The Pirates Are Back
pandasecurity.com
pandasecurity.com
DVDs don't require a monthly payment to remain accessible, and there's no executive who can decide on a whim to deny access even when paying. Nobody cares that the season 1 DVDs come from studio A, while season 2-4 DVDs are from studio B. They can be shared or swapped with friends. Some DVDs are even available to loan at the public library for a modest annual membership fee (and we're members anyway because they also have gasp books!)
So I have Prime (which is kinda/sorta effectively free to me because I pay for it for the delivery service), Netflix, Disney (I like Star Wars and Marvel), we sometimes subscribe to Apple. Then over here in Aus there's also Stan and Binge, who have some of the tv content we want.
This is already a far cry from what Netflix used to be - the place to go to for most stuff. It's also a far cry from the music situation, where I can pick my streaming service (I use Deezer) and more or less have the same catalogue available whichever one I pick. (I know, none of them pay artists very well, I also buy CDs and t-shirts.)
And now on top of this, the various studios are trying to get me to subscribe to their offerings, either as standalones or as add-ons to Prime - AMC, Paramount etc, so I can get their one flagship show on there. How about no?
This is getting more expensive than the old cable and satellite packages that streaming was supposed to replace, and they're putting prices up at the moment.
And that's before we get into stuff that's not available on any service legally here. That show you like? Yeah we're only going to give you access to the first few seasons, even though there have been five more seasons made.
Why won't you let me pay?
So yeah, piracy is quite appealing, especially when I can go to yandex.com, type "Stream <movie>" or "Stream <show>" and I'll be taken to a site where I can watch it immediately. Maybe it's not always the best quality stream, but the pirate bay still seems to be up too.
Definitely not in the US. People were paying minimum $100 per month for a fraction of the content, not inflation adjusted, not on demand, not on nearly any device anywhere, 15 years ago.
Not to mention you can simply cancel and resubscribe so you only pay for one or two services per month, an option that was never available before.
Apple: $10 Netflix: $23 Amazon: $9 WarnerBros Discovery: $20 Disney: $20 Comcast: $12 Paramount: $12
The only one missing is Sony, but I don’t think they offer streaming. $106/month gets an individual on demand access to almost everything except sports, without advertising breaks. Family sharing would make it much cheaper. Either way, I would take this situation over having to pay Comcast/DirecTV/Dish Network/Verizon to be a middleman any day.
I don't give a crap about 'any device', and 99% of the content is not interesting, we tend to watch a handful of things on each one. We're back to paying a premium for a few things we want and a load of shit we don't want.
I also only watch a handful of things, so I just rent the series in my Apple TV app. Usually a few USD per episode.
Honestly I'm not all that price sensitive, I just don't want to subscribe to 15 different things when I usually only want to access a couple of shows on each. And the interface fragmentation bothers me as well.
I should probably get something with an interface like Roku used to offer, with a unified search across services. It's a shame there isn't one subscription service I can access here that will do that automatically behoind the scenes. But rights are complex.
The great thing about the Apple TV app is if you have to sign up for a monthly fee to watch something, I can subscribe and immediately cancel and still continue watching without having to remember to cancel the subscription.
I haven't tried using the Apple TV app that way, perhaps I should give it a go.
And local news which is important to a sizeable demographic. And advertising is now coming to a number of platforms - not yet within shows but give it time!
It has long been within US shows, even before streaming, but it has gotten more and more egregious.
Whilst this is true, we've spent the last decade hearing how the intermediaries (streaming services) and media companies continually screw over artists.
It is more true to say any drop in revenue due to any alternative way to consume media (of which piracy is just one way) results in the _intermediaries_ seeing the biggest drop in revenue as they were the ones who took the most from the artists.
Perhaps if labels and studios paid artists more their argument would resonate more with the fans who consume the art.
The internet never did fully deliver on the dream to disintermediate the studios and labels, but there's always a hope that there's still time.
Granted, I'm probably an outlier here since I'm not a big consumer of the type of media they're talking about, but it seems like affordability and convenience would be much bigger factors. Keep in mind that people were doing things like sharing accounts even when streaming services were undergoing massive growth. It doesn't sound like they had much concern about artists or other people working behind the scenes.
Sale
Fallacy
There's no way I'd see anything I download for free otherwise. I don't even have a TV, and I'm not getting one of those spyware shit boxes any time soon. The thought of subscribing to some service which leases content to me in exchange for paying them back indefinitely is a joke to me; I'll never do it for anything.
If they sold DRM-free digital movies and shows, like they do for music (and sometimes books), it'd be a different story. I like to own files and store and play them however I want. I don't pirate music because it's easier to search and buy it DRM-free on an online store.
Also, "digital piracy" makes as much sense as "digital murder". Piracy is robbing people of physical goods because pirates can't copy them for free ad infinitum. If they could, we'd be in some post-scarcity paradise, where "piracy" wouldn't even have violent criminal connotations. And what we're trying to do is impose the same tyrannies of physical scarcity on the paradise we have in cyberspace. Because of a fallacious urge to get more $$$ (in a specific, paranoid business model that ironically decreases your sales)! :D
Yawn... sounds like 1999, when the piracy was supposed to kill the music industry. It survived, and thrived just fine. So tired of seeing this bullshit.
Then you have a large number of low quality/low effort and high price "products". It's not enough to just create something, it must be good. You can't just for instance create a piece of music that sounds terrible and expect it to sell, then blame piracy for lost sales, or make a low budget "film" with your phone and expect people to pay , idk how much a movie DVD or blue ray or whatever medium it is nowadays costs and blame piracy again.
Or recent real life example, Diablo 4. Low effort, unfinished game with a static map and huge pointless grind and they wanted 70€. 100€ for the deluxe edition including season 1 pass. A complete failure of a game, unfinished, boring and overpriced. EA has started selling their new games for 70€ base now. I can't and won't afford that.
I have my go to MMORPG which I play out of boredom and I download a pirated game every so often. Most of the time this game gets uninstalled very quickly. So there I saw the game, saw it was bad and no harm done. Then there are games I liked playing (BG3) or did not like (Starfield) but still played and did not buy, because the price is too expensive BG3 60€, Starfield 70€ (if Diablo 4 can so can we, right).
Movies, man I pay 23€ / month for a TV streaming service that is buggy and has loads of ads. Sometimes I dick around and go to some online movie and series platform and watch the Disney Star Wars series or Star Trek. The Star Trek series are particularly disappointing and I'm glad I didn't pay some subscription service for temporary access to their platform.
I was subscribed to HBO Go but only as part of the local ISP's TV bundle. When it became HBO Max it became much worse. Also the content is "woke" as far I understand the word woke being used. LGBT propaganda. I'm not interested in seeing that. Netflix, part of an ISP package for 1 year. I barely watched it. The series are uninteresting. The one movie I saw that was somewhat good was "Don't look up". If the pirate offerings were not available I would just not watch the stuff.
When I was young I had CD and vynil collections, I DJed, I created music. I spent so much money to in the end have my records and CDs stolen and my career ended. Music and movies, series, all disposable "art".
How I spend my time is playing games or coding and watching Twitch IRL streams on the side, enough to make some noise and you get to see different places around the globe.
Nowadays movies are just superhero shit and Barbie and other stupid nonsensical stuff. Low quality/ effort stuff and overpriced. And tons of recreations/remasters. Same for games, a lot of low quality and effort, high price garbage and remasters.
Quality over quantity.
You don't need much, you need 1 thing that's good.
And the thing with streaming service, either they're not available in my country or they're expensive. 8€ per month or more to access, temporary access to a limited collection of content. And if you want it all, you have to subscribe to 4 5 or more services all with their own little walled garden app. And in terms of Netflix, they're so hostile towards their users. Sharing the account with someone in your house is against their rules? Fuck off. They pay flat rate for their egress. It's just pure greed. I'm not playing their game.
Let's see if dictator dang shadowbanned me, because he doesn't like the truth, like all little silicon valley bitches
They don’t. They have the right to sell their wares. You have the right to not buy if you dislike the terms. No one has the right to steal.
To copy.
This is copyright, not theft, which is why this is civil law rather than criminal law.
Also law... just because something is law does not make it correct. Things which in hindsight should never have been legal in the most obvious way (slavery, apartheid, etc) were legal in their time. Copyright doesn't feel even as obvious as those things.
From: U.S. Constitution - Article 1 Section 8 [1]
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Make the copyright term 10, 15, or even 20 years at most and the “justification” to “steal” gets a lot weaker.
> There are two main problems with digital piracy. First, it robs the creator of their income. It’s not just big companies who suffer – the people working behind the scenes lose out too.
How risible! Over the decades we have come to learn that those who pirate are those who are willing to expend their time and use their technical competence to consume media that they otherwise wouldn't pay for or cannot afford to begin with. Like younger folk. And the economically disadvantaged (George Carlin vocetto). A small % of the media corps' "attention base."
It's just a rhetorical talking point in the service of effecting leverage for the incumbents, but does the average Joe know that? And what would change if they did?
Now I'm falling into cynicism, albeit well founded ... Oh, let's go devil's advocate:
And what of the societal consequences of the copyrighting of what is effectively a very large number (encoded media file IP). As though ideas can be owned.
So, here in the UK, we more or less have to pay the BBC license fee if we want to use a TV service, and so we pay for the BBC's programming and they put some of their stuff onto iPlayer (their streaming service). However, iPlayer often time limits programmes (30 days is common) and there's a lot of older stuff that isn't available on there, but is available on torrents or sometimes people upload old obscure stuff to YouTube.
Once I've downloaded something away from the official BBC iPlayer service, I can keep it for as long as I like and it doesn't matter if it's obscure.
With other streaming services, there's a focus on popularity and so less popular products either never get added or get removed. I worry that this is going to lead to the cultural disappearance of many older films and TV.
That article is very poorly written or at least it just regurgitates the fallacies from the big media companies. Piracy is most definitely not "stealing" as copying doesn't deprive the owner of their copy. They just wish to impose artificial scarcity to increase their profits and to wield control over their customers e.g. region locking
During the pandemic, spending a few bucks on Netflix or Disney+ made sense if you had heaps of free time every day and could binge anything you wanted from their massive back catalogs. But the value proposition of $20 for a month of access to such catalogs changes when you only have an hour a day or less to dedicate to content consumption (and this is without taking into account price hikes, password sharing crackdowns and whatnot).
As a long-time pirate, I'm encouraged to see the break-up of streaming services into different fiefdoms as it is enticing people back into piracy. I think that media companies (not just tv/film ones) have far too much power and influence over people and society, so I prefer to see them having to listen to their customers. I find the way that the big companies have bought their way into politics and legal areas to be very concerning (e.g. Sony Music vs Quad9).
(In the interests of full disclosure, I also pirate and watch a lot of new popular stuff as well)
> The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment.
I cancelled Netflix because of the drop in quality of the content over the years. It just isn't worth it to keep it around for the few shows which are decent. I don't pirate, I have other hobbies, but I could imagine many people in the same circumstance would pirate content to catch a good show. This is doubly true of movie geeks that would subscribe to multiple streaming services at once to get their content.
This feels akin to Chrystia Freeland saying families should cut a $8 streaming subscription to balance their budgets... during a COL crisis where people are spending >$3000 a month for basics.
No wonder people are going back to piracy, it's just better in every way.
Another example, even if I rent a movie online, I can't often get it in my language's audio or subtitle because of my region.
It is funny that the industry can't seem to get that.
This does play a part, but I'd wager that a larger part of piracy becoming more attractive is these services becoming more expensive (I really doubt that in this case its inflation...), while they have less to offer. And that you now need accounts with multiple streaming services to watch all the popular shows. And then also a crack-down on account sharing started happening. It shouldn't come as a surprise that piracy is becoming popular again.
I also kinda hate how suggestion algorithms are not customizable at all, and all your actions are input to them.
It adds a mental burden when choosing a song: choosing a song not just affects what I listen now, but what I will get suggested in the future.
A simple switch "don't feed my actions to algorithm" would have solved that, but of course the company doesn't want that. It wants all the data it can get.
Spotify has a private listening mode that does that
(For those whose privacy concerns would prevent them from using Last.fm to keep track of their music listening over time, there is Libre.fm. However, all it is good for is keeping personal records, not socializing with many other listeners.)
Gives me the creeps.
With Spotify or Yandex.Music, however, everything is shared, and you can't use a different player.
Then the internet blew up. I was so excited about all the new communities and tools that it made available to us. I didn’t think about privacy at all since I never had before and now there was all this cool stuff.
I slowly came to understand what was happening and now that I do i can’t go back.
I don’t begrudge any one service from existing, but I think it’s bad if the default way to participate in our culture is through platforms that Hoover up everything you do.
That's laughable.
All the big studios licensed their stuff to Netflix because that's where everyone was going, but that wasn't as profitable, and in the process they destroyed the rest of their channel-by-channel and appointment TV business without really thinking about sustainability for the workforce in the long term.
Then the big media companies wanted those profits back, so they started fragmenting into multiple streaming services as their Netflix deals expired, and now we're back to $200/month to get all the shows.
But the workforce isn't seeing any of that money this time around due to the lack of streaming covering in the contracts, which is what led to the current strikes.
It's a tricky problem for that industry: I suspect I'm not alone in wanting to see creators and working class people get paid for their work, but also not willing to go back to the old system of having to over-pay for a ton of content I don't want just to get the fraction of content I do want because it's spread across a ton of different "channels" that all need to be paid for separately.
> "stealing digital content"
Most of the definitions for "steal" involve the word "property" in the way that you deprive the owner of their property. When someone steals something, the owner loses that exact thing. This is not true when copying digital content. Some studies have found that in some cases, piracy can even enhance legit sales, which makes this even fall apart further "he stole $10 from me so I ended up $50 richer" doesn't make any sense, does it?
> "content that should be paid for."
Who decides what content should be paid for? "Okay guys, you should all pay me for all my tweets. Oh and since you are technically 'downloading' them by reading them, pay up a fine" would def not fly, so this definition holds water.
And even if we go to a more practical approach where we imagine copyright holders, international licensing deals, etc. are no problem at all (which they are), copyright law still varies greatly from country to country for different reasons, for example in most countries you can copy a small part of whatever content you want for educational purposes (not-profit), or e.g. critique, even if the author or copyright owner vehemently oppose it.
They also recognize a cause of increase (less disposable income due to inflation) but don't recognize the solution (reduce prices, increase value) instead threaten with increasing prices which will just cause a negative feedback loop.
But I'm sure they'll soon demand the "big government" to "meddle in the free market" by implementing freedom and privacy distroying monitoring and evforcement in order to protect their government enforced monopoly.
Or, you know, they could just do what the music and game industries have done (offer convinient, affordable access) and stop being assholes.
> New subscription services make it easier for people to access whatever digital content they want, when they want it. And because these services are relatively affordable, more people are choosing to pay for content.
And then they say:
> hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers. > > If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy.
I don't know what to tell you, content providers. Maybe you'll figure it out someday.
well actually I do. The problem lies within ourselves. If you cannot access the media, why not just not watch it? I know it’s hard because of our addictions and boredom, but that is an option.
The reason why these companies can keep charging higher and higher prices and keep giving less and less quality service is because of our addiction.
On a related note, I've also been building an offline cache of the internet, basically any web resources that I bookmark (blog / youtube / a few others) will automatically get indexed and stored locally.