5 ms·

o7 thank you for your service, keeping the Internet awesome and anti-corporate. Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse. Maybe the media

by sph 3y ago

o7 thank you for your service, keeping the Internet awesome and anti-corporate. Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse. Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel, allowing the existence of legal, paid streaming sites a-la-Spotify with access to 99% of the repertoire. Until then, torrent is how we protest while they create more and more insular streaming services to milk people $9/mo at a time. "Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell (If you need a semi-private tracker that's easy to get into, try TorrentLeech. Also /r/opensignups)

oxygen_crisis 3y ago
[dead]
robertoandred 3y ago
I love when thieves act like they're such noble saints.
- izacus 3y ago
  Yeah, we all love Robin Hood books. What does your comment have to do with this thread though?
  - youreincorrect 3y ago
    Uh, because it responded to a comment that wrote a bunch of 2009-era Guy Fawkes mask-wearing redditor bullshit that attempts to make piracy noble. > o7 thank you for your service (o7 would be a salute) > Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse. False and nonsense, especially in 2023. > Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel... Okay, I'll stop here. I'm fine with piracy, personally. I'd prefer we just admit that you're mostly using it to download movies, music, and television shows for free. This isn't some noble fight for freedom. We're talking about watching mindless bullshit content like Star Wars, without paying for it. Piracy proponents, and comments like the one starting this thread, make it seem like we're entitled to this content. We're not. But I'll admit, I don't watch much in the way of tv or movies any more anyway, so the whole debate is lost on me. I just rolled my eyes at the ridiculous tone of that comment, like they're freedom fighters. It's self-important bullshit.
- redundantly 3y ago
  I love when soulless corporations bribe governments to keep a stranglehold on works of art that have impacted cultures around the world and prevent future artists from being able make more art and prevent the proper collection and preservation of these works and block the access to them, all so they can keep making money off of decades old IP. It goes both ways. There are no Saints to be found on either side. I don't care one bit about the pocketbooks of our corporate overlords, and neither should you.
  - robertoandred 3y ago
    Don't pretend you care about artists when you refuse to pay them.
    - redundantly 3y ago
      You shouldn't assume what I do or do not do. I take my kids to the movies. I subscribe to services like Apple Music and TV+, and HBO Max. We watch YouTube videos where there's sponsored content in them. We buy officially licensed merchandise like clothing and toys. We buy books, both physical and digital. And, frankly, it doesn't matter what I do personally. Millions, hell billions, of people around the world do as well. If artists are struggling it's because they're not getting paid properly by the corporations they work for, like Disney, Netflix, and others. It's not because of individuals like you or me or the people that run piracy sites.
      - gamblor956 3y ago
        If artists are struggling it's because they're not getting paid properly by the corporations they work for, like Disney, Netflix, and others. It's not because of individuals like you or me or the people that run piracy sites. This is false. Artists get paid residuals, meaning, per sale, so every non-sale due to piracy is literally coming out of artists' pockets.
        scotty79 3y ago
        Not once in the history of my consumption of digital content has me not pirating something turned into a sale. Sometimes I pirate it, sometimes I buy it. Sometimes I consume something free instead. Sometimes I pay for the stuff I don't consume at all. But the substitution is always in the direction of cheaper, more available solution. Never in the direction of buying something. There were cases however when me pirating something eventually turned into a sale or even few sales.
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  Your useless copypasted comments brought nothing to this discussion. You have changed nobody's mind. Have you wrote all that to make yourself feel good?
  - robertoandred 3y ago
    I don't think you know how copy/paste works.
- protocolture 3y ago
  I love it when noble saints steal
  - scotty79 3y ago
    Creating fake meanings for old words doesn't make them real. They even had to go through one level of indirection to make people believe what they made up. They couldn't just say, watching digital copy witout paying for it is a theft because people would just laugh at them, no it's not. They had to do a two step process through obsure old crime to confuse people. Using a digital copy without paying for it is piracy. And piracy is theft. Consuming didgital content on your own terms has as much to do with theft as it has with actual piracy that got some resurgence around Africa in recent years.
chromoblob 3y ago
> Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse. Maybe that's a bad thing. Having one central site rather than many is better for searching and availability of uploads.
lostgame 3y ago
>> "Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell Once again; the media companies are absolutely doing everything in their power to drive even casual media consumers into piracy. I wouldn't be surprised if piracy was already more rampant than it's ever been - but it's only getting worse, due to ludicrous streaming fragmentation. It'll never happen, but the only thing that can save piracy is an aggregate all-inclusive monthly subscription platform where all the films/shows from all services are available, just like Apple Music or Spotify. I pay $30-40/mo and I have access to all the stuff on Netflix, Prime, Max, Disney... When you stream a movie from Netflix, they get the credit. Disney? The same. Nobody is going to pay for all these services, and more and more are ditching them altogether. The response of the streaming services is to increase prices and reduce content. It's hilariously embarrassing. They are asking us to pirate.
seanalltogether 3y ago
> "Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell I find this an odd argument in favor of pirating movies, because everything that steam offers for games, amazon prime or itunes offers for most tv shows and movies. In fact with amazon prime you can buy content and watch it on pretty much any kind of device out there.
- muti 3y ago
  The coverage by service for tv/movies is so much worse than games/audio, that's what makes it a service problem. Netflix was killing pirating when it had "everything", pirating is seeing a resurgence as the landscape becomes more fractured.
AdamH12113 3y ago
> Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel, allowing the existence of legal, paid streaming sites a-la-Spotify with access to 99% of the repertoire. Until then, torrent is how we protest while they create more and more insular streaming services to milk people $9/mo at a time. I have been hearing people make this same basic argument since the 90s. (I'm sure it's older than that.) During that time the price of video and audio entertainment has decreased while availability and quality have vastly improved. Despite this, piracy is still going strong. The ideological goalposts used to justify it keep moving, but the desire for free stuff is timeless. (Not judging here -- I've certainly done my share.) Adjusting for inflation: Twenty years ago, a DVD with one recent movie cost ~$30, or you could rent one for $5-8. One album on CD cost ~$20. Buying individual songs for the then-unheard of price of $1.65 (99 cents at the time) on iTunes was brand new. They had limited bit rate and DRM, and you had to buy an expensive iPod if you wanted to use them conveniently. If you wanted good TV shows, you paid something like $60-80/month for cable TV (more if you wanted to watch The Sopranos) and had to watch on a schedule, with lots of ads. If you compare that to today's world of cheap streaming services, high-quality DRM-free music, and even cheaper physical media, it's not even a contest.
- sph 3y ago
  That's a very US centric view of the problem. Because these days if you leave the borders of your country, you'll see that the streaming world is still a fragmented archipelago of crappy B-tier licensed movies, while the good stuff people want to watch is only available in the US through a VPN. And cable TV or films at the cinema are as expensive as ever. Which is why Spotify has had an incredible success worldwide and music piracy has reduced dramatically: their repertoire is very comprehensive and mostly the same everywhere in the world. People really want to believe it is a money issue, and they are just terribly misguided. Gabe Newell is absolutely right here, and he knows piracy, as he deals with the demographic with expensive needs (gamers wanting the latest $70 game) and the least money (as young gamers don't have a job, or don't earn a lot) It is not a money problem.
Asooka 3y ago
A service and a pricing problem. All cases of piracy I have observed stem from one of 3 reasons 1. Too expensive. This encompasses several varieties, like the media in question being literally priced more than the person is willing to pay, or the pricing is acceptable, but the person can buy only one of several choices and wants to evaluate all before giving one their money. 2. The product is not offered for sale. This is sometimes literally that the product isn't available for sale in your country, or the product is not available in a useful form, e.g. it doesn't come with subtitles in your language, it won't work on your device, it requires a stable internet connection, which you don't have, etc. 3. For political reasons, to avoid supporting DRM.
- ajford 3y ago
  Exactly. I dropped out of the torrent scene for probably around 5 years when Netflix had a huge back-catalog and it just wasn't worth the hassle to manage torrents and a media server. Then the Netflix catalog shrunk to originals, there's now 6 different streaming services I have to juggle to watch the usual content my family likes, and we're constantly using third-party services just to figure out what's available where. I hate having to switch from Netflix to Hulu to finish out a show because the last season is only on Hulu. Or things like Warner and Disney cutting shows because they don't want to pay residuals or whatever dumb accounting BS they feel like pulling. If you make it more convenient to torrent and shove everything into Plex, why would I pay to get a worse experience.
- mvanbaak 3y ago
  With the globalisation, there is actually a 4th reason rising: availability of content in specific regions. I sometimes want/need content with audio and/or subtitle language X, which is not available legally where I live, but the exact same platform does have it available in the region that speaks this language. pirating is in this case the best solution as I can pick the quality I want, with the audio and subtitle languages I need.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
    I think this is just the second reason rephrased a bit differently. And it isn't at all new — pretty much all Japanese game and animation studios have refused to acknowledge our region's existence for about as long as these industries have themselves been around. For example, Nintendo consoles have been unavailable since the 90s — which is why we've been using these clones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendy_(console) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendy_(console) and are still unavailable now unless you're willing to buy consoles and games on ebay, overpriced and without warranty (which is what some of my friends have been doing, but I refuse to support publishers that consider my American dollars second class to those coming from actual Americans). So torrents it is, then. 'Fuck you' can go both ways.
jokowueu 3y ago
Most people have moved to Plex shares these days
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  Nobody I personally know have ever heard of Plex at all. Almost everybody uses BitTorrent to some extent.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  My experience is that 100% of what I see on friends' (and friends' friends') Plex shares is.... movies that they downloaded via TPB/RarBG/etc torrents. If the supply of torrented content dries up, it seems like many Plex shares will start to become very stale.
  - calmoo 3y ago
    Plex Shares (like ones you buy on the internet from a stranger) are mostly fully automated and pull from private/public trackers + usenet. I don't see the supply of torrents really having any effect in this regard.
  - jokowueu 3y ago
    Ofcourse, I'm not saying torrents don't have a place it's just that they seem less trafficked these days , online piracy streaming sites , iptv(with vod) and Plexshares have taken the front seat.

by sph 3y ago

oxygen_crisis 3y ago

[dead]

robertoandred 3y ago

I love when thieves act like they're such noble saints.

izacus 3y ago
Yeah, we all love Robin Hood books. What does your comment have to do with this thread though?
- youreincorrect 3y ago
  Uh, because it responded to a comment that wrote a bunch of 2009-era Guy Fawkes mask-wearing redditor bullshit that attempts to make piracy noble. > o7 thank you for your service (o7 would be a salute) > Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse. False and nonsense, especially in 2023. > Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel... Okay, I'll stop here. I'm fine with piracy, personally. I'd prefer we just admit that you're mostly using it to download movies, music, and television shows for free. This isn't some noble fight for freedom. We're talking about watching mindless bullshit content like Star Wars, without paying for it. Piracy proponents, and comments like the one starting this thread, make it seem like we're entitled to this content. We're not. But I'll admit, I don't watch much in the way of tv or movies any more anyway, so the whole debate is lost on me. I just rolled my eyes at the ridiculous tone of that comment, like they're freedom fighters. It's self-important bullshit.
redundantly 3y ago
I love when soulless corporations bribe governments to keep a stranglehold on works of art that have impacted cultures around the world and prevent future artists from being able make more art and prevent the proper collection and preservation of these works and block the access to them, all so they can keep making money off of decades old IP. It goes both ways. There are no Saints to be found on either side. I don't care one bit about the pocketbooks of our corporate overlords, and neither should you.
- robertoandred 3y ago
  Don't pretend you care about artists when you refuse to pay them.
  - redundantly 3y ago
    You shouldn't assume what I do or do not do. I take my kids to the movies. I subscribe to services like Apple Music and TV+, and HBO Max. We watch YouTube videos where there's sponsored content in them. We buy officially licensed merchandise like clothing and toys. We buy books, both physical and digital. And, frankly, it doesn't matter what I do personally. Millions, hell billions, of people around the world do as well. If artists are struggling it's because they're not getting paid properly by the corporations they work for, like Disney, Netflix, and others. It's not because of individuals like you or me or the people that run piracy sites.
    - gamblor956 3y ago
      If artists are struggling it's because they're not getting paid properly by the corporations they work for, like Disney, Netflix, and others. It's not because of individuals like you or me or the people that run piracy sites. This is false. Artists get paid residuals, meaning, per sale, so every non-sale due to piracy is literally coming out of artists' pockets.
      - scotty79 3y ago
        Not once in the history of my consumption of digital content has me not pirating something turned into a sale. Sometimes I pirate it, sometimes I buy it. Sometimes I consume something free instead. Sometimes I pay for the stuff I don't consume at all. But the substitution is always in the direction of cheaper, more available solution. Never in the direction of buying something. There were cases however when me pirating something eventually turned into a sale or even few sales.
5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
Your useless copypasted comments brought nothing to this discussion. You have changed nobody's mind. Have you wrote all that to make yourself feel good?
- robertoandred 3y ago
  I don't think you know how copy/paste works.
protocolture 3y ago
I love it when noble saints steal
- scotty79 3y ago
  Creating fake meanings for old words doesn't make them real. They even had to go through one level of indirection to make people believe what they made up. They couldn't just say, watching digital copy witout paying for it is a theft because people would just laugh at them, no it's not. They had to do a two step process through obsure old crime to confuse people. Using a digital copy without paying for it is piracy. And piracy is theft. Consuming didgital content on your own terms has as much to do with theft as it has with actual piracy that got some resurgence around Africa in recent years.

chromoblob 3y ago

> Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse. Maybe that's a bad thing. Having one central site rather than many is better for searching and availability of uploads.

lostgame 3y ago

>> "Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell Once again; the media companies are absolutely doing everything in their power to drive even casual media consumers into piracy. I wouldn't be surprised if piracy was already more rampant than it's ever been - but it's only getting worse, due to ludicrous streaming fragmentation. It'll never happen, but the only thing that can save piracy is an aggregate all-inclusive monthly subscription platform where all the films/shows from all services are available, just like Apple Music or Spotify. I pay $30-40/mo and I have access to all the stuff on Netflix, Prime, Max, Disney... When you stream a movie from Netflix, they get the credit. Disney? The same. Nobody is going to pay for all these services, and more and more are ditching them altogether. The response of the streaming services is to increase prices and reduce content. It's hilariously embarrassing. They are asking us to pirate.

seanalltogether 3y ago

> "Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell I find this an odd argument in favor of pirating movies, because everything that steam offers for games, amazon prime or itunes offers for most tv shows and movies. In fact with amazon prime you can buy content and watch it on pretty much any kind of device out there.

muti 3y ago
The coverage by service for tv/movies is so much worse than games/audio, that's what makes it a service problem. Netflix was killing pirating when it had "everything", pirating is seeing a resurgence as the landscape becomes more fractured.

AdamH12113 3y ago

> Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel, allowing the existence of legal, paid streaming sites a-la-Spotify with access to 99% of the repertoire. Until then, torrent is how we protest while they create more and more insular streaming services to milk people $9/mo at a time. I have been hearing people make this same basic argument since the 90s. (I'm sure it's older than that.) During that time the price of video and audio entertainment has decreased while availability and quality have vastly improved. Despite this, piracy is still going strong. The ideological goalposts used to justify it keep moving, but the desire for free stuff is timeless. (Not judging here -- I've certainly done my share.) Adjusting for inflation: Twenty years ago, a DVD with one recent movie cost ~$30, or you could rent one for $5-8. One album on CD cost ~$20. Buying individual songs for the then-unheard of price of $1.65 (99 cents at the time) on iTunes was brand new. They had limited bit rate and DRM, and you had to buy an expensive iPod if you wanted to use them conveniently. If you wanted good TV shows, you paid something like $60-80/month for cable TV (more if you wanted to watch The Sopranos) and had to watch on a schedule, with lots of ads. If you compare that to today's world of cheap streaming services, high-quality DRM-free music, and even cheaper physical media, it's not even a contest.

sph 3y ago
That's a very US centric view of the problem. Because these days if you leave the borders of your country, you'll see that the streaming world is still a fragmented archipelago of crappy B-tier licensed movies, while the good stuff people want to watch is only available in the US through a VPN. And cable TV or films at the cinema are as expensive as ever. Which is why Spotify has had an incredible success worldwide and music piracy has reduced dramatically: their repertoire is very comprehensive and mostly the same everywhere in the world. People really want to believe it is a money issue, and they are just terribly misguided. Gabe Newell is absolutely right here, and he knows piracy, as he deals with the demographic with expensive needs (gamers wanting the latest $70 game) and the least money (as young gamers don't have a job, or don't earn a lot) It is not a money problem.

Asooka 3y ago

A service and a pricing problem. All cases of piracy I have observed stem from one of 3 reasons 1. Too expensive. This encompasses several varieties, like the media in question being literally priced more than the person is willing to pay, or the pricing is acceptable, but the person can buy only one of several choices and wants to evaluate all before giving one their money. 2. The product is not offered for sale. This is sometimes literally that the product isn't available for sale in your country, or the product is not available in a useful form, e.g. it doesn't come with subtitles in your language, it won't work on your device, it requires a stable internet connection, which you don't have, etc. 3. For political reasons, to avoid supporting DRM.

ajford 3y ago
Exactly. I dropped out of the torrent scene for probably around 5 years when Netflix had a huge back-catalog and it just wasn't worth the hassle to manage torrents and a media server. Then the Netflix catalog shrunk to originals, there's now 6 different streaming services I have to juggle to watch the usual content my family likes, and we're constantly using third-party services just to figure out what's available where. I hate having to switch from Netflix to Hulu to finish out a show because the last season is only on Hulu. Or things like Warner and Disney cutting shows because they don't want to pay residuals or whatever dumb accounting BS they feel like pulling. If you make it more convenient to torrent and shove everything into Plex, why would I pay to get a worse experience.
mvanbaak 3y ago
With the globalisation, there is actually a 4th reason rising: availability of content in specific regions. I sometimes want/need content with audio and/or subtitle language X, which is not available legally where I live, but the exact same platform does have it available in the region that speaks this language. pirating is in this case the best solution as I can pick the quality I want, with the audio and subtitle languages I need.
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  I think this is just the second reason rephrased a bit differently. And it isn't at all new — pretty much all Japanese game and animation studios have refused to acknowledge our region's existence for about as long as these industries have themselves been around. For example, Nintendo consoles have been unavailable since the 90s — which is why we've been using these clones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendy_(console) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendy_(console) and are still unavailable now unless you're willing to buy consoles and games on ebay, overpriced and without warranty (which is what some of my friends have been doing, but I refuse to support publishers that consider my American dollars second class to those coming from actual Americans). So torrents it is, then. 'Fuck you' can go both ways.

jokowueu 3y ago

Most people have moved to Plex shares these days

5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
Nobody I personally know have ever heard of Plex at all. Almost everybody uses BitTorrent to some extent.
JohnBooty 3y ago
My experience is that 100% of what I see on friends' (and friends' friends') Plex shares is.... movies that they downloaded via TPB/RarBG/etc torrents. If the supply of torrented content dries up, it seems like many Plex shares will start to become very stale.
- calmoo 3y ago
  Plex Shares (like ones you buy on the internet from a stranger) are mostly fully automated and pull from private/public trackers + usenet. I don't see the supply of torrents really having any effect in this regard.
- jokowueu 3y ago
  Ofcourse, I'm not saying torrents don't have a place it's just that they seem less trafficked these days , online piracy streaming sites , iptv(with vod) and Plexshares have taken the front seat.