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Make it easy for me to get the shit that I want and maybe I won’t pirate. It’s fucking easier to just pirate shit than to sign up for a bunch of services and deal with asscunt companies. Fuck you.
Exactly. If there was a Spotify-like service for video where i could get 99.9% of all tv and movies of all time in one place without ads, then I’d be willing to pay like 40 bucks a month, maybe even 50. But since no video service is even remotely close to that, then i just pirate instead, which provides exactly that type of service, and costs zero dollars a month.
Shit dude, give me access to most things I want to watch and most of the stuff I’ve forgotten about and that’s worth $50/month as a minimum.
I’ve come full circle back to wearing an eye patch. I was using amazon, hulu, hbo and paramount, usually letting some lapse or pause to watch stuff on the other ones but they have all gone to shit. It’s impossible to find what you might be interested because just like netflix they show the same shows/movies in multiple categories and their search sucks ass plus they are all missing a ton of good shows.
Now I am slowly downloading shows from the past that I don’t already have in my library and haven’t watched in years while I keep an eye out for new shows I might be interested in. I use showrss to auto download current shows that it has in its DB to a vps and I have sync setup to mirror it to my nas so I can stream it to my TV with vlc. So much easier than opening hulu, finding the show I want to catch up on, etc.
I’ve gone through the effort to build a 50terabyte media center. And am slowly filling it with tv shows, movies, and documentaries I like. It’s expensive and inconvenient. But still a fun hobby.
But the reason I do it is because I can have everything in one spot. Easily accessible. I control it. Never going back.
This is the way. It’s just me who watches stuff off my nas and I’m fine with vlc so I don’t use plex or jellyfin or whatever. I have an old (at this point) qnap nas that I’ve been doing the same with. Mine is a total of 40tb’ish iirc. I definitely need to get a second nas and some more drives but for now what I have is enough though I am going to run out of space soonish.
And they also shouldnt require specific browsers and a CPU that is less than 2 years old to stream content in resolutions above 720p.
Its not because its not possible, its because it lacks some bullshit copyright protection.
I find it interesting, how Spotify is often mentioned as the standard service because last time I used it, it struggled with similar issues as the video streaming platforms, that not every song I want to listen to is available
There’s one thing that’s preventing me from doing exactly that and that is, as a non-native English speaker with tinnitus, the constant struggle to find good subtitles that are properly synced. My lazy ass just wants to enjoy a movie at a normal volume without having to force myself to be super-focussed in order not to miss the whole goddamn plot of the movie.
If buying is not owning, copying is not stealing. Simple as that.
I can’t find it now, but there was that one text post that went something like “1. Copying a movie costs the studio money, 2. Download a movie, 3. Make 1000 copies, 4. Studio goes bankrupt”
I saw one where it went:
- Publish a copyrighted work
- Sell it for 10 bucks
- Have a friend pirate it 100 million times
- Declare bankruptcy
- Have the friend delete his copies
- You’re a billionaire now
Trolls ripped me a new one for saying that. I hope they wont do the same to you. But yes I agree.
If your business model needs undercover advocates to fake grassroots legitimacy you may have a problem.
Whos going to tell them?
Bankruptcy court?
I think bribing politicians to make it illegal to own anything is more likely.
But stealing is not owning so QED
I started this meme and have been having a ball watching it go wild. 😁
FYI, the original context was about a software company that bricked it’s customers’ lifetime licenses to force them into a subscription model.
I‘m pretty sure I remember the article about the incident.
It’s a Louis Rossmann video.
Thats possible! Thanks for sharing.
Whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night. It’s definitely stealing. This is a piracy community. Don’t feign moral superiority. They offer a product, you don’t want to buy the product so you find it for free elsewhere. A digital file that you experience for a cost is no different than a book you buy from a store, regardless of the state of ownership after the fact. And regardless if it’s a locally published author or a multi billion dollar studio, there’s a cost of entry. Semantics is all you’re arguing, not the legitimacy of piracy, when you share that copypasta.
“Theft” has a legal definition that at least in my jurisdiction is not met by downloading copyrighted materials. So, no, copying is not stealing.
Actually, even if you are an EU citizen, downloading copywritten material for free is very much considered theft. Ever read those FBI or Interpol statements at the beginning of films?
It’s legally called “Copyright Infrigement” and it’s not even part of Criminal Law in most Legal Jurisdictions, unlike Theft.
You’re talking off your arse so hard that by now you must hovering on your own farts.
In many places, downloading is legal. It’s the uploading that’s illegal.
You are wrong. You are talking about copyright infringement, which is a civil matter and not a criminal one. That means the party whose rights have been infringed must prove that and sue you. But you won’t go to jail if convicted, you’ll have to pay damages. That’s why the Netherlands, for example, used to be safe for torrenting. It wasn’t legal, but copyright holders did not have the right to get account details from providers for IP addresses that were caught sharing content (sharing, not downloading) and thus had no one to sue. If it were a criminal matter, the state would be after you and they have a lot more rights.
You should definitely reevaluate your priorities
In this case, the phrase’s become more popular because people buy digital goods and, due to business shenanigans, they lose access to it, like buying a digital copy of a movie, “owning it”, then no longer being able to access it because Sony couldn’t be arsed to get the rights sorted out.
There’s also the numerous situations where you can’t legally own media, simply because it’s not up for sale, like the vast majority of content on streaming sites. There’s no way to own and consume some media except through the provider. It’s still illegal, it’s still an unauthorized copy, but in this case, it’s the only way to “own” something.
Despite crappy licensing agreements and the tenuous relationship between consumers and ownership of a thing, finding a way to circumvent paying for a thing that is for sale in one form or another, is theft.
By that definition making coffee at home and taking it with you to work instead of buying is theft.
Even further anytime you make a product or do a service yourself or get a free alternative (for example, open source software instead of a close-source alternative) instead of buying would be theft by that definition.
That’s not the legal definition of “theft”, it’s not even the historical or common sense definition of “theft”, it’s some kind of neo-Capitalist Dystopia definition of “theft” that only makes sense if you’re starting from a foundation of there being a “right to make money”.
How dare you cook dinner for yourself when McDonald’s is right there? How will the franchise owners or the brand owners be able to buy meals for their children!?
Look man, I get that piracy isnt an ethically clean solution, but the current state of legal digital media is nowhere near ethically clean either, and I’m far more likely to root for a person than I am for a corporation. Especially since its because of corporations that the digital ownership sphere is so fucked
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I will gladly take a position of moral superiority, because copyright has evolved from a very limited monopoly, intended to encourage creativity while balancing public access, into a licence for corporations to seek rent.
So, call it stealing if you like, I will sleep well tonight regardless.
You’re taking a thing that costs money, for free. I don’t see how it’s anything other than stealing.
If you go to a theme park, and they want $20 for you to enter, and you decide you don’t want to pay, you’ll be in violation of their rules. Those that did pay will leave the park at the end of the day with a great experience, but with no presumption of ownership of the park. This is analogous to piracy by copying a movie. You didn’t want to pay the entrance fee, so you found a way to have the same enjoyment for free. The people that paid for their media, however shitty the licensing agreement is, received the agreed upon service with no presumption of ownership.
I’m not here to defend streaming services or crappy licensing deals, but to pretend that it’s not stealing, gaslighting everyone here into following your train of thought, is the definition of unearned moral superiority. You’re not entitled to free media.
The only theft going on is the ongoing theft from the public domain, due to corruption of copyright law by special interests enabled by law for hire. Your analogy is irrelevant as the marginal cost of operating a park for an extra visitor is not zero.
It’s like refusing to pay the $20 park entrance fee and then making your own copy of the park in your backyard. Is that stealing $20 from the park?
I mean it’s still possibly copyright and/or trademark infringement, but…
He didn’t take the movie/music from them. They still have it. It still exists on their tape/film/drive. If you are going to argue, at least argue in good faith, with words that mean what you are trying to say.
It’s not stealing unless you delete the original when you download it. It’s forgery at best
I prefer the term appropriation:
the action of taking something for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission
Still doesn’t fit, because you’re not taking anything, you’re making a copy.
It’s copyright infringement.
Cocksucking cabin is over there --> https://www.motionpictures.org/
Ever been to a library? Try it. They don’t bite.
Those Ads at the beginning of legitimate copies of DVDS and movies, really bugged me, like why are you annoying the people who actually bought the product!? Also the people downloading stuff online seemed cool in those videos so I think the ads had the opposite effect a lot of the time.
That shit bothered me as far back as in the 80’s on VHS rentals. They’ve never treated viewers as anything other than a sales opportunity. The motion picture industry has always been disgusting and dehumanizing.
Plus they come off like those ridiculous anti-drug ads that make it seem like a single puff of weed will make you shoot your friend in the face and run your dog over. They’re just way over the top to the point that they’re comical and easy to mock.
We are cool get in it with us chud.
Check out the cool hoodie!
Might have to cop that hoodie, but I’m not watching bros camrip 💀
Agreed, they’re the worst!
Weirdly enough I used to enjoy camrips when I was broke and depressed, kinda gave me the feeling I was in a room with people.
My favourites were the ones where people couldn’t sit still, felt good yelling at someone to sit the fuck down, knowing they cant hit me.
That’s actually really sweet ahhh
hella 90s
Give me the means and hell yea I’d download a car!
This is Chad. Chad downloaded the movie from a pirate site, then smoked a joint and got a blowjob. Don’t be like Chad.
I would gladly pay good money to just download an MP4, but they have never given me that option.
Hello, yes i would like to buy high res music files, please show me a store that has a large catalog that I can choose from. Oh there are non?
I guess I’ll have to look else where
There’s qobuz but they don’t have everything
Also Bandcamp.
Bot they also don’t have a lot (i buy from both those sites btw)
Qobuz has a lot of DRM-free high-res music.
Oh thanks i haven’t heard of that store I’ll check em out
The media corps have people hooked on non downloadable streaming services. Today’s youth don’t know what an mp3 or a flac file is. Hell, a lot of them have never owned a CD. They’re buying vinyl records (lol) and don’t even own a vinyl record player.
Qobuz and Bandcamp have almost everything
I’ve been using bandcamp mostly for the indie artists i listen to, seems like Qobuz has a pretty decent selection of more mainstream artists
You could use streamrip to download high quality FLACs from Tidal and Qobuz if you have a subscription.
Bandcamp now is most user friendly, but even the creators cheat by deleting their 1$ offerings, and Yes I hate bundles of 600 albums for a price of 1$
gnutella
I liked beatport
Like GOG, but for movies. GOM?
i remember when valve’s steam completely killed nearly all video game piracy just by existing
There was a golden age of Netflix where I basically stopped pirating movies and TV too.
Now streaming is a fragmented ad-ridden nightmare and I pirate more than ever before. It’s not like it’s free either, I pay for a VPN, disk storage, let alone the time and maintenance.
If I could buy (and actually own) high quality digital copies of movies/tv with no bullshit at a reasonable price that would be a serious value proposition that would beat out the hassles that come along with piracy.
Fully agree. Why is renting a movie the same cost as a month of some random subscription service? Then you also get a copy you can only watch for like 24 hours. If you “buy” you still dont get access to the file, just some digital copy that can be taken away at any point.
I mean I always knew digital renting was kind of a lame idea, but I didn’t put together how monumentally bad it is until you said that…
Imagine if steam sold movies and TV shows
They did that 10 years ago. Right around the time they added the video stuff. Didn’t work out. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/steam-stepping-back-from-selling-films
Around 50 are still available if you know how to look for them: https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC&category1=992
Watch Kung Fury if you want to test it. I loved the cheese: https://store.steampowered.com/app/374570/Kung_Fury/
I don’t think Steam’s business model works well for Movies/TV. Besides delivering the game files after your initial purchase Steam also continues to host and deliver update files for games over time, as well as lots of extras like syncing game saves, the workshop for mods, etc. I like having a centralized service that offers these features and acts a launcher for games because it’s very convenient. These features are a huge value add that makes the service very attractive over piracy.
But for Movies/TV the main thing I want is the ability to watch the content, at a high quality, on whatever device I want, whenever I want to watch it. Theoretically this shouldn’t be to hard, but with the way all the rights work it’s effectively impossible for any streaming service to offer this. Content gets removed all the time, it’s spread across a ton of different services that all offer a different experience. In a vain attempt to thwart pirates it’s a pain in the ass to watch content offline so it’s unreliable at best.
The only way to get the experience I want with Movies/TV is to pirate the content.
And Spotify pretty much killed music piracy . Although you could argue they just changed who did the robbing
I think people still pirate music by downloading them off of youtube
To the point where a lot of gamers have paid for more games than they’d ever have time to play.
Hey… I only have 600 Steam Games and i don’t remember half of them… But don’t worry, I will play them, after Dragons Dogma 2 and the Elden Ring DLC of course.
After I’m finished doing the same shit over and over again for another 7-800 hours in warframe I’m sure I’ll get around to playing some of the games I actually paid money for.
This is the truth man, I will even buy games on Steam that I’ve pirated in the past with no intention of playing them again. We all largely stopped pirating movies and TV for almost a decade when the streaming experience was superior.
If there was a steam like service for movies and tv and music that worked on all my platforms I would pay for it just like I paid for a home server running the *arrs.
“You wouldn’t put on a tricorn hat, would you?”
I actually would, if I could find a nice one…
“…and leave your job to sail the seas?”
… That’s an option? I didn’t even consider-
“And you certainly wouldn’t drink rum, and fire cannons, and carry a saber and tell silly parrot related puns.”
buys a tricorn hat
Steals a tricorn hat
FTFY
Downloads a Tricorner hat
You wouldn’t!
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We only started pirating after Amazon refused to let us play movies we paid for because our hardware was too old for their DRM. It was a 2014 PC made of recycled parts. At the time, it was less than 10 years old. We pirated the same movie and realized it was easier to find, higher quality, and surprise, surprise, capable of playing on a PC we kept out of the landfill.
When I see anti piracy measures that punish people that don’t pirate, such as massive performance hits or privacy violating features, it makes me want to pirate more.
720 streams run from strange websites in timbucktoo have higher fidelity than the 4K stream I paid good money for.
Here’s a great price and you can share it with your friends. Wait not those friends. Wait your phone isn’t authorized anymore. Okay you authorized your phone but you need to authorize it again. Okay we just doubled the price and cut the quality again. Now you can’t watch the movies that you downloaded for offline viewing without an internet connection. Now your ad-free service has ads.
Netflix can take a long hard suck on my pudding factory, they’re never going to see another penny of my money again, and this is from somebody that goes back to the DVD days of Netflix.
Oh yeah, and we changed the movie too.
I rented a car to do Uber with while I apply for jobs, and the car is an electric. They had no gas powered cars available.
It is such a pain in the ass. I’ve only had it for a couple of days, but so far I’ve spent 2.5 hours today waiting for charge, and about 5 hours driving passengers.
I’m ready. I want to download a car. Just need someone to point me in the right direction.
I love it when corpos remind us that there is an alternative to purchasing their add bloated products.
I love that cyberpunk made that term popular. Fuck them, indeed.
It poses a significant challenge to creative economies worldwide, costing industries billions annually.
Other studies found, that piracy actually increases sales, offsetting the (always oversestimated) loss of revenue.
So, no, that’s a lie.
The real challenge to creative economies are the billionaires sucking all the profit from album sales or deleting television shows from the face of the earth for a tax writeoff.
Agreed. I copied that exact quote to see if someone called it out already. Also this one:
educational messages tend to try and educate the consumer on the moral and economic damage of piracy.
Citation fucking needed.
As an anecdotal example, I pay for Netflix, Spotify, Prime, and Kindle Unlimited (and CBC Gem partly through taxes), I regularly buy videogames and ebooks (and pay for a library with taxes), and I buy phone apps. I’m paying as much as I comfortably can for media in various forms.
I also pirate TV/film content, books, games, apps, operating systems, etc. A lot.
But about half the TV/film piracy is content I have already paid to get streaming access to simply because it’s easier to pirate than figure out which service it’s on, and the other half is mostly freely available on YouTube at garbage quality.
The content industry, net everything, is getting all the cash out of me that they ever will. Piracy has 0 net effect on my media spending; I’d just consume different content, content at a lower quality, spend more time on Where To Stream, and get books from the library a bit more often.
I don’t really understand the gender difference thing, because I would think that in general it comes down to understanding what “ownership” is and that it has been taken from us, replaced with “licensing” where we have to buy the same movie every 10 years on a new format, and now that streaming is THE format, companies have made The Producers real, where they can make a whole movie, shitcan it, and get a tax break. We’re dealing with items we’ve paid for being removed from our digital storage boxes, because the “rights ran out.” It’s wild, because it used to be that you bought a movie and it didn’t matter that the rights ran out you could still watch your fucking movie in your own home. Same for old video games. If you have old copies of Grand Theft Auto, you can still listen to the great soundtrack, because they hadn’t stripped the music they lost licensing for out of the new copies.
I mean, going back to when the music companies were suing music fans for downloading music, the RIAA sued Limewire for so much that if the max payout was given to every rightsholder for all the piracy going on, that it would be a bill larger than the amount of money that actually existed.[1]
When the fines for all piracy that exists would be bigger than the amount of money that exists, its clear that the system is fucking broken and has been.
Nobody respects copyright, and that started when Disney fucked us all over with the Mickey Mouse Protection Act in the 1990’s.
The rightsholders did this to themselves by making it increasingly draconian.
When cops are playing copyrighted music when they’re being filmed so people can’t post it online without it being auto-removed for having copyrighted music in it, things are flat out fucked and everybody knows it.
It’s akin to living the end stages of the Soviet Union with Hypernormalization. Everything is totally fucked, but everyone is running around trying to pretend that nothing has changed and everything is fine.
For citizens who get nothing but working themselves to death and taxes that do nothing for them, piracy is one of those small “fuck you”'s that we can give to the rich.
“The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) estimates that filesharing website LimeWire owes it over $72 trillion dollars (£46 trillion) in damages. … Given that the combined wealth of the entire planet is around $60 trillion (£38 trillion), the RIAA likely has no hope of securing this in damages, but believe this is what it is owed, reports Computerworld.com.” ↩︎
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As a man… that sounds about right lol. I was watching a show and then realised if I wanted the later seasons I’d have to subscribe to a different service and I took that personally and got annoyed and now I just pirate stuff. No one tells this manly feller what to do.
I would say risk taking isnt always bad and not always illogical. But yeah, as a man I know what you mean when you talk about testosterone and risk taking.
I imagine it used to have quite a lot of benefits back when we were still sleeping in caves, shure you might die when facing a mammoth, but you could also feed the whole tribe for weeks when you succeed.
It sucks that you have to deal with misogyny on-line like that.
I don’t know where that hatred comes from, but I can only assume it’s because those guys couldn’t find good ladies to be with. They probably got rejected a lot and now they don’t like wimen at all. But I don’t know for sure.
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I think its simply, at least for a while, the tech space was male dominated. And depending on the type of piracy, it requires an amount of tech skills
Probably the reason, pretty valid point here.
Also, there’s so much “free” content that a lot of young ones don’t even bother or care about learning about piracy and how to do it
This as well. I will say even the time where i would normally spend watching shows on stuff like dailymotion primewire etc i know most just watch youtube channels
As a woman into tech I’ll chime in. We seem to have a mild case of ignorant as shit. My friends are all completely blind to tech and piracy. Now I don’t blame them because they’ve been taught by capitalist culture to care about pointless things since birth, but god does it hurt sometimes and make me want to claw my eyes out. Patience and education will solve the gap.
What is even more painful is seeing friends glued to TikTok on their phones all day when they have STEM degrees. I didn’t grow up in a typical household, so I have a hard time relating to other women, but I don’t get it either. Do your friends with kids seem to be this way more than those without?
Indeed. Piracy is good because it is preservation
I would think that in general it comes down to understanding what “ownership” is and that it has been taken from us, replaced with “licensing”
Your mistake is thinking that the average person
- Knows that this is happening/has happened, since it’s rarely clearly or prominently stated,
- Understands what it means, since it doesn’t often affect them,
- And in the uncommon scenario where both 1 and 2 are met: actually cares at all.
It’s wild, because it used to be that you bought a movie and it didn’t matter that the rights ran out you could still watch your fucking movie in your own home.
I understand the concern and I’m sure it does happen, but I have literally never heard this complaint from a single person that I actually know. What movies/services has this actually happened to?
No argument against anything you said related to copyright laws, just to be clear.
Here’s an article that was discussed extensively on HackerNews about how Apple has the rights to remove items you’ve paid for from your digital library:
https://theoutline.com/post/6167/apple-can-delete-the-movies-you-purchased-without-telling-you
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17970197
Here’s an example where Amazon removed books from people’s Kindles, although to be fair to Amazon they did attempt to change how they handled situations like this. However, the licensing issue should have been handled before customers could buy it, yet in this instance customers were initially punished for something they had no control over (how are they supposed to know Amazon is offering ebooks without proper licensing?).
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole by Amazon.com.
In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.
Here are two separate examples of Warner Bros. canceling finished movies wholesale because it’s a “wise business decision.” These are completed films that will not be released.
https://variety.com/2023/film/news/batgirl-movie-shelved-dc-studios-head-peter-safran-1235506921/
Lots of shows/films are being licensed to streaming services and then disappearing altogether, since there was never a “physical” copy available to begin with. Here’s a short list of some that you can’t find anywhere anymore.
https://www.looper.com/1333407/best-streaming-shows-you-cant-watch-anywhere/
Finally, every company has a right to not do business with you. If Microsoft, Apple, Google, or any other content providers decide to ban your account (a very effective way to choose not to do business with a person), all your digital purchases are gone with it. That alone should be proof enough that you don’t and never “owned” any of it. In the “olden times” Blockbuster couldn’t come into your home and take back all the movies you ever bought from them (I know they mostly did rental, but they did sales, too) and smash your VHS so you couldn’t watch anything anymore.
Also, I’m pretty well aware that most average people don’t understand this subject at all.
Two examples I’m aware of for that last part, I believe, are the TV shows House M. D. and Quantum Leap. For House, the intro music in most places you can find it has been replaced by the music in the end credits, and with Quantum Leap, i think a number of songs on the show have been swapped out due to rights and licensing
I’m not 100% sure on either of those if my memory is correct or the reasoning matches, but I do know there are other examples
Scrubs has different music in many places in the streaming episodes compared the original broadcast and DVDs.
I understand the concern and I’m sure it does happen, but I have literally never heard this complaint from a single person that I actually know. What movies/services has this actually happened to?
Pretty much every digital platform at some point or another.
Piracy is a service issue. Give people the option to stream all of their media with an option to download for the nerds, and sell it at a reasonable price, you will hurt piracy. Splintering all media up into a thousand streaming services and implementing black box licensing agreements is what pushes people to piracy.
Also, the number of seeds are a good measure for popularity of media that one might not had in their radar at all. Meanwhile, platforms try to push all sort of content only because they produced it, recommendation algorithms are needed (and insufficient), because there a huge load of crap being produced at such a high rate…
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And back in the GTA 4 days, I very much did. Several, in fact.
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And to think they almost killed OpenIV, fuck taketwo.
You wouldn’t break into someone’s house and smash the DVDs they legally bought over the years would you?
The MPAA absolutely would. I’m happy they don’t know where I live.
I remember the commercials “Piracy is not a victimless crime” pissed me off so hard, and drove me to download much more than I otherwise would have
Won’t somebody think of the shareholders?!
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People who bought the movie seeing anti-piracy ads: 🤡
People who pirated the movie not seeing anti-piracy ads because they’ve been cut out: 😎
Classic: punish the law abider while the law breakers have it made
