3 ms·

One of the things that really boggles the mind here is that there even is people paying for piracy.

IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
I don't think its that mind boggling. Everyone pays -in some way- for value. Pirated streams may not cost $$, but they cost time, labor, and its risky to set up (virii, installing bloatware, etc). So there's a cost to them. A hybrid model that is low cost and low labor, simply approximates the real value to the consumer. If someone is not paying Sky 30 EUR per month, but is paying a random reseller the equivalent of 3 EUR/mo, then the question is, why doesn't the content provider sell that value to the end user?
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Right, but this is copyright brained "lost sale" logic. Sky costs 30 EUR/mo because everyone involved in the value chain can only produce their creative works if they can charge that much. The resellers are charging 3 EUR specifically because they cut the publishers and creators of that work out of the profit. Of course you can charge 3 EUR for something you didn't have to pay for. But you could also charge nothing - you don't really have costs because you aren't paying anyone. I distinctly remember the days of P2P and BitTorrent where pirated content actually was being provided for free[0]. So in my mind, charging any amount of money for pirated content feels like a grift. [0] Or at the very least, using an internal scrip denominated in bytes transferred to encourage people to host the content
mathieuh 3y ago
I'm paying £15/month to rent a seedbox on which I have a media centre application and a torrent client installed. If I could get the same user experience for the same price legally then I would, but the legal experience is both too expensive and too shit. There was a golden year or two where it really was easier to do it legally. Now you need ten different subscriptions, and half the things you want to watch cost extra money on top of that.
- nixgeek 3y ago
  Seedbox providers seem like a pretty bad idea if you are based in a jurisdiction with strong copyright infringement laws or precedent of prosecuting piracy. Many of the servers are operated in locations which have cooperation agreements with law enforcement and authorities in other countries. Go after a bigger provider, obtain records of their customers and you have “caught many people in the act” — you get access logs with IPs to control panels, any other logs in infrastructure (all those things they may do to make it easier to use a seedbox are also potential evidence of crimes committed), payment instruments to trace you. You’re paying £15 and gambling a bit that this won’t happen, or that the Crown Prosecution Service and Police don’t care. But the UK keeps revising the Digital Economy Act, and changing/increasing the penalties for copyright infringement, so they’re spending valuable legislative time on this (somewhat indicating it may become a prosecution priority). There’s always the specter of a coordinated, multinational operation to disrupt piracy because it’s a great headline that authorities care about intellectual property. If you are caught and they do make an example of you, the penalties (a criminal record; a significant fine like £50,000; or even a short jail stint) seem to dramatically “cost more” than the savings. It might be worth understanding what logs your seedbox provider keeps external to the system they’re renting you, what’s on the box itself, what duration all these logs are kept for, how long do they keep records of your payments (the authorities will inevitably argue this is a criminal enterprise and you’re supporting organised crime). But perhaps you’re paying through cryptocurrency from wallets the clean side of a tumbler/mixer and you only ever access this all via VPN and have perfect OpSec!
  - Moldoteck 3y ago
    imo a simple normal vpn would solve any issue (well, it costs, but still may be cheaper compared to legal alternative)
gosub100 3y ago
I recently paid about $30 for license codes for office/project/visio/visual studio enterprise. I spend 99% of my time on Linux, but on my windows machine I wanted these titles and didn't want to pay for a subscription or risk unknown binaries from torrent sites (although I generally do trust them). $30, 1-time, was acceptable, products work great, and if MSFT offered the same deal I'd have bought from them.

I don't think its that mind boggling. Everyone pays -in some way- for value. Pirated streams may not cost $$, but they cost time, labor, and its risky to set up (virii, installing bloatware, etc). So there's a cost to them. A hybrid model that is low cost and low labor, simply approximates the real value to the consumer. If someone is not paying Sky 30 EUR per month, but is paying a random reseller the equivalent of 3 EUR/mo, then the question is, why doesn't the content provider sell that value to the end user?

kmeisthax 3y ago
Right, but this is copyright brained "lost sale" logic. Sky costs 30 EUR/mo because everyone involved in the value chain can only produce their creative works if they can charge that much. The resellers are charging 3 EUR specifically because they cut the publishers and creators of that work out of the profit. Of course you can charge 3 EUR for something you didn't have to pay for. But you could also charge nothing - you don't really have costs because you aren't paying anyone. I distinctly remember the days of P2P and BitTorrent where pirated content actually was being provided for free[0]. So in my mind, charging any amount of money for pirated content feels like a grift. [0] Or at the very least, using an internal scrip denominated in bytes transferred to encourage people to host the content

mathieuh 3y ago

I'm paying £15/month to rent a seedbox on which I have a media centre application and a torrent client installed. If I could get the same user experience for the same price legally then I would, but the legal experience is both too expensive and too shit. There was a golden year or two where it really was easier to do it legally. Now you need ten different subscriptions, and half the things you want to watch cost extra money on top of that.

nixgeek 3y ago
Seedbox providers seem like a pretty bad idea if you are based in a jurisdiction with strong copyright infringement laws or precedent of prosecuting piracy. Many of the servers are operated in locations which have cooperation agreements with law enforcement and authorities in other countries. Go after a bigger provider, obtain records of their customers and you have “caught many people in the act” — you get access logs with IPs to control panels, any other logs in infrastructure (all those things they may do to make it easier to use a seedbox are also potential evidence of crimes committed), payment instruments to trace you. You’re paying £15 and gambling a bit that this won’t happen, or that the Crown Prosecution Service and Police don’t care. But the UK keeps revising the Digital Economy Act, and changing/increasing the penalties for copyright infringement, so they’re spending valuable legislative time on this (somewhat indicating it may become a prosecution priority). There’s always the specter of a coordinated, multinational operation to disrupt piracy because it’s a great headline that authorities care about intellectual property. If you are caught and they do make an example of you, the penalties (a criminal record; a significant fine like £50,000; or even a short jail stint) seem to dramatically “cost more” than the savings. It might be worth understanding what logs your seedbox provider keeps external to the system they’re renting you, what’s on the box itself, what duration all these logs are kept for, how long do they keep records of your payments (the authorities will inevitably argue this is a criminal enterprise and you’re supporting organised crime). But perhaps you’re paying through cryptocurrency from wallets the clean side of a tumbler/mixer and you only ever access this all via VPN and have perfect OpSec!
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  imo a simple normal vpn would solve any issue (well, it costs, but still may be cheaper compared to legal alternative)

gosub100 3y ago

I recently paid about $30 for license codes for office/project/visio/visual studio enterprise. I spend 99% of my time on Linux, but on my windows machine I wanted these titles and didn't want to pay for a subscription or risk unknown binaries from torrent sites (although I generally do trust them). $30, 1-time, was acceptable, products work great, and if MSFT offered the same deal I'd have bought from them.