It’s funny how much better the Russian torrent tracker «Rutracker» is for foreign movies and serials, this show included. I love foreign movies and shows, and sometimes I literally can’t pay to watch it.
Yup. Top 2 reasons I became a pirate again after not being a pirate since maybe 15 years ago:
#1 I literally couldn't give someone money to watch/listen to what I wanted
#2 I was paying someone money to watch/listen to something and then they removed it
Even popular things like Saturday Night Live are still impossible to acquire legally in my country.
Edit: Forgot another point that became very annoying, the show is available but not with the subtitles I want and/or need. For example, watching a Swedish TV show on Spanish Netflix doesn't let me have English subtitles for example. But if I use Swedish Netflix, it would work, but technically breaking Netflix's ToS. Content rights have completely fucked up the user experience.
Can I stiff my Uber driver if I don't agree with their politics? If I don't like their car? Can my boss not pay me for developing software if I didn't laugh enough at his jokes?
We find it easy to say "no" in those cases. But because media piracy is pretty easy to do and pretty difficult to punish, we simply stop caring.
TV and movies are part of pop culture and depending on your circle can be critical to have knowledge on for social reasons. If something is unavailable to you due to means outside of your control (licensing, internet speed, accessibility of UI, etc) then there's more justification to that than not paying your Uber driver based on politics.
TV and movies are "critical" because... you want to partake in watercooler banter? I'm not sure how that's more convincing than uber being "critical" because you need it to get to work on time, or to get home safely after drinking.
That would be an example of the opposite. Uber is pretty much a tracker (peer-to-peer platform) for unlicensed taxis.
That's no way to disobey.
I'd love a better way to pay the artists of the content I end up torrenting--just so long as it actually gets to the people who made the content and not the people turning the world into a pile of telescreens.
I strongly want to pay people for good content, and I think they deserve to make some money for their work, but as soon as they slap DRM on it to limit my ability to back it up, consume it on whatever device I want, etc, the scales are tipped and I think piracy is actually more ethical than supporting such shit financially.
For me, the ethical dimension comes from how the DRM will be abused. By paying somebody who develops DRM, you're complicit in building something that may later pivot from protecting content to silencing dissent or preventing local-manual override in a hazardous way, and that's unethical. Maybe it's not right up there with biological weapons, but it's still one of those things that we should not tolerate.
In that case it's ethical to resolve this want by consuming the content without paying. Sorry if I'm not Monk McMonkface and deny this want with mental fortitude, but they have a whole marketing agency and I'm just trying to get by.
I've been doing this for years. I have a stack of Blu-Ray discs I've never opened because I send a request to my home server while I'm in line to check out at the store and by the time I get home the exact same content on the disc I just purchased has already landed there exactly as if I had ripped it myself.
As you note, every element of the user experience is better with the pirated copy and absolutely nothing is worse, even for those who legitimately own it. The only way you compete with free is by being better than the free offering, and the home video industry just refuses to acknowledge that reality.
Most people don’t care about that though.
there are specialized pirate sources that cater to this niche specifically, but most of them only have the AD tracks as MP3 files, without the actual video.
If you're watching with friends and your audience is a mix of fully sighted and visually impaired people, and you want both AD and video on the screen, you're in for a world of pain.
This, I'm constantly seeing reels and clips of shows and then searching for "where to stream x" on google and finding out that not only is the show not available on any of the 5 or so paid services that I have access to, it's not available for streaming at all, or if it is, it's by paying $3 per episode.
I think you can set which subs (and audio tracks) should be available in you Netflix profile. I can get chinese voice and subs for a lot of stuff in Sweden.
It is the same for Disney+ as well.
It's a geo-content restriction of some sorts. I'm guessing some of the subtitles Netflix is leasing/renting/whatever, they only lease for specific regions.
I'm 100% sure I've watched shows in the past on Netflix where if I use a VPN to set my location to Sweden, I could get English or Swedish subtitles, but if I use it without VPN (so Spanish location), it would refuse to allow me the English subtitles and instead allows Spanish or Swedish subtitles.
I'm sure someone more knowledgeable knows exactly why that is.
I'm sure someone more knowledgeable knows exactly why that is."
If you are in Sweden Netflix algorithms give you Swedish as a language option. But you can add this in your profile as well when you are not in Sweden.
The only regions that give you carte blanche (in general) language options are the anglophone countries and some EU regions.
But they're also geocoded (presumably, for travelers), so if you can get a VPN/tunnel that works, you can use another regions' primary languages. Max, last I checked, is the only one that outright limits usage outside of your region.
Have you actually tried to do what I have described? If you want to test, try with a studio Ghibli movie on Netflix, they have dubs and subs for a lot of languages.
Go buy a Netflix/Max/Prime/etc account in Mexico/El Salvador/Indonesia/etc. It'll be 1/3 the price and you'll be limited to "original" (usually English) and Spanish for dubbing/subbing. In some cases you won't even have the original options. I've lived in a few of those low CoL regions, that's literally how it works.
As I said in the following paragraph (which you probably also didn't read), those limits do not exist for most accounts originating from English-speaking regions (especially North America) and some Western European nations. So if you're using your American/British/Canadian/etc account to try to disprove a point I never made, it's already been addressed.
Just....read.
This is so weird, why are they doing this? That the localized audio might have stupid local licenses ok, (or not ok) - but even the subtitles?
Returning to my favorite books is a concentrated dose of spaced repetition; e.g. an Andy Weir book will have a lot of scientific language, classics like the Lord of the Rings are rich with literary language and description.