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Comment by pierat | Hacker News Reader

You can do it right now, in Jellyfin.

And with Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Jellyseerr, Prowlarr, flaresolverr, VPN, and qbittorrent - you can automate a request->watch pipeline for your users.

And if you use distributed block storage, you can make this scale pretty damn big.

(Prowlarr scrapes torrent sites for viable torrents. Uses Flaresolverr to bypass cloudflare shit.

Sonarr Lidarr Radarr - categorizes and prepares downloads for movies, tv shows, and music and submits them to qbittorrent.

Jellyseerr is a request dashboard that works alongside Jellyfin that allows users to request stuff.

VPN/Qbittorrent is a combined tool thats used as a download-endpoint for the whole thing.)

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I'm currently trying to make this work for me so I can cancel all my streaming subscriptions, but the storage cost really makes it unreasonable. I have everything set up but as of now I can't just torrent every Netflix original because storing it all would be much more expensive than a monthly Netflix sub.

I notice you say distributed block storage here but don't name a service like every other part of the pipe, is there something you use? I can't imagine you're storing 1000s of 4K movies and TV series in S3 and not paying 100s of dollars monthly for the privilege

Is this made up?

What do you mean "made up"?

The Arrs suite is definitely a thing, as are the other tools I talk about.

There's a reference docker that automates this whole toolchain https://github.com/AdrienPoupa/docker-compose-nas

Whats nice is that Prowlarr will scrape all the torrent sites for goodies to index, and your users in jellyfin can just request, and it just shows up. You can even have a discord channel and the tools will announce when stuff's done.

Piracy is 10000x better than paying for continually worsening streaming (pile of shit).

Edit: And frankly, the billionaires copy with little ramifications, and add paywalls. I'll copy as well. The big difference is I do it for free.

No, this is how people pirate stuff. This is a thorough but not comprehensive list of apps to serve the needs for managing, downloading, streaming, and otherwise working with different forms of media.

If you've ever gone down this path, it's a great way to see the value proposition in a service like Netflix or Prime. It's also great to highlight where the value gets diminished because of the legacy media dark patterns like migrating content licenses between providers and region restrictions.

Our current copyright regime is what happens when legislation is pay to play. There are no conscientious, well informed representatives in charge looking out for the welfare of their constituents, but they're more than happy to dance on corporate strings, as long as the strings are paid for. No rational, well informed society would consent to being exploited by an industry like American legacy media, but here we are.

Piracy is an act of civil disobedience. Nobody gets hurt, and the sooner we come around to a better informed, more rational, less exploitative legal regime, the sooner we'll have more time, money, and energy to spend on things that matter. Instead of spending it on keeping the already wealthy even more flush with unearned cash.

Imagine if Netflix or Prime didn't have to contend with the old Cable conglomerate licensing schemes and could both have copies of content available for viewing - you could choose the objectively, technically better service, or you could choose the service that you simply liked better than the others.

Instead, we're incentivized to pay over and over and over again for the same things, with no value being provided except to the gatekeepers.

If something is published to the internet that is not behind a paywall, it's been broadcast to the universe. Just like google is able to index things, machine learning models fall squarely under fair use in the technical and technological sense.

NYT and other legacy media companies don't give a flying rat's ass about the ethics of copyrights or the rights of their journalists. They desperately want a slice of the profits and are projecting their entitlement through the use of lawyers and a horribly broken and corrupt copyright regime.

Their behavior is a lot like the classic Mafia extortion trope - "it'd be a shame if something happened to your fancy new AI techology."

As far as I'm concerned, legacy media can't die fast enough. These media conglomerates mostly made sense 70 years ago. In a world with the internet, they're as archaic and outdated as quill pens and vellum.

I could also go to my local library, steal a bunch of books every week, and sell them on ebay for profit. There's a lot of ways to make money if you're willing to ignore the rule book.

Please. Copying is not theft.

And yes, I have gone to the library with my laptop, and rented DVDs of stuff I couldnt find. I then ripped them, and returned them.

And trust me, nobody cares about someone copying some early authored VHS or DVD of a 1950's-1980's movie. Not all of us archivalist/pirates care about current movie of the week. There's a LOT of older and really neat stuff trapped on VHS as well.

The real worry with copyright law is the super-long terms create abandoned content nobody has, and is stuck on obsolete formats. Its not all about "current movie of the week".

My comment wasn’t in response to an individual’s ability to do these things.

I was trying to illustrate (and so was the original commenter) that many things only become a problem when you start making money by doing it, especially at massive scale with millions of customers.

E.g. I have no problem with someone making a LLM (or a Netflix clone) using copyrighted material if they are doing it for pleasure and not profit.

If you’re going to make a Netflix clone and share it with your friends, cool (would probably get upvoted as a Show HN even, like Popcorn app a few years ago). But if you’re going to do that and turn it into a billion dollar business, not so cool and you should expect to be legally challenged.

> Copying is not theft

Copying is not theft, and I don’t think anyone would dare to claim otherwise.

Unfair use of someone else’s intellectual property, however, is.

IP fuels innovation and progress—the very same that gave us tech and LLMs. IP is a major factor that incentivizes us to make new things, as you can subsequently profit from the value you created for the world. Take it away and you get a society where barely anyone is motivated to bother (unless they are coerced into it, with predictable results).

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