anything more like SSL (https) and a domain is optional for getting it working, and only a benefit if used outside of your home network. Using Tailscale makes a domain/SSL unnecessary and also no longer needs messing around with networking (e.g. no opening ports on the router).

It’s difficult to know how much of a difference it makes, but I also think it’s at least a reason. Given Nintendo is also going after sites like Vimm’s Lair, which does not host recent consoles ROMs, it’s not the only reason.