How pirates pirate pirates

One thing I think is interesting is how bittorrent trackers all, to a man, pirate each other's content.

Of course, in this case we're not talking about "content" in the way people normally mean, but simply the torrents they have listed.  If you're not familiar with bittorrent you might check out my earlier post about the nature of linking,  or my explanation of bittorrent.  In essense, however, bittorrent sites only host links to content, not the actual content itself--ever.

Point is, on public trackers (sites where you don't have to register), all the links to all the content are out there on the internet for everyone to see.  And private trackers, such as Demonoid, always always scrape the public tracker sites and copy all the data from them to include on their own sites.  After all--it's out there.

And I think this is what geeks tend to intuitively understand about the internet--when you put something on the internet, you can't take it back.

The Pirate Bay and other public trackers don't even try to stop other sites from copying their links, and not just because it would be asinine, I think.  It's simply because they understand what's going on.  But the same things are true with other media.

If you don't want someone copying your song or book--don't ever let anyone see it.  Problem solved.  But once you put it out there, it's obvious you want someone to see it.  So if people see it, but not on your terms, well, boo freaking hoo.  You can try to control the distribution of your movie with encrypted DRM discs, but when it's out there it's out there, and that is the way of the world.

And you seem to be making plenty of money still, so quit trying to destroy the internet, please.