4 ms·

I feel so sad for people forced to use the legal distribution channels - it must be such a chore to have to be informed which movie or series is available on wh

by seer 11y ago

I feel so sad for people forced to use the legal distribution channels - it must be such a chore to have to be informed which movie or series is available on which channel, have to switch between different apps / recommendation engines and have pay to every single middle men his toll, when their part could very well be free. Using pirate solutions seems such a great experience in comparison - a global free peer to peer distribution channel with incredible bandwidth, availability and full catalog of most of human produced media, one click away. Services that are so resilient that are actually designed to withstand multiple governments' attempts to shut them down. No censorship of media, but a lot of structure and quality controls baked in, where actual people dynamically help each other police and secure content. I really can't believe an actual paying customer can't get even close to the comfort, ease and availability of something like this. It really is astonishing.

chasing 11y ago
I agree completely. I also always laugh at those suckers standing in line at the grocery store. The customer experience of just picking out my Mountain Dew and ice cream sandwich and just walking straight out of the store without paying -- it's cheap, it's easy. You don't have to deal with pesky middle-men trying to take their cut. Astonishing. Such comfort.
- fpgeek 11y ago
  Sigh. I was hoping you were going for an analogy with self-checkout. That would have neatly and effectively pointed at the missing piece of the puzzle. Instead you went for the cheap moralizing, which can make you feel good but doesn't get anyone any closer to solving the problem.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - sp332 11y ago
      Netflix has an extremely limited selection. Pirate Bay has much better coverage. seer's point is that there's plenty of room for improvement in the legal streaming business. There's no reason it has to be this hard for the user to give studios money. (edit) Here's a concrete example: a list of movies I have wanted to see. Only 3 of the movies on my list are available via streaming, and they are each on a different service! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1atQ1ZHAoI6SC9a4Qk9MFdjnyYHGCIS8y56xOZPqKcWQ/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1atQ1ZHAoI6SC9a4Qk9MF...
    - Mithaldu 11y ago
      Responding to an earnest post with sarcasm is never a useful way to have a conversation, regardless how misguided the first post was.
  - mcphage 11y ago
    > which can make you feel good but doesn't get anyone any closer to solving the problem That does a better job of describing piracy.
- Drakim 11y ago
  It's not just that people have to stand in line. They also have to go between a bunch of different stores since Milk producers have an exclusive contract with Walmart and Bread producers have an exclusive contract with 7-Eleven. Furthermore, after you grab your Milk, the terms and services of the Milk states you have to sit and watch an advertisement on their projector before you are allowed to leave the store.
  - com2kid 11y ago
    I already cannot get certain brands of milk at my local grocery store due to distribution agreements that in some ways resemble the distribution agreements that surround digital media. I actually have had to visit 3 different major grocery stores to get the ingredients for one meal. As for the advertisement? Well there are the ones on my receipt, the "coupon" that pops out, and possibly ads plastered on the side of the product I just purchased.
    - talmand 11y ago
      > I actually have had to visit 3 different major grocery stores to get the ingredients for one meal. I'm sorry, I seriously doubt that.
  - talmand 11y ago
    Or you could just stop buying the milk.
    - sp332 11y ago
      Then the milk producers would start complaining about the thieves taking all their profits, without considering that maybe their business model is turning people off from buying milk.
      - talmand 11y ago
        Let them complain, it doesn't change the fact their stupid business model is costing them money. I say let the stupid complain as they go out of business.
- commentzorro 11y ago
  Oh please ... spare us. You're comparing physical goods that have to be physically transport, stored, distributed, etc. Goods where some (admittedly minimal in your Mt. Dew example) scarcity is involved. The parent is talking about goods where there is effectively no (or again, minimal) cost for transport, storage, or distribution. And absolutely no scarcity. Nobody is saying we refuse to pay for digital content. We just want to pay a reasonable price. But most most important, we don't want ANY _artificial_ restrictions on transport, storage, distribution, and ESPECIALLY consumption.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Netflix doesn't have bandwidth costs?
- unprepare 11y ago
  In your example, the grocery store will do inventory and discovery they are short 1 ice cream sandwich and 1 mountain dew. They write the cost of those goods off as shrinkage/stolen goods. What exactly is warner bros missing at the end of the month when they do inventory? What item comes up 1 short when they go to grab it, because 1 person downloaded a copy? What do they write off on the balance sheet as shrinkage? The answer is nothing, because copyright infringement is not theft. They may have commonalities, but they are separate and distinct. If they were the same there would be no legal definition for copyright infringement, because it would be already covered under existing theft laws. I wish people would retire this ridiculous argument. There are legitimate arguments to be made against piracy without having to misrepresent the issue.
  - chasing 11y ago
    > They may have commonalities, but they are separate and distinct. Yeah, that's how comparisons work. Read my comment again in light of the commonalities, not the differences. seer: "It's so much easier if you break the law." chasing: "Everything's so much easier if you break the law!" I was commenting on seer's statement by extending what I considered to be flawed logic into a situation that would expose the flaw. I could've chosen a completely unrelated crime: "I feel so sad for people forced to not drug women to sleep with them - it must be such a chore to have to get them to consent to sex." See, I'm not comparing the act of pirating a movie to rape. They're obviously very different. One is heinous and one's a fairly minor transgression, all things considered. I am commenting on the absurdity of comparing the "user experience" of doing something legally instead of breaking the law.
    - skygazer 11y ago
      It doesn't strike me as absurd at all. For various reasons, I prefer not to "jay walk," but when the cross walks are miles away, and I judge I can safely cross without them, I'll follow the what seems the most pragmatic approach to get to the other side.
- seer 11y ago
  The trouble is that currently there is no reasonable amount of money you can give to receive such a nice and user friendly experience as what you get with torrent sites (even more so with the popcorn app). Usually when one deals with black markets you get much worse user experience, where there is no guarantee of quality, no economy of scale effects, no standardisation. Everything is less pleasant, but you get to have your stuff cheaper than buying it officially. The paradox here is you get a bad user experience AND you pay for it. That's what I find appalling. Almost nobody who holds the contracts for these movies comes from "what value can we bring to the customer" point of view (well maybe with the exception of Netflix). Everybody does the "how much we can fleece the poor stupid people" approach, and it shows. Pirate solutions tend to compete on user experience ONLY, and there you can get a real honest competition.
  - dalore 11y ago
    Actually I find you get a better user experience now using the paid services. Fire up your Amazon Fire tv and pick a movie, starts streaming. Compared with bittorrent, go find a torrent. Download it. Unpack it. Make sure it's the right format, language, subtitles etc. If not go get it again. Granted there are tools to automate it but from a purely UX pov the paid services do have a better experience.
rch 11y ago
Just point me to the 'pirate solution' that can sustainably produce and deliver original content.
- jerf 11y ago
  By definition, that's not piracy, that's content production. The real answer to your real question is probably Patreon. Usually you can't "pirate" the results of Patreon because they're freely released anyhow. Kickstarter to a lesser extent, but that site seems less focused on "content" production and more on "thing" production. (Yes, there is a lot of "content" being done there, but I'm yet to see even a single such thing go really viral and big.)
tired_man 11y ago
Oh, yeah. It's not like there aren't half a dozen programs that will grab schedules and listings for you and even program a pcdvr.
- sp332 11y ago
  I tried http://www.canistream.it/ http://www.canistream.it/ but it's pretty unreliable. Do you have a better suggestion?
  - tired_man 11y ago
    It will take me a day or so to find it.
  - tired_man 11y ago
    Or not. This will give you something to begin invesitgating. PVR software (there are more): http://www.team-mediaportal.com/ http://www.team-mediaportal.com/ http://www.chris-tv.com/index.html http://www.chris-tv.com/index.html Schedules Direct has a list of packages that work with their service: http://www.schedulesdirect.org/approvedsoftware http://www.schedulesdirect.org/approvedsoftware
throwaway23545 11y ago
Want something more than a year old or a little less than mainstream? Good luck finding an active torrent. Maybe you'll find one with incredible bandwidth where the CD or TV show from a year or two back you seek can download at all instead of sitting stalled at some random percentage. You seem to be describing the picture of 4 or 5 years back rather than now
- commentzorro 11y ago
  So what you're saying is to use Amazon Prime and Netflix for the older content but torrent the newer stuff? ;-)
happyscrappy 11y ago
I feel so sad for people who are completely pwned to save a few bucks. The convenience and value of a Netflix account is what is astonishing.
- commentzorro 11y ago
  That is the entire point of the article. The convenience and value of Netflix was astonishing. But with half the content going away is it still? Especially with Netflix saying the solution is to repurchase what you just got rid of (cable) in order to get that newly missing content back.
  - happyscrappy 11y ago
    It will depend on the specifics and the users taste. For me I don't have enough time to watch what is in my queue already. People who have lots of time and little money can futz around with being a pirate.
    - Mithaldu 11y ago
      Also people who have lots of time, money and don't live in the usa.
      - happyscrappy 11y ago
        Standardized licensing across Europe seems to be a very thorny problem. Between the different languages and regulatory bodies I do not see much hope.
        Mithaldu 11y ago
        I still hold out the hope that they will be able to look at Steam and realize that what they're doing is beneficial. Steam seems to be at the forefront regarding these things both in terms of technology and legal matters.
hsod 11y ago
Piracy fails the "what if everyone was doing it?" test. So you shouldn't feel sad for people using legal channels, you should thank them for subsidizing your consumption. You're welcome!
- patzerhacker 11y ago
  >Piracy fails the "what if everyone was doing it?" test. Yup, which is why TV didn't exist before pay TV, because if everyone viewed content for free over the air then it would be massively unprofitable. Oh, wait...
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    Profitable OTA TV was (and is) not free, the content creators are paid by the content deliverers out of money the content deliverers get paid to provide advertising. With piracy, even if the deliverers are getting paid by advertising (which is certainly true in some cases), the content creators aren't getting paid (because if they were, it be legal delivery, not piracy.)
DanBC 11y ago
> and full catalog of most of human produced media, one click away. There's a bunch of stuff that just isn't available on torrents. If it's American there's a much hetter chance of it being seeded, but anything foreign over a few yews old tends to drop off.

by seer 11y ago

chasing 11y ago

I agree completely. I also always laugh at those suckers standing in line at the grocery store. The customer experience of just picking out my Mountain Dew and ice cream sandwich and just walking straight out of the store without paying -- it's cheap, it's easy. You don't have to deal with pesky middle-men trying to take their cut. Astonishing. Such comfort.

fpgeek 11y ago
Sigh. I was hoping you were going for an analogy with self-checkout. That would have neatly and effectively pointed at the missing piece of the puzzle. Instead you went for the cheap moralizing, which can make you feel good but doesn't get anyone any closer to solving the problem.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - sp332 11y ago
    Netflix has an extremely limited selection. Pirate Bay has much better coverage. seer's point is that there's plenty of room for improvement in the legal streaming business. There's no reason it has to be this hard for the user to give studios money. (edit) Here's a concrete example: a list of movies I have wanted to see. Only 3 of the movies on my list are available via streaming, and they are each on a different service! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1atQ1ZHAoI6SC9a4Qk9MFdjnyYHGCIS8y56xOZPqKcWQ/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1atQ1ZHAoI6SC9a4Qk9MF...
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    Responding to an earnest post with sarcasm is never a useful way to have a conversation, regardless how misguided the first post was.
- mcphage 11y ago
  > which can make you feel good but doesn't get anyone any closer to solving the problem That does a better job of describing piracy.
Drakim 11y ago
It's not just that people have to stand in line. They also have to go between a bunch of different stores since Milk producers have an exclusive contract with Walmart and Bread producers have an exclusive contract with 7-Eleven. Furthermore, after you grab your Milk, the terms and services of the Milk states you have to sit and watch an advertisement on their projector before you are allowed to leave the store.
- com2kid 11y ago
  I already cannot get certain brands of milk at my local grocery store due to distribution agreements that in some ways resemble the distribution agreements that surround digital media. I actually have had to visit 3 different major grocery stores to get the ingredients for one meal. As for the advertisement? Well there are the ones on my receipt, the "coupon" that pops out, and possibly ads plastered on the side of the product I just purchased.
  - talmand 11y ago
    > I actually have had to visit 3 different major grocery stores to get the ingredients for one meal. I'm sorry, I seriously doubt that.
- talmand 11y ago
  Or you could just stop buying the milk.
  - sp332 11y ago
    Then the milk producers would start complaining about the thieves taking all their profits, without considering that maybe their business model is turning people off from buying milk.
    - talmand 11y ago
      Let them complain, it doesn't change the fact their stupid business model is costing them money. I say let the stupid complain as they go out of business.
commentzorro 11y ago
Oh please ... spare us. You're comparing physical goods that have to be physically transport, stored, distributed, etc. Goods where some (admittedly minimal in your Mt. Dew example) scarcity is involved. The parent is talking about goods where there is effectively no (or again, minimal) cost for transport, storage, or distribution. And absolutely no scarcity. Nobody is saying we refuse to pay for digital content. We just want to pay a reasonable price. But most most important, we don't want ANY _artificial_ restrictions on transport, storage, distribution, and ESPECIALLY consumption.
- DanBC 11y ago
  Netflix doesn't have bandwidth costs?
unprepare 11y ago
In your example, the grocery store will do inventory and discovery they are short 1 ice cream sandwich and 1 mountain dew. They write the cost of those goods off as shrinkage/stolen goods. What exactly is warner bros missing at the end of the month when they do inventory? What item comes up 1 short when they go to grab it, because 1 person downloaded a copy? What do they write off on the balance sheet as shrinkage? The answer is nothing, because copyright infringement is not theft. They may have commonalities, but they are separate and distinct. If they were the same there would be no legal definition for copyright infringement, because it would be already covered under existing theft laws. I wish people would retire this ridiculous argument. There are legitimate arguments to be made against piracy without having to misrepresent the issue.
- chasing 11y ago
  > They may have commonalities, but they are separate and distinct. Yeah, that's how comparisons work. Read my comment again in light of the commonalities, not the differences. seer: "It's so much easier if you break the law." chasing: "Everything's so much easier if you break the law!" I was commenting on seer's statement by extending what I considered to be flawed logic into a situation that would expose the flaw. I could've chosen a completely unrelated crime: "I feel so sad for people forced to not drug women to sleep with them - it must be such a chore to have to get them to consent to sex." See, I'm not comparing the act of pirating a movie to rape. They're obviously very different. One is heinous and one's a fairly minor transgression, all things considered. I am commenting on the absurdity of comparing the "user experience" of doing something legally instead of breaking the law.
  - skygazer 11y ago
    It doesn't strike me as absurd at all. For various reasons, I prefer not to "jay walk," but when the cross walks are miles away, and I judge I can safely cross without them, I'll follow the what seems the most pragmatic approach to get to the other side.
seer 11y ago
The trouble is that currently there is no reasonable amount of money you can give to receive such a nice and user friendly experience as what you get with torrent sites (even more so with the popcorn app). Usually when one deals with black markets you get much worse user experience, where there is no guarantee of quality, no economy of scale effects, no standardisation. Everything is less pleasant, but you get to have your stuff cheaper than buying it officially. The paradox here is you get a bad user experience AND you pay for it. That's what I find appalling. Almost nobody who holds the contracts for these movies comes from "what value can we bring to the customer" point of view (well maybe with the exception of Netflix). Everybody does the "how much we can fleece the poor stupid people" approach, and it shows. Pirate solutions tend to compete on user experience ONLY, and there you can get a real honest competition.
- dalore 11y ago
  Actually I find you get a better user experience now using the paid services. Fire up your Amazon Fire tv and pick a movie, starts streaming. Compared with bittorrent, go find a torrent. Download it. Unpack it. Make sure it's the right format, language, subtitles etc. If not go get it again. Granted there are tools to automate it but from a purely UX pov the paid services do have a better experience.

rch 11y ago

Just point me to the 'pirate solution' that can sustainably produce and deliver original content.

jerf 11y ago
By definition, that's not piracy, that's content production. The real answer to your real question is probably Patreon. Usually you can't "pirate" the results of Patreon because they're freely released anyhow. Kickstarter to a lesser extent, but that site seems less focused on "content" production and more on "thing" production. (Yes, there is a lot of "content" being done there, but I'm yet to see even a single such thing go really viral and big.)

tired_man 11y ago

Oh, yeah. It's not like there aren't half a dozen programs that will grab schedules and listings for you and even program a pcdvr.

sp332 11y ago
I tried http://www.canistream.it/ http://www.canistream.it/ but it's pretty unreliable. Do you have a better suggestion?
- tired_man 11y ago
  It will take me a day or so to find it.
- tired_man 11y ago
  Or not. This will give you something to begin invesitgating. PVR software (there are more): http://www.team-mediaportal.com/ http://www.team-mediaportal.com/ http://www.chris-tv.com/index.html http://www.chris-tv.com/index.html Schedules Direct has a list of packages that work with their service: http://www.schedulesdirect.org/approvedsoftware http://www.schedulesdirect.org/approvedsoftware

throwaway23545 11y ago

Want something more than a year old or a little less than mainstream? Good luck finding an active torrent. Maybe you'll find one with incredible bandwidth where the CD or TV show from a year or two back you seek can download at all instead of sitting stalled at some random percentage. You seem to be describing the picture of 4 or 5 years back rather than now

commentzorro 11y ago
So what you're saying is to use Amazon Prime and Netflix for the older content but torrent the newer stuff? ;-)

happyscrappy 11y ago

I feel so sad for people who are completely pwned to save a few bucks. The convenience and value of a Netflix account is what is astonishing.

commentzorro 11y ago
That is the entire point of the article. The convenience and value of Netflix was astonishing. But with half the content going away is it still? Especially with Netflix saying the solution is to repurchase what you just got rid of (cable) in order to get that newly missing content back.
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  It will depend on the specifics and the users taste. For me I don't have enough time to watch what is in my queue already. People who have lots of time and little money can futz around with being a pirate.
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    Also people who have lots of time, money and don't live in the usa.
    - happyscrappy 11y ago
      Standardized licensing across Europe seems to be a very thorny problem. Between the different languages and regulatory bodies I do not see much hope.
      - Mithaldu 11y ago
        I still hold out the hope that they will be able to look at Steam and realize that what they're doing is beneficial. Steam seems to be at the forefront regarding these things both in terms of technology and legal matters.

hsod 11y ago

Piracy fails the "what if everyone was doing it?" test. So you shouldn't feel sad for people using legal channels, you should thank them for subsidizing your consumption. You're welcome!

patzerhacker 11y ago
>Piracy fails the "what if everyone was doing it?" test. Yup, which is why TV didn't exist before pay TV, because if everyone viewed content for free over the air then it would be massively unprofitable. Oh, wait...
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  Profitable OTA TV was (and is) not free, the content creators are paid by the content deliverers out of money the content deliverers get paid to provide advertising. With piracy, even if the deliverers are getting paid by advertising (which is certainly true in some cases), the content creators aren't getting paid (because if they were, it be legal delivery, not piracy.)

DanBC 11y ago

> and full catalog of most of human produced media, one click away. There's a bunch of stuff that just isn't available on torrents. If it's American there's a much hetter chance of it being seeded, but anything foreign over a few yews old tends to drop off.