It feels increasingly like paying for media is for chumps. If you pirate then you get the format you want, the edition you want on the device you want… indefinitely.
But it's movies and TV shows that are the real odd ones out. That industry has always been some of the worst, and unfortunately they seem to have watched what happened with music and learned all the wrong lessons plus had the opportunity to stop the particular path towards DRM free music took from happening to them. Things are a complete mess a true perversion of the point of copyright. I hope this sort of thing eventually prompts backlash that results in legal changes.
1. Companies lock down access until everyone starts pirating, broadcast rights become increasingly worthless.
2. A company realizes that this is a great opportunity to provide easy access to all of the media and becomes wildly succesful. Broadcast rights suddenly become very valuable.
3. Goto 1
Consumer rights only matter to these people if they are codified in a law and the consequences have teeth.
For Netflix originals I have no explanation, I though they do it all themselves.
Which is in itself already yet another reason why pirates get the better service.
Are we talking widely available bootlegs or some private channels?
and in essence, a made up problem. The owners of those licenses simply wants to increase profits by price segmentation - that's why media is restricted in some countries from being viewed from other countries etc.
So i have absolutely zero qualms about piracy when such practices exists.
It's easier with books, or music (with different degrees of truth, a single singer-songwriter would be a lot easier to pay directly than a symphonic orchestra...), but involved products are not easy to finance individually - or pay individually - that's the exact reason right-management studios exist to begin with.
There is no right that grants you the ability to take the product of another's time and effort because you didn't like their terms. In fact, there's a corresponding negative right - you have the right to possess the product of your work and prevent others from taking it away from you unless you transact it away on your own terms.
Piracy is theft, and even if you could make arguments that it's "justified" theft in the case of taking something like insulin to save your life, there is no justification whatsoever for works of entertainment.
I've heard it repeated many times over the years that movie torrent sites are a magical one-stop shop where every movie in the history of cinema is available instantly and in full quality, but I've just never seen it except for new release stuff. Now perhaps the story changes a little with private trackers, but in order to use those you have to be an active seeder. Now you've moved from a simple DMCA bypass to actively distributing pirated content. Thanks, but I think I'd rather rip purchased movies onto my Plex server.
For science it took me 10:57 to locate, download, and extract a 45,215MB remux of Django (1966) from USENET.
But there must be some sort of re-encoding going on there. Because the copy of Django I ripped myself is 61.5GB, and it's only video and one DTS audio track. So I would put money on the copy you found being re-encoded somehow.
Here's a selection of releases for the movie Django (1966): http://rarbg.to/torrents.php?imdb=tt0060315
On the most popular Russian public torrent tracker, there are 22 results for that right now, and even though none of them are UHD, top two of the highest-bitrate 1080p BDRip torrents do have active seeders.
From my experience due to DHT there are actually more seeders than listed on the site. I didn't have any trouble getting even quite obscure films.
And, movies this old in 4k HDR, that's a thing? I can understand the 4k part, that at least can be done by scanning the original film at a higher resolution, but HDR? Doesn't it need to be shot in HDR to begin with?
I'd be surprised if more than 3% of the viewing population cared about this much resolution. You also can't torrent a reel of film, so dudes with private film screening rooms are screwed.
Of course, some movies exist exclusively on platforms like Netflix. If I want to watch something bad enough, then I'll go ahead and pay for one month, which is again cheaper than buying outright. And then I'll usually suck up all the other exclusive content that month, so it doesn't feel too much like a rip off. It's still annoying though.
It's for honest people.