7 ms·

Every arthouse buff you know is pirating films

115 points by XzetaU8 2y ago

dtagames 2y ago
What ended piracy for common films was not DRM or videocassette seizures but the offer of cheap tapes and eventually cheap streaming that made it simply "not worth it" to pirate. The same is true of video games where paid players far outweigh pirates. In other words, if the art film industry wants piracy to stop, it needs to bring all its materials together in a cheap subscription store that people can afford. Criterion[0] is one such product with outstanding content, real human curation, and a lower price than mainstream movie providers. [0] https://www.criterionchannel.com/ https://www.criterionchannel.com/
- rolph 2y ago
  this also needs to be commonly accessable, no matter how you download or "stream" it into your device.
- ilvez 2y ago
  Video game pirating was mostly killed by viruses. At one point it was too just too risky. Probably good sources still around but it's too much hassle, maybe only if you game a lot and don't have a job to pay for a hobby.
  - BossingAround 2y ago
    You probably need a seedbox + private trackers for the best pirating experience. If you play <5 games a year, probably not worth it.
    - Supermancho 2y ago
      I'm thinking more like a vm/container.
      - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
        Even for non pirated content, I built a dedicated gaming pc. Kernel level anti cheat is becoming more prolific and it is impossible for me to trust the code quality going into those. Even games are not immune to ad tech revenue and are sending system telemetry to their servers.
  - Sakos 2y ago
    Is this a joke? I don't see it being any less prevalent than at any time in the past. There are plenty of trustworthy sites and plenty of people know about them. It's all over Reddit for anybody who's interested and it doesn't take a rocket scientist. It's easier now than it's ever been before.
    - ilvez 2y ago
      Wasn't meant as a joke, thanks for the response. I honestly thought it so. Now I know..
  - jorvi 2y ago
    > Video game pirating was mostly killed by viruses. At one point it was too just too risky. It wasn’t, teenagers don’t give a shit, and torrent sites like Piratebay had trusted uploaders (green/pink skull) and comments. Steam sucked initially but it kept increasing its value add (cloud saves / settings sync, easy voice chat before Discord, Steam Workshop for mods, etc) and simultaneously the sales got better and better. Why pirate a game when you can wait a couple of months to buy it for 66% off, niceties included.
- downWidOutaFite 2y ago
  Depending on how you look at it Criterion's $11/month for 1,000 titles is not cheaper than Netflix's $15/month for 5,000 titles.
  - Supermancho 2y ago
    Quantity is not the important factor in entertainment channel selection. Most people do not pay for a streaming service, if there's only 1 thing they want. Consumers aren't concerned with what they dont want, unless it gets in the way of what they do want.
  - squidsoup 2y ago
    Just about everything is worth watching on Criterion however, and unless you have very low standards, I don't think you can say that about Netflix.
    - ascagnel_ 2y ago
      The worst movies on Criterion Channel are interesting, even if they're not good. The worst movies on Netflix are just boring.
  - tortila 2y ago
    I was using Criterion subscription extensively for about 2 years. What I loved the most is that I could make a random pick from their main page and be sure it’s going to be a good quality film. I could never say this about Netflix, there I have to struggle to find something that’s at least decent
- Supermancho 2y ago
  Notably, Sega is halting the last legal way to purchase many games. https://support.sega.com/hc/en-us/articles/29776767664145-SEGA-Classics-FAQ#h_01JBWBDET2BT55YPJKK0K537Z0 https://support.sega.com/hc/en-us/articles/29776767664145-SE... I can buy most of these games on steam with a classic bundle ~36$ now. https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/10143/SEGA_Mega_Drive_and_Genesis_Classics/ https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/10143/SEGA_Mega_Drive_... A great price at 1$ a game. I can also boot up an emulator and play all these games, plus more for free. I don't feel compelled to buy the bundle.
  - favorited 2y ago
    While I think it's still an unfriendly move on Sega's part, they're presumably delisting these specific titles in advance of releasing new products/packages for them. That's what happened a couple years ago – they removed Sonics 1-3 (+ Knuckles) from Steam as individual titles, then released Sonic Origins, which included all of those plus Sonic CD. The SEGA Classics games came out 14 years ago, so they probably want to release these titles again with an updated emulator and market it as a new collection. This seems especially likely to me, since they're delisting the existing Classics Collection title on consoles.
- BossingAround 2y ago
  This is certainly true for me. As a kid, I used to pirate movies/tv shows on my slow 1Mbps connection. Nowadays, I just want to turn on my TV and start Netflix/HBO/Disney/... But, with the advent of pretty severe content locking and geolocking on various services, pirating is starting to be very enticing once again. The thing I would miss the most is the recommendation algorithm, which tends to be pretty good on Netflix.
  - daveslash 2y ago
    Downloading The Matrix over a 28k dial-up modem (on a shared house/family line) was an exercise in patience! I didn't, but a friend did... and we all waited weeks for it to finish.
    - im3w1l 2y ago
      Weeks... that's gotta have cost more than buying it?
      - daveslash 2y ago
        Ha, that's a good point. We were broke kids in a rural town without drivers licenses a hundred miles from anywhere that sold physical VHS or DVDs. We didn't have money, and if we did we didn't have the means to get to a store, and if we did it was far far away, and if we could I don't think most of us had DVD players at home. The phone bill, on the other hand - parents pay for that. ;-) IIRC, our dial-up ISP was a "local call", which was free then. I'm pretty sure my friend capitalized on the phone line during night times when the house was asleep.
  - homebrewer 2y ago
    > with the advent of pretty severe content locking and geolocking on various services It's been the norm for many of us for decades. Even if you want to pay and stay an "honest citizen", you're not found of being worthy by most streaming/distribution platforms. For the longest time I thought geolocking will die out and we will be able to access the same stuff you have, but it's going the opposite way. As the result, "piracy" never died out here, it's more alive than it's ever been. Take the hint. It's a true pleasure to see dozens of countries from around the world represented in the peer list of my torrent client. At least there is one area where we can work together for the good of all. (Gabe is one of very few exceptions, and Steam is a very successful platform commercially speaking, once again proving the old quote, by gaben himself IIRC.)
- KMnO4 2y ago
  I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created. And there was a brief period in the 2010s where I could almost say that about movies. But now, most people I know are back to pirating because it doesn’t require an eclectic taste to find that you need 6 different streaming services to meet your needs. The film industry was so close, and dropped that ball.
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    > I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. What do you think the biggest category is, by every measure, on YouTube? There are lots of distribution and payment mechanics changes over the years across creative industries. So it's very hard to generalize. But strictly in terms of piracy, there are more than enough non-monetized audio uploads on YouTube to say, music piracy is alive and well.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      YouTube's Content ID systems ensures that the vast majority of uploads pay royalties to the performer. Those royalties may be miniscule, but they are paid.
      - doctorpangloss 2y ago
        Sure. I too have heard many “performers” celebrate the effectiveness of content ID. They all talk about how that was the end of piracy. Thats exactly how they put it: “Content ID ended piracy.”
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Implementation detail. What matters is the UX: think of a song, search for it, there it is on YouTube. Open the link and it plays. No payment needed, for a long time not even an account. The platform itself was pretty inobtrusive for most of its lifetime; it's gotten quite bad recently, but for most of those who care enough to do something about it, uBlock Origin clears out the UX of all the bullshit. Pirates couldn't possibly beat that if they tried. But it only exists because of an accident of history: YouTube got big on pirated content early enough and fast enough they could transition to "content id" instead of getting sued to oblivion.
- romwell 2y ago
  Sure, but I remember pirating La Maman Et La Putain specifically because it was yet-to-be-released by Criterion in any form - and it was Jean Eustache's masterpiece that made a splash at the Cannes back in 1972, not an obscure film by any measure (even if not mainstream by any measure either). Piracy still remains a supremely important means of both accessing and archiving content after it stops being a moneymaker, or simply when it pauses being one. Case in point - plenty of stories about games on being officially published by the content owners... with cracks, after the source code was lost (or wasn't in a shape to be rebuilt), and officially selling the pirated version was the only thing the publisher could figure out how to do[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_and_the_Whore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_and_the_Whore [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/16ahvqk/rockstar_is_selling_cracked_game_copies_on_steam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/16ahvqk/rockstar_is_...
- daveslash 2y ago
  Agreed. The same with Music - with the rise of services like the iPod and more modern streaming services like Spotify, the effort just wasn't worth it. It turns out that people will happily pay for that content if its in an easy and convenient format. Regarding video specifically, one problem I see with the streaming services is the increasing push of New content. Streaming services like Netflix or Hulu or Paramount+ are really dependent on new subscribers, which means they tend to focus on new and exclusive content to draw in new people, so they prioritize that (to a fault imho). Many of us still want to rewatch those shows from the 90s we loved. Paramount+ specifically is "The Star Trek Streaming Service", and I know the folks over on reddit have their beef with P+ for seemingly de-prioritizing it instead of milking an extensive library like a cash cow. The past few years I've been digging into older movies - some black and white, silent, foreign, or weird avant-garde stuff. Streaming really drops the ball there, but I can understand how the business model doesn't really favor that.
- mzi 2y ago
  > Criterion[0] is one such product with outstanding content, real human curation, and a lower price than mainstream movie providers. "Sorry. This is currently unavailable in your region." This has been the case since before launch and is also a reason why pirates are still a thing.
  - Yeul 2y ago
    Distribution rights for obscure cinema are complex. Apparently Prime video has "suicide club" according to where to watch. But not in my country lol.
    - squidsoup 2y ago
      Sion Sono is such an odd film maker, I seem to vacillate between "this is genius" and "this is garbage" every other minute while watching his films.
    - triceratops 2y ago
      > Distribution rights for obscure cinema are complex. That's what I don't understand. The odds that more than 10 people in Mongolia are going to give two shits about say an arthouse drama about an immigrant Latino family in Yellowknife are incredibly low. No matter how well-drawn the characters, or compelling the story, obscure arthouse films are not expected to find a big paying audience. So why not make that film free to watch in any market that you don't expect to be interested in it? How much revenue do you really stand to lose?
      - rolph 2y ago
        i do belive loss leader is a sound marketing principle, if you can eliminate an all or nothing mentality [ its all mine or you get nothing ]
  - cptaj 2y ago
    Yeah, totally nonexistent product for most of the world
- bayareacommie 2y ago
  [dead]
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  Worth pointing out that video gaming piracy has a number of challenges that make it less appealing. No connected experience (usually); you have to play in offline modes only, sometimes with more compromised. Game updates are often lagging. Others have mentioned viruses already. Steam sales are frequent so /r/patientgamer types can just wait till the game becomes affordable where-as there's a rarely discounts available & a patchwork of streaming services.
- artimaeis 2y ago
  MUBI[0] is another streaming service that's focusing on curation and smaller lists of films available. Their service is available in a lot of countries, and each region has its own curation. I'm a huge fan of this ultra-curated approach, since it lets me find a lot of things that I'd otherwise have to hunt for, and would likely miss out on. [0] https://mubi.com https://mubi.com
  - mega_dean 2y ago
    In 2008/2009, I bought a DVD of this movie called "The Fall": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(2006_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(2006_film) . I'm a sucker for visually-appealing films so I loved it, but I eventually lost the DVD and was never able to find another copy, despite checking every year or two. The wikipedia page says: > As of September 2023, The Fall had been unavailable on streaming services or rental services, making it notoriously difficult to access with secondhand Blu-ray copies of the film being very expensive. But apparently that isn't the case anymore! MUBI bought the rights earlier this year, and it looks like I can watch it through Amazon Video if I sign up for a MUBI trial. EDIT: I maybe should have visited https://mubi.com/ https://mubi.com/ before commenting - clips from The Fall is the very first thing they show.
- jdietrich 2y ago
  True to the article's point, The Criterion Channel is only available in the US and Canada. Mubi and BFI Player offer a good selection of independent films at a fair price in my country, but that's part of the problem - there's an annoyingly complex matrix of services and regional restrictions. Rarely does anyone have to ask "where can I listen to that album?", because essentially all of the music streaming services have the rights to essentially all music. "Where can I watch that film?" is still a very real problem.
- tortila 2y ago
  Last time I checked Criterion was only available in the US because of publishing rights. It could be easily bypassed by using VPN (location is actually only checked at account registration), but I’m wondering: is it really different from pirating if you’re breaking the rules anyway? Here in Europe MUBI[0] is an alternative to Criterion. I’ve tried it during lockdown but the streaming quality was seriously lacking, and their library was really small. I’m curious if they improved in those areas [0]: https://mubi.com/en/ https://mubi.com/en/
  - squidsoup 2y ago
    The concept behind MUBI is that they provide a small set of curated films which change frequently - sort of like a little independent movie theatre. Criterion is possibly a better offering if you want a large catalogue.
    - dtagames 2y ago
      Criterion also rotates through human-curated collections. They do not offer a full library archivally, which was initially a disappointment when I subscribed. It turns out the curated content is great, changes all the time, and really has movies that are worth watching and I don't already know about -- along with lots of favorites.
- JoblessWonder 2y ago
  There are many hurdles but one of the biggest I see is that there isn't a common/market leading way for independent films to self-publish their films to an independent streaming service. Something like Steam but for films. I'm sure YouTube, Vimeo, and others may offer the ability to do this... but none of them are winning that market or advertising themselves to potential viewers. And it isn't cost effective for a streamer to go after independent films that are very niche.
- nasmorn 2y ago
  I would even buy it out right but the rare movies I am interested in almost never have any distribution. Which is strange since that surely can’t be the most lucrative way to monetize it
- pacifika 2y ago
  Perhaps It’s not the cost per se but the convenience that made it not worth it.
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  That isn't enough. A big motivator for these kinds of people is preservation, and a subscription service doesn't solve that problem. Licenses and agreements end, many culturally significant works are completely unavailable today except for pirating. This goes for music, film and video games. Until we live in a world where the conglomerates taking their huge slice of the revenue from artists and creatives are also stewards of culture, acting in the best interest of culture itself, I couldn't care less about their bottom dollar.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago
  > What ended piracy for common films was not DRM or videocassette seizures but the offer of cheap tapes and eventually cheap streaming that made it simply "not worth it" to pirate. Piracy has all but ended for movies. The issue with streaming is that there are movie streaming apps (for TVs, browsers, etc.) that basically offer the Netflix interface. I know of people with hundreds of TB of movies and series: catalog in the five digits (so more than 10 000 movies and series). In Europe there's also the totally rampant "IPTV" craze: where even retired boomers (not necessarily the most tech savvy audience) buy/rent an illegal little box with all of Disney+Netflix+HBO etc. plus also all the regular TV channels (of the entire world). I don't know in which world movies and series piracy disappeared but it's certainly not in the world in which I live in (FWIW I pay Netflix). I actually don't know if there's ever been an era with more movie piracy than nowadays!?
- cameldrv 2y ago
  This used to be true with the original Netflix where they mailed you DVDs. They really had almost everything you could think of, you just had to wait a day or two to get it. I watched so many obscure movies, it was fantastic!
longtimelistnr 2y ago
I also am drawn to piracy just so i can get a high enough bitrate to look good on a modern display!
- romwell 2y ago
  >I also am drawn to piracy just so i can get a high enough bitrate to look good on a modern display! Then there's languages and subtitles, and publishers still don't get that shit right. FFS, I can't watch a Ukrainian movie in Ukrainian outside Ukraine, because the publisher only released the English version on US streaming services. And if I want to watch a film with a soundtrack in one language (the original, perhaps) and subtitles in another (out of the ones I speak that it better translates to), sayonara, we're hitting the torrents. Oh, and go figure, sometimes you just don't have a reliable Internet connection where you want to watch a movie. Unbelievably, but it does happen if you go outside the house.
  - WorkerBee28474 2y ago
    > FFS, I can't watch a Ukrainian movie in Ukrainian outside Ukraine, because the publisher only released the English version on US streaming services. I suspect there's a cost associated with licensing the Ukrainian version that will not be recouped in markets outside Ukraine.
    - romwell 2y ago
      >I suspect there's a cost associated with licensing the Ukrainian version that will not be recouped in markets outside Ukraine. About a third of Ukrainians are currently outside Ukraine due to war. Even setting that aside, [citation needed] that providing additional soundtracks comes with an additional cost to the streaming service, and if so, that this additional cost is upfront (and not per stream). If the publishers are so idiotic as to kill Ukrainian language distribution outside Ukraine with their fees, that just shows that piracy is necessary. Knowing people in Ukraine, it's less likely to be stupid greed than plain old stupidity (like Daenerys, the officials and executives in Ukraine kind of forgot that Ukrainians outside Ukraine exist). This is a discussion for another time, though.
underseacables 2y ago
My cubicle mate pirates everything, even if it's on a streaming site. Books, movies, music, comics, everything. He doesn't seem to care.
- bramhaag 2y ago
  Is it a matter of not caring, or is it simply the easier and better solution? Even if something is available on a streaming service, you have to deal with low bitrates, missing subtitles and audio tracks, wrong editions, and even ads.
  - lancesells 2y ago
    I mean it's clearly not caring about the author of the works. With a Disney movie you're not making a difference in the creators pockets, but an author of a book or a comic do feel the effects of pirating.
- nunez 2y ago
  Honestly I get it. When you want content _in it's original format_ and want to guarantee that you'll be able to enjoy it in the future, you can't rely on streaming services. (So many albums from 20+ years ago are only available as remasters on streaming services, and many eBooks these days are DRMed out the wazoo, as I recently learned from setting up Calibre. Speaking of Calibre, Amazon is, soon, going to shut off downloading books. This means that it will be next to impossible to get books THAT YOU PAID FOR off of the platform unless you have a physical Kindle. This does not include Kindle Unlimited books, which, at this time, are still un-decryptable.)
squidsoup 2y ago
If you are looking through the web's back alleys to find obscure films, just be aware that sometimes you can buy them directly from the filmmaker. I discovered this while looking for a copy of Sleep Has Her House by Scott Barley (https://scottbarley.com/sleep-has-her-house https://scottbarley.com/sleep-has-her-house). Also, if you have even a passing interest in cinema, subscribing to Criterion is worth every penny, it is an absolute joy.
righthand 2y ago
Maybe 40% of the time I pirate, you can’t see anything original or cult otherwise. The other time I do try to find it at the library. If I can find it on a service I torrent the 4K version anyways because streaming quality is varied trash. If streaming didn’t offer such generalized garbage for everyone then it wouldn’t be this way. If consumers just made a leap for physical copies again it also wouldn’t be this way. It’s the drive to consume once and move on that causes this, but what if I never consume it in the appropriate time frame, then I’m just out of the loop as it goes in the vault because services lose money otherwise.
- squidsoup 2y ago
  > If streaming didn’t offer such generalized garbage for everyone then it wouldn’t be this way. Mubi and Criterion are great.
  - righthand 2y ago
    I am enjoying the stuff on Tubi too, lots of great anime, even if it is teaching me to hit the mute button and zone on my phone.
  - rodgerd 2y ago
    Also Kanopy if your local library is a subscriber. Basically anything you might see at a film festival, that could be considered "art house", and a remarkably long tail that goes back to pre-Hayes Code Hollywood (for example).
- sgt 2y ago
  Agreed, but even if I wanted to see something relatively mainstream like Last of the Mohicans (great movie with Daniel Day Lewis), I'd still go to a certain pirate site to find it. It may be on some of the streaming sites, but which one? Will it be on Apple? I don't mind paying, but where will it be, will it be on Amazon? Oh forget about Netflix as they don't seem to have anything more than a few years old, unless it's some series they are promoting like Seinfeld. Also, on a certain pirate site of note, I can also look for the best quality one like a Blu-Ray HD rip if it exists, that'll be something like 20GB - but that's fine!
JohnFen 2y ago
It makes total sense. A similar thing is happening with music. So much music (and movies) that is important to me is becoming unavailable that I've been resorting to buying used CDs and DVDs (which are getting increasingly expensive as others do the same) while I still can so they don't become unavailable to me entirely.
karaterobot 2y ago
I have had people pirate things I created, and even though it was hypocritical of me, I got frustrated because it cost me so much time and money to make. It felt like people just pirate everything without consideration for whether it is actually expensive to buy, or hard to obtain, or if it was made by a giant, faceless corporation, or me and my friend Charlie after work and on weekends. There is a pipeline that just puts everything out there, no introspection, no questions asked. It's not conceivable to me that we'd ever run into a situation where a pirate group would say "it'd be wrong of us to rip this and distribute it." It just wouldn't ever happen. I said it was hypocritical, because I pirate a lot of stuff myself. I think it's great, it lets me be exposed to so much more than I would otherwise. So, I'm not complaining. But, I'm also not rushing out to spend another year making something small and personal just to have it show up on torrent sites a couple days later. Not sure what to do about that. Ultimately, I guess it comes down to people's choices, but people don't think too hard about the ethics of this stuff—I know I don't, 99% of the time.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  > It felt like people just pirate everything Yes, there is a group of people for whom pirating stuff is an actual hobby. They still exist today -- I know a couple of them. And I'm glad that I do. I know that if I can't find something I really want, there's a very good chance that one of them has it.
  - Balgair 2y ago
    https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ Also, though I'm having trouble finding the source, I do remember Orwell publishing a preface to Animal Farm (?), but only in illegal bootleg copies behind the Iron Curtain. I remember him saying something like 'I'd only ever give a preface to those copies, because I knew those were the people that would give a damn to reading it'. Now, I know there is a preface that Orwell published in the West to Animal Farm, but I just can't shake that it was Animal Farm that he did this illegal publishing for. If anyone know a bit better what I'm talking about or remembers the story better, please let me know here.
- 2y ago
angst_ridden 2y ago
I live in the US half the year, and elsewhere for the other half. Movie rights go in and out of availability even when staying in one place, but when you cross borders, you find your access changing pretty frequently. So for movies, I have a VPN which works much of the time. There are still plenty of good/interesting films whose rights issues prevent streaming. There is also a significant collection of films that are just not commercially successful, and which may never be digitized commercially. I go for physical media for those when possible. With music, a fair amount of what I listen to isn't available over streaming services. I buy physical media when I can and digitize it to keep with me. I haven't pirated in a long, long time. I remember having to hunt down The Star Wars Holiday Special for a friend back in the day. It ended up being easier to buy a home-made dvd from a shady place. I'm sure there's more out there now, and it's easier now, but search time is at a premium.
amelius 2y ago
As long as BigCorps don't respect the rights related to my personal data, then why should I respect the rights of their data?
Flatcircle 2y ago
I've been wanting to watch the William Friedkin movie To Live And Die in LA starring Willem Defoe and William Peterson from 1985 but it hasn't been on any steamers for rent or to buy. It's so frustrating that such big mainstream movies can be unavailable.
NoboruWataya 2y ago
Convenience and accessibility is a huge factor, moreso than price IMO. When you're paying a company for access for their streaming service and you still can't find the particular show you want (that they produce) then why not pirate it.
kristianp 2y ago
There is an option for some movies that are not too rare, but are arthouse enough to not get on the regular streaming services, called Movie On Demand (MOD), where movies are provided on DVD-R. I'm struggling to google a direct service, but I recently got a dvd for an obscure movie from the 80s from a reseller on ebay.
chocolateteeth 2y ago
Movie piracy (and other domains as well) is one of those, in my opinion, exceptions to the idea that “Well, if everybody pirated (or xyz’d) then where would we be?” Or something similar. Ignoring the law for a moment, which I liken to pedestrian traffic lights in nyc, but with a wider range of consequences, the reason I usually find pirating material unobjectionable is everybody doesn’t do it (in general) and those who are of the sort to do it ought to do it, as there is “room” for their behavior. Well what about creators? It’s an important question, but I answer that the circumstances of the consumer along with that of the creator and their product should be evaluated on a case by case basis as regards deciding whether or not to pirate. Also it often has happened to me that piracy of some product was not the final word. That is there are a good deal of things that I went out and bought afterward anyway. Various reasons having been cause.
arthousebuff 2y ago
Highly reccommend Mubi. Unfortunately, their unique business model (only have 30 films available to stream at any one time) means they lack an archival aspect, but the films they do carry are highly curated and always worth the time.

115 points by XzetaU8 2y ago

What ended piracy for common films was not DRM or videocassette seizures but the offer of cheap tapes and eventually cheap streaming that made it simply "not worth it" to pirate. The same is true of video games where paid players far outweigh pirates. In other words, if the art film industry wants piracy to stop, it needs to bring all its materials together in a cheap subscription store that people can afford. Criterion[0] is one such product with outstanding content, real human curation, and a lower price than mainstream movie providers. [0] https://www.criterionchannel.com/ https://www.criterionchannel.com/

rolph 2y ago
this also needs to be commonly accessable, no matter how you download or "stream" it into your device.
ilvez 2y ago
Video game pirating was mostly killed by viruses. At one point it was too just too risky. Probably good sources still around but it's too much hassle, maybe only if you game a lot and don't have a job to pay for a hobby.
- BossingAround 2y ago
  You probably need a seedbox + private trackers for the best pirating experience. If you play <5 games a year, probably not worth it.
  - Supermancho 2y ago
    I'm thinking more like a vm/container.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
      Even for non pirated content, I built a dedicated gaming pc. Kernel level anti cheat is becoming more prolific and it is impossible for me to trust the code quality going into those. Even games are not immune to ad tech revenue and are sending system telemetry to their servers.
- Sakos 2y ago
  Is this a joke? I don't see it being any less prevalent than at any time in the past. There are plenty of trustworthy sites and plenty of people know about them. It's all over Reddit for anybody who's interested and it doesn't take a rocket scientist. It's easier now than it's ever been before.
  - ilvez 2y ago
    Wasn't meant as a joke, thanks for the response. I honestly thought it so. Now I know..
- jorvi 2y ago
  > Video game pirating was mostly killed by viruses. At one point it was too just too risky. It wasn’t, teenagers don’t give a shit, and torrent sites like Piratebay had trusted uploaders (green/pink skull) and comments. Steam sucked initially but it kept increasing its value add (cloud saves / settings sync, easy voice chat before Discord, Steam Workshop for mods, etc) and simultaneously the sales got better and better. Why pirate a game when you can wait a couple of months to buy it for 66% off, niceties included.
downWidOutaFite 2y ago
Depending on how you look at it Criterion's $11/month for 1,000 titles is not cheaper than Netflix's $15/month for 5,000 titles.
- Supermancho 2y ago
  Quantity is not the important factor in entertainment channel selection. Most people do not pay for a streaming service, if there's only 1 thing they want. Consumers aren't concerned with what they dont want, unless it gets in the way of what they do want.
- squidsoup 2y ago
  Just about everything is worth watching on Criterion however, and unless you have very low standards, I don't think you can say that about Netflix.
  - ascagnel_ 2y ago
    The worst movies on Criterion Channel are interesting, even if they're not good. The worst movies on Netflix are just boring.
- tortila 2y ago
  I was using Criterion subscription extensively for about 2 years. What I loved the most is that I could make a random pick from their main page and be sure it’s going to be a good quality film. I could never say this about Netflix, there I have to struggle to find something that’s at least decent
Supermancho 2y ago
Notably, Sega is halting the last legal way to purchase many games. https://support.sega.com/hc/en-us/articles/29776767664145-SEGA-Classics-FAQ#h_01JBWBDET2BT55YPJKK0K537Z0 https://support.sega.com/hc/en-us/articles/29776767664145-SE... I can buy most of these games on steam with a classic bundle ~36$ now. https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/10143/SEGA_Mega_Drive_and_Genesis_Classics/ https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/10143/SEGA_Mega_Drive_... A great price at 1$ a game. I can also boot up an emulator and play all these games, plus more for free. I don't feel compelled to buy the bundle.
- favorited 2y ago
  While I think it's still an unfriendly move on Sega's part, they're presumably delisting these specific titles in advance of releasing new products/packages for them. That's what happened a couple years ago – they removed Sonics 1-3 (+ Knuckles) from Steam as individual titles, then released Sonic Origins, which included all of those plus Sonic CD. The SEGA Classics games came out 14 years ago, so they probably want to release these titles again with an updated emulator and market it as a new collection. This seems especially likely to me, since they're delisting the existing Classics Collection title on consoles.
BossingAround 2y ago
This is certainly true for me. As a kid, I used to pirate movies/tv shows on my slow 1Mbps connection. Nowadays, I just want to turn on my TV and start Netflix/HBO/Disney/... But, with the advent of pretty severe content locking and geolocking on various services, pirating is starting to be very enticing once again. The thing I would miss the most is the recommendation algorithm, which tends to be pretty good on Netflix.
- daveslash 2y ago
  Downloading The Matrix over a 28k dial-up modem (on a shared house/family line) was an exercise in patience! I didn't, but a friend did... and we all waited weeks for it to finish.
  - im3w1l 2y ago
    Weeks... that's gotta have cost more than buying it?
    - daveslash 2y ago
      Ha, that's a good point. We were broke kids in a rural town without drivers licenses a hundred miles from anywhere that sold physical VHS or DVDs. We didn't have money, and if we did we didn't have the means to get to a store, and if we did it was far far away, and if we could I don't think most of us had DVD players at home. The phone bill, on the other hand - parents pay for that. ;-) IIRC, our dial-up ISP was a "local call", which was free then. I'm pretty sure my friend capitalized on the phone line during night times when the house was asleep.
- homebrewer 2y ago
  > with the advent of pretty severe content locking and geolocking on various services It's been the norm for many of us for decades. Even if you want to pay and stay an "honest citizen", you're not found of being worthy by most streaming/distribution platforms. For the longest time I thought geolocking will die out and we will be able to access the same stuff you have, but it's going the opposite way. As the result, "piracy" never died out here, it's more alive than it's ever been. Take the hint. It's a true pleasure to see dozens of countries from around the world represented in the peer list of my torrent client. At least there is one area where we can work together for the good of all. (Gabe is one of very few exceptions, and Steam is a very successful platform commercially speaking, once again proving the old quote, by gaben himself IIRC.)
KMnO4 2y ago
I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created. And there was a brief period in the 2010s where I could almost say that about movies. But now, most people I know are back to pirating because it doesn’t require an eclectic taste to find that you need 6 different streaming services to meet your needs. The film industry was so close, and dropped that ball.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  > I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. What do you think the biggest category is, by every measure, on YouTube? There are lots of distribution and payment mechanics changes over the years across creative industries. So it's very hard to generalize. But strictly in terms of piracy, there are more than enough non-monetized audio uploads on YouTube to say, music piracy is alive and well.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    YouTube's Content ID systems ensures that the vast majority of uploads pay royalties to the performer. Those royalties may be miniscule, but they are paid.
    - doctorpangloss 2y ago
      Sure. I too have heard many “performers” celebrate the effectiveness of content ID. They all talk about how that was the end of piracy. Thats exactly how they put it: “Content ID ended piracy.”
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Implementation detail. What matters is the UX: think of a song, search for it, there it is on YouTube. Open the link and it plays. No payment needed, for a long time not even an account. The platform itself was pretty inobtrusive for most of its lifetime; it's gotten quite bad recently, but for most of those who care enough to do something about it, uBlock Origin clears out the UX of all the bullshit. Pirates couldn't possibly beat that if they tried. But it only exists because of an accident of history: YouTube got big on pirated content early enough and fast enough they could transition to "content id" instead of getting sued to oblivion.
romwell 2y ago
Sure, but I remember pirating La Maman Et La Putain specifically because it was yet-to-be-released by Criterion in any form - and it was Jean Eustache's masterpiece that made a splash at the Cannes back in 1972, not an obscure film by any measure (even if not mainstream by any measure either). Piracy still remains a supremely important means of both accessing and archiving content after it stops being a moneymaker, or simply when it pauses being one. Case in point - plenty of stories about games on being officially published by the content owners... with cracks, after the source code was lost (or wasn't in a shape to be rebuilt), and officially selling the pirated version was the only thing the publisher could figure out how to do[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_and_the_Whore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_and_the_Whore [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/16ahvqk/rockstar_is_selling_cracked_game_copies_on_steam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/16ahvqk/rockstar_is_...
daveslash 2y ago
Agreed. The same with Music - with the rise of services like the iPod and more modern streaming services like Spotify, the effort just wasn't worth it. It turns out that people will happily pay for that content if its in an easy and convenient format. Regarding video specifically, one problem I see with the streaming services is the increasing push of New content. Streaming services like Netflix or Hulu or Paramount+ are really dependent on new subscribers, which means they tend to focus on new and exclusive content to draw in new people, so they prioritize that (to a fault imho). Many of us still want to rewatch those shows from the 90s we loved. Paramount+ specifically is "The Star Trek Streaming Service", and I know the folks over on reddit have their beef with P+ for seemingly de-prioritizing it instead of milking an extensive library like a cash cow. The past few years I've been digging into older movies - some black and white, silent, foreign, or weird avant-garde stuff. Streaming really drops the ball there, but I can understand how the business model doesn't really favor that.
mzi 2y ago
> Criterion[0] is one such product with outstanding content, real human curation, and a lower price than mainstream movie providers. "Sorry. This is currently unavailable in your region." This has been the case since before launch and is also a reason why pirates are still a thing.
- Yeul 2y ago
  Distribution rights for obscure cinema are complex. Apparently Prime video has "suicide club" according to where to watch. But not in my country lol.
  - squidsoup 2y ago
    Sion Sono is such an odd film maker, I seem to vacillate between "this is genius" and "this is garbage" every other minute while watching his films.
  - triceratops 2y ago
    > Distribution rights for obscure cinema are complex. That's what I don't understand. The odds that more than 10 people in Mongolia are going to give two shits about say an arthouse drama about an immigrant Latino family in Yellowknife are incredibly low. No matter how well-drawn the characters, or compelling the story, obscure arthouse films are not expected to find a big paying audience. So why not make that film free to watch in any market that you don't expect to be interested in it? How much revenue do you really stand to lose?
    - rolph 2y ago
      i do belive loss leader is a sound marketing principle, if you can eliminate an all or nothing mentality [ its all mine or you get nothing ]
- cptaj 2y ago
  Yeah, totally nonexistent product for most of the world
bayareacommie 2y ago
[dead]
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Worth pointing out that video gaming piracy has a number of challenges that make it less appealing. No connected experience (usually); you have to play in offline modes only, sometimes with more compromised. Game updates are often lagging. Others have mentioned viruses already. Steam sales are frequent so /r/patientgamer types can just wait till the game becomes affordable where-as there's a rarely discounts available & a patchwork of streaming services.
artimaeis 2y ago
MUBI[0] is another streaming service that's focusing on curation and smaller lists of films available. Their service is available in a lot of countries, and each region has its own curation. I'm a huge fan of this ultra-curated approach, since it lets me find a lot of things that I'd otherwise have to hunt for, and would likely miss out on. [0] https://mubi.com https://mubi.com
- mega_dean 2y ago
  In 2008/2009, I bought a DVD of this movie called "The Fall": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(2006_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(2006_film) . I'm a sucker for visually-appealing films so I loved it, but I eventually lost the DVD and was never able to find another copy, despite checking every year or two. The wikipedia page says: > As of September 2023, The Fall had been unavailable on streaming services or rental services, making it notoriously difficult to access with secondhand Blu-ray copies of the film being very expensive. But apparently that isn't the case anymore! MUBI bought the rights earlier this year, and it looks like I can watch it through Amazon Video if I sign up for a MUBI trial. EDIT: I maybe should have visited https://mubi.com/ https://mubi.com/ before commenting - clips from The Fall is the very first thing they show.
jdietrich 2y ago
True to the article's point, The Criterion Channel is only available in the US and Canada. Mubi and BFI Player offer a good selection of independent films at a fair price in my country, but that's part of the problem - there's an annoyingly complex matrix of services and regional restrictions. Rarely does anyone have to ask "where can I listen to that album?", because essentially all of the music streaming services have the rights to essentially all music. "Where can I watch that film?" is still a very real problem.
tortila 2y ago
Last time I checked Criterion was only available in the US because of publishing rights. It could be easily bypassed by using VPN (location is actually only checked at account registration), but I’m wondering: is it really different from pirating if you’re breaking the rules anyway? Here in Europe MUBI[0] is an alternative to Criterion. I’ve tried it during lockdown but the streaming quality was seriously lacking, and their library was really small. I’m curious if they improved in those areas [0]: https://mubi.com/en/ https://mubi.com/en/
- squidsoup 2y ago
  The concept behind MUBI is that they provide a small set of curated films which change frequently - sort of like a little independent movie theatre. Criterion is possibly a better offering if you want a large catalogue.
  - dtagames 2y ago
    Criterion also rotates through human-curated collections. They do not offer a full library archivally, which was initially a disappointment when I subscribed. It turns out the curated content is great, changes all the time, and really has movies that are worth watching and I don't already know about -- along with lots of favorites.
JoblessWonder 2y ago
There are many hurdles but one of the biggest I see is that there isn't a common/market leading way for independent films to self-publish their films to an independent streaming service. Something like Steam but for films. I'm sure YouTube, Vimeo, and others may offer the ability to do this... but none of them are winning that market or advertising themselves to potential viewers. And it isn't cost effective for a streamer to go after independent films that are very niche.
nasmorn 2y ago
I would even buy it out right but the rare movies I am interested in almost never have any distribution. Which is strange since that surely can’t be the most lucrative way to monetize it
pacifika 2y ago
Perhaps It’s not the cost per se but the convenience that made it not worth it.
soulofmischief 2y ago
That isn't enough. A big motivator for these kinds of people is preservation, and a subscription service doesn't solve that problem. Licenses and agreements end, many culturally significant works are completely unavailable today except for pirating. This goes for music, film and video games. Until we live in a world where the conglomerates taking their huge slice of the revenue from artists and creatives are also stewards of culture, acting in the best interest of culture itself, I couldn't care less about their bottom dollar.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> What ended piracy for common films was not DRM or videocassette seizures but the offer of cheap tapes and eventually cheap streaming that made it simply "not worth it" to pirate. Piracy has all but ended for movies. The issue with streaming is that there are movie streaming apps (for TVs, browsers, etc.) that basically offer the Netflix interface. I know of people with hundreds of TB of movies and series: catalog in the five digits (so more than 10 000 movies and series). In Europe there's also the totally rampant "IPTV" craze: where even retired boomers (not necessarily the most tech savvy audience) buy/rent an illegal little box with all of Disney+Netflix+HBO etc. plus also all the regular TV channels (of the entire world). I don't know in which world movies and series piracy disappeared but it's certainly not in the world in which I live in (FWIW I pay Netflix). I actually don't know if there's ever been an era with more movie piracy than nowadays!?
cameldrv 2y ago
This used to be true with the original Netflix where they mailed you DVDs. They really had almost everything you could think of, you just had to wait a day or two to get it. I watched so many obscure movies, it was fantastic!

longtimelistnr 2y ago

I also am drawn to piracy just so i can get a high enough bitrate to look good on a modern display!

romwell 2y ago
>I also am drawn to piracy just so i can get a high enough bitrate to look good on a modern display! Then there's languages and subtitles, and publishers still don't get that shit right. FFS, I can't watch a Ukrainian movie in Ukrainian outside Ukraine, because the publisher only released the English version on US streaming services. And if I want to watch a film with a soundtrack in one language (the original, perhaps) and subtitles in another (out of the ones I speak that it better translates to), sayonara, we're hitting the torrents. Oh, and go figure, sometimes you just don't have a reliable Internet connection where you want to watch a movie. Unbelievably, but it does happen if you go outside the house.
- WorkerBee28474 2y ago
  > FFS, I can't watch a Ukrainian movie in Ukrainian outside Ukraine, because the publisher only released the English version on US streaming services. I suspect there's a cost associated with licensing the Ukrainian version that will not be recouped in markets outside Ukraine.
  - romwell 2y ago
    >I suspect there's a cost associated with licensing the Ukrainian version that will not be recouped in markets outside Ukraine. About a third of Ukrainians are currently outside Ukraine due to war. Even setting that aside, [citation needed] that providing additional soundtracks comes with an additional cost to the streaming service, and if so, that this additional cost is upfront (and not per stream). If the publishers are so idiotic as to kill Ukrainian language distribution outside Ukraine with their fees, that just shows that piracy is necessary. Knowing people in Ukraine, it's less likely to be stupid greed than plain old stupidity (like Daenerys, the officials and executives in Ukraine kind of forgot that Ukrainians outside Ukraine exist). This is a discussion for another time, though.

underseacables 2y ago

My cubicle mate pirates everything, even if it's on a streaming site. Books, movies, music, comics, everything. He doesn't seem to care.

bramhaag 2y ago
Is it a matter of not caring, or is it simply the easier and better solution? Even if something is available on a streaming service, you have to deal with low bitrates, missing subtitles and audio tracks, wrong editions, and even ads.
- lancesells 2y ago
  I mean it's clearly not caring about the author of the works. With a Disney movie you're not making a difference in the creators pockets, but an author of a book or a comic do feel the effects of pirating.
nunez 2y ago
Honestly I get it. When you want content _in it's original format_ and want to guarantee that you'll be able to enjoy it in the future, you can't rely on streaming services. (So many albums from 20+ years ago are only available as remasters on streaming services, and many eBooks these days are DRMed out the wazoo, as I recently learned from setting up Calibre. Speaking of Calibre, Amazon is, soon, going to shut off downloading books. This means that it will be next to impossible to get books THAT YOU PAID FOR off of the platform unless you have a physical Kindle. This does not include Kindle Unlimited books, which, at this time, are still un-decryptable.)

squidsoup 2y ago

If you are looking through the web's back alleys to find obscure films, just be aware that sometimes you can buy them directly from the filmmaker. I discovered this while looking for a copy of Sleep Has Her House by Scott Barley (https://scottbarley.com/sleep-has-her-house https://scottbarley.com/sleep-has-her-house). Also, if you have even a passing interest in cinema, subscribing to Criterion is worth every penny, it is an absolute joy.

righthand 2y ago

Maybe 40% of the time I pirate, you can’t see anything original or cult otherwise. The other time I do try to find it at the library. If I can find it on a service I torrent the 4K version anyways because streaming quality is varied trash. If streaming didn’t offer such generalized garbage for everyone then it wouldn’t be this way. If consumers just made a leap for physical copies again it also wouldn’t be this way. It’s the drive to consume once and move on that causes this, but what if I never consume it in the appropriate time frame, then I’m just out of the loop as it goes in the vault because services lose money otherwise.

squidsoup 2y ago
> If streaming didn’t offer such generalized garbage for everyone then it wouldn’t be this way. Mubi and Criterion are great.
- righthand 2y ago
  I am enjoying the stuff on Tubi too, lots of great anime, even if it is teaching me to hit the mute button and zone on my phone.
- rodgerd 2y ago
  Also Kanopy if your local library is a subscriber. Basically anything you might see at a film festival, that could be considered "art house", and a remarkably long tail that goes back to pre-Hayes Code Hollywood (for example).
sgt 2y ago
Agreed, but even if I wanted to see something relatively mainstream like Last of the Mohicans (great movie with Daniel Day Lewis), I'd still go to a certain pirate site to find it. It may be on some of the streaming sites, but which one? Will it be on Apple? I don't mind paying, but where will it be, will it be on Amazon? Oh forget about Netflix as they don't seem to have anything more than a few years old, unless it's some series they are promoting like Seinfeld. Also, on a certain pirate site of note, I can also look for the best quality one like a Blu-Ray HD rip if it exists, that'll be something like 20GB - but that's fine!

JohnFen 2y ago

It makes total sense. A similar thing is happening with music. So much music (and movies) that is important to me is becoming unavailable that I've been resorting to buying used CDs and DVDs (which are getting increasingly expensive as others do the same) while I still can so they don't become unavailable to me entirely.

karaterobot 2y ago

I have had people pirate things I created, and even though it was hypocritical of me, I got frustrated because it cost me so much time and money to make. It felt like people just pirate everything without consideration for whether it is actually expensive to buy, or hard to obtain, or if it was made by a giant, faceless corporation, or me and my friend Charlie after work and on weekends. There is a pipeline that just puts everything out there, no introspection, no questions asked. It's not conceivable to me that we'd ever run into a situation where a pirate group would say "it'd be wrong of us to rip this and distribute it." It just wouldn't ever happen. I said it was hypocritical, because I pirate a lot of stuff myself. I think it's great, it lets me be exposed to so much more than I would otherwise. So, I'm not complaining. But, I'm also not rushing out to spend another year making something small and personal just to have it show up on torrent sites a couple days later. Not sure what to do about that. Ultimately, I guess it comes down to people's choices, but people don't think too hard about the ethics of this stuff—I know I don't, 99% of the time.

JohnFen 2y ago
> It felt like people just pirate everything Yes, there is a group of people for whom pirating stuff is an actual hobby. They still exist today -- I know a couple of them. And I'm glad that I do. I know that if I can't find something I really want, there's a very good chance that one of them has it.
- Balgair 2y ago
  https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ Also, though I'm having trouble finding the source, I do remember Orwell publishing a preface to Animal Farm (?), but only in illegal bootleg copies behind the Iron Curtain. I remember him saying something like 'I'd only ever give a preface to those copies, because I knew those were the people that would give a damn to reading it'. Now, I know there is a preface that Orwell published in the West to Animal Farm, but I just can't shake that it was Animal Farm that he did this illegal publishing for. If anyone know a bit better what I'm talking about or remembers the story better, please let me know here.
2y ago

angst_ridden 2y ago

I live in the US half the year, and elsewhere for the other half. Movie rights go in and out of availability even when staying in one place, but when you cross borders, you find your access changing pretty frequently. So for movies, I have a VPN which works much of the time. There are still plenty of good/interesting films whose rights issues prevent streaming. There is also a significant collection of films that are just not commercially successful, and which may never be digitized commercially. I go for physical media for those when possible. With music, a fair amount of what I listen to isn't available over streaming services. I buy physical media when I can and digitize it to keep with me. I haven't pirated in a long, long time. I remember having to hunt down The Star Wars Holiday Special for a friend back in the day. It ended up being easier to buy a home-made dvd from a shady place. I'm sure there's more out there now, and it's easier now, but search time is at a premium.

amelius 2y ago

As long as BigCorps don't respect the rights related to my personal data, then why should I respect the rights of their data?

Flatcircle 2y ago

I've been wanting to watch the William Friedkin movie To Live And Die in LA starring Willem Defoe and William Peterson from 1985 but it hasn't been on any steamers for rent or to buy. It's so frustrating that such big mainstream movies can be unavailable.

NoboruWataya 2y ago

Convenience and accessibility is a huge factor, moreso than price IMO. When you're paying a company for access for their streaming service and you still can't find the particular show you want (that they produce) then why not pirate it.

kristianp 2y ago

There is an option for some movies that are not too rare, but are arthouse enough to not get on the regular streaming services, called Movie On Demand (MOD), where movies are provided on DVD-R. I'm struggling to google a direct service, but I recently got a dvd for an obscure movie from the 80s from a reseller on ebay.

chocolateteeth 2y ago

Movie piracy (and other domains as well) is one of those, in my opinion, exceptions to the idea that “Well, if everybody pirated (or xyz’d) then where would we be?” Or something similar. Ignoring the law for a moment, which I liken to pedestrian traffic lights in nyc, but with a wider range of consequences, the reason I usually find pirating material unobjectionable is everybody doesn’t do it (in general) and those who are of the sort to do it ought to do it, as there is “room” for their behavior. Well what about creators? It’s an important question, but I answer that the circumstances of the consumer along with that of the creator and their product should be evaluated on a case by case basis as regards deciding whether or not to pirate. Also it often has happened to me that piracy of some product was not the final word. That is there are a good deal of things that I went out and bought afterward anyway. Various reasons having been cause.

arthousebuff 2y ago

Highly reccommend Mubi. Unfortunately, their unique business model (only have 30 films available to stream at any one time) means they lack an archival aspect, but the films they do carry are highly curated and always worth the time.