

> There are so many other ways to monetize media content. The paper and plastic was never the valuable part. The latter part of that is true (setting aside quibbles about bandwidth and storage not being absolutely 100% free), but here's the thing: back in the days of physical media, of books and DVDs and CDs and what have you, the bulk of the price was never the physical media itself. > Data yearns to be free - sharing it and copying it costs nothing. I don't mean to pick on you, per se, but I think there's a long-standing confusion about creative works that's captured in your line: (This was a small 7 person startup so trust was super important).Īs for why the intern needed to ssh into a digital ocean box to run a torrent? The college internet (where he was working from) blocked torrent connections and he wanted to be the first one to download and release the episodes on the college intranet.

But repeating the offense, failing to come clean and making us waste our time to locate who did it was not. Sure enough a couple of mkv files had been downloaded and deleted by an intern :( Making the mistake of downloading it was forgiveable once, since we lived in a culture where piracy was rampant / normal (this was before Netflix et al were available in my country).

Then we got a second email (a final warning).Įveryone denied doing it, so I had to find the offender via checking the bash history of the box for all users. We sent an email to everyone with access, saying whoever was doing it to stop. We found out after Digital Ocean forwarded us an email from HBO (who presumably tracked Digital Ocean down via the IP) that we were engaging in piracy. An intern once thought it was a good idea to torrent a couple of Game of Thrones episodes using my startup's Digital Ocean box.
