All the people correcting my pronunciation of µTorrent because they didn't watch the video. 😍😍😍😍😍 Morning Brew has actually made the news interesting for me! ☕📰 Thanks Morning Brew for my daily news perk - sign up for free here cen.yt/mbnationsquid

Remember guys, It's always morally correct to pirate Adobe products

Just remember this: Torrenting is also a way to preserve content that will most likely dissapear from streaming services.

I like how you referred to malware companies as "malware providers" as if its a service lol

Until someone makes a single streaming platform for all movies/shows that comes at a reasoanble price, and where you know your favourite show or movie would never be removed, then I'd say piracy still has a place. I've seen a few instances recently of people losing access to shows (even ones they've directly bought digitally) just because of licencing agreements between the creator and provider. A shop won't break into your house and steal back the DVD, so why is it "okay" for a digital platform revoke something you've bought?

Gabe Newell really said it best, “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”

Torrenting isn't on the decline. I think it's on a parabolic trajectory. The rise of greedy streaming companies means it's gonna become normal again.

Torrenting at a decline /= "piracy" at a decline. Plenty of people use "pirate streaming services", like those movie sites you mentioned earlier in the video. And good for them. ;)

As someone who grew up with 56k AOL Internet... I'll tell you that it was longer than 10 minutes. I remember setting WAV files to download and then leaving to get lunch, hoping they'd be done when i got home haha

I spent 6 months when I was 12 years old downloading Blair Witch Project 2 on KaZaa on a 56k modem, coming home every day to see how much further it had downloaded, it became an absolute obsession seeing that one movie. Imagine my utter disappointment when it eventually finished and it turned out to be absolute shite.

Gaben once said “Pirating is a service problem” He was completely right cause nobody wants to pay $50 a month for Adobe Edit: Looks like piracy is back on the menu now that stuff is getting too expensive again for an average/low quality product or even turning into a subscription service

I’ve been saying this for years, if you get a service that makes watching movies cheaper or playing video games cheaper people will want to be legal and pay for their services. Since the launch of Netflix and Spotify, we saw a decline in pirating. Ever since the launch of Disney + when I realized that the publishers would want in on the Netflix pie and that prices would skyrocket and that would lead to more people pirating again. Statistics now show that pirating has increased again. If corporations actually learned from their mistakes in the 80’s and 90’s when movies and music became too expensive, if they had been less greedy and let Netflix have most shows then people wouldn’t download. Corporations and corporate greed never learn.

Minor correction: torrenting is still p2p technology, but simply distributed. P2P merely refers to the fact that you are not using a central hosting server (party A uploads for party B to download afterwards), but are circumventing that so that party A, one of the peers, is able to connect directly, just as you describe, with further *peers*. Even further: if A and B have different parts of the stream (which they could have received from C), they can become both up- and down-load peers to each other, while taking the load off C. Your video is also poignant, because when you posted it, you already mentioned that price increases, balkanisation and reducing of catalogues may lead to a return of pirating. Only 1 year later, and the streaming services are in a self-inflicted, dramatic free-fall. I wouldn't be surprised if torrent traffic is back on the rise!

Streaming services caused a decline in pirating, but it's also going to cause a comeback. So many shows and movies are spread out over so many services. Everyone wants to set up their own streaming service. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney, Universal. I'm not subscribing to 20 fucking services to watch a show. Screw that.

fun fact : people after pirating sometimes buy the actual program after pirating it to support the dev's. but for adobe products, nothing changes.

I'm surprised he didn't mention the government's stand against internet piracy in the early 2010s, which directly affected the ease of torrenting. By partner with isps to detect torrent traffic. Isps would throttle and torrent traffic or send to warning emails for downloaded certain torrents which could ultimately lead to termination or internet service.

leechers are not just people who own a copy of the file. Leechers are people who only Download, with no upload ratio. leeching bandwidth.

Years ago, uTorrent was known as "green steam" over here in Latin America lol. I see torrenting coming back, but not with games or software, but thanks to greedy streaming services.

"Torrenting itself is not illegal. Torrenting copyrighted content is illegal" Short sentence that explained the problem

The one thing that annoyed me were the thousands of fake files out there, waiting for hours to grab a movie only to find out it was a porno or sometimes just a black screen was so bloody annoying that was until torrent clients started to let you preview what you were grabbing be it music, movies, programs etc. When that happened it was a god send and saved me many hours on fake downloads.

You know why I uninstalled it , the first time it shipped with malware and never looked back , deluge does the same thing, they ruined it with one release.

Love the video. Pirating Adobe products is always morally correct

him: *piracy is declining* me who lives in brazil: this is the biggest lie of the century

1) closed source 2) ads 3) included a mining program in bundle

In Germany, torrents never really took off in public. It wasn't the choice for pirates, either because lawyers acted as seeders, logging every IP address, and sued everyone in a fully automated process. So basically, if you started an illegal torrent download in like 2008, you could have been sure to get a friendly letter in the mail a few weeks later. Same went for P2P like eMule. So basically, pirates moved on to one click hosters. Torrent only became a thing for closed and trusted groups.

Piracy is something that will always be around due to 3rd world nations often times relying off of it just to make ends meet, see Brazil. However, I would imagine that the over-saturation of streaming services combined with more and more classic games either becoming highly scarce or outright becoming abandonware, I foresee that in the coming years many will sail the high seas once again.

14:11 When they put ads in it I dropped it in a heart beat and never looked back.

A 23 minutes video that basically says "They put ads."

I’ve seen a theory that the ammount of people who pirate content hasn’t lowered, but instead the ammount of people who dont pirate has increased. In ye olden days of the internet, most people online where computer nerds who knew what they where doing, but now everyone’s online. And with less of the internet’s population pirating, it’s harder for new people to find out how

Valve got it right. If people are going to the trouble of pirating your content, you aren't doing a good enough job of delivering that content legitimately.

Ads and monetization in general damaged the internet a lot. I often hear the excuse "that money makes this channel possible" by creators, but I still remember the time when people invested their own time and money to contribute to the knowledge of the world. Basically like Wikipedia or Open Street Maps still work today. A UKposts video does not have to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. Once you bought some equipment for a basic studio, you can just sit in front of the camera and talk. No need to pay for copyrighted music in the video. Creating content for the internet should go back to a hobby that people do in their free time. Personally I have spent a lot of time to create my own website about skyscrapers. That website does not have any ads and will never have any.

Remember: piracy is always morally correct

Torrents will never die. There's a shitload of gamers/internet users from countries like India, East Europe and South America that just don't have the money to squander on games. And the current prices are absurd. I live in one and my gaming life's biggest wish was to play HOI4. I had to save up money and wait until a 75% discount AND I've passed my college admission exam. I had to wait 3 years to buy and play legit HOI4. And I'm probably better off than other countries. So yeah, pirating isn't going away any time soon

Piracy isn't getting smaller, the internet is getting bigger as a whole, making piracy a smaller slice of the pie. Streaming services are dying of their own greed. piracy will always be there. because it's ultimately a service problem. when a service is bad piracy steps in and makes it good. Piracy's main appeal isn't price, it's convevience. Music piracy is on decline because all music streaming services carry all songs. Movie piracy is up because streaming services carry less and less of what you want. Worse service=more pirates

you can always try to reduce or slow down piracy, but you'll never be able to completely get rid off it. it's just like someone posted an embarrasing video or photo of you. if it's once on the internet, it'll be there forever.

Yeah, that's not exactly what happened to napster, it wasn't exactly going smooth before it ended, and it all started going downhill with Lars Ulrich serving as the face of the whole "Music industry vs Napster"

I have to disagree on one point. Piracy is still as rampant as ever, it's just quieter. Back in the 00s, it was common to hear, "Check out what I got from Limewire last night!!" But with lawsuits ramping up, especially targeting the individuals, people are getting sneakier and definitely quieter

I have always called it Micro-Torrent, because µ is the SI symbol for that. That the original dev didn't go with "micro", for you know, the SMALLEST most light weight client, is completely baffling to me.

When you have a subscription to a streaming service and you still have to add subscription over it to have access to studio's catalogs. Piracy is not dead at all.

Yup, he hit the nail on the head. It was one thing when Netflix was pretty much the only game in town for $9.99/mo. (currently double that). Now content is spread over a dozen streaming services, all at about the same price. All of a sudden, cord cutting is not be the cheap alternative that it once was, and piracy will be on the rise once again. Do I want to pay for a streaming service to watch ONE show...Star Trek Discovery as an example? Maybe, but not at the current pricing.

I always thought it was pronounced 'Micro Torrent' because the µ is an abbreviation for Micro, and one of the original goals of the program was to maintain a small file size.

what's the background music around the "piracy" chapter of the video?

Qbit da best, The hilarious analogy about using photos off the wall in photocopying is far more complicated than just explaining that torrenting is that multiple people have the file and all shared at the same time eliminating individual probelms amongst users

In a weird way I think that piracy has actually become an important and valuable component of the internet world. It is the anchor that keeps corporate greed in check, it keeps the digital free market in check. It has essentially become the "competition" that companies compete against for the consumer's attention. When a product becomes available, companies can decide how they want to market and sell it. If the people feel that what they offer is reasonable, they will willingly part with their money to purchase something 'the legal way'. But always having a free alternative there means that once corporations start getting greedy, charging unreasonable fees and reducing the quality of their products, people will not hesitate to ditch these companies and go back to pirating. We've already seen this happen. When itunes charged $1 per song, it _sounded_ reasonable, but when you consider that an album probably had 12 songs on it, and the average person might have had 300 albums that they wanted in their library, paying $3600 for music was not feasible, especially for children. Especially when you factor in that many people had already paid for this music once in vinyl, cassette or cd. Because of this people pirated music. Same thing with movies. Movies were too expensive, going to the theatre was no longer enjoyable when people felt like they were getting robbed just to get a drink and a popcorn, plus the ticket itself which cost as much or more than actually buying the dvd. So people pirated movies. Corporations saw a decline in sales because people would literally rather break the law than pay what these companies were demanding, so they had to change. They couldn't stop people from pirating (they tried), so they had to adapt. This led to the rise of streaming services. People were thrilled to see that they could listen to all the music they wanted for a flat monthly rate roughly equivalent to the cost of one music album. People were happy to ditch piracy for this because the price was reasonable and it was way easier. Likewise with movies, when Netflix started streaming movies people ditched piracy because this was way easier and the price was good. But now there are so many streaming services competing for attention and they are all poaching production studios, signing exclusivity deals, and raising prices. These anti-consumerist business practices are driving customers away and people are turning to piracy again. I guess we'll see how long it takes for the market to break again and force companies to make changes.

Torrents are historical digital archives of the future, that need to be kept alive. In some distant future, the emergence of torrenting would be considered as the watershed moment in the evolution of internet. Mark my words.

Hello old friend! I never forgot you!

Calling installing literal malware "one bad marketing decision" is quite apologetic.

I disagree with your conclusion at the end about the demise of piracy due to online streaming. For a brief period, there were decent alternatives, but right now? To get access to the content that sites like TPB offer at a hassle, you'd need to get 4 to 5 streaming subscriptions, each currently going up in price. The reasons for which piracy initially reared its head - lack of access - is returning. I suspect we'll likewise see torrent traffic rise a bit again. But at the same time, as average connection speed goes up, and applications take advantage of that (video teleconferencing for instance), legitimate traffic is going to grow faster then torrents will.

This past Christmas my family wanted to watch Home Alone, but for the first time ever it was not airing on linear TV and not available for streaming where I live. The only option was to rent it for an extra cost through a streaming platform we were already subscribed too... This is the kind of crap that is bringing piracy back, and I'm all for it

I still use it and it does the job. If it didn't i would look for something else. Been using it for a decade. Super fast downloads and had no idea there was even a video made of its downfall lol. I'm allergic to streaming so i'd be lost without peer to peer sharing.

"Piracy is at a decline" Let's see how that ages as streaming services revert to ads on a subscribtion

I honestly still use µTorrent but that's mostly because I've been out of the piracy game for so long that I just don't know what the newer and more popular programs are.

Has piracy really declined that much or is it that the amount of internet traffic is infinitely greater than in bittorrents' hay day? Great video

several inaccuracies in this video... a few of the most notable: 2001 was not the year of napster. 1999 was. Leechers are not people who have a piece of media and do not share it. They are people who downloaded it and then do not seed. Torrenting declined in internet usage because the capacity of the internet massively increased and more of the internet was being used for other things - not because torrenting slowed down. Torrenting actually increased during this time. Torrenting has not declined in volume, nor is it declining. It has only increased and continues to do so, and is at the highest it has ever been over the last few years.

"Morning Brew - for people that are so addicted to social media that they've forgotten RSS exists"

As much as I dislike gaben, he's right: piracy can go away if you offer better services. The problem is companies have started taking users for granted and in the endless search for a record quarterly report they have gotten, again, to the point where the worth of their service vs value becomes questionable; so yes, I do believe piracy will rise once again. Heck I've been questioning for months if netflix is worth it anymore. It's certainly been in decline for a few years now.

I believe streaming companies are pushing the general audiences back to torrenting, and a major factor could be that some material gets pulled on said streaming network by the IP as it might not adhere to the "modern audiences" and forever can be lost unless the general audience can get their hands on the physical copy of said material.

This entire video could have been 3 minutes long with the same amount of information.

I would argue movie and tv series piracy must have risen since the streaming services started to split up or creators started their own streaming services, leading to the customers now having to pay way more money to get access to all the movies and tv series they like. What also does not help is that there are sometimes platforms you wouldn't think about that offer streaming, but not any of the streaming services. Which leads to pirate platforms filling the gaps.

22:29 I find it plausible that streaming services have reduced piracy, but the fact that torrenting is a smaller share of total bandwidth usage nowadays isn't really evidence of that by itself. The rise of video streaming would reduce torrenting's total share of internet traffic even if people were still torrenting exactly as much, because streaming takes a lot of bandwidth. People are just using way more data overall.

I used to use uTorrent back then during my high school era around 2012 i think, but some day it asked me to update to version 3 and i hate the new UI, so i reverted back to the previous version and never update it again for years, turns out that decision saved me from crypto mining issue

The problem with streaming services is the overwhelming amount of garbage content, content being removed, and too many services. So if I want to watch The Boys, Stranger Things, and Rick and Morty, I have to subscribe to 3 different streaming services. When South Park did their Panderverse episode, there was no "TV Guide" to tell me who was streaming it, so now it becomes a hunt to find the one streaming service offering the content I want to see. Now people "buy" shows and movies on streaming platforms without realizing that platform can lose the rights to host content that was purchased by customers; you don't own your purchases anymore, they can be taken away at any time. This dystopian, anti-consumer garbage needs to stop...but it won't because the majority of consumers keep giving these vampires their money.

Still boggles my mind how thy decided to install a crypto miner program on ppls pcs and thought they could get away with it

GabeN is absolutely right, and the dramatic fall of video game piracy is thanks to, in a major way, to Steam. The reason why Steam got so dominatingly successful is its core concept: convenience. A lot people don't know this, but Steam *didn't* start out as an online game store. It began as a small utility to deliver automatic patches for Valve games (back when they still made actual games). This was so successful, that the service was extended to other third-party games. In the early 2000's, getting patches and updates for your games was a cumbersome process. IF you had internet (big IF) you had to find and download the patches which was easier said than done, or buy overpriced gaming magazines that came with a CD with patches for many popular games at the time, and pray yours was among them. But even when you had the patches, you had to apply them in a certain order or in some other special way or you'd brick your game. Steam cut through this arduous process by offering to download and install patches automatically for all your (applicable) games, saving you all that hassle, which was a *huge* accomplishment at the time. In short order Steam became a sort of virtual game library, a convenient hub to keep all your favorite games in one place (regardless if it was a Valve game or not), updated and ready to go whenever you wanted to game. Then they started adding even more features, like friend list, chat functionality, server browser for multiplayer games, in-game overlay, patch notes and news about your games, mod support, and so on. (The online store functionality came much later, which is what the platform is generally known for nowadays.) And this is where the piracy argument comes in. GabeN knew, that the only way to defeat piracy is to offer gamers a better service, better value than what they get from pirates. While pirating theoretically gets you a free game, you pay for it in other ways, mainly security and inconvenience. When pirating games you usually have to wade through lots of seedy websites and services, often chock full of dangerous malware, and even what you download you can never be sure if it's installing just your game or sneakily stuffs your computer full of viruses, spyware, trojans, cryptominers and dreck like that. Also, in most cases cracked games can't be patched/updated, can't use multiplayer or online features, etc, so you often end up with a vastly inferior product. What Steam offered is not just a game, but security that you indeed get a game and nothing else malicious, immediate automatic patches and updates, plus a whole truckload of added features and convenience, with the one caveat of needing to have a legal copy. Steam grew as a sort of stealth-DRM system, that indeed kept your games up to date and showered you with great features, but your game also wouldn't start if Steam detected any unauthorized changes to the game files and the VAC system would prevent most forms of cheating in online games. And surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, depending on your stance on the issue) to a lot of ex- and would-be pirates, this was a trade they were more than willing to take, because they were no longer just paying for a game, but for the peace of mind and the plethora of added benefits and convenience Steam offers, which just swung the scales wildly in the legal copy's favor. And even through all this Steam was and still remains a free program without any third party ads, paid premium features or other obnoxious monetization, focusing instead on making gaming as simple and convenient as possible, with tons of integration and quality-of-life stuff simply no other competing platform offers to this day. Steam is not successful because it's dominating the market. It's dominating the market because it's successful. Other huge companies tried to create their own version of Steam and failed miserably (Origin, UPlay, RSC, GoG Galaxy, EPIC, etc). No other competing platform ever even came close to measuring up to Steam in features, ease of use and sheer convenience. Granted, Valve has multiple decades of development on them, but that's not the reason competing platforms are usually DOA/non-starters. It's because of the aforementioned core concept: those platforms are all built around monetization from the start, while Steam is built around delivering QoL and convenience first and being a shop floor second.

I rarely get interested to watch videos that talk about past internet history/software history, but when it's NationSquid that's doing it, I 100% get interested and enjoy all the videos he drops. Great work man! Love your content!

Title for this video should be "Poor memory of uTorrent user". User need good software, and uTorrent is that software now. Steam is bad example because it's completely different business model. Adobe software is more popular because been pirated for logng time, people know how to use it and more people create content.

Nah, torrents are always alive. A lot of copyrighted things can be downloaded only by using torrent trackers. Copyright is an evil thing that want to stop human technological progress - new startups have no chances against "huge monsters" who don't want to do anything new while there is no rivals. But I would prefer qBittorent client.

Piracy can be a tough thing to kill off, especially when not all forms of media are available to everyone

I just came here to say that after watching only 2-3 videos, you quickly became on of my favorite content creators here in youtube. You make me feel incredible interested for a topic I never felt interested in before. Thank you so much for this amazing content and please never stop!

Number of seeders won't make a lick of difference on dial up once you're downloading @ that tiny bandwidth cap. Only so much data can transfer to you at once.

As a Greek dude, let me make a correction. The letter "μ" is basically the Greek version of "m", but in Greek it's actually pronounced as "me", not "mju". So the whole thing is pronounced as "metorrent".

Not only torrenting can save some time and download speeds but it can also preserve many lost files and specially lost games

If you feel morally guilty after torrenting a fine then just seed the file for 10 mins in this way you'll help growing the files seed and helping other people.

Yep, and now that there are a billion streaming services where all the movies and series are scattered I'm dusting off the good ol' pirate hat.

I recall calling it micro torrent instead of u torrent

I never considered uTorrent a "cultural icon" like Napster or Limewire, but rather, just the most used torrent client among a long list of choices. If anything, the Pirate Bay was more the "cultural icon" we associated with torrents than uTorrent.

Me: *Sees the title* Also me as Russian: ha-ha, funny joke. Oh, new repack of Forza Horizon 5 with online-fix? I'll take two!

16:22 Actually I do NOT have a problem with creators putting sponsored content within their videos. Sometimes they tie in the sponsored content with the subject of their video very well. I see the name and I can skip immediately. When you give the user the power to skip at ANY moment, you challenge the ad creator to _entertain!_ The makers of the Superbowl ads know how to entertain. That´s why some people watch the Superbowl just for the ads. What I absolutely hate is the repeated ads where you can only skip after 5 seconds AND the repeated non-skippable 30 sec ads. If UKposts went back to banner ads that can be closed immediately, I might consider not blocking.

There's no fall. I'm still using it

I got 2 ads in the first couple of minutes of the video, after those 20 or so seconds were over i got a minute long ad from the videomaker. That was a nightmare.

To spare you 24 minutes. uTorrent added ads and bloat to their software and made the software more unstable and worse to use. People migrated to better freeware.

Fun fact: In my country we call it Micro Torrent, instead of 'U' Torrent

In regards to youtube ads? I can handle the my video eas sponsered by so and so short a quick ads performed by that channels cast. I cannot stand the ads in between videos similar to live cable. For that reason i have had YT Premium pretty much since it was called UKposts Red.

does anybody remember that Opera used to have torrenting built in? also transparent widgets and stuff. then they remade it based on webkit instead of presto and we still dont have anything as good yet...

It's crazy to think that 2mb used to take ~10 minutes, and 500mb took a day. I wonder how people then would react to speeds now

Adobe becoming subscription base reduces piracy? I thought it is the opposite

Torrenting is still the way of downloading game here at Bangladesh . Infact its usage is more than ever now after covid when people started having internet connection at home

This video should really be about 24 seconds long not 24 minutes. Once it turned commercial it was toast. Plenty of people still use it they just use an old version without all the ads and crap.

I rarely torrent anymore...and when I do, it is exclusively stuff that you just plain can't get anywhere else...like old software, old versions of software, old archives, ROM goodsets, and unstreamable albums that have never had re-releases (I don't care how much I want an album...I am not paying $600 for an out-of-print CD on the secondary market).

22:58 "And now you can get access to pretty much every movie and tv show you've ever watched" Unless it's blocked in your country, for (monetary) reasons. Or some other streaming service hold the rights, so you now have to fork out 100 dollars a month to 10 different streaming services because they each hold the rights to a bit of the stuff you like.

Now that streaming services are getting shittier, with games getting lower in quality but higher pricetag, lots of people are just going back to pirating. Me included.

6:40 absolutely no one in those days, especially those on dialup, downloaded a 500+mb file without a download manager..everyone knew better than to have to start over and got a download manager after the first time a download failed due to a lost connection regardless of it's size.

The thing i love about torrenting and all these "could be used for piracy" programs is that im free to just not give a shit and get whatever for free. It doesnt get better than that. Dont want 5 streaming apps? Pirate. Dont want to pay for music? Guess what, pirate it in sometimes even better quality... Want to justify to yourself all of this? Just think about how absurdly much companies are earning and how little and insignificant YOU, a single human, are to them.

The reason Naspter was interesting was that you were able to find and very quickly listen so songs you simply can notnormally listen, like the stuff you last heard 10 or 20 years ago. The music you heard for free in the radio in the 80s was available in a heavy laptop. It was the only digital media service. Price or legality was totally irrelevant. Music industry was run by boomers so none of them bothered to provide this service, so people did.

Also copying can't be theft if buying is not ownership.

Torrenting is still fairly popular and is on the rise again.

I'm just so glad we have Transmission nowadays. Also I think quite a bit of the reason why people stopped torrenting and moved to subscription services is because we as a generation grew up. Back in the day I was about 12-13yo, and it was pretty hard to ask my parents for their cards to a) buy something on the internet and b) buy something DIGITAL on the internet, like there was no package, no physical product they could verify and make sure I wasn't throwing money away or getting scammed. Then as I grew up I started to manage my own money and eventually got my own card so I could just spend it on whatever I wanted be it a digital copy of a game or a streaming service. This is something most kids nowadays will arguably never experience as well, we as their parent generation grew up in this environment and we understand what they're talking about when they want to get digital content on the internet.

As someone who gets movie and gaming media from both legit and pirated services, I don't think it is indeed going away soon. People don't just pirate because they can get something for free but because so much media out there is still so hard to get or are gatekept in regions. And in terms of gaming, there are many like me who would mostly rather pirate for reasons like getting the good game without making certain publishers (who are usually greedy/scummy in context) profit, or trying if a game is even good without regretting to buy it later if it sucked. *I previously said devs but I had actually had things like EA and _that certain popular and infamous entity I don't wanna mention_ of Take Two on my mind so I was prompted to be corrected by a reply.

It is _MicroTorrent,_ not _YouTorrent,_ because µ is the "mu" Greek character, equivalent to "m" in Latin languages.

My problem is utorrent ADS work perfectly, but it becomes unresponsive (but still working in the background) and thise rechecks.. ugh