8 ms·

This is nothing new [1], but the music industry has seemingly been getting more aggressive recently. The other day there was a story about an independent label

by _23sd 3y ago

This is nothing new [1], but the music industry has seemingly been getting more aggressive recently. The other day there was a story about an independent label trying to get a Wikipedia article delisted [2]. TorrentFreak is doing great work covering all these developments, by the way. The sites are being delisted and sometimes taken down entirely with “anti-circumvention” claims, and it will continue at least until some appeals courts rule on whether YouTube ripping counts as circumvention under the DMCA. Search engines can follow GitHub’s example and take a stand against the validity of these notices, but otherwise they are just following the letter of the DMCA. [1] https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-delists-youtube-rippers-from-google-using-rare-anti-circumvention-notices-191108/ https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-delists-youtube-rippers-from-g... [2] https://torrentfreak.com/music-company-asks-google-to-delist-youtube-downloader-wikipedia-article-230528/ https://torrentfreak.com/music-company-asks-google-to-delist...

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
Now that most people use LEGAL online sources of music, the industry is scraping for new members of the public to persecute, prosecute, and rip off.
- meinheld111 3y ago
  Maybe stagnating subscriber numbers force the question of where they are going
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    That, but also, movie companies are not exactly living well with great profits right now. Disney+ is losing about $1.5 billion per quarter. Despite being very close to maxing-out the number of subscribers they will ever get. They've tried raising prices which seems to be helping reduce the bleeding, but investors are now in a lawsuit with them to determine whether the profitability projections were ever reasonable (and, surprise, Disney might have been doing some classic Hollywood Accounting to make the streaming division look better). Warner Bros. Discovery; well, $57 billion in debt with only about $40 billion in revenue per year... or $6B in profit per year. Financial struggles and pressure from investors? Immense. Their leverage ratio is 5:1 (whereas, 3:1 is considered the maximum for even remotely healthy). It's also kind of a big deal to have $57 billion in debt when the company's entire market cap is $28 billion, give or take. Thus HBO Max had a very stiff and sudden price hike a few months ago. And so on. The media market just isn't great right now. The Disney+ and Warner struggles are also definitely coming into play when the Writer's Guild comes knocking asking for higher pay.
    - danjoredd 3y ago
      Having long been angry at The Mouse for their monopolistic and anticompetitive tendencies, I am indulging myself in a bit of schadenfreude seeing them fail like this. This has been LONG in the making and I'm glad to see their ivory tower start to fall.
    - GuB-42 3y ago
      Big movie production is getting more and more expensive. We have been making movies for more than a century, and yet, the majority of the most expensive movies (inflation adjusted) have been made in the last decade, and that includes the pandemic. It is even worse with TV series. At some point, there won't be enough money in the world's entertainment budget to pay for it. And big studios don't really have the option of lower budgets. They need to go bigger and bigger to meet the ever increasing demands of spectators, cheap production won't cut it anymore. It is not that you can't make good low budget productions, in fact, movie production is more accessible than it ever was, which is the other side of the problem. Big studios have a hard time competing against the creativity of thousands of small producers who have little to lose and a lot to win in pursuing bold ideas. It is the same thing for AAA video games. Players want the latest ultra-HD, ultra-expensive stuff. And those who don't will typically turn to the indies.
      - somenameforme 3y ago
        Fun factoid: domestic movie ticket sales have been declining for more than 2 decades at this point. [1] We reached 'peak movie' in 2002, both in terms of tickets sold and real gross revenue. That's in spite of the population increasing by just under 50 million since then. 'Highest grossing' and other such accolades since have been driven entirely by inflation and ticket price increases beyond inflation. The point is that there's often this online discussion with one guy saying 'modern movies suck' and the other saying 'nah, it's just what the people want.' But what's happening is quantifiably not what the people want. Hollywood (and AAA games) have become almost entirely creatively bankrupt, mostly due to going to the extremes of risk intolerance. They want creative endeavors to be more like factory line productions where a product is reliably created, ready to go on a tight schedule, and matches well to profit projections. The reason there's an obsession over things like visuals is because that's one of the few things studios believe they can "improve" in a formulaic and safe way. It's not what people want let alone demand, it's simply an area movie (and AAA) companies see as being a low risk target for "improvement." Movie studios likely see ChatGPT as their savior. In reality, it will probably be their executioner. [1] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/ https://www.the-numbers.com/market/
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    Subscribers to music labels?
- herbst 3y ago
  MOST people do?
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    Yep. Have I conducted any kind of scientific survey? Nope. But do you really think there are more people torrenting music than Apple, Spotify, and Amazon subscribers combined?
gjsman-1000 3y ago
Recently, there was also a lawsuit against Yout, and that lawsuit (now on appeal) ruled conclusively that YouTube does have legally-protected copy-protection mechanisms ("technological protection measures" aka TPMs aka DRM). Now, this is the first time I think anyone here will have heard the theory that YouTube has DRM, but legally from that case, they do. And anything that breaks said DRM... I think Piracy is actually much closer to dying than people think. Not just with RarBG going down today and 1337x being the last major player standing; but also Denuvo now being so complicated there is only one person known to be able to crack it who is also schizophrenic (literally); the Xbox One having never been cracked and the PS5 currently uncracked, and the Nintendo Switch having software that has been described as being basically perfectly secure and unlikely to ever have a kernel exploit ever again (if only NVIDIA's code and chip was as well designed), laying the groundwork for a potentially-uncrackable Switch 2 once NVIDIA adds glitching protection and all Switch 2s have the recovery mode patch...
- flangola7 3y ago
  What stops people from hacking an Xbox? Ultimately all the processing and memory is right in front of you, lots of people have access to sophisticated electronics labs.
- Firmwarrior 3y ago
  > perfectly secure and unlikely to ever have a kernel exploit ever again -_-
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    It's actually not my words on this one. The Nintendo Switch uses a completely homegrown microkernel, that a single open-source developer (SciresM) was able to reimplement from scratch single-handedly. This would normally have a performance impact, which is partially mitigated by having the Switch permanently reserve 1 core for the OS and many other optimizations. However, the microkernel design is intrinsically much more secure than the monokernels used by Xbox (NT) and PlayStation (BSD). Outside that tiny kernel, everything runs in a sandbox, in userspace and not kernel space. Graphics drivers? USB drivers? The games themselves? All in userspace, confined to minimum functionality, and W^X. Exploits in the USB drivers, WebKit, and games are actually fairly easy to find on the Switch, but useless for launching homebrew from. The last exploit bad enough to launch homebrew in Nintendo's software was over 4 years ago. Some commentary from the developer (SciresM) who reimplemented it from scratch (everything below comes from https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/hygtnx/mesosphere_opensource_nintendo_switch_kernel_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/hygtnx/mesospher...): "It is a completely unique microkernel with a cooperative (non-preemptive) scheduler. The kernel is secure -- so far as I can tell (as a reverse engineer and hacker), it has zero security bugs. They throw out years of backwards compatibility (they're not POSIX/UNIX), and they really, really benefit from it from a security and modularity PoV." "Horizon's the only meaningful RTOS with a microkernel that I'm aware of (other than Fuschia). Everything's in userland -- filesystems, gpu (and other device drivers). The OS is capability-based and conceptually all about lots of different processes/drivers ("system modules") that host microservices. The fact that Nintendo designed such a rock-solid, modular, custom operating system for their consoles fascinates me."

by _23sd 3y ago

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

Now that most people use LEGAL online sources of music, the industry is scraping for new members of the public to persecute, prosecute, and rip off.

meinheld111 3y ago
Maybe stagnating subscriber numbers force the question of where they are going
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  That, but also, movie companies are not exactly living well with great profits right now. Disney+ is losing about $1.5 billion per quarter. Despite being very close to maxing-out the number of subscribers they will ever get. They've tried raising prices which seems to be helping reduce the bleeding, but investors are now in a lawsuit with them to determine whether the profitability projections were ever reasonable (and, surprise, Disney might have been doing some classic Hollywood Accounting to make the streaming division look better). Warner Bros. Discovery; well, $57 billion in debt with only about $40 billion in revenue per year... or $6B in profit per year. Financial struggles and pressure from investors? Immense. Their leverage ratio is 5:1 (whereas, 3:1 is considered the maximum for even remotely healthy). It's also kind of a big deal to have $57 billion in debt when the company's entire market cap is $28 billion, give or take. Thus HBO Max had a very stiff and sudden price hike a few months ago. And so on. The media market just isn't great right now. The Disney+ and Warner struggles are also definitely coming into play when the Writer's Guild comes knocking asking for higher pay.
  - danjoredd 3y ago
    Having long been angry at The Mouse for their monopolistic and anticompetitive tendencies, I am indulging myself in a bit of schadenfreude seeing them fail like this. This has been LONG in the making and I'm glad to see their ivory tower start to fall.
  - GuB-42 3y ago
    Big movie production is getting more and more expensive. We have been making movies for more than a century, and yet, the majority of the most expensive movies (inflation adjusted) have been made in the last decade, and that includes the pandemic. It is even worse with TV series. At some point, there won't be enough money in the world's entertainment budget to pay for it. And big studios don't really have the option of lower budgets. They need to go bigger and bigger to meet the ever increasing demands of spectators, cheap production won't cut it anymore. It is not that you can't make good low budget productions, in fact, movie production is more accessible than it ever was, which is the other side of the problem. Big studios have a hard time competing against the creativity of thousands of small producers who have little to lose and a lot to win in pursuing bold ideas. It is the same thing for AAA video games. Players want the latest ultra-HD, ultra-expensive stuff. And those who don't will typically turn to the indies.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      Fun factoid: domestic movie ticket sales have been declining for more than 2 decades at this point. [1] We reached 'peak movie' in 2002, both in terms of tickets sold and real gross revenue. That's in spite of the population increasing by just under 50 million since then. 'Highest grossing' and other such accolades since have been driven entirely by inflation and ticket price increases beyond inflation. The point is that there's often this online discussion with one guy saying 'modern movies suck' and the other saying 'nah, it's just what the people want.' But what's happening is quantifiably not what the people want. Hollywood (and AAA games) have become almost entirely creatively bankrupt, mostly due to going to the extremes of risk intolerance. They want creative endeavors to be more like factory line productions where a product is reliably created, ready to go on a tight schedule, and matches well to profit projections. The reason there's an obsession over things like visuals is because that's one of the few things studios believe they can "improve" in a formulaic and safe way. It's not what people want let alone demand, it's simply an area movie (and AAA) companies see as being a low risk target for "improvement." Movie studios likely see ChatGPT as their savior. In reality, it will probably be their executioner. [1] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/ https://www.the-numbers.com/market/
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  Subscribers to music labels?
herbst 3y ago
MOST people do?
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  Yep. Have I conducted any kind of scientific survey? Nope. But do you really think there are more people torrenting music than Apple, Spotify, and Amazon subscribers combined?

gjsman-1000 3y ago

Recently, there was also a lawsuit against Yout, and that lawsuit (now on appeal) ruled conclusively that YouTube does have legally-protected copy-protection mechanisms ("technological protection measures" aka TPMs aka DRM). Now, this is the first time I think anyone here will have heard the theory that YouTube has DRM, but legally from that case, they do. And anything that breaks said DRM... I think Piracy is actually much closer to dying than people think. Not just with RarBG going down today and 1337x being the last major player standing; but also Denuvo now being so complicated there is only one person known to be able to crack it who is also schizophrenic (literally); the Xbox One having never been cracked and the PS5 currently uncracked, and the Nintendo Switch having software that has been described as being basically perfectly secure and unlikely to ever have a kernel exploit ever again (if only NVIDIA's code and chip was as well designed), laying the groundwork for a potentially-uncrackable Switch 2 once NVIDIA adds glitching protection and all Switch 2s have the recovery mode patch...

flangola7 3y ago
What stops people from hacking an Xbox? Ultimately all the processing and memory is right in front of you, lots of people have access to sophisticated electronics labs.
Firmwarrior 3y ago
> perfectly secure and unlikely to ever have a kernel exploit ever again -_-
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  It's actually not my words on this one. The Nintendo Switch uses a completely homegrown microkernel, that a single open-source developer (SciresM) was able to reimplement from scratch single-handedly. This would normally have a performance impact, which is partially mitigated by having the Switch permanently reserve 1 core for the OS and many other optimizations. However, the microkernel design is intrinsically much more secure than the monokernels used by Xbox (NT) and PlayStation (BSD). Outside that tiny kernel, everything runs in a sandbox, in userspace and not kernel space. Graphics drivers? USB drivers? The games themselves? All in userspace, confined to minimum functionality, and W^X. Exploits in the USB drivers, WebKit, and games are actually fairly easy to find on the Switch, but useless for launching homebrew from. The last exploit bad enough to launch homebrew in Nintendo's software was over 4 years ago. Some commentary from the developer (SciresM) who reimplemented it from scratch (everything below comes from https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/hygtnx/mesosphere_opensource_nintendo_switch_kernel_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/hygtnx/mesospher...): "It is a completely unique microkernel with a cooperative (non-preemptive) scheduler. The kernel is secure -- so far as I can tell (as a reverse engineer and hacker), it has zero security bugs. They throw out years of backwards compatibility (they're not POSIX/UNIX), and they really, really benefit from it from a security and modularity PoV." "Horizon's the only meaningful RTOS with a microkernel that I'm aware of (other than Fuschia). Everything's in userland -- filesystems, gpu (and other device drivers). The OS is capability-based and conceptually all about lots of different processes/drivers ("system modules") that host microservices. The fact that Nintendo designed such a rock-solid, modular, custom operating system for their consoles fascinates me."