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by xiphias2 2186 days ago
People are already paying for downloading seeded torrents, they are just hidden behind private trackers, as the public torrent selection is quite small.

I'm also paying for youtube premium, at the same time the people I'm listening to have to be careful not to say ,,COVID-19'', because their revenue would drop to 0, even though it was the main meme of the last few months. I would happily pay them through lightning network instead.

4 comments

People pay for private trackers? Every private tracker I have heard of is free to use. They handle the seeding motivation problem by having rules in place that require whatever level of seeding they feel is best for the community of the tracker. If you break those rules, you are kicked out. That seems to work fine without the need for micropayments.
Of the private trackers that I know of, only the ones that solicited donations were raided and taken down. I am unaware of any explicitly paid private trackers, and such a business model seems like a great way to conjure the ire of the FBI.
They instead require seeding performance/behaviour that almost necessitates renting a seedbox.
I don't understand the sites that require a > 1.0 seed ratio... Like it's mathematically impossible for everyone to seed to > 1.0
It's possible because of freeleech downloads or finding the files elsewhere and seeding them, but > 1 ratio is very strict indeed.
This doesn't seem to pay creators though, it pays people who have bandwidth to seed (redistribute) their streams instead.
It's paying the people actually doing the work required at the time (the distribution of works which are already public). If creators want to get paid they need to arrange for that before making the work public, not after. There are plenty of perfectly viable options for ensuring that creators get compensated for their work. Copyright just isn't one of them.
> the people I'm listening to have to be careful not to say ,,COVID-19'', because their revenue would drop to 0

I don't understand what you meant by this. As in, everyone's tired of hearing about it?

Early on in the pandemic, Youtube was demonetizing videos related to COVID-19 as they do for numerous other sensitive topics like war, death, or terrorist attacks. Many Youtubers would therefore be cautious even mentioning it tangentially to prevent that potential demonetization. I think it has been months since Youtube adjusted their policy on this to allow monetization (EDIT: Yep, this policy was changed over 3 months ago[1]).

[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/youtube-will-now-allow-cre...