Eli5 How are websites able to provide pirated content for free? Doesn’t it cost money to host the content, program and maintain the site etc?
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I’m a gigantic pirate
ELI5: You know how you saw a tv commercial for McDonalds and they had that cool pokemon toy you wanted? So when you got to McDonalds we had to buy you a happy meal you didn’t really want just so you could get the toy?
NonELI5: Advertising, just aggressive shady advertising. The most common form of piracy is bittorrent where the actual “cost” of piracy (the bandwidth) is handled by one user to the next. Like you can make a copy of a CD I own, but you have to come to my house and pay for your gas to get here and your own blank CD. So the pirate website just maintains an index of bittorrent links. You’ll get about as many shady ads as a porn site, if not a bit more. If you have an adblocker or two it isn’t too bad.
You’ll have other sites where the files might be hosted on a paid filehosting service, like rapidgator or megaupload. In that case there’s a referral service to get people to sign up for the filehosting service.
If it’s something like pirating a stream say the World Cup or a UFC PPV, the ads will be more aggressive, but also related to betting.
That covers the majority of pirating. At a higher level you’re talking about scene groups and release groups, and those people aren’t necessarily in it for the money and it’s more of a weird clout thing. In those scenarios pirated content and access to the content becomes the currency.
Like someone has written a script to quickly download content from netflix and netflix doesn’t know to patch for it yet. So Wednesday comes out and it’s eight episodes, recording it all in real time would take eight hours, but using the script they can download all the episodes and post them online in an hour, and the first group to do that can attach their name to it and get recognition. Sort of a weird illegal influencer dynamic.
Or someone knows someone who works in a visual graphics studio, back in the day if you were in the oscars voting committee that was always an ideal time for leaks.
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