Download Rights

atavism

My download rights have been taken again, it will cost €45 to reinstate them. Am i right to feel a little ripped off that i am being charged to download illegally shared material???
Anyone else feel like this. other torrent sites do not have these rules

domepro

Hi, just wanted to comment.

I rutinely have my download rights taken (i'm without download rights for some time now) for several reasons:

I'm on adsl and my upload is shit
I usually seem to download unpopular torrents with few leechers
I don't really download that much (36gb dl and 12gb ul in 5 years :D)

however, if you are feeling ripped off only because people are sharing "illegal" content, you are wrong.

creating and maintaining a site costs money, and more importantly time. you can't expect people to work for free. this is already a free site if you somehow manage to keep your ratio at a decent level. so, basically if you're keeping the torrent network alive (basically donating your bandwith) it's free money-wise. If for some reason you are unable to do that (low upload, unpopular torrent, not an "active" member of the torrent cloud like me) you're supposed to make it up to the community somehow and you have a lot of ways to do so without money:

seeding a new torrent
voting on additional categories
giving freeleech to a torrent for other people without download rights to enjoy
even seeding dead torrents gives you a small amount of bonus points

if you don't want to "wait", you can always pay. however, looking at donations as "paying for illegal content" is wrong. you're only paying it forward and enabling the community - people still have to pay for servers and the programmers/sysadmins have to eat and live, you can't expect everything for free. You're paying for the site and community to stay alive, not for the content.

so, no i don't feel ripped of having to donate and don't feel bad with no download rights because I actually don't deserve them

cannonmc

@atavism:

…Am i right to feel a little ripped off that i am being charged to download illegally shared material???
Anyone else feel like this. other torrent sites do not have these rules

No, you are not right to feel ripped off. No-one is forcing you to download anything. But if you do it from this site, then you are expected to abide by the rules. If you fall foul of the ratio rule, the staff will do their best to get you back on track.

And the quickest way of adding to your ratio (without paying) is simply upload a torrent to share. Another good way is to get friends to sign up using your Affiliate link. I have got 1500 Bonus points that way, equivaklent to an upload of 25GB.

As for other sites not doing this, of the 12-15 torrent sites I use only two have a 'no ratio' policy. Others are even more restrictive than .ru.

If you really want a way of downloading with no commitment to share I suggest you learn how to use usenet news groups but a decent server there would set you back about $10 a month