I'm done with Google
deijin.bearblog.dev
deijin.bearblog.dev
I really like the frank tone of the article and I wish people in general would just write unabashedly more often when it comes to stuff like this. Writers online love to dance around the idea of "pirating" their digital goods when communicating on the topic: "Ooh my 'friend' may or may not have downloaded 'xyz' movie from 'abc' website, but I don't advocate piracy".
I pirate music. I pirate movies. Who gives a fuck? I'm not selling it for money. I love having mp4 files, I love having mp3 files. I ESPECIALLY love pirating mp3 files ever since Spotify and the streaming/subscription model has taken over. spytify automatically records mp3 files with metadata tags while you personally listen to Spotify https://github.com/jwallet/spy-spotify
Adhering to file-based digital possessions has saved me countlessly over the years and it will continue to. I had my music uploaded to Google Play Music, and once that was shut down (the equivalent songs are not in the replacement), I swore off streamed music as a way to organize my personal library, forever. When I end up liking enough content from an artist, I try to find best avenues for compensation, like Bandcamp or SoundCloud.
The things I could be doing better in this regard is better file organization and encrypting everything to safeguard against when cloud file-hosting services come for me based on some dystopian DRM file-content scanning scheme. I've not hit that extreme point yet, however, although I should get around to it sooner than later with rclone (makes it trivially easy) https://github.com/rclone/rclone
And when a situation like the article arises, getting your auntie access to The Wizard of Oz might just be an Airdrop away.
…and, if I may add, shops like https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop , which fill the gap of providing HQ downloads of popular music that cannot be found on Bandcamp. I have to admit I haven't used them in years (ever since I got a Spotify account) but they used to be my go-to place for purchasing FLACs.
* non english (but english subs)
* actual language you understand
Plus subs selection is pathetic - Apple TV shines here, but it's not perfect.
Especially youtube music, sure i have access to otherwise "unpublished content" (looking at you Watsky refusing to put Wounded Healer on a streaming platform). But in a 3 hour flight I found myself iterating through all the songs I could download via the app.
For spotify, why do I have to go through all the hassle to explain to a person why tf I want my account closed? Why are you not giving me the tools to manage my library better? Why do I have to manually delete every single one song instead of group select or even purging everything?
I am not saying I am pirating, but I am not saying that it's a thing I will never do again.
The industry should get their shit together and build something that works for the customers (us), and smaller artists as well (cough spotify cough).
This is not the right thing to do. Spotify is peanuts to artists. If you want to do the right thing, buy music at Bandcamp: you get files you can keep forever and artists get a fair share of your money.
Although it is true artists do get something, the lion's share goes to the music corporation.
Ranting about Spotify's, Apple Music's, Tidal's payments to the artists or region-locking IP is a smoke-and-mirrors move from major labels, they are the ones forcing these practices unto the distributors/streaming services.
You'll never see mainstream pop artists on there.
I love to promote Bandcamp where possible but have to remember what it can offer to "Average Joe"
The right thing to do is to directly subscribe to their Patreon. It not only gets you access to exclusives, behind the scenes and even events, it also crowdfunds the future projects of the artist.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Take this with a grain of salt, I am not a tax attorney nor an accountant.
i.e. If you were a true supporter, the right thing to do would be to form a legal trust and make the beneficiary of the trust the artist's children, and put your money into that, as this would help them legally avoid income taxes on the money you are giving them while using the money for their children's education.
Or a TRUE SUPPORTER wouldn't use band camp, instead they would evaluate the quality of roads and infrastructure around the artists house and pay for a series of contractors to improve the surrounding roads and areas, which will not only improve the artists quality of living but will also improve the value of their house. etc. etc.
In reality there is no 'right thing to do' - just choose whatever channel the artist has put up that supports them at the level that you want them to, and where you get value out.
I don’t want recurring payments.
You could remake your Spotify account. Alternatively, make a family account and share it with 5 more members. Works out to just 3$/month (Canadian!) for us. Wonder what it would work out to from a cheaper geolocation.
So use it if you want to get recommendations, or don't want to bother managing your library, or want to give some pennies on a dollar to the actual artists. But remember, you're still a pirate. Be proud of it. Yarr!
IANAL
I always thought if they want me to pay, they gotta make it worth it. And they have. So they get my money.
Not having to worry about being a data hoarder, with all the sorting, renaming, categorization, archiving etc is incredibly liberating.
I think of all the time I spent on an ancient single core machine ripping CDs (or downloading for OG Napster on dialup), many of which I probably never even listened to, and just shake my head.
Sure, as long as that holds. I like the music services as they have all the weird stuff I listen to. I like the book services as they have all the weird stuff I read. But movies/tvshows are a different ballgame; if i'm watching some series or saw some trailer and I want to see it but it doesn't appear in the netflix/hbo/disney/apple in my country, I am not going to wait or not watch it at all.
There are too often new shows that seem interesting (sure, they hardly ever actually are) but are anglo-saxon countries or US only.
Then, in the days of yore, Netflix used to have old movies/shows and people used to hate that. I did not, but they are mostly gone. Why would they not stock ancient content from the 40s-80s? Maybe they do in the US, but here it's almost completely gone.
Currently on there is Wrongfully Accused (funny Leslie Nielsen movie), Glengarry Glen Ross, Robocop (1987), Ghost in the Shell, The Mask, License to Drive, The Neverending Story, Tombstone, Leon The Professonal, The Amityville Horror, Over the Top (some Stallone movie), Miracle on 34th Street, Con Air, Edward Scissorhands, Gone Fishin', Look Who's Talking, While You Were Sleeping, The Craft, Red Dawn, So I Married an Axe Murderer, Secret of Nimh, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Revenge of the Pink Panther, Mad Max, Das Boot, Little Shop of Horrors, Hackers, Children of the Corn, Death on the Nile (1978 version, remade recently), Delirious, Rock-a-Doodle, The Big Boss (Bruce Lee, 1971), Babes in Toyland, Samson an Delilah (1950), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Seven Year Itch (Marilyn Monroe, 1955) .... okay, I'm just going to stop now, but it keeps going, I'm only a third of the way though the list.
Also it's newer, but one of my favorite movies is currently free with ads on there: Kung Fu Hustle, a hilarious and ridiculous spectacle with excellent choreography.
Only downside is you never know how long they'll stay on there, it doesn't seem to be as long as other services, so you kind of need to check the list often and watch the ones you want to see while they're on there. I think I had a similar comment on here six months ago and the list I had then would have been completely different.
But I'd expect that of HBO also. They were the original channel to go to if you wanted to see great movies when I was a kid.
What we come to is that for one person, dealing with the pains of content management and organization is not worth the cost, monetary or otherwise. For me, it is worth the cost, it's just not primarily monetary.
Having said that, I use Netflix although that may change in the future. It helps with content discovery. Still, by no means is it my go-to method for content organization or full retrieval. I compared the colors side-by-side to Inception in Netflix compared to a downloaded version and for some reason it was way off to the point it hindered my enjoyment of the film. The massive blue tint was that noticeable.
I prefer pirating my music off YouTube.
yt-dlp -f bestaudio https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=XXX
mkvextract input.webm tracks 0:output.opus
yt-dlp --output "%(upload_date)s ---- %(artist)s --- %(title)s.%(ext)s" --add-metadata --embed-thumbnail --audio-format opus --format bestaudio --remux-video opus "https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=0oAAlssVwEw"
I quote Mark 12:15.
> But, knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, “Why put me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.” And they brought one. And he said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said to him, “Caesar’s.” Jesus said to them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” And they marveled at him.
This is pretty much the reason I don't pirate.
I wasn't a Christian before. I first thought "if everyone else pays, why should I get it for free?". But eventually I came to question the concept of personal sharing of media being controlled by the state, and just gave in to 'piracy' (a silly name for the act). I suppose I also generally became jaded on social conscientiousness.
More recently I became a Christian and now I don't 'pirate' at all. It's because the above passage in my opinion can be applied to media (although it's not literally what was said, I think the rationale still works): most of the people who make such media don't approve of me 'pirating'. Therefore if I engage in it, which I actually have a choice about, rather than with the currency which frankly is mandatory for most people, then surely I owe them their price. And if I don't have a way to pay for it then I don't have any more right to it.
Respectfully, you act as if your hand is forced here, but you don't actually need to consume the media, you just want to.
It was Google's technical ineptitude that did not allow him to use his legitimately bought movie, which had been readily available before.
So he obtained an illegally made copy of the movie which he had legally obtained before, which he had every right to keep in his possession, formally. I don't see anyone's interests being hurt by this, including financial interests, or any moral wrong done.
I can't understand how that particular bible verse could be a genuine influence on deciding whether or not illegally downloading copyrighted material is acceptable, at all. Can you explain what logic led from reading that text to deciding it meant you shouldn't pirate things?
And I'm also curious, if you hadn't read that verse would Jesus' other teachings, as told in the new testament, not have left you considering digital piracy to be immoral?
> would Jesus' other teachings...not have left you considering digital piracy to be immoral?
Romans 13 calls Christians to be subject to authorities, that would be most Christians' given reason. It's one of my reasons, but it was not the reason that first convinced my heart.
> I can't understand how that particular bible verse could be a genuine influence on deciding whether or not illegally downloading copyrighted material is acceptable, at all. Can you explain what logic led from reading that text to deciding it meant you shouldn't pirate things?
Enemies of Jesus asked (paraphrasing) "Is it righteous to pay Caesar's tax, or not?". They were trying to trap him into saying something either illegal in the eyes of the Romans, or unrighteous in the eyes of the Jews. This is why Jesus says to bring him a coin, and asked "Who's head is on this coin?", and then says therefore "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and give to God the things that are God's". This is the answer to the question of what is right with conflicting authorities, because on reflection it is not controversial that God's ownership should take precedence, but that otherwise in Caesar's land and with Caesar's money you must play by Caesar's rules.
Furthermore, for a free man of those days, this principle would have been a precursor of the social contract: you partake in Caesar's money (or live in his land), then you pay Caesar's tax; the same way that you might argue that people who benefit from society owe a debt to society.
Thinking of it this way, now think about media that is 'owned'. It bears someone's mark. You watch completely freely, you are far more free and flexible to choose what media you consume than what economy you engage with. Nobody in the free world is oppressed into watching movies. I find it now actually principled to defend therefore that the 'owner' of some media (especially the creator) can expect payment in return for a copy of the media. We can certainly debate about reasonable scope of copyrights, but I think copyrights themselves are reasonable to an extent.
Which in my view is a fair approach to life, but hard for me to adopt personally.
For example,
> So I go to google play store and go through the 50,000 security verifications.
And this comment:
> Google is contributing to the destruction of the concept of ownership, as are many services of the modern age.
Pretty much any service that uses DRM. There is a lot to be upset with Google about, but this is like someone ranting that they can't figure out how to use a Google device. If you don't like it then buy a portable blu-ray or DVD player, or convert the DVD and blu-ray yourself to a digital format without DRM.
Remember that this is grandma’s setup. Sure, there are alternative paths for young bucks like us, but for others they simply want to “buy” something and then play it at will. This is a story about Google depriving a dying grandma of one of her last joys.
Like I said, there are a lot of reasons to dislike Google but this post sounds like a misguided complaint. The issue likely could have been solved and maybe entirely be attributed to user error, but it didn't matter.
I wonder if it's a generational thing where those of us who are old enough to remember when streaming wasn't a thing don't find it acceptable because companies didn't used to be able to treat us this way. Once the physical media was in our hands it was ours and if it randomly stopped working it was generally duo to a physical problem we had a hand in.
But it's still doing bad transcoding. It's like taking a screenshot of a JPEG photo: if you save it, you end up with more artifacts.
I'd just use one of the numerous Deezer downloaders – they decrypt the actual audio stream, and the input quality is just as good.
(FWIW, there were some tools that could rip out the exact Ogg stream as used by Spotify, but I don't think they're working now.)
Thanks for clarifying that point about spytify.
Does anyone make re-encoders that can actually do that?
I still remember when not pirating would get you strange reactions, and it was considered polite to share (on a USB drive or similar) the media you had recently consumed; some PMPs even had a USB host mode, which let users exchange files with others easily, and P2P was also far more popular. Here's some dated-but-related references from that era:
But then again it’s not pirating to re encode your audio files once you’ve downloaded them. So I feel more confident in saying it’s not the bits that are licensed, it’s the work itself. The act of downloading it from piratewarez.example.com feels fishy, but if you download it from musicbackups.example.com — a hypothetical site that says you should not download copies of files unless you have bought a license for them in the past — then it starts to feel like a more interesting gray area. You’ve licensed a digital copy of the work, so why is it wrong to get a copy of it from some place else? The person distributing the work is probably in hot water, but you shouldn’t be, as long as you have the receipt for the original purchase and/or a copy of the license.
For me, the big one here is ebooks. If I buy a physical copy of a book then as far as I’m concerned I’ve bought the license to the work as well as that particular piece of physical media. I don’t lose sleep about pirating the ebook version as well.
Bought a temporary license to use/read/watch. Its not like you bought a digital file. Nope.
People will do it anyway though
You also have a right to make a personal backup/copy of the content, again, as long as you don't share that copy (projecting for multiple people is also sharing in this context).
Torrents don't share it. You do if your torrent client is configured to do so.
BitTorrent is a protocol. You use it how you use it. If you only want to use it to download stuff, you can.
Very similar law in Poland: you can legally pirate music, books, comics, movies, images for yours own (including your family and closest friends) use.
What's interesting, there is an exception for software and video games - those are always illegal.
Current gen emulator developers usually say you should rip your own ROMs from the physical media instead of just downloading them from torrents (even if you have the disc/cartridge on hand). I don't think anybody's actually doing that, but discussing downloads is banned on official channels.
You can RIP copyrighted content of physical media you own for backup purposes, but you cannot share it.
This is why ripping a music CD you own is perfectly legal, but if you upload it that is not legal, nor is downloading it from someone elses upload.
Some people in the emulation community do actually adhere to this, but the vast majority do not, as you noted.
Also, IANAL, but I suspect the order of events might get somebody into hot water. Although the effect on the creator would be the same, I'm not sure it's legal to (1) make a backup, (2) be authorized to make a backup by a media owner, and (3) transfer it -- as opposed to (2,1,3). I.e., hosting the content perpetually might be illegal regardless of your access controls. That isn't a problem with upload/download/sharing per se, but it does potentially make doing so more complicated.
It's on Peacock Premium and HBO Max.
Not a plug because there are many things to dislike about roku, above all the ads on the homescreen. But that search ... there's nothing else like it.
Same with music, I have a huge music collection. A lot of them are pirated, many of them are FLAC rips from physical discs.
The _ONE_ exception I have to this is movies on Amazon. I'm not a huge movie/television guy but I _DO_ consume most of that type of media via Amazon Prime and Netflix. If something goes away I generally don't care, and if I _DO_ care I either already have physical copies or I know I can purchase them. So I will sometimes purchase this type of media on Amazon because I find the convenience acceptable considering the risk. Sometimes I'll repurchase on Amazon for things I physically own just for the convenience of it.
---
But yeah, pirating is going to become rampant again due to the behavior of these companies. I certainly have no qualms about doing it.
Generally speaking, if I want to watch a show and it's been pulled off of netflix or prime for some other service (HBO, CBS, etc) I just pirate it and move on.
I haven't watched past the last season of Survivor that's available on Amazon because I don't care enough to pirate it, but when I do decide I want to watch through the rest of it, that's how I'll consume it.
And fuck'em. You can't even _BUY_ the latest seasons on Amazon (my gf was purchasing them as she watched through them until they stopped offering it at all).
You don't want my money, then you don't want my money.
Movie and music licensing has been absolutely destroyed recently and the hoops that you have to agree to are becoming untenable. Recently, I mentioned to a band it was sad they pulled their music off Spotify. Puzzled, they were not even aware that the licensing was pulled, and they had to go yell at their record label (who was unaware they were even on Spotify because they made less than a dollar in royalties per year on it) who has sat on it for over a year and refused to release the rights back to the artist so they can have it available on Spotify.
But to spend money on something, a company has to plan to get more in return. Apple did. What would be the plan for Google? What money-making machine of theirs would it enable?
As for money making, I think a guarantee of 'yours forever, no takebacks' would put them way out front of their competition. But perhaps most people don't care enough for that to be true.
MP3s available form Amazon, iTunes, Bandcamp at the very least all have this commendable property.
And the sale is once and forever, while an enticing revenue source is a recurring one %)
But all G has to do is say 'yeah if you want us to feature your content, you must agree to X'
With 90% of the search market, half of phones, and who knows what percentage of the smartTV market, they could institute a death sentence to those they wanted to.
IF they wanted to.
As if google doesn't already abuse its power and weild it for nefarious reasons, or have massive anti-trust concerns? But god forbid they use their power to prevent others abusing theirs by forcing people to pay again and again for media they already own.
but also
"Why doesn't Google use their market dominance to do X"
There's a reason they don't do that, in any business. How do you think e.g. anti-trust regulators would feel about that?
As a seller of widget X, there's no way I'd accept a product with a license that says they could just take it back anytime for any reason. No sane seller should agree to that.
Now, the terms for the movie rentals / sales would definitely be negotiated between Google and the content owner. And Google could of course make your no-DRM policy a line in the sand in those negotiations. But why would the content providers agree to that? There's plenty of other competitive platforms they can (and do!) sell exactly the same content on, being specifically on YouTube's movie rental system won't make or break them.
And then we get back to your original proposal, which was clearly that they'd be using all their unrelated properties as (highly unethical) leverage in the negotiations.
If that's not what you're proposing, maybe you could be really concrete about what you think Google would be saying in those contract negotiations? "We will be selling your movies without DRM; if you don't agree then X". What exactly do you think X would be?
It would be unethical to completely remove them from search. But would it be unethical to prefer partners and give them higher precedent in results?
As for what X is, I don't know precisely. They could easily update Play terms that no app my sell an item to a user that may be removed later. That would mean X would mean you weren't in Play Movies and TV, but also weren't allowed to sell movies via a Play Store App.
That said, I agree with the principle of what you're saying. Google put a LOT of things in place on youtube specifically so the large publishers wouldn't go after them, and that has extended to everything else.
Google absolutely has a large responsibility in this, but it's also true they're not the only party with responsibility for it.
But they won’t. They aren’t in the business to ethically make money, just legally. Many times, what is legally right is not ethically right.
They can also use their vast resources to try to change laws, even if it is a Herculean task. They won’t try that either. Because the only thing that matters is profit, everything else be damned
Putting it differently: if Google tried to do anything, their counter would be calling the licensing bodies anticompetitive, which puts Google in the crosshairs next.
Nice try. One of the largest tech companies of the world, which in most countries other than USA holds basically a monopoly on mobile computing, is not being pushed around by the creative industries. Remember when Youtube became a thing and the media companies wanted it gone? Google fought with them and created a technology stack that almost any media company today uses, because it was in their interest to do so.
No, it's Google all the way down alright. They can force creative industries to accept real ownership of the media by the users, but this time it's just not in their interest to do so.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/technology/ai-chatgpt-goo...
But it's not the majority, especially not the majority of the engineers, who makes decisions like that.
(And if you'e so annoyed you'd rather leave than shut up, welcome to today's IT job market.)
That band didn't own their music and the "label" likely didn't either. They got fronted money that was never repaid (as per contract) and their shit traded hands multiple times. There was wild consolidation in this world over the last 10 - 25 years. What used to be money printing turned to "GOT EM!!" dollar signs in bold on contracts, which turned to small joints falling over (dollars and commas in bold didn't map on the backend) and now some banger owns their shit.
Most likely the banger who owned their shit lost it in the shuffle of the more banger shit they owned, or the overhead of the split with the 5% the small label who was able to retain that cut didn't even render on the P&L and they just shoved it in the virtual vault because who gives a fuck?
>Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem
And by in large I still agree with it. For me I've only ever turned to piracy when the legitimate service has become a complete mess of red tape and user frustration.
[1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-pir...
Service problems means you pirate stuff because it's too inconvenient to do it legally, and easier to pirate stuff.
I'm happy to pay for games too, but I've stopped buying from Steam unless they're not available elsewhere. GOG has been my go-to, as they only sell games without DRM.
If Valve someday goes belly-up, or just decides to stop running their license servers, all those games we've bought on Steam are just gone, absent (illegal, in the US, anyway) third-party tools to strip the DRM. I believe some versions of Stream DRM can be removed, but not all.
I just don't see the need to reward a company that treats me like a criminal when I can get the same games from a company that respects me and my purchase.
(Bonus: Steam-the-software even allows you to add non-Steam games to the app, which makes it easy to run non-native games I've bought from GOG under Proton, for example.)
Meanwhile in pirating land:
Pick your desired resolution, want 8/10 bit HDR? You can have that too. Pick your desired format. Downloads quickly, don’t have to worry about network interruptions.
This nonsense directly lead to my permanent cancellation of Amazon Prime. It's infuriating to be treated like a second-class citizen even as a paying customer.
But when paying for it and maintaining access for what you paid becomes more complex than pirating, then you have a service problem that can't be solved by pricing.
A service problem would be where the service or app is too complex or time consuming to use, or has a lot of friction during use (as was the case in the original post).
I don't know if it's been backed up by real data, but services like Steam and Spotify tend to confirm this intuition.
Studios only agreed to the Spotify pricing model because the alternative was rampant file-based piracy. They figured that getting something is better than nothing.
What about demand? We are certainly listening to more music than ever before, and the population is growing, but not at the 10x or 100x rate that has happened to the supply of music. There’s an upper limit of 24 hours per day listening time per person. There is already more music than it is possible to listen to in a lifetime. Soon there will be more good music than it is possible to listen to in a lifetime.
I personally listen to less music and play more. Rather than looking for the new thing I'll examine songs in quite a lot of detail to understand them.
Sure, the latest top 40 and a bit of "common niche" albums (like the usual suspects when it comes to classic music or classic rock) were easy to find. But black and death metal? Not a chance.
I wasn't even living in the middle of nowhere, mind. Just a fairly populous suburb of a major European city. But as a teenager, it was extremely unpractical to travel to the city center, and to even learn about the stores where this music would be sold.
With piracy or Spotify, that issue evaporates.
And actually, Spotify is much better. Because it's much quicker and practical to just search Spotify and click play, than it is to browse dubious trackers, not knowing if or when I might get my download. Plus, with Spotify connect, they can be sure I won't be cancelling my plan anytime soon.
iTunes didn't improve on the physical store model any further than "now you don't have to get out of you chair to get new music." The DRM that wrapped around most tracks was frustrating enough for most people that the cost of the album didn't matter, you were better off going to a physical store, buying the physical CD, ripping it using iTunes to unencumbered ALAC/AAC and using it with iTunes or with other devices and apps.
Sure, people still used iTunes, but more for the fact that it was HEAVILY integrated with the Hot Shit Object, the iPod.
Spotify removed the barrier at the right time to succeed in the market. If you wanted to listen to Albums, you paid. But it was there, easy, no questions. You could just pop in and listen to That Single that just came out.
Most people who wanted ad-free music are going to be willing to pay for it. The rest, who are fine with radio-ish "I want to listen to the current top40" are fine with ads. It took Apple quite a while to come to near that, and they Only have a subscription model that isn't very well liked by its users.
I believe in supporting those who create media, and don't mind at all paying for streaming services that provide quality content for a fair price. As such, I happily subscribe to Amazon Prime (with several "add on" channels), Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max. Then one day I decided, "hell, I think Peacock TV has some stuff I might want to watch." So I signed up for a paid account, like any other good law-abiding citizen might.
A couple of days later I finally got around to logging in and trying to watch something, only to be met by some bizarre error message. Which led me to find out that Peacock doesn't support playback on Linux. Which sent me down a rabbit-hole of trying to find some kind of way to make it work nonetheless. After a couple of days of futzing around with everything I could think of short of running Windows in a VM (and including going as far as running Android in a VM) I gave up and cancelled my paid account.
What makes it all the more galling is how their support lines lie and say "We're always working to add support for more platforms" when the reality is, there have (from online accounts I've read) at times in the past been workarounds that let Peacock work on Linux... and they have systematically identified and blocked all of them. It would be one thing if any other major streaming service had a similar policy, or if Peacock had a position of "we don't officially support Linux, so it might work or it might not". But this is different. It's an active, hostile, intentional effort to block Linux users.
Anyway, that's what I'd call a "service problem". As far as I can tell, there is no amount of money I can pay Peacock that will let me use their service. So not a "pricing problem".
In conclusion, I will now return to using Bittorrent or other mechanisms to pirate any Peacock content I find interesting. Fuck 'em, I tried to pay the fuckers and they didn't want to play ball.
Hell, even on Windows with their app, Prime won't let you watch more that HD. For UHD, you need their stick or some other device. [0]
Netflix supports UHD on computers, but only on some browsers, of which Chrome is not one [1].
But, to your point about Peacock, at least they do work on Linux, as in you'll get some sort of image.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
I don't know (or care) about "high-def" but I can assure you that Prime and Netflix work just fine on Linux.
Netflix supports UHD on computers
That's not really relevant to me. I don't care about UHD, I just care about being able to watch. I'm not that picky.
Peacock, on the other hand, doesn't work at all.
For mainstream content it's available around the globe, in all kinds of different formats / bitrates, with community sourced subtitles, usable on any device (hw performance limitations notwithstanding) and in my possession forever after downloading should I choose to keep the content.
Another service improvement on piracy is better availability of more obscure content. Live shows, foreign movies/music or anything out of the mainstream is usually accessible better when you're pirating content.
The only content class traditional media companies and online streaming offers a better service for is live broadcasting, and even then geographical restrictions f*ck you over depending on the licensing agreements.
e.g. a lot of times no assortment of streaming subscriptions will get you access to certain shows/films/games. sometimes they may be out of print on disc as well. there may be no actual legal way to access that content. but piratebay is right there...
Actually I had that impression some 7-8 years ago, but since then the experience on Spotify (France) continually deteriorated, with sometimes entire playlists (not even from a single artist, but e.g. one of my fav chiptune compilations) becoming entirely unplayable (greyed out) over night. I have the impression that this situation is getting more and more similar to the madness in video streaming. Every freaking time I want to watch a specific movie (vs just taking whatever they propose right now) I end up with zero hits on the streaming platforms in the house. (But in my family's defense, they only have amazon prime, netflix, and disney+... /s)
I don't participate in either of these shit-shows any longer. If this mode of operation of "one walled garden against the other" centering around exclusive content at the front of the distribution, with so much disregard for the long tail, is what streaming breeds, then streaming is no improvement over pirating. (and that doesn't even go into the economics of the system, i.e. who really makes money in it)
It’s both. I can go on Steam and find a fun looking game that can range from $0 to $100. There’s no minimum spend. I spend hundreds of dollars a year on “cheap” games and nothing on movies or music.
I think service quality is an issue too, at least for me.
Recently I wanted to rewatch Twin Peaks on TV. I found out I can stream it on Sky Showtime, which also has an AppleTV app. Sounds great!
I sign up, pay the cash and start watching.
And they are sending me a 1080p video stream with stereo audio.
This show has 5.1 and 7.1 DTS-MA audio-mixes on Blu-ray, so official surround-mixes definitely exists.
It would have perhaps cost Showtime 200kbps extra to offer me a 5.1 AC3 track?
But instead they will nickel and dime me to save some measly amounts of bandwidth and only give me a 128kbps stereo-track.
I’ll be honest and admit I went out and downloaded a “proper” release for this instead, and the subscription is now cancelled.
Because the service quality was not on par with a pirated alternative.
It's simply not worth the risk. And games that I want will be on sale sooner or later anyway.
This is because until recently (by the timescale of "buying things") there were no intangibles to be bought or sold. An intangible is mostly a right to something - in other words, it's paperwork.
But some things are both tangible and intangible, i.e. that copy of the movie you have on your computer.
That's when the regulator should have stepped in to make precise use of words: you are decidedly not "buying" or "purchasing" a movie from Google Movies. You can only be "renting" it, on Google's terms, albeit long term.
Regulators should mandate the use of the word renting as soon as there is no tangible copy that you can use independently of the company that "sold" -- actually, "leased" -- whatever you "bought" from them.
The one i have in mind is in France (UFC Que Choisir vs Steam iirc) but i know there are others.
From time to time, someone look at these, read the judge opinion, realise how much it would change the web economy out there, write a panicked piece... Then swiftly erase it from their memory because it is a tad too big to think through.
Can the user use the thing mostly without the provider? Yes = purchase, no = rental.
If all of sudden it's all "rentals" everywhere, what does it change -- apart from opening up an avenue for the people willing to actually sell the things they would otherwise lease, because consumers will prefer it that way?
Did you bought a game on Steam? Now they have to give you a lot of rights they were not allowed to give you. And still are not.
But I would be okay if they had to change the misleading "Buy Movie" to a phrase like "Buy a Limited License to Watch Movie". Or "Buy Limited Access to Movie".
And yes, I know people are restricted in what they can do with Bluray discs, but as long as you have a functioning player, you can watch the disc. I think that's all anyone has ever expected out of physical media. DRM'd digital media comes with much more uncertainty, and that should be reflected in the terminology used to "buy a license" for it.
Or we agree that such a set of conditions constitutes renting rather than 'owning' as one typically does after 'buying'.
Genuinely not sure which option has more downsides.
When you buy something it's your property that you own and you can sell it to someone else if you want.
When you rent something it's still owned by someone else restricting what you can do with it.
In my mind it's fraud to pretend to sell a thing when you are in fact renting it out.
Maybe something for EU to regulate next!
See, back in the they when you purchased something physical like a VHS tape, that was useful mental model because it resembled the purchase of bread or tomatoes.
Then people started finding ways to reproduce the contents of these physical objects for re-sell or distribution without a license and the illusion of purchasing physical songs and movies fell apart.
People would argue that piracy is not stealing because the original still remained in its place.
Today we experience the act of purchasing a movie or a song in much purer form. No more charade trying to make it look like as if you are purchasing avocados, you get exactly what you are paying for: the right to enjoy the media in the medium.
People no longer can pretend that they purchased Die Hard 3 and they own the movie and they can do whatever they want with it. The producer(and those who hold the rights) still own the movie, you just pay to enjoy it in the form you paid for and you can't do anything else with it.
You don't even own the right to watch it the way you want, just because you payed for a ticked and watched in the movie theater doesn't give you the right to watch it on iTunes or Netflix. You pay for each medium.
technically correct, sure. letter vs spirit of the law.
I think it should be a finable offense for a company to use verbiage that implies ownership when in fact it's licensing.
While I agree with you that some creators do believe they can still make a living with DRM-free content, many do not, which includes essentially anything from a major movie or TV studio.
Imagine buying a car just to figure out that a couple of years later you can't fill it up anymore, because "that particular model of inlet is not supported any longer." You are not allowed to change the inlet.
[1] While we're dreaming, make copyright 20 years.
The result is I started downloading everything I loved and "liking" the content to track what I already have. There's still some duplicates but overall I retain all the videos I want. [Don't need YT premium now]
After that I downloaded mp4 to mp3 converters and stored the result in a cloud [Don't need Spotify Premium now].
Movies, TV Shows, Games, Mobile Apps, Books, Research paper are all piratable. OTT pulls episode out of air frequently and I don't like someone telling me what I should watch. [Don't need Netflix, OTTs now].
Steam is an exception since I think they really earn their 30% cut.
From the money I save, I buy/donate it to actual content I consumed and liked or software that actually help in ownership such as VLC, archive.org, overpriced merch etc. I'm supporting the revenue starved pirate community this way. Also, This means the money actually reaches the developers instead of a fat cut by the middlemen.
Paying for what you like instead of what you consume means you're supporting great work rather than spraying all works with equal money.
Don't make a free cloud service your source of truth. (Paid, too, unless you just pay for compute and storage.)
If you care about any data, have it under your control, stored on machines / media under your (physical) control. All else can and will disappear without notice.
I just logged in to Spotify for the first time in about two years and checked out a few playlists I had saved. Most of them skipped every song. Absolutely ridiculous.
I’m not justifying the absolutely garbage user experience here though.
Personally: I refuse to buy digital movies on any platform because it’s deceptive marketing. You can never actually “buy”, only rent. So I go for that option if I really have to. If pirating is easier than paying (which on appletv is just one click) then you have failed and I will rather pirate it instead.
I know this quote gets thrown around whenever we talk about piracy, but there is a reason it resonates so well with everyone.
I might have multiple streaming subscriptions and I still occasionally get blu-rays and DVDs, but I still prefer my Radarr+Jellyfin setup to download "Linux ISOs". It automatically syncs the progress with Trakt, and it automatically fetches anything I add to my watchlist almost instantly.
The same applies to Meta and Microsoft as well, and some others. I have a general rule, if a company does something, anything at all, that translates to "fuck you what are you going to do about it you need us more than we need you" then I cease using all their services immediately, no matter how painful. Require me to sign in to use a local application? Demand updates and install them automatically, or prevent me from continuing until I update? Bye, forever. This means I don't have a video game console of any kind, I often get my emails sent to spam, I do quite a bit of my own user infrastructure maintenance, and my experience is alien to a lot of other people, but let me tell you, I'm free and I feel it 24/7. My mind is free from worry about losing access to these things, I don't think about what I am allowed to say, almost ever, I'm not subject to attempts to manipulate my behavior nearly as often, I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone, no matter how difficult. I've got a secret for you: it's only difficult because you've been trained to do things their way for so long. Their way is not actually easier or more convenient, you're just not used to the other way any more. But you used to be, there used to be a time when they couldn't treat you this way, they still can't unless you let them, they've spent enormous resources convincing you that you don't have a choice, but you do, they need you more than you need them, you don't have to take this abuse, stop giving your patronage to companies who treat you like this or none of this will ever get any better.
Personally I dont consider open source codebases that don't come with services embedded as services, so things like Blink or AOSP that are made by google are fine, so long as they don't interact with google in any way or incorporate patterns that lead you into their funnel. They're FOSS code, not services, you might as well be running a fork, it doesn't really matter who makes them. I do use some software that is forked from google upstream code that removes these sorts of things, but I go to great lengths to make sure even simple things like using 8.8.8.8 are not occurring.
Disclosure: founder here.
You can share albums via links, and you can even allow your family to add photos[1] to your albums. They don't need an account or an app. All your photos are stored in original quality, e2ee.
If you've feedback, please let me[3] know, would love to understand what we can do better.
[1]: https://ente.io
[2]: https://ente.io/blog/collect-photos
[3]: vishnu[at]ente.io
But good on you for avoiding their services, i do the same (however, i still use Google maps regularly for navigation because Apple maps has let me down too often). I also watch youtube.
Regarding video game consoles, you could get an older one that has no cloud connectivity. They are cheap and the games are still great.
Basically the same as the search engines he mentioned that rely on google, but he doesn't use google directly.
Address lookup is a shortcoming, and there's this https://github.com/pnoll1/osmand_map_creation to help you get around that, and sometimes the routing algorithm used by Osmand in particular can be goofy from time to time, I can't speak to other clients. Finally, there's traffic, which is not a problem that can be resolved without collecting and processing data from all users, which I find unethical and so will live without.
>... I use no Google services...
>I have a general rule, if a company does something, anything at all, that translates to "fuck you what are you going to do about it you need us more than we need you" then I cease using all their services immediately, no matter how painful.
>Bye, forever.
>... stop giving your patronage to companies who treat you like this or none of this will ever get any better.
That's all well and good, except:
>Now, if someone sends me a YouTube link, I watch it (in an invidious instance, of course) and I use some metasearch engines which rely on Google to some degree...
So much for ceasing the "use of all their services immediately". All of your "I'm above the system"/holier than thou rhetoric falls flat on it's face. You still give them patronage. Great job cutting a lot of it out, I'm not trying to take that away, but maybe be a bit more humble and honest?
FYI I have created a tool to break this dependency also, https://codeberg.org/mister_monster/YouTube2Peertube it enables the content on YouTube to be mirrored elsewhere, and a good number of people use it, but not near enough.
As far as search goes, the truth is I find myself using search less and less in general, because it is mostly broken, but when I do I default to independent indexes like marginilia, brave (which isn't 100% independent yet), even yandex sometimes, but find myself sometimes using a metasearch engine like ddg or metager and so in that way one step removed I do use google search every so often.
> So I pirate the movie (please don't arrest me, it's google's fault).
Is it pirated if you already own a legally valid license?
How about rips of blu-rays you own, which you solely use and do not intend to share? Is that pirating or using your legally owned product on a different medium?
I imagine it depends on who you talk to. If you talk to the company lawyers, they'll say it's illegal and you need to pay up. If you talk to a different lawyer that believes in better IP rights, they'll tell you it's not illegal but hasn't been tested in a court of law.
Ultimately, the only way to know if something is illegal, in the US, is to do the possibly-illegal act, then get yourself sued for it (or worse, arrested, since some IP violations can be prosecuted criminally), so that it can be decided in a court of law whether it's actually illegal or not. Once a court precedent has been set, then we know if something is truly illegal or not. Though this can change if another case ends up with the court (usually a higher court) throwing out the precedent.
The most famous case decided in consumers' favor was about recording tapes from TV broadcasts to watch at a different time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Uni....
** This is here to point out that it being illegal can be interpreted in multiple ways. Some steps of the process have not been covered. Like "is writing everywhere that i allow you to buy a thing or possess it but only give you a temporary licence to play it under TOS and EULA that you cannot physically read legal?"
This is protected fair use. But distributing software to decrypt DVD DRM is illegal.
Ripping blu-rays, most likely means getting around AACS which is probably illegal under DMCA. See 17 U.S. Code § 1201 and some rulings[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_shifting [2] https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2018/
Halfway through reading, it refuses to open on my Kindle. Deleting the book and re-downloading it results in the same thing. I update the software, still nothing. No amount of time spent troubleshooting suggestions from Amazon, Reddit, etc. change a thing about the situation. There is literally no way to open the book that I legally paid for on my Kindle hardware that I legally paid for.
Maybe I can buy another Kindle and cross my fingers that the bug doesn't show up there, but this Kindle isn't even old. I bought it in 2019 and the battery life is still excellent.
Guess what I did after that with Count Zero and every other book I ever bought on the Kindle Store just in case?
Feel zero guilt about it.
It's like trying to explain to your aunt that "the fediverse is like email" when email itself might as well be a Google service for most people.
I'm a technical user. On a website full of technical users. We really should stop considering their needs over our own even in recreational discussions.
Hell, sometimes something isn't available in my region through any legal means.
Imo this is the important thing here. Eroding "I buy, I own" and replacing it with "I buy, I own until seller says otherwise" is nefarious.
Giving Google, Apple, and so forth the benefit of doubt and a cop-out with "it's a language problem" is not the way. Surely they can afford linguists and user-study-groups to find a phrasing that better conveys the idea.
The thing is, pessimist as I can be, I think they already have done that and came out with the idea that "we don't want to convey that notion, we can price it higher if we call it 'buy'".
This to me is similar to planting ideas like plastic recycling, or the individuals carbon footprint, in the consumer mind. It displaces the responsibility away from companies doing the best _they_ can.
You pay to enter into a contract to obtain a license to do things using the data, under the legal system for your jurisdiction.
Hypothetically, if people could be trusted to follow the law or the law could be enforced practically, it would be fine if all digital media were widely available. You could obtain the data, but being a law-abiding citizen, you would not play it without having obtained a license to do so.
Thus, the current state of affairs is really just the reductive case of the prisoners dilemma combined with society's decision that content creators deserve to be paid for their work (a tangential discussion on copyright as a concept).
Just the other day I gave up trying to cast a zoom meeting from my phone to my Roku express box. I experienced very laggy video, no audio no matter what I tried o both zoom and Roku, and myriad errors when I tried to update the software on Roku. In the end I just gave up.
From apps that demand an internet connection to do functions that should have nothing to do with connectivity, health apps that no longer sync with the ihealth app, my health monitoring device that has stopped syncing with my phone for no reason, my MiFi that randomly asks me login before continuing to access the internet…
I get the sense these are the way things are set up to be. When consumer tech works, it’s great, but the reliability is pretty bad because it would eat into profits to spend on improving reliability.
It's a shame that it's hard to convince people that tech shouldn't be broken by design without someone on death's door, but it does really hit home just how shallow and empty modern tech is becoming when you think of these scenarios. I'm glad that she can see the movie anyway, unfortunately most people in this situation won't know another way to see it.
Not only piracy is not a crime in these cases, but it should be morally encouraged.
Of course I feel sorry for the creators whose work gets ripped off (and, being a creator myself, I know how much it hurts when somebody eats away my already thin profit margins).
But creators have lots of distribution channels today that they can actually own (from Bandcamp, to Funkwhale, to Peertube), that they can monetize however they like, that don't throw some spare change back at them (like Google or Amazon do), and that don't encourage broken and exploitative business models.
I feel like we ought to build more platforms that are actually owned by the creators in order to get out of Big Tech's grip over the creative industry - with all the distortions that come with it.
But to point out something not mentioned and likely come up with in the comments, why not Apple iPad?
And there is a reason why Apple is financially doing insanely great. Where are the competition? All the alternatives are so good damn appalling, to quote Steve Jobs, ( Cant find the Clip ) "Makes me embarrassed as a human being".
I always kept a French credit card for the sole purpose of having access to the French music catalogue, and not the Dutch one (yeah, I learnt that's a thing).
Lately, they started forcing me to also setup an address in France, and regularly log in FROM THE ADDRESS I set up.
Guess who hasn't pirated any music in over 12 years and started again...
People, the internet is decentralized. Use it.
Stop using social media, build your website. Own your domain. Don't buy it in google, don't host on AWS.
Nobody visits it? Good.
Use use smartphone less, use your laptop more. Buy a dumbphone.
Use Linux.
Be unashamed of pirating stuff, if you have to pay yet another corporate rent.
Buy shareware from independent developers. Don't use the corporate stores.
Overall: create, don't just be a consumer.
It was an app modeled after Spotify, but used torrents for the actual music streaming. Those would get hand picked from actual trackers (so they have seeds already) and matched up with metadata.
There would also be a pay-what-you-want subscription that would go directly to the artists you've been listening to. It would be in Zcash, so that artists can choose not to share their donations with the label they're on. Songbee would take a small cut (I was thinking ~30%, nowadays I'd say 10% should be enough) to pay moderators etc.
I got burned out at the time, but nowadays I think it's an idea worth reviving?
[1]: some are open source at https://github.com/Songbee, some are lost forever but that's for the best
This is why I switched to iPhone/apple products and never looked back, and I say that as a former Android fanboy who started with the G1 and flashed custom roms and participated in XDA forums for years to make our Android phones make sense to us UX/UI wise.
iOS simply solves 95% of all the issues I had when using Android, while respecting my settings as configured and upholding my privacy. Good riddance Android/Google, never again.
As an Apple user, I’m aware of the insane limitations I have in every part outside their garden. Have you tried adding a ringtone?
There is a reason gog sells games without drm and you can download and keep the installer forevers, that's what differenciates them from the rest.
Remember:
- you pay once for a single item - you own.
- you pay on a regular basis to access multiple items - you don’t.
As simple as that. The pre-internet model is a book library. You pay a small monthly fee for the right to borrow books subject to some rules and limitations. You don't own them but on the other hand you have access to a huge collection of resources owned by someone else.
Same story with all the music and video streaming services. Someone owns a huge collection of media and you can buy access to this collection if you pay a relatively small regular fee.
If you really want to own stuff then you need to invest a substantial amount of time and money into organizing your own library or collection of music, video, books or whatever else you are passionate about.
PeerTube and LBRY are perfectly usable YT replacements - there's just the chicken and egg problem of getting either viewers or creators to switch en masse first.
[0] https://yewtu.be [1] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.polymorphicshad... [2] https://freetubeapp.io/
I like that term. I am a happy DDG user who uses Youtube without an account and typically avoids everything else by Google. Sorry for not clicking the thumbs up button or subscribing to your channel - I would if it would not require a Google identity. I also use Firefox and would prefer if Mozilla would find a way to diversify away from Google sponsorship.
If your survey is a Google form, I am not participating. If your document is on Google behind a login-wall, I am not reading it. If your email account is on Google, I will ask you about other channels. I think my data is worth much more than Google is willing to pay for it and they don't deserve to get it in exchange for a couple of candies or glass beads.
I also cancelled my HBO because they removed Westworld which I was just about to watch. Thanks but no thanks.
Do not let the seller to manage what the seller alleges is yours; even if the seller is not malevolent, you can lose what you "legitimately bought". Take control into your hands.
Good distributors, like Bandcamp, or iTunes, or even Amazon, allow you to directly download the music that you've bought, and still continue streaming; always go for this option if you care about your purchase.
With movies and, paradoxically, books it's very often not nearly so straightforward; a direct download may be not available at all. See the first paragraph then.
Maybe sometimes that’s technically illegal, because the law is wrong. Fuck the wrong law. I’m unfortunately not done with Google, but I’m done with rentals for sale.
Spent way too much time trying to figure out how to solve it... pirated it in the end.
It's amazing how they still cannot understand that all this DRM and antipiracy bullshit does is annoy their paying customers.
You can also find media cheap at yard sales, pawn shops, ebay or online.
Also have you seen the price of dvds now? Bud Spencer & Terence Hill movies are going for bank now. For classic spaghetti westerns and funny cops movies!
Changed Google, got logged out of Chromecast/Google TV. And reinstall process is "allow locatio ", "no, allow precise location", "allow bluetooth", "allow voice match", ... - all this to stream music in my local network...
Eventually, despite my staunch opposition to piracy, I ended up pirating the copies. This world doesn't make sense anymore.
The popular stuff will be available anyway; i'm more worried about the fringe stuff which gets removed (from netflix etc) for reasons of woke-ness etc.
That is right! You buy a license that gives you right to consume the content. It is not just Google's fault, everyone is doing this! I believe reason it is so is because of greed and incompetence.
The incompetence becomes apparent when you try to use the content you have access to and it doesn't work.
I am more than willing to pay for content, but once availability breaks down, a use case for piracy/free use is created.
The pros - you're paying for "all-you-can-eat" like approach where everything is available (as long as you pay)
Sadly, Digital media was never to be owned. (it to be - grant rights to use) If it's open without no DRM - it can be copied, no real ownership.
It's only rights, unlike physical goods where copying can be more complex to accomplish meaning - we can own something.
The "funny" thing is that we were sold on the lie that digital goods would be cheaper, because now they don't have to manufacture and ship physical media. Of course, everything still costs the same, or more. This is most striking when looking at books: often the Kindle version will cost roughly the same (or even more!) than the paperback version. Even when it does cost less (and isn't part of some promotion or sale), the difference certainly isn't explained by the cost savings around digital distribution.
That is exactly what is written in the EULA you agreed with on the first run.
I will argue about the first problem: one doesn't really own the things we buy on Google platforms.
This is a general trend with many platforms nowadays like Amazon and Kobo ebooks for example but also Netflix, Spotify and almost everything else. They just don't want to let you to download the content in DRM-free format. They say they are legally obliged but in reality this is what the content industry wants. They have used their lobbying power to obtain from the government the laws they wanted.
I sustain that this system is unfair to the users because:
1. users can be deprived of the goods they purchased with little or no possibility to have their rights restored. 2. users cannot, even temporarily, lend something they purchased to a friend or a familiar 3. users cannot sold back of give away what they purchased and no longer want to use
Please note that all these problems did not existed when the goods were physical objects like a music CD or a book. You owned them and you was free to lend or just give them to a friend or just someone else.
Please note that the fact you had these rights was not thanks to the benevolence of the content creation industry but it was just come from the simple fact that they sold you a physical objects and it was not practically possible to restrict people rights on the object they purchased.
In addition the laws we have since centuries protect the right of private property. These laws are a pillar of our society and has not been done under the pressure of some industries' lobbies.
What follows from these considerations is:
- the practice of restrict people from content they purchased in unfair to the user - the laws that govern these practice serve the interest of the content industries and are contrary to the user's right.
This means people should say "no" to purchase content on all these platforms and only purchase digitally when they get a DRM-free file with the content they purchased. It is also fine to pirate things because the system is just broken and unfair.
I would like also to add that even when they sell you a physical object or give you a DRM-free file, the relation between the user and the vendor is unfair. The reason is that, if we look to all the users together, the vendor can extract an unlimited and potentially disproportionate amount of money from their creation. I consider this unfair because the reward they get should be proportionate to the value of the content and the work it took to produce it but this is not actually the case.
To cite some example: an Elsevir article written and peer-reviewed by University researcher, may be thirty years ago, and if you want to read it you have to pay a ridiculous disproportionate amount like 30 dollars. They can extract and unlimited amount of money for something they contributed very little to. The system is flawed and unfair and the law are not there to fix things.
Another example: the copyright for US created content have been extended to the unreasonable to protect the interest of the content industry. Initially the old copyright law dictated a more reasonable duration before the copyright expired.
This means that the system of the copyright was already unfair since its beginning but now it is even more unfair than before.
We are trading our rights for a better system and good laws for convenience but sometimes, because of an accident, we are struck all of the sudden about how unfair the system is.
Also, the boot process is pretty slow, and most tablets I've tried are pretty slow in general (responsiveness). I think they need to de-bloat Android, especially for tablets. The hardware I've used these on is plenty quick.