Scene bust triggered historic drop in ‘pirate’ releases
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
A better gauge might be the condition of the industry at the lower tiers, all the way down to some musician just trying to sell a few albums to augment their income. It's possible that the "free" content available from the top tier players helps keep the lower tier players from getting ahead in the business.
I realize it's not a perfect analogy, but I'm thinking about Microsoft in the 1980s. They made their money from OEM licenses and enterprise sales, while the "free" copies of their software erased any chance of competing with them in the consumer market.
Had they done this deliberately to discourage competition, the police would have come knocking at their door.
If you don't feel like paying, don't watch it.
If you don't feel like finding out what service a show is on, don't watch it.
If you don't like the fact that you need to subscribe to multiple streaming networks to watch the shows you want to, don't subscribe and don't watch the shows. Having 5 streaming services to subscribe to is still infinitely better than cable.
If you think piracy "sticks it to the man", you'd do a better job by not watching a show and not talking about it. Pirating the Mandalorian and gushing about it to friends, family, and the internet just helps Disney.
Edit: Please downvote me, I enjoy finding out how many people consider media consumption a fundamental human right instead of the luxury good that it is.
Regardless, ask yourself how you'd feel if the film, video game, or book you pirate was made by a close friend. Would you tell them you pirated their product? And if so, why?
As a video game creator whose digital games cost nothing to copy and distribute, I can assure you that piracy directly affects my ability to continue making games.
>Regardless, ask yourself how you'd feel if the film, video game, or book you pirate was made by a close friend. Would you tell them you pirated their product? And if so, why?
Yes. They didn't create it to brag about how good their ratings were, and pirating their content doesn't mean they aren't getting anything from me, as you yourself mentioned.
>As a video game creator whose digital games cost nothing to copy and distribute, I can assure you that piracy directly affects my ability to continue making games
No, you can't assure me of that. You can say things but would be unable to provide any proof.
>"if I can get something for free, why shouldn't I"
Any time anyone buys something they've previously pirated, this argument falls apart. Not that it needs to wait until then, "why am I paying $20 to be advertised to" breaks it too.
Convenience, pricing and social features. That's how Steam grew so big.
It takes much more effort to torrent something than to click "Add to cart" button in Steam. And even if the price is too high, one can always wait for a sale or a giveaway. Nor will a pirated copy give street cred in the form of achievements, "games owned" and "hours played".
The success of Steam, Netflix and Spotify has shown that there's plenty of money in the world, but you have to earn it by providing the best value.
I've bought Thief 2 & 3 and bunch of other games twice now, on original CDs / DVD and on Steam or GOG, and used No-CD cracks for the originals for convenience.
Pirates love to conflate their activity with the noble pursuit of freeing the world from DRM. Maybe that is true for the people on the 'scene', but the countless millions of people torrenting their releases are doing it because they simply want something for free. Your actions are very much the exception.
Panem and Circensis.. Everyone considers food to be a fundamental human right- but entertainment, that is a great stabilizer of society and actually great for the environment. It costs nothing to copy it, and allows defacto to drug the masses with electric dreams.
One of the reasons, many nations actively sabotage anti-piracy efforts, while claiming to support them. Citizen couch potatoe is the dream citizen of this lean, ecologic future tomorrow.
'Piracy' of tv/movies won't go away until that problem is solved.
Could also be nice if there was some sort of system where the people who actually worked on the film could decide who really deserves the money.
Most of them individually have more content than you can watch in a lifetime.
What about the concept of, picking the shows you have access to watch?
If the service barely has anything you watch, what happens if you don't get access to it?
People compare this all to cable, the problem with cable is you couldn't just pay $10 and get something. You payed $10 for a cable box, then you payed $30 for standard definition, then you added 20 dollars here and there for packages and HD, and a fee for mobile viewing.
Now you can pay $30 for one or two services and get access to more content than people were paying hundreds for!
But then the complaint becomes "yes but I can't watch literally everything"?
i have a very specific list of things i do want to see. favourite shows, certain actors, prefered genres. but what i want to see is spread over half a dozen services.
for $30 i get a lot of content that i don't want, and with every additional service i get more content that i don't want. and yet i'd have to spend more than $100 just to get 40 hours of the content that i do want.
you are effectively suggesting that i should not be picky and just watch what i am offered.
if i needed more content than i can watch in my lifetime, i could just watch youtube for free.
no thanks.
You want a 5 course dinner with items from 5 restaurants.
You don't want to eat everything on each restaurant's menu... but you want to eat "everything", * you want a plate of everyone's content*
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I'm saying you're allowed to want that, but if you can't afford it don't blame the restaurants for not huddling under one roof and making this imaginary buffet with "everything" under one roof.
We had that setup and it sucked worse than this, this new paradigm works better for people who understand the concept of... not getting everything you want?
It's like people don't get the concept of not getting to watch something because you can't afford it or something.
You're free to pirate it, really it's no skin off my back. I'm not even judging you (unless you try and give it some lame validation other than "I didn't want to pay for it" or in some cases "It's not available to pay for")
But then don't pretend it's the studios fault! It's literally easier (and cheaper, and more flexible) than ever to pay for access to their shows.
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A little over 10 years ago a $200 cable bill wasn't unheard of after regional fees, per set top box fees, HD channel fees, special packages for movies.. and it wasn't until last year these fees even had to be disclosed up front, so after a sketchy sales call you'd wait a few weeks for it to all get set up, then get your first bill and start a developing a new skill: negotiating your cable bill. And good luck canceling it if you needs changed
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There's this strange sense of entitlement people have that lets them overlook how much better the current situation is because they just need be able to watch everything they have a whim to watch.
I mean your response of "you want me to just watch what I'm offered?!?!" is so funny to me.
I mean yes? If by "offered" you mean what you paid for then yes lol. Sometimes I want to watch a show but it's not on a service I have and I don't fond any value in that service so I just... find another show to watch!
Is that really so mindblowing?
I don't see it as oppression, I don't see it as something so fundamentally unfair, I think "good thing there's these cheap services I have that have so much content I don't think I'll ever not find another show".
Now people who couldn't afford cable packages can get more content than they did before for less, on more flexible payment terms, with more flexible access, it really is a good thing if you can get over the fact sometimes you just might have to give up some gratification...
in my home country cable was available for a decent price without hidden fees because such trickery is illegal there.
for the restaurant: food courts do exist, and they can have surprisingly high quality food, so yes, it is possible to create a market where everyone can pick and choose.
sure, for you the current situation may be an improvement. and if you are satisfied with that, that's fine.
i am not satisfied because i know we can do better.
So I'd say you're over thinking the analogy, but actually that's the perfect representation of what's wrong with cable.
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Not to mention, my comment isn't just saying "it's good because it's better than cable", that's just focusing on an aside lol.
My comment is "it's good period as you're (god forbid) willing to watch something else once in a while, or pay for it." Hell like I said I don't care if you pirate it just again don't pretend the studio made you by not making a bespoke service with everything you want.
And also your comment about your home country... something tells me your home country doesn't have the worlds largest entertainment industry: https://www.selectusa.gov/media-entertainment-industry-unite...
People often confuse raw sales with revenue, even Bollywood revenue the pails in comparison to American revenue
That being the case a simple comparison of "I paid less elsewhere" doesn't represent the reality of things. You were either paying for less overall content, or paying for a lot of content produced and heavily funded by the US payment structure and much more cheaply licensed to your country.
The complication being of course, if it was values at that pricing locally then the shows wouldn't exist.
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And it's not like the US was alone in their cable situation so I'm very surprised to hear it was better else aside from the fees. The fees were problematic, but by it's very nature cable involves hardware and often has termed contracts
I've lived in multiple other countries (I wasn't born in the US) and 10 years ago I find it very hard to believed any country has cable (or even worse satellite) TV at "decent price" without the "pay us more for HD" and bundled packages mess unless there was just straight up a barely any content compared to the kinds of packages I'm talking about.
Two decades post-Napster we finally have what everyone wanted all along: an easy, cheap way to watch almost every movie without leaving the couch / listen to almost every song from almost any device.
But now it's not good enough unless it's literally every piece of content from a single origin 0_0
We're seeing more and more content getting split up and requiring more and more separate subscriptions as time goes on.
I mean, I'm annoyed that Netflix had a bunch of Marvel movies, but not all of them. I'm annoyed that I used to watch them on Netflix all the time and now they're gone.
On the other hand, it's because Disney+ exists, and there's no reason for Disney+ to ever remove them (preasumably), since they own the rights to them so there's no licensing deals to work with. That means that they should be there "forever".
Likewise, I don't want to also have to pay for CBS All Access to watch the latest Trek, but, if I do, it does mean that I don't have to worry about Star Trek: Discovery disappearing down the road.
The only way for things to be there "forever" is to be streaming from the company that owns the copyright, and more and more such companies are setting up their streaming services and can then guarantee that "foreverness", but that comes at costs for them, and thus costs for us. It's unfortunate, but it feels as though it's either one or the other.
Now, in order to guarantee that we always have access to content, we're ultimately being asked to pay for more services at a total cost that looks more like the cable fees we didn't enjoy paying to begin with. We cut cords because of cost, and now that savings is almost gone and we're back to square one.
I don't have an answer and it's not an easy question to solve, I'm just saying that that's the point of frustration for a lot of people.
Edit: In some sense, what we have now - and seem to continue expanding upon - is worse than before. We used to be able to find it all on one cable provider with one UI, now we have to pay the same amount that many people found to be "too much" and have to deal with countless different UIs.
subscribing to 3 different streaming services has no benefit for the customer. there's no reason to pay for essentially the same thing 3 times just because some studios decided to have fun with movie rights
This year I've been signing up for whatever has the movie I want to watch at the moment and then terminating right away so I'm never really subscribed to anything and have a time constraint to max out the other content on the service over the next 30 days.
The content industry would prefer the all content is charged per view based on who is in the same room as the screen with differentiated costs based on market and even consumer. To enforce them they would prefer all computers be so locked down they are effectively paid for and maintained by you but owned by them with the right to reach over the wire and destroy your hardware if they find you are using it in a way they don't approve of. [1]
They also want veto right over roll out of any new tech that might change the amount of money they are apt to make. Example the VCR, netflix etc.
In return consumers want everything to be completely free with no ads with a great interface and Hatch to be launched into space with no space suit.
We can probably settle in between on something like compulsory licensing like radio play so that any service can offer any video and the creators always get paid. Let copyright holders set the rate but offer the same to all parties
[1] In case you didn't catch it, during a Senate Judiciary committee hearing this week on copyright abuse, the chairman -- that'd be Sen. Hatch -- endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."
https://money.cnn.com/2003/06/19/commentary/wastler/wastler/
That may be almost true for music, but is not remotely true for movies. Sure, recent releases are usually available on _some_ streaming service, but back catalog movies are often only available on DVD/Blue ray. The big streaming services are not great for movie catalogs (Netflix is much worse than it used to be). We have regressed from the Blockbuster days in that regard.
Do you have examples?
Disney for instance are destroying the Disney Vault.
Paying for Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max and still not coming close to "almost every" movie isn't cheap.
And, yes, we want it from a single origin. It's not our fault that the movie/tv industry is a dumpster fire.
I'll start considering rights holders arguments when they're not capriciously gating or scalping on content, and are not limiting their content to their service du jour. The music industry has solved about 60-80% of this problem depending on what you like. The movie and series side has regressed to become worse and more expensive than blockbuster was. Shame!
Arctic Air - Arctic Air Season 1 is not streaming nor available to rent or purchase.
jPod - jPod Season 1 is not streaming nor available to rent or purchase.
Being Erica - List several streaming services that have it, including Pluto TV, which is free/ad supported.
So three Canadian tv shows off the top of my head and there's only a 33% hit rate. That's not very good.
Your kidding yourself. We could limit to movies released in U.S. theaters in the past 20 years and you'd still be completely wrong.
Now if a show or movie doesn't stream in your region or isn't otherwise easily online accessible, that's a different story. In that case it's on the industry to do better. When content is readily available on a streaming service, I don't think it's fair to point at the entertainment industry and say they have a problem to solve. In that case 'the problem' might actually be people wanting to watch movies and not pay for it.
Why would you need to change your public IP? Is the how cable works in the US?
Also they didn't say they're in the US.
I almost exclusively use streaming services now, but it's still annoying to have to search what streaming service everything is currently on, and there are some older movies (been watching a lot of 80s movies I missed lately) in which there is no subscription service it's available, only pay $4+ to rent on Amazon Prime.
1) Having to signup and manage accounts on every streaming service is not easy even if you forget about the money.
2) Most services are not global.
3) Even if they are in your area, they might not be complete. Last week I tried to rent a German movie on Amazon, but realized they only provide English subtitles if you live in the US.
and other services are excellent for it.
To me, the real issue is finding movies/tv shows where you cannot buy or rent them. Amazingly, it is still an issue in this world.
I would love to see The Bob Mathias Story from 1954. It was created by Allied Artists that has been bought and sold a few times ending up at ViacomCBS. Through many weeks of trying to find out if I could get a copy the best I could get was ViacomCBS sometimes allows it to be shown on TV.
I want to buy/rent a copy of movie that exists and cannot. How in 2020 can this happen?
I get: "Heads up! Reelgood does not support your region yet."
Sometimes I'm curious about how many movies a service has.
After some checking around, I did find it for $20 / season on Amazon, which comes with the following license agreement:
> Offers and pricing for subscriptions (also referred to at times as memberships), the subscription services, the extent of available Subscription Digital Content, and the specific titles available through subscription services, may change over time and by location without notice (except as may be required by applicable law).
So... I can give them $20 for them to stream it to me for however long they'd like.
It is impossible to buy the series on DVD.
This is not an isolated incident. As with the late what.cd, at some point these torrent services also serve as an archive of secondary and rare work. This particular example does not fall into that category, but it is not hard to find others, such as the classic Max Headroom, that do (https://reelgood.com/show/max-headroom-1987).
My friend uses sonarr + usenet and its not as easy as amazon/google/itunes/redbox/fandago rentals or purchases on a roku.
A Slack alert can notify you of an automated download of a movie off someone’s top list or a TV series that has started screening again and has been downloaded. Automated piracy is impressive.
https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/docker-home-media-server-2...
It equates a completely non-violent act with a very violent act that was once a capital crime.
https://torrentfreak.com/uk-government-video-urges-advertise...
*from the 1660's https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462700/what-is-t...
> piracy
> 2. fig. The appropriation and reproduction of an invention or work of another for one's own profit, without authority; infringement of the rights conferred by a patent or copyright.
> 1771: Luckombe Hist. Print. 76 “They..would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition.”
> 1808: Med. Jrnl. XIX. 520 “He is charged with `Literary Piracy', and an `unprincipled suppression of the source from whence he drew his information'.”
> 1855: Brewster Newton I. iv. 71 “With the view of securing his invention of the telescope from foreign piracy.”
So exactly what should happen with regard to consumption of digital content that's expensive to produce but basically free to distribute? I'm not really sure, nothing that's been done yet seems quite right.
Old-school pay big $$$ to own a copy doesn't seem to work very well, when most of the money is going to fatcat corporations that don't add any value, and "own" in the context of digital services that get turned off or moved on a whim doesn't seem very good.
Piracy channels work great for the end-user, but nobody knows how to get money to the artist and producer when distributing through these channels.
Subscription services seem kind of okay. At least until they either split into hundreds of them and you end up paying even more, or it consolidates into a couple of big ones who exert the same forces, especially regarding effective censorship for lack of willingness to take a chance on something risky, as the old guard did.
Something fair to content creators, distributors, and consumers.
I, personally, would like to be able to purchase one time "unlimited" licenses (like buying a book or a DVD) that can be easily validated by the publisher's web API and enable non-subscription content to be served by netflix/hulu/amazon/etc.
To enable (for example) streaming an amazon show through netflix. Presumably, streaming providers would (assuming the cost on an individual movie/series basis would be too small to be practical as a single payment made by me at time of consumption) include low-cost "Bring your own content" add-ons to subscriptions that would cover distribution costs through aggregate balances between providers.
"To make the service easy to use, MP3.com did not require users to load their own music into the virtual lockers. Rather, a user merely had to insert a copy of the music into the CD-ROM drive of a computer, at which point MP3.com would verify that the person had possession of a CD, then the company would automatically put a copy of the music into the person's virtual locker."
"However, the lawsuit by the record companies asserted that MP3.com had violated copyrights by creating the digital database of albums to which they held the copyrights. In April, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that MP3.com had infringed companies' copyrights."
"In the ensuing months, MP3.com reached settlements with four of the record companies, including Sony Music, Time Warner, EMI Group and Bertelsmann. Details of the settlements were not made public, but analysts estimated the company paid $20-million to each company."
https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2000/08/29/mp3-com-chief-de...
One thing that I believe doesn't work is a "culture flatrate" where you pay a fee and can access what you want. In the end, this is not much different from having a tax, and having the state pay the artists. And I really don't want the state to decide what is art and what not.
What I really think we have to do long term, and I'm totally serious, is to move to a post-capitalist society, and get rid of money and the requirement to do wage labor. I'm convinced there are many pressing problems - climate change, rising inequality, the fact that many people are overworked despite productivity increases - that we cannot easily solve in our current society. It's like our political system has collected too much technical debt.
I know, Joel Spolsky says you should never do a total rewrite, and I think this applies even more for your whole society :-) but I believe strongly we're in for a serious refactoring and core replacement. And the content industry is only one small symptome of that.
With physical media (paper books, boards games, records, film, etc) the cost of creating+distributing copies is so high that it meets or exceeds the cost of creating (or, curating/funding an environment/projects that enables the creation of) the original work. Creation and distribution of physical copies is challenging and profitable enough that creators can be paid by a portion of the profits from distribution.
In contrast, copying + distributing digital media is so phenomenally easy and egalitarian that there is very little opportunity to add value and create profit. So the method of paying creators that is essentially "built in" to physical media does not exist for digital media.
Distributors compete on service quality not library. If I need 2, or more service subscriptions, including my isp, that's too many for me and I will actively seek out solutions that provide better functionality without paying a tax for worse service.
You really don't need to get very creative, as the solutions already exist for music: Bandcamp and Spotify. Streaming services provide access to all music, as long as you keep paying. Bandcamp is pretty much perfect for buying the music you want.
I'm mostly in the second group, and if everything would be on Bandcamp I would end up buying a lot more. Top quality, hassle-free, DRM-free, for a reasonable price, with generous previews. Payment unlocks a download link, and an optional account allows you to maintain a collection. Everybody wins.
Music not being on Bandcamp is the easiest way to make me reconsider a purchase, and only offering it through streaming services is the easiest way to unlock piracy as a potential option in that consideration.
Other people like a streaming service, and both can and should exist in the same universe.
You'll never kill piracy, but it's very easy to be better. Just give the customer what they want. It doesn't have to be free. The industry should stop wasting so much time and money fighting illegal solutions to a problem they actively keep causing. It is much simpler and cheaper to just fix it.