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> What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. For a lot of pirates, it's a niche hobby to preserve the best quality version of some media
by nvarsj 2y ago
> What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality.
For a lot of pirates, it's a niche hobby to preserve the best quality version of some media / art. I see it as an underground librarian archivist movement.
In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.
- eisa01 2y agoIn addition, quite a lot of the backlog has never been released on iTunes I wanted to complete a set of DJ mixes, and had to purchase them on Discogs to as there were no digital copies, one cost me EUR50 for one CD...
- bratwurst3000 2y agoHahahaha I had the same problem. Had to buy a vinyl for 80€ and digitilize it. Did upload it then. Now the artist has a bandcamp with the collection for free so sharing is caring
- exe34 2y agoalready, Disney has been censoring past episodes not even based on today's sensibilities but it seems purely based on keywords. there's an episode of the suite life of zach and cody where zach pretends to have dyslexia in order to get extra time in his exams, and near the end of the episode he gets busted and they have a thoughtful conversation about how it's unfair and hurts the people who need the extra time, and he should be less lazy and do the work, etc, and somehow that's too offensive now.
- cyanwave 2y agoMy hope is human nature will prevail. SOME are that sensitive but I think there’s a growing amount of people maybe even a majority that don’t want censorship and nannie’s in media / comedy etc.
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoWhat’s offensive changes from generation to generation. Blackface is a problem because racism is a problem. I can envision a future where racism against blacks is so low that blackface in itself is no longer triggering. As an example: I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s with the feminist second wave. Women of my generation hated being called girl, for good reason! In that time, men were men, and women were considered children. Their granddaughters don’t seem to mind the term girl at all. They didn’t suffer the same trauma their grandmothers did. Society has progressed, at least a bit.
- seec 2y ago[flagged]
- lyu07282 2y agoPeople don't like to be discriminated against based on their skin color or gender so there is always going to be resistance against bigots like you, who justify and rationalize the discrimination. There has been some progress as evident by the fact that your racist beliefs are already a relatively fringe minority. Even people like you changed, you no longer advocate for slavery or colonialism and probably don't support lynchings, murdering gay people or banning women's right to vote, to understand social change in your case you just have to shift your timeframe by a hundred years or so. You will be dragged along into the future or die, that's how social progress happens, older bigots die off and are replaced by slightly less racist bigots. Overall, slowly progress will be made.
- account42 2y ago> People don't like to be discriminated against based on their skin color or gender Sure, but they do like to discriminate against others based on their skin color or gender. Race and gender-gated policies are everywhere today.
- 2y ago
- cruffle_duffle 2y agoDisney is only slightly better about nuking old “offensive” content than other providers. Many times they just gave an unskippable “this is culturally offensive to some” text and call it good. For example the old lady and the tramp has that “we are Siamese” song, which I guess is offensive… at least they still let you watch it. Hulu on the other hand just pulls shit. For example they pulled my favorite it’s always sunny episode where they do that diehard movie. I guess the fact they do black face makes it racist (which they call out as such in the show itself!) and since we are all apparently too stupid to think for ourselves about the content we watch they better block it. After all they know better than me about what is offensive. … shit like that… that is what is gonna lead me back to piracy.
- exe34 2y agoin the case I mentioned, the episode "smarter and smarterer" just went down the memory hole, it's like it was never there.
- glandium 2y agoI guess that means Hulu doesn't have Tropic Thunder?
- jamiek88 2y agoThe creators of always sunny pulled that themselves just fyi. They decided as artists that they weren’t cool with it and I think that is their right as creators, personally.
- exe34 2y agoI believe the opposite on this actually. You may be the creator of something, but once you've shown it to me, it becomes the property of the human race. Something our species has done and enjoyed (or hated). You have no right to erase it from existence. You could make a big speech about how bad it was, put a warning at the start, etc, but removing it entirely from existence is just vandalism. Imagine if the Pharaohs decided to blow up the pyramids after they built them!
- pavlov 2y agoIndeed. Many of these pirates are the most devoted fans of the music they store and distribute. They go to gigs, buy merchandise and vinyl editions, and otherwise support the artists directly. In contrast companies like Spotify don’t care about the music at all. They would just as well sell you white noise if it would somehow give them the slightest improvement in growth or margins. Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, regularly makes statements that suggest he’d rather see professional musicians disappear. Most recently: https://www.nme.com/news/music/music-fans-and-artists-hit-back-as-spotify-ceo-claims-the-cost-of-creating-content-is-close-to-zero-3761004 https://www.nme.com/news/music/music-fans-and-artists-hit-ba...
- listenallyall 2y ago[flagged]
- rickdicker 2y agoPresumably if you're pirating music you aren't "completely detached" from the music - otherwise why would you do it?
- ineptech 2y agoIn the early 80s, the local pirate scene in my hometown revolved around a guy who I'll call George. George's entire basement was devoted to boxes full of diskettes (5 1/4" in those days) of pirated software and photocopied documentation. All kinds of software - games, office apps, scientific stuff, you name it. Some was downloaded from BBS's but the majority of it was shipped USPS from god knows who. Thing is, he used virtually none of it. He collected software for the sake of collecting it. He didn't even play video games, just loaded them up once to make sure they ran. He was a hoarder basically, who had stumbled into a niche hobby, and like most hobbyists he would happily share it with anyone who asked. I'm not saying every pirate is like that, or even most, but I am saying, I don't think the pirate scene works without people like that. The music fans are spokes, but people who do it for the sake of doing it are the hubs.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- radley 2y ago> Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes. Bitrates are tied to the subscription tier. If you do the 4K plan, it's visibly noticeable that 1080p video bitrates are higher. They don't have much 4K content, but the 1080p difference is worth it for my 4K projector.
- jorvi 2y ago> In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes. Yeah, nah. WhatCD’s full catalogue has never been recovered.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago>> some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC > nah. WhatCD’s full catalogue has never been recovered. The loss of WhatCD's torrent database didn't wipe out anyone's library.
- JetSpiegel 2y agoThe value of a library is that it's all in one place. Burning the Library of Alexandria also didn't burn the other copies, and yet many books were lost.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y agoThat's a reasonable observation.
- eisa01 2y agoBut the successors still have stuff iTunes don't have, and there's even new uploads of old releases that What didn't have ;)
- thowawatp302 2y agoBy virtue of being a private torrent tracker, WhatCD never had that full catalog, itself. The members did and what you consider to be an inability to recover is only because the torrents were never remade. The same thing would happen if the tracker was up and there were no seeds.
- joshuaturner 2y agoThis is especially true with the current wave of upscaled 4k releases that are, frankly - awful. Eventually, these will be the only versions we have access to on streaming platforms, but someone will have the original Blu-ray remux or DVD rip on their Plex server.
- satvikpendem 2y agoYep, that is why I pirate as well, movies and shows are simply lower quality when streaming than via direct downloads. Plus, I can play them with my own media player and use software like SmoothVideoProject to interpolate the frame rate and use upscalers for sub-4k content.
- sharkweek 2y ago>every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. In college I ate up an entire hard drive downloading the bootleg discography of Pearl Jam live shows in the hugest quality I could find. Not sure why I needed 50+ live versions of the song Daughter or Yellow Ledbetter but… I had ‘em
- acchow 2y agoStill frustrated that 1080p bluray looks and sounds significantly better than 4k Netflix. Will a lot of quality stuff be lost forever when these companies disappear?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoYes but I also don't think enjoyment is gated behind some arbitrary maximum quality.
- rightbyte 2y agoBeing constantly reminded you are a tool watching some dark filter compressed pseudo-4k video at the mercy of some conglomerate takes away some of the fun in consuming culture. I feel way freer when watching downloaded films. Like the old VHS days. It is mine.
- acchow 2y agoNot as a goal within itself, but when the audio quality is so bad that you cannot understand the dialog without closed captions turned on.... That is a problem... I find this often the case with streaming. I used to think that this is just how they make movies now, but when trying out the same movie in Bluray, every word comes out crystal clear.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- shmuppet 2y agoHigh quality piracy, especially for music, can convey a lot of social status. Many of the “pirate clubs” online are gated behind presenting your own vault of gems: lots of lossless FLAC files and maybe some rare foreign cd rips.