4 ms·

Piracy is a service problem. Copyright monopolists always defeat themselves with their obnoxious greed. Things were easy enough when Netflix had a complete cat

Piracy is a service problem. Copyright monopolists always defeat themselves with their obnoxious greed. Things were easy enough when Netflix had a complete catalog, now every studio wants to roll their own shitty streaming services in order to cut Netflix out. Result is a fragmented mess where you want to watch a great film but you have no idea where the hell it even is, and even if you find it you discover it doesn't work because your computer isn't locked down to their tastes, and even if you buy a TV appliance they stream you some shitty horribly compressied "high definition" video with artifacts in pure black frames, all on their homegrown laggy borderline unusable video players with zero features. Meanwhile the pirates offer Blu-Ray remuxes with commentary tracks, subtitles for every language, DRM free files that just work on your video player of choice. It's the sort of thing that makes me feel like a total moron for giving money to these corporations.

bitwize 3mo ago
Apple TV has a search function that allows you to find a film or series irrespectice of whatever service it's on, and launch the appropriate app to play it.
- Aurornis 3mo ago
  Some times I read these mental gymnastics comments about piracy being easier and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like an Apple TV. I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button. Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.
  - vermilingua 3mo ago
    Sometimes I read these mental gymnastics comments about being leashed to half a dozen providers for “convenience” and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like a NAS. I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture. Inventing strawmans about how difficult it is to click one button in Jellyseer and have a max-quality, buffering free copy of what you want to watch in perpetuity is an order of magnitude more work than renting a poor-quality subset of the media that publishers consider it profitable to provide.
    - Aurornis 3mo ago
      > I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture. My local farmers and grocery stores contribute ~nothing to actual evolution of culture. I still think they deserve to get paid for what they do. I don’t think this is as smart of a point as you thought it was. Regardless, the content can’t both be worthless and worth pirating at the same time. This boils down to “I want free stuff but I want to feel morally superior about it”
      - defrost 3mo ago
        > the content can’t both be worthless and worth pirating at the same time. More commonly, at least in Australia which at various times has had record level piracy, content can be worth _something_ and also not worth "that much" and hence worth pirating. This has been seen with games - once charged in Australia significantly more than in Europe or the US. Game piracy was rife and didn't really drop in volume until Australian game prices fell more in line with elsewhere. With the coming of Netflix TV and movie piracy dropped a lot - as prices rose and sheer number of providers rose making it impossible to see whatever caught your eye all on the one source subscription, piracy volume in AU increased again. This boils down to "We'll pay for stuff .. but only so far".
        Aurornis 3mo ago
        You’re moving the goalposts from “contributing nothing” to “actually it’s valuable but I don’t want to pay that much but I also don’t want to not watch it” This is still a silly argument. If the price of something is higher than you want to pay, that doesn’t justify taking it. This has come all the way back to supporting what I said above: The only service problem is that people don’t like the part where it charges their credit card. Piracy lets them skip that part.
        defrost 3mo ago
        > You’re moving the goalposts Nope. I'm a first time commentator in this subthread I'm stating a position held in one part of the world. Maybe it'd require moving your "goalposts" to get there .. but I'm not moving anything, just pointing out exactly how the ground has lain here for decades.
  - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
    > I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button. You think wrong. My Steam account has 300+ games on it. I pay for several streaming services. I have a physical media collection that even includes a copy of windows vista, to my eternal regret. > Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work. And yet that's what you have to do if you don't want to pay to get total garbage in return for your money. The pirates compete with each other to release the best encodes, to the point they mix multiple Blu-Rays together into an ultimate release because some region somehow received a better version of some scene or whatever. Normal files you get to play using mpv. Netflix ships horribly compressed nonsense where color gradients are so full of artifacts it hurts my eyes. Highly dynamic segments are painful to watch. Amazingly enough it's still the least bad option, the other services have even worse quality and a borderline unusable video player software to boot. Service isn't just about ease, it's also about quality. If you want quality, piracy isn't just easier, it's almost always the best option, if not the only option. It's sad that the copyright industry can't seem to match what's essentially a bunch of amateurs but what can you do?
    - Aurornis 3mo ago
      If you don’t mind paying for things and your only concern is the quality, then presumably you pay for the source material and then also download the best quality pirated version you can find, right? That would satisfy both of your claims: That you don’t mind paying for things and you only do piracy to seek out the highest quality. If you selectively choose not to pay for things where you can get away with it (e.g. not Steam games) then this claim doesn’t hold the slightest amount of water.
      - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
        > presumably you pay for the source material I do. Multiple times, even.
        Aurornis 3mo ago
  - etdznots 3mo ago
    you bought a smart tv maybe you got a dumb tv and then plugged in a dongle? Or maybe you bought a smart tv and also purchased another home media device thingy and you gotta remember to switch to w the apple tv for this thingy. you signed in to it you created dozens ? Hundreds? Of accounts to watch all the content you want, try to figure out what plan you need to watch the content? Will you subscribe for a bit and cancel later ah ok siri set a reminder to cancel the subscriotion ill take care of that. Wait oops i went on vacation and netflix is mad that im. Not watching from home do i need a different plan? How do these amazon prime video channel subscriptions work how many do i have? All that instead of a jellyfin server and a single search? It’s all gymnastics just different gymnastics
  - nradov 3mo ago
    I would be happy to pay to buy or rent a single show or movie. The problem is that a lot of that content is only available with a monthly subscription. Screw that, those monthly bills eat you alive. I hear that the For All Mankind series is pretty good but there's no way I'm signing up for Apple TV just to watch that. So I'll skip it and watch something else.
    - bitwize 3mo ago
      And that's the appropriate response to have. If you don't want to pay according to the copyright owner's terms, then you don't watch the show. Not liking the copyright owner's terms for watching the show does not give you the right to steal it. Yes, I know copyright infringement is not stealing per the technical legal definition. But splitting those hairs is like splitting hairs between pedophiles and ephebophiles: anyone doing it is very likely just telling on themselves as the exact sort of criminal under discussion.
      - inigyou 3mo ago
        Where do rights come from?
  - matkoniecz 3mo ago
    > Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work. Not really, decent chunk of my MP3 collection is abandoned media not sold literally anywhere at all. Or was never published in public in the first place. > if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like an Apple TV no, as I am not interested in Apple's walled garden, and so far I have not used any of their devices or products (OK, I used Mac for about one hour helping neighbor to fix their printer, and I tested Mac-specific bug on website for hour or two) > I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button. Not in my case, I regularly try to buy MP3 that are in my collection already but I have not paid for them. It costs me mostly in time to find them and create accounts and pay for them and deal with various hoops. Far more than it costs me in actual payments.
  - mopsi 3mo ago
    > Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work. It's not 2003 anymore. If "navigating torrent sites" is your idea of piracy, then you should certainly check out the so-called arr-stack of software that searches online sources for wishlisted items, downloads them, equips with metadata and subtitles, and presents for viewing or listening without any user input, based on predefined preferences. Apple TV and other commercial offerings are a steaming pile of shit in comparison and I can't imagine people like the CEO of Apple watching stuff off Apple TV and not a proper arr-stack setup. It's like eating McDonald's every for every meal when a chef is readily available. Why would you do this to yourself. With Apple TV, you can't even do something as mundane was fixing translation errors in subtitles before you show a movie to a friend. You're stuck with what some cheap outsourced translation service came up with. It reduces the owner of the library to a passive mouthbreather who has virtually no control over their experience; can't choose which cut of the movie to see; can't replace an ugly poster with a nicer one; can't edit movie description to remove spoilers; and so on and on. In essence, you're watching someone else's library, and that someone has not put much effort into proper curation to present every item from the best possible side.
yndoendo 3mo ago
Issues and topics that are reduced to a single idea are oversimplified to were lost of reality can take hold. Example, say person chooses to never fund Amazon. Amazon owns MGM. The only way that person can watch an MGM movie is through piracy. The only alternative would be to buy second hand content so MGM / Amazon do not get a finical cut. As media corporations become more monopolistic, like Paramount buying Warner Bros, I could see more people pirating so they do not fund David Ellison and people like him.
- perpetuallunch 3mo ago
  [flagged]
- nradov 3mo ago
  So just watch something else. We have more video content available than anyone could possibly watch in a lifetime.
Aurornis 3mo ago
> Piracy is a service problem > Meanwhile the pirates offer Blu-Ray remuxes with commentary tracks, subtitles for every language, DRM free files that just work on your video player of choice. I think the only people who believe that pirating is easier than using the streaming services are people who spend so much time with computers that they round the mental overhead of navigating torrent websites, finding the correct file you want, downloading it with your torrent client behind the VPN they set up, and getting files to a point where they can watch it on TV to zero. When you think that stuff is fun you don’t count it. I am technically capable of doing all of those things. I also have a rotation of online streaming services. Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card. I think this is all just mental gymnastics to try to avoid the elephant in the room, which is that some people don’t want to pay for things and, of those, some get a little fun out of doing all the steps and setup to pirate things.
- bladeacidic 3mo ago
  There's apps for that these days. Not going to names them, but if you're still downloading a torrent file on a computer, you're behind the times. It's as easy as Netflix on an Android TV with a remote these days.
  - perpetuallunch 3mo ago
    Don’t all those apps also expose you to VPN services using your connection as a gateway, or enrol you in a botnet, or exfiltrate your watch history to this weeks popular bad-actor, or expose everything on your local network to the internet?
    - ziiinq 3mo ago
      [dead]
    - kyriakos 3mo ago
      No there are services that provide global cdn access to torrents. Your provider sees https traffic from your closest cdn edge. You don't share back at any point. These things are a couple of steps more to setup than getting a Netflix subscription and work almost an any device.
tokioyoyo 3mo ago
Every time this argument comes up, it doesn’t explain why piracy rates are much lower, despite having a lot of service problems. Piracy is a cultural thing. And I’m saying this as someone who kinda understands the pirate’s position.
- laserlight 3mo ago
  > it doesn’t explain why piracy rates are much lower, despite having a lot of service problems. Can you explain why you think piracy rates must be higher? Piracy isn't “free” after all.
  - tokioyoyo 3mo ago
    Very common for some movie, tv shows or music not be available here. Or also, fairly expensive to buy/rent for some. If it was service issue, this would drive people who want to enjoy the media to piracy. Yet it doesn’t.
    - laserlight 3mo ago
      Piracy has its own costs. It's likely that given the trade-offs, piracy rates don't increase. PS: I have no idea whether piracy rates are up or down.
- fc417fc802 3mo ago
  Isn't the explanation self evident? Piracy requires nonzero technical competency (not much but still), dedicated computing hardware, and a decent chunk of storage. It's a fairly low barrier to entry but it is nonetheless a barrier and your typical person off the street these days doesn't reliably know what files and folders are.
  - tokioyoyo 3mo ago
    I know Japanese people who can easily pull it off, but ideologically very against it.
casey2 3mo ago
The main problem is that media doesn't cost enough. It's all bundled so the true price is hidden. I'd gladly play thousands to watch a movie/series if studios could take that signal and work with it. $15 or whatever is the same as free most of the content is for people who don't care (or care way to much about miscellaneous trivia)

bitwize 3mo ago

Apple TV has a search function that allows you to find a film or series irrespectice of whatever service it's on, and launch the appropriate app to play it.

Aurornis 3mo ago
Some times I read these mental gymnastics comments about piracy being easier and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like an Apple TV. I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button. Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.
- vermilingua 3mo ago
  Sometimes I read these mental gymnastics comments about being leashed to half a dozen providers for “convenience” and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like a NAS. I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture. Inventing strawmans about how difficult it is to click one button in Jellyseer and have a max-quality, buffering free copy of what you want to watch in perpetuity is an order of magnitude more work than renting a poor-quality subset of the media that publishers consider it profitable to provide.
  - Aurornis 3mo ago
    > I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture. My local farmers and grocery stores contribute ~nothing to actual evolution of culture. I still think they deserve to get paid for what they do. I don’t think this is as smart of a point as you thought it was. Regardless, the content can’t both be worthless and worth pirating at the same time. This boils down to “I want free stuff but I want to feel morally superior about it”
    - defrost 3mo ago
      > the content can’t both be worthless and worth pirating at the same time. More commonly, at least in Australia which at various times has had record level piracy, content can be worth _something_ and also not worth "that much" and hence worth pirating. This has been seen with games - once charged in Australia significantly more than in Europe or the US. Game piracy was rife and didn't really drop in volume until Australian game prices fell more in line with elsewhere. With the coming of Netflix TV and movie piracy dropped a lot - as prices rose and sheer number of providers rose making it impossible to see whatever caught your eye all on the one source subscription, piracy volume in AU increased again. This boils down to "We'll pay for stuff .. but only so far".
      - Aurornis 3mo ago
        You’re moving the goalposts from “contributing nothing” to “actually it’s valuable but I don’t want to pay that much but I also don’t want to not watch it” This is still a silly argument. If the price of something is higher than you want to pay, that doesn’t justify taking it. This has come all the way back to supporting what I said above: The only service problem is that people don’t like the part where it charges their credit card. Piracy lets them skip that part.
        defrost 3mo ago
        > You’re moving the goalposts Nope. I'm a first time commentator in this subthread I'm stating a position held in one part of the world. Maybe it'd require moving your "goalposts" to get there .. but I'm not moving anything, just pointing out exactly how the ground has lain here for decades.
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  > I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button. You think wrong. My Steam account has 300+ games on it. I pay for several streaming services. I have a physical media collection that even includes a copy of windows vista, to my eternal regret. > Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work. And yet that's what you have to do if you don't want to pay to get total garbage in return for your money. The pirates compete with each other to release the best encodes, to the point they mix multiple Blu-Rays together into an ultimate release because some region somehow received a better version of some scene or whatever. Normal files you get to play using mpv. Netflix ships horribly compressed nonsense where color gradients are so full of artifacts it hurts my eyes. Highly dynamic segments are painful to watch. Amazingly enough it's still the least bad option, the other services have even worse quality and a borderline unusable video player software to boot. Service isn't just about ease, it's also about quality. If you want quality, piracy isn't just easier, it's almost always the best option, if not the only option. It's sad that the copyright industry can't seem to match what's essentially a bunch of amateurs but what can you do?
  - Aurornis 3mo ago
    If you don’t mind paying for things and your only concern is the quality, then presumably you pay for the source material and then also download the best quality pirated version you can find, right? That would satisfy both of your claims: That you don’t mind paying for things and you only do piracy to seek out the highest quality. If you selectively choose not to pay for things where you can get away with it (e.g. not Steam games) then this claim doesn’t hold the slightest amount of water.
    - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
      > presumably you pay for the source material I do. Multiple times, even.
      - Aurornis 3mo ago
- etdznots 3mo ago
  you bought a smart tv maybe you got a dumb tv and then plugged in a dongle? Or maybe you bought a smart tv and also purchased another home media device thingy and you gotta remember to switch to w the apple tv for this thingy. you signed in to it you created dozens ? Hundreds? Of accounts to watch all the content you want, try to figure out what plan you need to watch the content? Will you subscribe for a bit and cancel later ah ok siri set a reminder to cancel the subscriotion ill take care of that. Wait oops i went on vacation and netflix is mad that im. Not watching from home do i need a different plan? How do these amazon prime video channel subscriptions work how many do i have? All that instead of a jellyfin server and a single search? It’s all gymnastics just different gymnastics
- nradov 3mo ago
  I would be happy to pay to buy or rent a single show or movie. The problem is that a lot of that content is only available with a monthly subscription. Screw that, those monthly bills eat you alive. I hear that the For All Mankind series is pretty good but there's no way I'm signing up for Apple TV just to watch that. So I'll skip it and watch something else.
  - bitwize 3mo ago
    And that's the appropriate response to have. If you don't want to pay according to the copyright owner's terms, then you don't watch the show. Not liking the copyright owner's terms for watching the show does not give you the right to steal it. Yes, I know copyright infringement is not stealing per the technical legal definition. But splitting those hairs is like splitting hairs between pedophiles and ephebophiles: anyone doing it is very likely just telling on themselves as the exact sort of criminal under discussion.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      Where do rights come from?
- matkoniecz 3mo ago
  > Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work. Not really, decent chunk of my MP3 collection is abandoned media not sold literally anywhere at all. Or was never published in public in the first place. > if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like an Apple TV no, as I am not interested in Apple's walled garden, and so far I have not used any of their devices or products (OK, I used Mac for about one hour helping neighbor to fix their printer, and I tested Mac-specific bug on website for hour or two) > I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button. Not in my case, I regularly try to buy MP3 that are in my collection already but I have not paid for them. It costs me mostly in time to find them and create accounts and pay for them and deal with various hoops. Far more than it costs me in actual payments.
- mopsi 3mo ago
  > Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work. It's not 2003 anymore. If "navigating torrent sites" is your idea of piracy, then you should certainly check out the so-called arr-stack of software that searches online sources for wishlisted items, downloads them, equips with metadata and subtitles, and presents for viewing or listening without any user input, based on predefined preferences. Apple TV and other commercial offerings are a steaming pile of shit in comparison and I can't imagine people like the CEO of Apple watching stuff off Apple TV and not a proper arr-stack setup. It's like eating McDonald's every for every meal when a chef is readily available. Why would you do this to yourself. With Apple TV, you can't even do something as mundane was fixing translation errors in subtitles before you show a movie to a friend. You're stuck with what some cheap outsourced translation service came up with. It reduces the owner of the library to a passive mouthbreather who has virtually no control over their experience; can't choose which cut of the movie to see; can't replace an ugly poster with a nicer one; can't edit movie description to remove spoilers; and so on and on. In essence, you're watching someone else's library, and that someone has not put much effort into proper curation to present every item from the best possible side.

yndoendo 3mo ago

Issues and topics that are reduced to a single idea are oversimplified to were lost of reality can take hold. Example, say person chooses to never fund Amazon. Amazon owns MGM. The only way that person can watch an MGM movie is through piracy. The only alternative would be to buy second hand content so MGM / Amazon do not get a finical cut. As media corporations become more monopolistic, like Paramount buying Warner Bros, I could see more people pirating so they do not fund David Ellison and people like him.

perpetuallunch 3mo ago
[flagged]
nradov 3mo ago
So just watch something else. We have more video content available than anyone could possibly watch in a lifetime.

Aurornis 3mo ago

> Piracy is a service problem > Meanwhile the pirates offer Blu-Ray remuxes with commentary tracks, subtitles for every language, DRM free files that just work on your video player of choice. I think the only people who believe that pirating is easier than using the streaming services are people who spend so much time with computers that they round the mental overhead of navigating torrent websites, finding the correct file you want, downloading it with your torrent client behind the VPN they set up, and getting files to a point where they can watch it on TV to zero. When you think that stuff is fun you don’t count it. I am technically capable of doing all of those things. I also have a rotation of online streaming services. Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card. I think this is all just mental gymnastics to try to avoid the elephant in the room, which is that some people don’t want to pay for things and, of those, some get a little fun out of doing all the steps and setup to pirate things.

bladeacidic 3mo ago
There's apps for that these days. Not going to names them, but if you're still downloading a torrent file on a computer, you're behind the times. It's as easy as Netflix on an Android TV with a remote these days.
- perpetuallunch 3mo ago
  Don’t all those apps also expose you to VPN services using your connection as a gateway, or enrol you in a botnet, or exfiltrate your watch history to this weeks popular bad-actor, or expose everything on your local network to the internet?
  - ziiinq 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - kyriakos 3mo ago
    No there are services that provide global cdn access to torrents. Your provider sees https traffic from your closest cdn edge. You don't share back at any point. These things are a couple of steps more to setup than getting a Netflix subscription and work almost an any device.

tokioyoyo 3mo ago

Every time this argument comes up, it doesn’t explain why piracy rates are much lower, despite having a lot of service problems. Piracy is a cultural thing. And I’m saying this as someone who kinda understands the pirate’s position.

laserlight 3mo ago
> it doesn’t explain why piracy rates are much lower, despite having a lot of service problems. Can you explain why you think piracy rates must be higher? Piracy isn't “free” after all.
- tokioyoyo 3mo ago
  Very common for some movie, tv shows or music not be available here. Or also, fairly expensive to buy/rent for some. If it was service issue, this would drive people who want to enjoy the media to piracy. Yet it doesn’t.
  - laserlight 3mo ago
    Piracy has its own costs. It's likely that given the trade-offs, piracy rates don't increase. PS: I have no idea whether piracy rates are up or down.
fc417fc802 3mo ago
Isn't the explanation self evident? Piracy requires nonzero technical competency (not much but still), dedicated computing hardware, and a decent chunk of storage. It's a fairly low barrier to entry but it is nonetheless a barrier and your typical person off the street these days doesn't reliably know what files and folders are.
- tokioyoyo 3mo ago
  I know Japanese people who can easily pull it off, but ideologically very against it.

casey2 3mo ago

The main problem is that media doesn't cost enough. It's all bundled so the true price is hidden. I'd gladly play thousands to watch a movie/series if studios could take that signal and work with it. $15 or whatever is the same as free most of the content is for people who don't care (or care way to much about miscellaneous trivia)