4 ms·

> "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" I never buy into this. If copyright law doesn't exist, pirate sites will eventually always provide bette

> "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" I never buy into this. If copyright law doesn't exist, pirate sites will eventually always provide better service than the official channels. One example is scanlation manga. Chinese scanlation sites have reached the theoretical ceiling of service: just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provide significant better service than that.

Retr0id 6mo ago
But copyright law does exist?
- themafia 6mo ago
  The pirates still exist. The legitimate users are punished. Might as well abandon the law.
  - Retr0id 6mo ago
    DRM is effective(ish) because of both technical and legal mechanisms. Without the legal mechanisms they'd ramp up the technical ones, which might end up even worse for legitimate users.
    - themafia 6mo ago
      DRM is completely ineffective. It simply increases the cost of "piracy," as well as legitimate actions like home backup, to about $200 USD. The worse they make it for legitimate users the more likely they are to just buy the necessary device and move on. The technical battle is not some limitless option that IP owners get to use, it eventually impinges on their core interests.
      - nradov 6mo ago
        DRM is somewhat effective. I'm lazy enough about entertainment that I don't even bother with piracy. If content providers don't want to make it cheap and easy for me to watch then fuck 'em, I'll watch something else. I have a zillion other options.
        themafia 6mo ago
        The article is about sports leagues. I assume you're not as fungible with your choices there? Or at least, you'd agree, it isn't for the majority of the actual audience in question. See old school satellite piracy for a clear example of where this is headed.
        BlueRock-Jake 6mo ago
        Someone mentioned this previously in thread about how piracy (at least for sporting events) are a price issue. If they didn't charge an arm and a leg to watch (thinking of the NBA/NFL tv packages) they wouldn't have a problem.
hirako2000 6mo ago
Except that it isn't true. Candycrush (CrunchyRoll of course) had gained the love of the anime crowd. Until they started to "optimise" bandwidth. It wasn't a pricing error as subscription price didn't increase. They claim the degradation was perceptible. Except that it was. It was many years ago, and since then candycrush lost subscribers. It won't because illegal streaming platforms got better, simply because the illegal platform provided the choice to go all the way to lossless quality. For football, imo that's a pricing issue as well as a distribution issue. Basically I need to subscribe to a lock in plan even if I just desire to watch, say, the quarter to finals. Or simply the champions league.
- falcor84 6mo ago
  Candycrush? I suppose you mean Crunchyroll, right?
  - hirako2000 6mo ago
    That's right. Pervasive games got into my head. As the other commenter, I also confirm the sub got worse.
- roer 6mo ago
  I assume you meant Crunchyroll. They've gotten even worse recently by moving away from .ass subtitles which removes a ton of typesetting options
embedding-shape 6mo ago
> just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provide significant better service than that. Why not? Provide same experience but for logged in users with extra benefits that they feel like it's worth paying for, behind-the-scenes content, WIP, whatever. There is always a way to stand out and provide a better experience, the very least because all people in the world don't want the same thing, and you can always find somewhat of a niche somehow.
roer 6mo ago
It doesn't have to be significantly better. If the service is stable, cheap and hassle-free, people will pay for it.
- plantain 6mo ago
  For many users it's just not true. I run a subscription weather forecast service for pilots, with a free trial period. A significant number of users reset their device every week to avoid paying 10 euros a month. These are aircraft owners.
  - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
    Just because you own an aircraft, doesn't mean you have a budget to pay random EUR 10/month subscriptions. People save money to buy expensive stuff. Or take out loans. One cannot assume that everyone doesn't care about spending < X dollars, where X is = 1% of the most expensive asset they own (see e.g. $3000 gaming PC vs. $30 software, elsewhere in the thread).
    - fragmede 6mo ago
      Everyone's poorer than you think, and sometimes the richest seeming people are under a mountain of debt. > own an aircraft, doesn't mean you have a budget to pay random EUR 10/month subscriptions. Still, if you can't afford a €10/mo subscription necessary to operate the airplane safely, when hanger fees are well in excess of that, then perhaps you can't actually afford to own an airplane? Airplanes aren't cheap to own, nevermind the aircraft itself. Put it another way. I like driving BMWs, but, y'know what, I hate having to pay insurance, and I can't afford to pay that after the monthly BMW lease payment, so I just don't pay it, cause fuck that noise. I don't think most people's response to someone saying that would be "eh, sounds fine, BMWs are expensive". "So don't drive a BMW." seems like more likely reaction to me.
      - fluoridation 6mo ago
        The reason people will tell you that is because paying for car insurance is rarely something you can just opt not to do, at least not without consequences. The consequence for not paying for a $10/month service is having to perform a minimally inconvenient chore once a week.
fsniper 6mo ago
I read this as you are in fact in agreement with the statement. If that's the ceiling, provide the same level of service and gain more of the market. In which you have all the means to be faster, non-intrusive, and less faulty so that you can be always better.
alt227 6mo ago
When Spotify came along, music piracy all but vanished. It has already been proven in other media, it needs to happen with sports and streaming in general, then media piracy will be a thing of the past.
- nradov 6mo ago
  Perhaps, but I don't think the sports leagues and other video content providers will ever agree to letting their IP be devalued that way. They see what happened to musicians and record labels with Spotify as a cautionary tale, not a model to emulate. Otoh, maybe Netflix and other streaming video services will start their own sports leagues in order to vertically integrate and own everything end-to-end just like what they did with TV and movie production. It would be tough and expensive but maybe not impossible?
  - alt227 6mo ago
    Thats an interesting thought. Netflix are already starting get big sporting events like boxing matches, which are usually pay per view on other networks but included with subscription fee on Netflix. This might be crereping in the direction you are suggesting? https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/82699237 https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/82699237
- raincole 6mo ago
  Music is the single field where copyright laws are enforced aggressively. Plus signers and bands earn pennis from Spotify. Practically Spotify did vanished music privacy - by proving how bad a business it is to sell music and pushing the whole industry to personal branding (tours+ad revenue).
  - alt227 6mo ago
    Yeah I suppose the same alternative is not really possible for video based media. I sometimes see producers touring their independant films along with a Q&A session, but I doubt that it is ever going to become popular to go and pay a venue to sit and watch your favourite show every week!
nemomarx 6mo ago
Can they try providing equal service to that? Ie, localized into English at the same time as the fans group, fast loading site, etc. In my experience they're usually noticeably behind in those areas even with a subscription active.
nodja 6mo ago
Official sites make things worse on purpose after getting any sort of traction because they can't stop chasing profits. I don't watch sports, but my father watches soccer. He really only cares about 1 team and the national games from our home country. He was spending over $100/month to be able to watch the games, and they werent even in his native language. Now he pays $80/year for a pirate IPTV service and not only can he watch the games anywhere he wants, he also gets native language commentary for the games, national tv channels like news, etc. When pirates can charge you money and offer a superior service, it absolutely is a service problem. You can claim that the realities of licensing and whatnot don't allow official channels to provide the best service they can, but that's not true in this case. When the same provider is splitting game broadcast from one team into different packages you know they're just trying to extract the most amount of money possible. IDK the deal with scanlator sites nowadays, but I assume the official sites can provide more timely translations for manga since they can access the source material before anyone has seen it. I know most popular manga gets translated within hours of release, but if you're following some more niche stuff it can be several days. I also know a lot of scanlators have patreon pages so it's not like the demand from paying customers for translated media isn't there.
0x457 6mo ago
I mean you just proved that it's service problem.
Klaster_1 6mo ago
I dunno, with advent of Mangaplus I basically stopped reading scanlations, except for a few cases that are not officially available online. Paired with Mihon, the experience is super smooth, all for 2 bucks per month - a very reasonable price. Compare that to Crunchyroll, which has some exclusives I'd like to read, but doesn't offer a good service and costs more - I choose to read something else and maybe download the rips some years later from Madokami.

Retr0id 6mo ago

But copyright law does exist?

themafia 6mo ago
The pirates still exist. The legitimate users are punished. Might as well abandon the law.
- Retr0id 6mo ago
  DRM is effective(ish) because of both technical and legal mechanisms. Without the legal mechanisms they'd ramp up the technical ones, which might end up even worse for legitimate users.
  - themafia 6mo ago
    DRM is completely ineffective. It simply increases the cost of "piracy," as well as legitimate actions like home backup, to about $200 USD. The worse they make it for legitimate users the more likely they are to just buy the necessary device and move on. The technical battle is not some limitless option that IP owners get to use, it eventually impinges on their core interests.
    - nradov 6mo ago
      DRM is somewhat effective. I'm lazy enough about entertainment that I don't even bother with piracy. If content providers don't want to make it cheap and easy for me to watch then fuck 'em, I'll watch something else. I have a zillion other options.
      - themafia 6mo ago
        The article is about sports leagues. I assume you're not as fungible with your choices there? Or at least, you'd agree, it isn't for the majority of the actual audience in question. See old school satellite piracy for a clear example of where this is headed.
      - BlueRock-Jake 6mo ago
        Someone mentioned this previously in thread about how piracy (at least for sporting events) are a price issue. If they didn't charge an arm and a leg to watch (thinking of the NBA/NFL tv packages) they wouldn't have a problem.

hirako2000 6mo ago

Except that it isn't true. Candycrush (CrunchyRoll of course) had gained the love of the anime crowd. Until they started to "optimise" bandwidth. It wasn't a pricing error as subscription price didn't increase. They claim the degradation was perceptible. Except that it was. It was many years ago, and since then candycrush lost subscribers. It won't because illegal streaming platforms got better, simply because the illegal platform provided the choice to go all the way to lossless quality. For football, imo that's a pricing issue as well as a distribution issue. Basically I need to subscribe to a lock in plan even if I just desire to watch, say, the quarter to finals. Or simply the champions league.

falcor84 6mo ago
Candycrush? I suppose you mean Crunchyroll, right?
- hirako2000 6mo ago
  That's right. Pervasive games got into my head. As the other commenter, I also confirm the sub got worse.
roer 6mo ago
I assume you meant Crunchyroll. They've gotten even worse recently by moving away from .ass subtitles which removes a ton of typesetting options

embedding-shape 6mo ago

> just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provide significant better service than that. Why not? Provide same experience but for logged in users with extra benefits that they feel like it's worth paying for, behind-the-scenes content, WIP, whatever. There is always a way to stand out and provide a better experience, the very least because all people in the world don't want the same thing, and you can always find somewhat of a niche somehow.

roer 6mo ago

It doesn't have to be significantly better. If the service is stable, cheap and hassle-free, people will pay for it.

plantain 6mo ago
For many users it's just not true. I run a subscription weather forecast service for pilots, with a free trial period. A significant number of users reset their device every week to avoid paying 10 euros a month. These are aircraft owners.
- TeMPOraL 6mo ago
  Just because you own an aircraft, doesn't mean you have a budget to pay random EUR 10/month subscriptions. People save money to buy expensive stuff. Or take out loans. One cannot assume that everyone doesn't care about spending < X dollars, where X is = 1% of the most expensive asset they own (see e.g. $3000 gaming PC vs. $30 software, elsewhere in the thread).
  - fragmede 6mo ago
    Everyone's poorer than you think, and sometimes the richest seeming people are under a mountain of debt. > own an aircraft, doesn't mean you have a budget to pay random EUR 10/month subscriptions. Still, if you can't afford a €10/mo subscription necessary to operate the airplane safely, when hanger fees are well in excess of that, then perhaps you can't actually afford to own an airplane? Airplanes aren't cheap to own, nevermind the aircraft itself. Put it another way. I like driving BMWs, but, y'know what, I hate having to pay insurance, and I can't afford to pay that after the monthly BMW lease payment, so I just don't pay it, cause fuck that noise. I don't think most people's response to someone saying that would be "eh, sounds fine, BMWs are expensive". "So don't drive a BMW." seems like more likely reaction to me.
    - fluoridation 6mo ago
      The reason people will tell you that is because paying for car insurance is rarely something you can just opt not to do, at least not without consequences. The consequence for not paying for a $10/month service is having to perform a minimally inconvenient chore once a week.

fsniper 6mo ago

I read this as you are in fact in agreement with the statement. If that's the ceiling, provide the same level of service and gain more of the market. In which you have all the means to be faster, non-intrusive, and less faulty so that you can be always better.

alt227 6mo ago

When Spotify came along, music piracy all but vanished. It has already been proven in other media, it needs to happen with sports and streaming in general, then media piracy will be a thing of the past.

nradov 6mo ago
Perhaps, but I don't think the sports leagues and other video content providers will ever agree to letting their IP be devalued that way. They see what happened to musicians and record labels with Spotify as a cautionary tale, not a model to emulate. Otoh, maybe Netflix and other streaming video services will start their own sports leagues in order to vertically integrate and own everything end-to-end just like what they did with TV and movie production. It would be tough and expensive but maybe not impossible?
- alt227 6mo ago
  Thats an interesting thought. Netflix are already starting get big sporting events like boxing matches, which are usually pay per view on other networks but included with subscription fee on Netflix. This might be crereping in the direction you are suggesting? https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/82699237 https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/82699237
raincole 6mo ago
Music is the single field where copyright laws are enforced aggressively. Plus signers and bands earn pennis from Spotify. Practically Spotify did vanished music privacy - by proving how bad a business it is to sell music and pushing the whole industry to personal branding (tours+ad revenue).
- alt227 6mo ago
  Yeah I suppose the same alternative is not really possible for video based media. I sometimes see producers touring their independant films along with a Q&A session, but I doubt that it is ever going to become popular to go and pay a venue to sit and watch your favourite show every week!

nemomarx 6mo ago

Can they try providing equal service to that? Ie, localized into English at the same time as the fans group, fast loading site, etc. In my experience they're usually noticeably behind in those areas even with a subscription active.

nodja 6mo ago

Official sites make things worse on purpose after getting any sort of traction because they can't stop chasing profits. I don't watch sports, but my father watches soccer. He really only cares about 1 team and the national games from our home country. He was spending over $100/month to be able to watch the games, and they werent even in his native language. Now he pays $80/year for a pirate IPTV service and not only can he watch the games anywhere he wants, he also gets native language commentary for the games, national tv channels like news, etc. When pirates can charge you money and offer a superior service, it absolutely is a service problem. You can claim that the realities of licensing and whatnot don't allow official channels to provide the best service they can, but that's not true in this case. When the same provider is splitting game broadcast from one team into different packages you know they're just trying to extract the most amount of money possible. IDK the deal with scanlator sites nowadays, but I assume the official sites can provide more timely translations for manga since they can access the source material before anyone has seen it. I know most popular manga gets translated within hours of release, but if you're following some more niche stuff it can be several days. I also know a lot of scanlators have patreon pages so it's not like the demand from paying customers for translated media isn't there.

0x457 6mo ago

I mean you just proved that it's service problem.

Klaster_1 6mo ago

I dunno, with advent of Mangaplus I basically stopped reading scanlations, except for a few cases that are not officially available online. Paired with Mihon, the experience is super smooth, all for 2 bucks per month - a very reasonable price. Compare that to Crunchyroll, which has some exclusives I'd like to read, but doesn't offer a good service and costs more - I choose to read something else and maybe download the rips some years later from Madokami.