Nah, but they’re both forms of intellectual property.

In this case, it seems like they decided Zynga was infringing on patent US7072849B1. They managed to convince the court that Zynga’s advertising methods were too similar to what was described in that patent. Which is bullshit, as software patents shouldn’t exist, but oh well.

Without direct connection, PMS uses Plex Relays, which limit streams to like 320p.

There are many crawlers, and I’m confident at least a couple have tried to connect to your server (unless you have an IP firewall, or if you’ve changed Plex Media Sever’s default port, in which case significantly less likely).

I assume it’s not really about them watching content, but to avoid them exploiting any possible PMS bugs.

You are now not hosting publicly available links

That’s also the case with open trackers (without indexers), yet I’ve gotten shut down way too many times. But that made me wonder, does this project share metadata if someone else in the DHT swarm queries for an info_hash you have, or does it simply “leech”? Pretty cool project regardless.

This gets rid of any questionably legal gray area of using sites like Nyaa, etc for Torrent links

Except that now you’re asking the swarm for metadata behind a boatload of info_hashes? Unlikely anyone would care (though you’d be surprised how many DMCAs I get when just having a simple open tracker running, not even an indexet), but I don’t see it as being any less grey than using any existing sites.

Why don’t you run the update service? Or if you do, how does the few seconds it takes to apply the update really impact you? I never even realize it apparently updates so much as it doesn’t nag or anything.

something Mozilla doesn’t even dare, as that’s where they get all their Google money from

Or because they’re aware that it’d be a huge waste of time and money? It’d be a lot of work to build a search engine anywhere near as good as the existing alternatives, so it’d give worse user experience and waste time.

Does your university allow you to use VPNs? Do they have any acceptable use policy? It’s unlikely they’ll care if you download a few cars, but they’ll probably get mad if you’re just trying to maximize bandwidth used for fun and wonder why you’re using so much.