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Normies don't pirate using BitTorrent, especially for live-events streaming (which BitTorrent doesn't support): they'll find some dodgy website offering a proxy

Normies don't pirate using BitTorrent, especially for live-events streaming (which BitTorrent doesn't support): they'll find some dodgy website offering a proxy'd (and downsampled) video stream for free (with ads overlayed) or for a modest one-time fee via PayPal or a cryptocoin, especially when some big event has an extortionate pay-per-view fee. Music piracy was killed-off by Spotify. For movies/TV, they'll turn to publicly-shared Plex libraries - I only found out about this a few weeks ago: so in 2025, with more-and-more people having high-upload-bandwidth Internet connections it turns out that now you don't need a distributed DHT-based swarm of chunks of files with hundreds of seeders: all you need is a couple generous individuals running an open Plex box that's served-up behind a cheap offshore VPN provider, using the official Plex App from the Samsung TV app-store. ...I've no idea how long that's going to last: running behind a VPN means the MPAA (et al.) can't do much against those sharing their collections publicly like they did with BitTorrent (c.f. PeerGuardian), and Plex has somehow survived this-far given it does have legitimate uses, and the apps don't violate any app-store policy I'm aware-of, so I'm concerned the MPAA is going to lobby for some laws outright prohibiting apps/software/technology that facilitates piracy for nontechnical users somehow. (Or they could follow GabeN's advice and start offering a superior service and convenience to the user with a cooperative consolidation of all rightsholders under a single branded tent, but we all know that's not going to happen)

pmontra 2y ago
> Music piracy was killed-off by Spotify I've seen many places playing music from a YouTube playlist, with ads included. And anybody can download the audio stream from YouTube with a minimal software setup. There used to be browser addons that added a Save As button to YouTube pages. I'm not using them, maybe Google banned all of them from its store but there are many ways to do it.
- n144q 2y ago
  > And anybody can download the audio stream from YouTube with a minimal software setup. That's the issue. Almost nobody downloads music anymore, however easy it is. Because streaming apps like Spotify make the experience so much better. You are in the middle of the song and wants to cast to your living room speakers? Two clicks. You want to transfer that from your phone to your computer? Just a few clicks. Want to quickly jump back into an album or get recommendations of similar albums? It's all there on the home page. It's hard to beat this experience. The only exception I know is people who rip/pirate FLAC files because they want the best quality possible and don't care about anything else. That's like <0.01% of the users these days.
- gosub100 2y ago
  By "places" do you mean physical establishments like bars and restaurants?
  - pmontra 2y ago
    Yes. What's the correct English word for that?
    - gosub100 2y ago
      You used the word correctly, but I asked because those businesses were probably breaking copyright law (at least in the US). They require very specific broadcast licenses to play music in a business. Even though it was subsidized by ads from Google, those agreements are intended to handle personal use.

pmontra 2y ago

> Music piracy was killed-off by Spotify I've seen many places playing music from a YouTube playlist, with ads included. And anybody can download the audio stream from YouTube with a minimal software setup. There used to be browser addons that added a Save As button to YouTube pages. I'm not using them, maybe Google banned all of them from its store but there are many ways to do it.

n144q 2y ago
> And anybody can download the audio stream from YouTube with a minimal software setup. That's the issue. Almost nobody downloads music anymore, however easy it is. Because streaming apps like Spotify make the experience so much better. You are in the middle of the song and wants to cast to your living room speakers? Two clicks. You want to transfer that from your phone to your computer? Just a few clicks. Want to quickly jump back into an album or get recommendations of similar albums? It's all there on the home page. It's hard to beat this experience. The only exception I know is people who rip/pirate FLAC files because they want the best quality possible and don't care about anything else. That's like <0.01% of the users these days.
gosub100 2y ago
By "places" do you mean physical establishments like bars and restaurants?
- pmontra 2y ago
  Yes. What's the correct English word for that?
  - gosub100 2y ago
    You used the word correctly, but I asked because those businesses were probably breaking copyright law (at least in the US). They require very specific broadcast licenses to play music in a business. Even though it was subsidized by ads from Google, those agreements are intended to handle personal use.