Can anyone explain the usenet to me?

[fleshconsumed]

Well yes, but if you subscribe to usenet you could instead save money for 2 months and buy your DVD. Someone who torrents could claim they don't have enough money to save up to properly purchase the project.
Really though, I try to buy used (when I do, which is rarely) since I don't want to directly support the RIAA/MPAA. Cheaper as well.

To elaborate a little, do usenet folks admit to themselves "I am pirating this material," or do they try to justify it some other way? Out of principal I don't condone piracy, but I feel no sympathy for organizations like the RIAA.

Part of the reason I'm asking is because I met up with some friends from highschool a month or so ago. We were talking about games and World of Goo had come up. I had bought it from the Direct2Drive (i think it was them) $5 sale, but both of them had pirated it. One played it through and said it was interesting but he wouldn't pay for it. It's not like he's in highschool or anything, he has a job and I'm pretty sure he gets paid more than me. And despite completing it he decided it wasn't worth paying for. Considering it was an indy game studio it felt "more wrong" than if it was something like RIAA.
Sorry to ramble, I should probably start a blog or something. I'm just thinking out loud on a forum...oh dear.

He could save for 2 months and get 6 DVDs/BluRays in a year, or he could get a lot more with usenet. It's all about getting fair value for your money. Buying music/movies is always risky because you never know if you're going to like it or not and you can't return it if you didn't like it. I bought a fair share of music albums because I heard one good song and thought the rest of the album would be just as good and I've purchased plenty of movies that plain sucked. I also bought plenty of games that I liked but never finished because I never had time, for example FAKK2, Giants Citizen Kabuto, Prey. Buying media, be it music, movies or games is a gamble, a very expensive gamble. You can buy 6 movies in a year, of which 3 you will actually like, or you could have all you can eat buffet for the same money. Simple economics dictates that people who are smart enough to figure out torrents/usenet will chose the latter. Why did Netflix and RedBox gained popularity so quickly, even though they are "paid" aka not free services? Because they provided value for people's money. People will buy stuff legally if they feel like they are getting their money's worth.

 

[TubeTote]

People will buy stuff legally if they feel like they are getting their money's worth.

Exactly how I see it. Concerning music, which is my first love, I don't really pirate. I have a collection of well over 500 CDs. The way I see it, I paid for the album, so I am entitled to a better sounding copy if it's available. For example, I have 'Dark Side of the Moon' like everyone else, paid full price for the CD. I heard an audiophile vinyl rip and it made me want to throw the CD away. I don't feel guilty about downloading a better copy of something I already paid for...or something that is not available as an official release.

 

[Terzo]

He could save for 2 months and get 6 DVDs/BluRays in a year, or he could get a lot more with usenet. It's all about getting fair value for your money. Buying music/movies is always risky because you never know if you're going to like it or not and you can't return it if you didn't like it. I bought a fair share of music albums because I heard one good song and thought the rest of the album would be just as good and I've purchased plenty of movies that plain sucked. I also bought plenty of games that I liked but never finished because I never had time, for example FAKK2, Giants Citizen Kabuto, Prey. Buying media, be it music, movies or games is a gamble, a very expensive gamble. You can buy 6 movies in a year, of which 3 you will actually like, or you could have all you can eat buffet for the same money. Simple economics dictates that people who are smart enough to figure out torrents/usenet will chose the latter. Why did Netflix and RedBox gained popularity so quickly, even though they are "paid" aka not free services? Because they provided value for people's money. People will buy stuff legally if they feel like they are getting their money's worth.

I understand what you are saying about value and economics, but doesn't that change a bit when one of the activities is piracy? I agree that buying media is a gamble, especially for tv/movies where you can't really demo it and have to rely on the reviews of others. I tend not to buy a lot of movies/musics/games, but I'm relatively stingy. For the aforementioned and reasons you have listed, I am a big fan of Hulu.
But back to the economics, if it's all about price and value, wouldn't torrents (free) be better than usenet (subscription)? Or are the security features and higher speeds of usenet value enough to justify spending the money?

People will buy stuff legally if they feel like they are getting their money's worth.

Exactly how I see it. Concerning music, which is my first love, I don't really pirate. I have a collection of well over 500 CDs. The way I see it, I paid for the album, so I am entitled to a better sounding copy if it's available. For example, I have 'Dark Side of the Moon' like everyone else, paid full price for the CD. I heard an audiophile vinyl rip and it made me want to throw the CD away. I don't feel guilty about downloading a better copy of something I already paid for...or something that is not available as an official release.

I don't have any qualms with something like that. Going back to my earlier example, my friend had downloaded a game, completed it, but decided that it wasn't worth his money. Hell, there have been several sales for World of Goo at $5, and even a pay what you want sale from the game makers themselves. I don't see how he can say it was worth nothing when he completed the game. On the flip side I purchased the game at $5 and got bored after the first few levels.

 

[ultimatebob]

Usenet itself is perfectly legal. However it can also be used for illegal purposes; namely piracy. Pretty much guaranteed all that music, movies and games your friend has are pirated.

BitTorrent has legitimate uses for it (like downloading Linux .ISO's) as well, but there is a reason why most businesses ban it's use...

 

[boomhower]

I love usenet. I pay $10 a month and it is well worth it over torrents. Main reason is you are not reliant on seeders. It comes from a server and can and will max out your connection(point may not be valid for you damned fiber users). That is every file, where on a torrent to get a decent speed you have to have a ton of seeders. Torrents tend to pretty much crash my net speed even if the torrent is still slow. Usenet just put the priority down and surf no problem.

 

[fleshconsumed]

I understand what you are saying about value and economics, but doesn't that change a bit when one of the activities is piracy? I agree that buying media is a gamble, especially for tv/movies where you can't really demo it and have to rely on the reviews of others. I tend not to buy a lot of movies/musics/games, but I'm relatively stingy. For the aforementioned and reasons you have listed, I am a big fan of Hulu.
But back to the economics, if it's all about price and value, wouldn't torrents (free) be better than usenet (subscription)? Or are the security features and higher speeds of usenet value enough to justify spending the money?

Usenet provides several advantages over torrents. 1 you always max out your download speed so you get stuff fast instead of waiting hours, days or weeks, 2 you don't have to worry about upload/download ratio, and 3 it's secure from RIAA/MPAA lawsuits (at least for now). Apparently people feel it's worth paying $10 a month for.

As far as first part of your post goes, I didn't want to get into it because I felt it was a little off topic, but as long as we are talking about it... Yes, technically it's piracy/copyright infringement.

However,

1. I think it would server everyone better to take a look at it from economic standpoint. Econ 101 teaches demand supply curves and how to use them to maximize profit. There will always be people who pirate music. The higher the prices are the more people will refuse to buy it and pirate it instead. It's part of life. It's capitalism.

2. And it would also serve everyone better to remember that it is thanks to napster that RIAA has finally started considering download market seriously and it is thanks to p2p and allofmp3 that iTunes and amazon ditched DRM. It is also thanks to p2p that RIAA/MPAA finally started bringing prices down.

Basically what I want to say is that I recognize that it is essentially piracy, but I don't like when people automatically proclaim that it is something horrible and that we must throw a bunch of money at law enforcement to combat it or that we should give RIAA/MPAA even more protection/powers (as if they don't have enough already). Piracy will always exist and it is perfectly natural and if we actually look at the issue, it has done a lot of good for consumer. So meh... I suppose it's me that's ranting this time.

 

[alkemyst]

i bet my first post on USENET is older than most here and also has had more girlfriends.

That's a lot for a post to do.

 

[chalmers]

Going from torrents to usenet is like going from dialup AOL to cable internet when broadband was first made widely available in my area in 1998. Best service ever, fast ass speeds, anything I want, secure as hell.

But I don't know anything about it, sorry.

 

[SludgeFactory]

The third rule of usenet is to quit calling it "the usenet."

Once upon a time it was the wild west of the internet. Thousands of text-based discussion groups, almost all unmoderated. The quality of posts and discussions in a few of those groups was better than anything I've found since. In certain groups, you could find highly knowledgeable people who would shoot down BS, with no moderators to insert their biases. Real, honest to goodness trolling still existed, and some of them were hilarious.

But that aspect of usenet has either been dead or dying for 8-9 years, as everybody migrated to http forums. Now usenet is all binaries, decoded from text, and the insane amount of terabytes coming through every month means there are enormous hardware demands on usenet providers to store the full usenet feed. You have to pay to play, which IMO is actually a plus at this point, it keeps it out of the mainstream.

Software is good enough now that there's very little learning curve in finding stuff and saving it. There weren't even search engines and NZB sites back in the day, you mostly had to manually browse thousands of posts for your pr0n warez stuff. But even nowadays, it's still too complicated for the average person to bother with

 

[Red Squirrel]

Don't you need to dial in to those? I did not even know they still existed.

 

[purbeast0]

used it for a while before I realized the ease of torrents. then again, I am lazy.

lol wut?