DMCA takedown requests - how responsive?

I'm in my first month of Usenet. I own several popular BluRay Movies but thought I'd save time ripping them manually and instead see what I could get off Usenet (NZBGeek + Eweka) now that my niece is visiting and needs entertainment.

I noticed a number of popular titles are consistently difficult to obtain ("aborted, cannot be completed"), even when live within only a few days, or even hours.

I assume this is a very vigilant DMCA takedown bot. How commonplace is this? And why does it only apply to some titles and not others?

Is it worth continuing with Usenet? I thought paying for content would ensure a certain "quality" of experience. So far, I'm a bit disappointed.

17 comments

Haven't had any experience with eweka, but this is the reason why people tend to have multiple providers from different backbones and multiple indexers - to increase your chance for completion. Weirdly, eweka does not follow DMCA, but NTD which I've seen regarded as slower to take down content, so in theory the experience should be better, especially on fresh content.

Your mileage will vary greatly depending on what indexers/providers you pick and unfortunately it's very difficult to say whether it will reach your expectations until you try different options.

If you're willing to spend some more on it, you could try just looking for a small and cheap block account from a different backbone to see if it helps with the missing articles, but there are no guarantees.

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- Thanks, great reply.
  
  I'm not willing to give up just yet. So I'll try a block account from a different provider and see how it fares.
  
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Usenet, while way better than torrenting, still requires multiple indexers and providers for this reason. I have 3 of each and rarely ever run into this issue except for very niche releases.

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- I'm inexperienced with Usenet, but why is it better than torrenting?
  
  I have 5-6 trackers which provides me basically everything I need and it sounds like Usenet might be similar in that regard.
  
  7
  
  The main benefit is that you don't need to use a VPN, so you get full download speeds. Also the availability and download speed isn't dependent on seeders, so more obscure content tends to survive longer on Usenet.
  
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- Which three providers/backbones dyou have?
  
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  For indexers, I have DrunkenSlug, nzbgeek, and nzbplanet. My backbone providers are UsenetExpress, FrugalUsenet, and Giganews. You can use https://whatsmyuse.net to make sure you don't have overlapping backbones.
  
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- I'm just trying the scene out, but so far I'm put off by having to pay for both indexers and providers, and now I need multiple of both to get what I thought was basic content (a film about a boy wizard).
  
  Maybe it's a different problem causing my downloads to not even start, but the help page suggests DMCA as likely cause.
  
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  It's understandable, sure. It's also a little more complex up front. For me personally, the pros outweigh the cons and I'd much rather use Usenet over torrenting, even with the cost.
  
  I definitely think it's DMCA, unfortunately.
  
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Isn't usenet paid?

I tried once exploring it but found out have to pay my ISP or something, so went back to torrenting.

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- Man I remember 20 years ago, Usenet came included as part of my Internet service. Grabbing stuff was so much simpler back then.
  
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I use a similar setup myself, though also make use of a Newsdemon block plan as a secondary usenet provider for any files Eweka doesn't have. Since the two providers are on different nodes and in different copyright jurisdictions (Eweka implements NTD requests while Newsdemon implements DMCA requests), Newsdemon can often finish releases that Eweka is missing a portion of. Since Newsdemon is only useful on the off-chance that Eweka can't finish a download, getting a one-time purchase block plan for it avoids needing to have another ongoing subscription.

On the off-chance that both fail (has yet to happen to me after switching to Eweka) and you don't mind also using torrents, I'd suggest joining TorrentLeech as another source for many such releases.

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Generally this is why you want to have multiple providers - one that follows DMCA and one that follows NTD. That way, you have a higher chance of actually finding the content you want before it gets taken down.

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