Downloading Ethics !!!

Hey guys, I feel that this topic is rather sensitive. Before everything, I should apologize. Bad english too :hehe:

Awright, I'd like to ask your opinions as parts of jdorama community about this sharing dramas idea (thru bittorrent or mirc) is really benefiting "every member in community"?
Think about dramas' suppliers, fserving, seeders or leechers.
There is no doubt that suppliers surely have done their deed to the community. Their dedication is not questionable.
Same goes for fservs and seeders...they do dedicate (in this case their bandwidth) to the community in sharing their dramas to folks who are in need. Honestly, I look up at those guys who respond to requests ( u know I'm referring to BT requests and all).
Now let's get to the bottomline.
I can be sure that almost 99.99 % of online drama hunters are leechers, including those fservs, seeders and even suppliers.
To make things easy, let's divide leechers as 'active leechers' who are helping other members in completing their series and 'passive leechers' who once have their files completed, they just shut off their client and disappear forever (meaning they never or seldomly bother to help others completing that particular file). That's what has been happening. That's why people like Prince and other JTV crews are sometimes upset with passive leechers, JEM who always tries really hard to help and remind us what sharing community is for. One blunt example is just look at how ppl complete the files but yet just very few of them who bother to seed the old episodes.

The questions now, (i'm not trying to be stereotyping)
-Have we acknowledged the concept of helping and sharing? What is this community for anyway?
-Do passive leechers have the right or even privilige to get what they want? Is it fair? Are they in good position to state their opinion, complain the suppliers and their works, to brag about when the next episodes gonna be and bla bla bla?
-What can we do more to make these passive leechers understand?
-If there is not any passive leechers, we can distribute the drama faster?

Please feel free to express ur opinions to bring one solid solution. The questions I have is rather a rough guidelines.

Id like to share a couple comments.

1. I have tried many p2p programs(napster, kazaa, morpheous, emule, bitTorrent etc etc) and have concluded that the problem with these programs will always be human. No matter how much you refine or fine tune a p2p program the problem will always lie in a smuk who cancels the download, sets his shared files to 0, or someone who leaves right after completing a download. You also have to look at the attempts p2p programs have tried to combat these problems. Kazaa tried to do some sort of Karma point system which was hacked with 3rd party programs. bitTorrent tried to make people force upload until people started making 3rd party bitTorrent clients that allowed people to set their upload to 0.

2. You cant blame all "passive leechers" for leaving right away. Some ISPs set upload caps on their bandwidth. This was the case for me until I switched ISPs. Now I try to seed as much as possible.

3. I have noticed this community does well in helping others. When I see people requesting something people like Michi, Pemu, Ruroshin are quick to help seed. You just have to make friends ^_^

Yeah, you're right, this is a rather sensitive issue. How to start with this statement. I have said this earlier in my previous statement and I shall restate it.
Yes, I'm an active and passive leecher. When I'm done downloading and I see 20s or 40s of seeds, I close the BT window. Kinda "finished leechin and there are enough seeds. Oh well, my seed doesn't have significant help" mentality. This usually happens to Jem's jdramas. If I see no seeds, I try to re-seed.

As for the re-seed, "old" releases are being requested, I have burned the dramas, I'm lazy at lookin for the cds and have them re-seeded. Looking for the cds may take some and have re-arrange the whole package again. The threshold is rather high.

When there are requests on the recent titles and I have not burned it yet, I try my best to re-seed it. Can't always, my cable allows 3 BT downloads at max at a time, very laggish surfin.
If we distro the files on the major BT sites, I'd say it'd have been different. There would be more seeds, always available. The current drama sites are good enough.

Jem's statement has affected pretty well, I see more recent and old seeds than before and not to mention the JTV site.

I have re-seeded some drama OST recently. I wouldn't mind re-seeding. I have plans to distro more dramas in the near future. Every community has its loopholes, just have to accept it and try not to fix it, might go to a wrong direction instead.

Yes, this might have rather negative impact to me in the forum, but I want to be honest.

I'm also sort of in-between. I let my client handle when to stop and when to seed stuff. So, when a file has a lot of seeders or very few leechers, those are the one my client turns off early. Sometimes, I make an exception and have a torrent seed for a week but that's usually just for stuff i really want to spread.

Anyway, being on DSL, u have to sort of manage ur upld a bit. You cant really share much especially if ur planning to dowload other stuff. In any case, any torrent my client stops seeding, I transfer to my fserv. But once I burned them, I dont usually look for them again to re-seed (besides most of them have no labels so its a pain to search).

EDIT:
Forgot to mention. when i do re-seed stuff, sometimes I manually SNUB IP ADDRESS that are way ahead of the others to give time for the rest to catch up and hopefuly they'll finish at the same time. (Like whe one is at 90% and the rest are like in 30%)

I apologize in advance if this gets long. First of all, it really pi$$es me off when people download from BT, finish leeching, and disappear, never to appear again to seed. There are a few types of people who close the window shortly thereafter, and we mostly think of greedy people who leech and run without a care. There are a few others I forget to think about:

- People with limited bandwidth and data transfer capability,
- People who actually *do* come back and seed later when they are better able (for having too many torrents open or for whatever reason they have to close temporarily) ~this is my category~,
- People crying that they can't stay on any longer because they aren't on broadband and took *SO LONG* to download the file....so they bolt.

And probably a few others I can't think of right now...:sweat:

When I leech and complete, some factors weigh into my keeping the window open to seed before closing:

- Are there sufficient seeders? Am I really needed *right now*?
- Is there anyone connected to me within 10% of download completion?
- How much data have I uploaded?
- Is my system smoothly functioning? (I have a semi-old computer with low RAM and drive space....I can barely handle 4 torrents simultaneously)

If I am not needed at the time or if I need to stop for a while for whatever reason, then I close that window. I try to make sure people connected to me that are close to finished are able to finish before I close out (90% complete or above). But.......I *do* return to seed later if I had to close the torrent soon after completion, as long as the file is on my drive or closely within reach and if I happen to notice (this is usually within 2 weeks of original download, for me).

I *totally* understand Jem's and others' aggravation with bolting leechers. If/when I upload things, I seed until 3 people finish, then I consider the torch passed on. Maybe that's soon for others, but I feel it's sufficient if everyone has common ettiquette. It drives me up the wall to later see 0 seeders, 10 people waiting, but about 100 files completed. That could mean people look to me, the source, for the seed when everyone takes off. It's just not fair when people leech and do not help when *needed*. It would just aggravate me to no end and would probably make me not to want to contribute anything extra (i.e. upload my own dramas commonly) because people would just take it and leave. Seeding, to me, is a sign of appreciation for the original uploaders' efforts, and the whole point is to help spread it around and not leave the contributor stuck having to come back and seed a bunch of times when they have done enough already.

Before I get even more into a rant, lemme acknowledge some of madol's original questions:

Do passive leechers have the right or even privilige to get what they want? Is it fair? Are they in good position to state their opinion, complain the suppliers and their works, to brag about when the next episodes gonna be and bla bla bla?

No, they shouldn't have the right, in my opinion. But, unfortunately, we can't force anyone to do anything to help. Sucky and greedy people just exist, sadly. It's not fair. And no, they are not in good standing to complain critique, request, or anything related. Another thing that really makes me boil in general is when people bug subbers and encoders "When is ______ coming out? I can't wait to see it! Please hurry! I can't wait, this is taking too long for the next episode!" as if encoders and, especially, subbers' main goal in life is to release episodes, that it's so easy, and that they have no personal lives to tend to. It makes me feel like saying "Shut up and be patient and appreciative!!! If you've never encoded or subbed anything, you have NO IDEA how much work and effort is involved!".

If there is not any passive leechers, we can distribute the drama faster?

Of course, I believe that would be so. If we didn't have people who leech and run and disappear forever, they wouldn't be sucking up bandwidth, and the only people leeching would be seeding, thus helping. I assume that's the main goal of people doing BT anyway :hehe:

What can we do more to make these passive leechers understand?

Until the day we can ban individuals from peer pools, I don't think there's much we can do but plead, rant, and threaten to stop uploading anything at all. It seems like they understand but just don't care, as long as someone seeds what they want until they get what they want.

Sorry for being so long with this. I'm sure I could have said more but this was long enough :sweat:

As far as d/l with BT, I'd like to know what is the basic ettiqutte for seeding? During the day, I really do not do any d/l, just thru the night when I sleep b/c no is using the machine. It's usually finished d/l'ing after I comeback from work. So depending on how long it's been seeded while I'm at work is how long my BT machine at home is been seeded.

When i am at home my computer is always on. I download and seed as much as i can but when i left for work or school i shutdown my computer. I noticed that if u want to dl a serie fast u need to start when the drama is first release and after a day or two later it really difficult to find any seed. That really suck.

I'm just wondering, how about us compiling a list of IP addresses to block (only good for static ips)? You can usually tell them anyway if ur using a bt client that provides upload/download statistics like shadow and those capable of multiple downloads. If ur downloading a file and look at the stats, you can see how much each ip address uploads/downloads to/from you. If they download a lot from you but upload 0kb to you, then those are probably the ones using the hacked clients that allows 0kb uploads. It wont necessarily prevent them from getting the file, it just that they wont be getting it from you freeing up some of ur bw for other ips/users.

Anyway, just my 2 cents...

Yeah, leeching is a huge problem in ALL aspects of on-line exchange of content. Not only is it a human thing, it's also by the design and concept of anonymous peer-to-peer technologies. Really, the only way of controlling leeching is to go back to the days of creating elite access to on-line resources like FTP, and give access only to people you trust. Much of the underground exchange of porno and warez function like this.

Matter of fact, think of the word everyone is using today... "trading"... It's not trading!!!! Virtually all of these technologies are based on "one-to-many". I always believed that the use of the term "trading" is totally bogus. People refer to the exchange of MP3s as trading... Yeah, right! Trading should be one-to-one. You give me one episode of something, and I'll give you one episode of something else.

I think BitTorrent is the most fair of the p-to-p technologies because it's designed to benefit those people who are in the giving mood, and penalize the leeches by cutting down the overall throughput of their downloads. Still, BT is not trading by definition. The only "true" methods of trading is either via snail-mail or via p-to-p using a technology that is truly one-to-one (instant messaging, for example) rather than one-to-many. With these two methods, you have full accountability of exactly what's going on in the trading process. You don't have to create an access list, deny list, or any of the sort.

Personally, leechers don't affect me. What does press my buttons the wrong way is their attitudes. Usually, these people are the most vocal. Leechers - if you leech something and there's something wrong with it, keep it to yourself. The only people who should have their opinions heard are those who make meaningful contributions to the community.

As for me... How am I contributing to the community? Several projects I'm working on to help out:

- Capturing of content to benefit those who otherwise would never see them.
- Improving on BT seeding by building a BT box for the sole purpose of seeding. See this link for complete details: http://www.d-addicts.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=143
- Snail-mail trading one-for-one, or distribution of content by mail for the cost of media and shipping to benefit fans who don't have much to begin with.

Hope this sheds some light...

--- groink

i think the main problem with things like BT, is that people leech too many different things at the same time, which kills their BW, and makes them want to turn watever they see done off.

same here. if i see a file with 40 seeds, i turn mine off and seed something else.

I've been through this debate before so I'll just summarize.

Leeching = taking without giving something back.

Technology is enabling more people to share however there will always be leechers.

You can't stop leechers with technology (people will always find a way around the tech). Open and annoymous sharing has its benefit, do we really want to go back to the days of 1:1 ratio FTPs or waiting weeks on end to try and get on a popular fserve? The current p2p protocals has it problems but it has also made sharing a lot easier and more people ARE sharing.

Leeching is a social problem and should be dealt with as such. I believe community like this one is helping. Whenever a familiar face around here ask for help they will always get it if its possible and I think that is the way to go.

arnel98 wrote:how about us compiling a list of IP addresses to block (only good for static ips)? You can usually tell them anyway if ur using a bt client that provides upload/download statistics like shadow and those capable of multiple downloads. If ur downloading a file and look at the stats, you can see how much each ip address uploads/downloads to/from you. If they download a lot from you but upload 0kb to you, then those are probably the ones using the hacked clients that allows 0kb uploads. It wont necessarily prevent them from getting the file, it just that they wont be getting it from you freeing up some of ur bw for other ips/users.

Anyway, just my 2 cents...

There should be a way to block the "leech-and-leave" people from the source.

just to add my 2 cents worth. basically, a lot of the talk has been on bittorrent. i am not an user of that because of the amount of bandwidth it takes up on my computer...instead i uses the emule. not that it would make any difference in this discussion

emule software developers attempted to address this issue by imposing some sort of credit system and even has set the client to a limit of 1:4 (upload to download). of coz, since it is open source, there are people that actually changed the code to be 1:8 or even more. hence there have been some commotion in the emule/edonkey community with regards to Gate (the person that started the change of the ratio) and AntiGate (people who try to counter this person's actions).

i am possibly both a passive and active leecher. for files that are heavily shared, i will just remove them from my shared list. for files that are rare, i will keep sharing them till i ran out of harddisk space.

leeching lies entirely with the user. i doubt there is a sure-fire way to ensure that people will always keep sharing files and not just download and run away.

zbl wrote:leeching lies entirely with the user. i doubt there is a sure-fire way to ensure that people will always keep sharing files and not just download and run away.

Yes, I totally agree with that conclusion. On-line exchange of anything will have its leechers. Like I said earlier, I really don't have a problem with people taking and not giving back. When I seed stuff, I expect that kind of thing to happen. As a result, I'm able to deal with it without becoming too emotional. If you participate in on-line trading, you need to come to grip with this reality before you begin. Otherwise, it'll just drive you nuts!!!

Let's look at an alternative method... I much prefer exchanging CD-Rs via regular mail. It does cost money in shipping and time spent burning discs. However, look at it from the on-line trader's point of view... If you put a price on the non-tangibles, such as the amount of time your computer eats up downloading/uploading, or time spent searching for stuff on emule and BT trackers, you'd be amazed at how much money that totals out to. In some cases, the amount of time-coverted-to-money spent on-line trading will cost more than it is in the cost of shipping and burning CD-Rs.

As an example... I shipped Ruroshin about 16 gigabytes of Jdorama content. Breaking down the cost, I spent about two hours creating the discs (and at the same time watched David Letterman and Craig Kilborn), $3.20 for the DVD-R media, and $9.00 to shipping them from Hawaii USA to Australia, which took six days to arrive.

It's really money spent up front versus money spent across a span of time. You're really not saving that much money. And, by trading via snail-mail, you've completely taken the leech factor out of the equation. You have full control of the exchange.

Sometimes advancements in technology just complicates things even more.

--- groink

I TOTALLY agree with you with the snail-mail trade, groink.

Some Bittorrent groups have custom made trackers that record the amount of data that passes through your comp. They can also set ratios for upload/download. Probably something like that would work out? You could probably also specify a connection speed to determine what type of ratio it would be...

This may sound a little menial, but i was thinking that we should put out name in some list in (for example) D-Addicts. That way we know who has d/l'ed a specific file and we can ask that person for seeding. Just brainstorming...

There is a new tracker software that keeps tracker of how much you've download and uploaded and your ratio. However, its still a bit buggy so I'm waiting for it to become a stable 1.0 release before i try it out.

I'm wondering though, since it doesnt have control of the BT client, it can only keep track of static IPs. Is this a correct assumption? anyway, just curious...

You see, the BIG HUGE problem with on-line downloading of files is that virtually all the trading technologies have one thing in common: the focus is to be anonymous. It's the anonymous element that throws out any possibility of tracking a downloader's history, thereby opening the technologies to leeching.

If you really think about it, what we really need is the ability for a leech or a seeder to register for an account with a tracker, then keep a permanent record of the account's activity. The details of what's being accounted for isn't important right now... The important thing is that there's a check-in process in place so the user's activities can be accounted for.

So you're probably saying right now that I want to stay anonymous. Well, think about why you want to stay anonymous. First thought... Is trading Jdoramas illegal? If it is illegal, then we might as well stop right here, and leeching will go on forever.

However, if trading Jdoramas is legal, then the anonymous factor should indeed be left out of the technology. And, you as a downloader shouldn't have a problem having your downloading activities tracked.

What the legalized trading world needs is a technology very similar to BitTorrent in its file transferring protocol, but with the anonymous factor left out. I would think that a programming wizard can take the existing BitTorrent source code, then implement a legalized account-based trading system. Now, this is different from what d-addicts.com is doing... What Ruroshin does is use accounts in his PHP tracker to allow posting of torrent files, and to add comments and link it to the torrents. Other than that, the usage of the torrent files is not linked in any way to the user's tracker account.

Like I said in previous postings, legalized trading needs a closed system.

--- groink