Lossy to lossless is fine it’s just a waste of space.

If this holds up in court and becomes precedent it will create a lot of people with nothing left to lose with a lot of grudges against these companies. I can’t say I would have any sympathy if executives became targets for heinous acts of violence stemming from such an injustice.

It’s consistent if they depend on copyright law to make money.

Using a VPN makes it a bit harder for your ISP and the French espionage apparatus to siphon your data as much as anyone not using one (ISPs have to keep a history for up to a year as well, it is a legal requirement to make it easier to spy on people). Of course with the laws in Five Eyes countries it won’t actually protect your privacy 100% if you get your VPN service from there but I don’t think France has the budget or capabilities to keep track of every foreign VPN company even with cooperation from other spy agencies.

That might explain some insane replies I’ve seen in the past.

That’s what I wrote.

They have DRM, even if easy to go around it, it doesn’t make sense to pay loads for a shitty medium with obstacles to getting what’s on it… it sends the wrong message to the criminal organisations peddling them.

this is not the 1980s we have reliable protocols for file distribution where integrity checks and load distribution are included

I search for torrents, I usually find anything I want, sometimes it takes a while because the torrents are not very active.

When they started doing away with torrents I stopped even bothering trying their site.

It is diverting the content from public torrents for the sole reason that no one can be bothered to make decentralised cataloguing work better than in the early 1990s in my very biased opinion.

Until it gets nuked by pigs stealing everything. A decentralised pirate catalogue based on Musicbrainz is something I want to see before I die. People diverted their efforts into vulnerable private trackers instead.

Single point of failure also. What.CD was the best vaccine against them: those naive idealists had hosting in France…

Use BitTorrent with DHT, no problem if site goes down.

Why haven’t people learned?! It’s been decades now!