Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy | Hacker News Reader

Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

theguardian.com

1,130 pointsnemoniac919 comments

Piracy offers:

1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies.

2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release.

3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations.

4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth.

I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads, because that's pretty much the least important attribute to me. If any company came out with a service that offered those four points, I'd probably be willing to pay a lot for it. How much? Who knows, we don't know how much this is worth because nobody is even trying to offer it.

Physical media offers the first three, but not option four.

I, too, would pay per show/movie to download and save DRM-free videos to my own drives.

Physical media has arbitrary device limitations.

and arent' there retro-active device blocklists on bluray? I seem to recall sth of the sort. Sure, they can be circumvented, but then why bother buying in the first place if you're gonna be the bad guy anyhow?

Yes and yes. I got mildly upset when I learned this, because it is oddly surprising amount of work to get it to work ( and some models do better than others, apparently ).

On the other hand, dvd is dirt cheap now and you get a very respectable collection that is not reliant on the internet.

It fails on all of them if it's not available to purchase, and none of them are of relevance if I want it right now vs having to wait 1-7 days to get hold of that physical copy and there's an easier alternative where I can have it right now.

The elder might remember a time where you could drive to a place and rent physical copies of a movie.

But of course, these places dried out a long time ago.

In NZ we have aliceinvideoland.co.nz which overnights you x DVDs. They have a pretty extensive library and a lot of lesser known and local content.

I used them for a few years, they are great and I'm happy to see they're still around.

They still exist and now are free.

They’re called “public libraries”.

So how come you can't (legally) watch Blue-Rays using a Linux computer, or when viewing it on an ancient CRT using an HDMI-to-analog converter?

A lot of effort has gone into making physical media work only with pre-approved devices.

And driving the price up for the consumer for the anti-consumer tech licencing fees.

A lot of effort has been wasted, thanks to MakeMKV+libredrive making ripping easy.

Supply and demand might argue that if there was real demand for something like this that people were actually willing to pay a lot of money for, then the market would be all too happy to provide.

I think the inconvenient truth here is that when anyone has got close to doing such a thing the price has been high enough that it turns out nobody actually turns up to pay for it, not at least outside a small niche.

IMHO not really, supply here is the limiting factor since the constrain is in licensing the work. The goal of the right holders is not to maximize access to the work or those stated by OP, but to maximize profit for the company, which when at odds with those other goals still prevails.

e.g. someone calculated/believes that having a big catalog from Disney at X/month is more worth more for Disney than sublicensing to Netflix at Y/month.

>> having a big catalog from Disney at X/month is more worth more for Disney than sublicensing to Netflix at Y/month.

But sometimes that leads to really stupid things. At one time all Star Trek TV shows were on Paramount while all the movies were only on Max. I believe they're all owned by Paramount, but apparently the shoes are the big draw (the new series "Picard" was exclusively on Paramount) and they could get more profit by putting the movies elsewhere and collecting a bit more than if it were all on their service. GAK!

I really wish we had laws that producers of content cannot also be distributors. That just creates perverse incentives to use content to lock people into their distribution platform.

If they had to be separate, that gives content producers the ability to cross license and those licenses to be better deals. We’d actually have competition in distribution companies as distribution providers would then be competing on price, quality, convenience, and other things that matter, not locking content away.

> I really wish we had laws that producers of content cannot also be distributors.

We have laws like that for beer and cars, and they're disasters in both cases.

Why would we want to implement an incredibly stupid idea a third time?

I think you're going to have to back that up with a bit more than "it's stupid"

Here's a much more relevant precedent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

Yes I considered the same but decided to keep the point simple.

And I still can’t help but think that if there really was a large market of people willing to pay a premium for a more permissive access model then we might already see trends in this direction. My hunch is the most folk don’t really care and price remains the dominant factor.

The essential point of the article was that it’s higher prices that’s pushing people towards piracy (either through price rises or fragmented subscriptions). It wasn’t that it is the restrictive streaming model that is pushing people towards piracy.

I’m fact it was precisely this restrictive streaming model that was the one to finally beat piracy. At low prices, that’s already been proven and it’s higher prices that is brining piracy back.

Unpopular opinion here but I wonder how much of the justification for piracy in this thread, broadly around what is perceived to be unfair business practices (“if only the terms were fairer and I would pay”), would actually stand up if the terms were actually fairer but the prices higher.

Or how much is really just the simple rational economic idea that piracy is better value for money.

I personally buy physical media (BluRays and/or DVDs). But I often feel too lazy to deal with the content ripping, so I just download it.

I like Youtube Premium and I'm gladly paying for it, although I'm considering switching to an alternative YouTube client because the official YT App is crap. But then the creators will lose income from my subscription.

Sigh. I wish content providers just gave us API to get the content in exchange for payment.

Nah; copyright is a monopoly on specific media/titles. It breaks all of the “market willing to provide” mechanics because there is no free market for Star Wars, it’s Disney or FOAD.

Pray they do not alter it further.

Bingo. When distributors get exclusive rights to media, there is no competition anymore. You either do whatever the publisher wants, pirate, or go without.

The aggravating part about this: that was not the intention of the copyright clause. "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."

Authors and inventors. Authors and inventors.

Not companies. Not entities, or even individuals, who purchased the "rights" and now "own" works. That has nothing to do with the intent here, which was to encourage actual authors and inventors to make more stuff. Walt Disney has been gone for more than half a century; he's not going to be able to come up with another Mickey Mouse.

"Intellectual property" is an oxymoron. Pray, tell me, which part of my brain does Disney own? Do they own the part that knows what Mickey Mouse looks like?

And it has only gotten worse since then. A copyright for a decade or two is completely reasonable, but "life of author, plus 70 years" benefits only large companies. Someone is violating your rights? Good luck suing them if you are an indie creator! Want to create a parody, which is totally legal? Sorry, you can't upload it anywhere - all the hosting companies decided to apply Copyright 2.0 instead!

You have to have real options or people can’t make informed decisions.

I have a background in city planning, and in the US, you’ll constantly hear about how trying to make cities more friendly to pedestrians, bicycles, or public transit is a waste because no one uses it. But the truth is, most people will end up using the system you design. If you build a system just for cars, people will use cars. If you build a city around public transportation, people will happily use it. If you build a walkable city, people will walk.

Great analogy. I'm visiting a particularly car-centric city atm, and from the car driver's perspective, "nobody uses the bike lanes, I never see them, so why build them, it constrains traffic". Well ya, there's so much car traffic because it's car-first, and nobody wants to be around tons of cars, not even people in cars. It's like arguing that you never see cyclists on the freeway, therefore nobody likes biking and we should discourage it.

> If you build a walkable city, people will walk.

No, they won't. If you build a walkable city and then make it impossible to do anything else, then people will walk.

It's a subtle difference, but it's there.

it's a welcome change from "if you build a driveable city and then make it impossible to do anything else, then people will drive".

Still good!

I live in a "walkable city". By walkable, I mean the old parts of the city that predated the automobile (and weren't destroyed in the name of modernization) are walkable. New parts of the city are completely unwalkable. If you came here, you would notice that massive numbers of people walk in the old parts of the city. Even the people who drive into the old parts of the city tend to walk once they are there. In the new parts of the city, virtually all of the pedestrians you see are on their way to or from a bus stop.

That said, there is more to a walkable city than a bunch of sidewalks. It also has to offer what people want and what they want must be easy to access. Something similar can be said about piracy. It wasn't streaming services that stymied piracy, it was cheap and easy access to legal sources of music and video. Even then, cheap was likely a secondary factor (as long as the price was reasonable).

> By walkable, I mean the old parts of the city that predated the automobile (and weren't destroyed in the name of modernization) are walkable.

OK. Here's my question: is it possible and feasible to NOT walk?

Because when the answer is "yes", people tend to not walk.

It is both possible and feasible to drive in the old parts of the city. It is a North American city, so old is not that old. It just predates the automobile. Yet virtually all of the roads are plenty wide for two lane traffic, on street parking and sidewalks. What differs most significantly is land use patterns. More stuff (homes, businesses, schools, parks, etc.) are within walking distance. One could argue that parking is problematic, but that is true of the core of every city I've been in. Even the modern car-centric ones. It should also be noted that plenty of people drive in the old parts of the city, it's just that people have an opportunity not to and plenty of people choose not to.

In many places where I’ve lived people walk just for fun, because it’s enjoyable activity.

I knew plenty of people in London who chose to walk 30+ mins. This is over other available options like ebike, bus, underground and taxi - simply because it is pleasant.

Absolutely not true. If anything, the opposite is true - people will walk unless/until you make the city unwalkable.

Streaming services were great back when they were separate from content producers and IP holders.

Once every media company became a streaming company and started using anticompetitive licensing practices in an attempt to drive viewership to their own platforms, the market fractured too much for it to be profitable.

Something smells “prisoner’s dilemma” about it: the best move for any individual streaming service is to have exclusive content (and the best-positioned players to do that are the studios), but when everyone does that, it decreases the overall profit available in the market more than it increases their slice of the pie.

> more than it increases their slice of the pie.

That's the part that might not be true, unfortunately. If each individual content producer sees more return on their own streaming service than they did sharing revenue from one of the independent services, then that's better for them, even if the total pie got smaller. If that wasn't the case, you'd think we'd see some of them shut their services down and go back to independent services once their income drops.

Sacrificing a wide audience to extract more from the most dedicated portion of the fanbase isn't an entirely new concept, and it financially makes sense short-term (until you start losing some of those dedicated fans over time and don't have the mindshare outside your bubble to attract new ones).

They just have to out-survive the competition, selling theme park tickets and merch. Oh, and putting hit movies in theaters.

The streaming service itself doesn’t need to be profitable.

I think we will see this eventually.

Once Netflix isn't the only one that doesn't share their monthly subscriber numbers anymore, we'll know that they're beginning to at least question why they own everything instead of license their content out

Supply and demand rules go out the window when the product is infinitely replicable.

Digital video is a big enough amount of data that replication at scale takes up a significant amount of netural resources and energy. That is true both for storage and transmission/streaming.

You can't talk about those rules when a single publisher corporation commands exclusivity deals and dictates pricing essentially forever.

No, because the owners of content libraries make more money with silos.

They won’t license content to third parties. So market forces can’t work.

Supply and demand means that corporations attempt to maximise their revenue. If the cost of providing a good service eats into their profits, they will provide a bad service.

This idea that "markets will provide" is eccentric, and obviously empirically wrong.

Markets are there to extract value and reinforce power imbalances. Consumer happiness is reliably at cross purposes with that.

Food for thought:

There are (possibly) two streams of demand:

1) How much customers are willing to pay.

2) How much pirates are willing to risk legal consequences.

Both represent sides of the implicit and intrinsic demand that drives acquisition.

>I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads

It's free in the same way shoplifting is free, until you get caught. You are very much in violation of copyright laws if you pirate.

Only consequences, physically speaking the two are not the same at all.

Copying of anything digital is not actual theft, nor will it ever be.

"You wouldn't download a car!"

Wait, I absolutely would download a car if I could... or food... or clothing... I'd download the shit out of physical goods if the technology existed. Who wouldn't? You could solve scarcity. If we had Star Trek Replicators, we'd be living in a literal utopia.

Thanks to 3D printing this is starting to become reality and not just science fiction.

The “download” catchphrase is a joke, it was originally “You wouldn’t steal a car”, which I’d argue is true for most people.

Stealing a car deprives the owner of their product. Privacy does not. They still have access and ownership of it. But now, you do too.

> it was originally “You wouldn’t steal a car”, which I’d argue is true for most people.

Sure, but it's only true if you stretch the definition of what's occuring. If we stretched it in the other way, in that "stealing" a car in fact left the perfectly fine original right where you found it, the vast majority wouldnt think twice.

Do you sneak into concerts or hop turnstiles too?

Those actually take the resources away (space at the venue for example). In piracy that's not the case.

no true scotsman

wordsmithing on theft is the only defense thieves have

How dare you steal these hn comments by copying them over to your PC using your browser? Thief!

So long as you’ve paid for it before… maybe not. In many jurisdictions you are entitled to a backup. The fact that you have to pirate it… might be a gray area.

Of course it's theft. The owner of that content didn't intend to give it to you for free, they expected to get paid for their work.

I could copy A New Hope once for every atom in the universe, and no money is lost and the original continues to exist.

Theft is moving stuff. You can't move software or digital assets, you can only copy them.

If I committed a burglary and instead of taking your TV I go to Walmart and buy a copy, then that's not burglary. You certainly wouldn't report me to the police.

Then how come a month ago you were talking about preventing zero-days from stealing files: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44578850 ?

This is the worst no you I've ever seen.

I'm not concerned about my files being leaked because that's stealing. I'm concerned because they hold sensitive information that can be used for actual stealing, like for example with money.

Malware isn't bad because it's stealing. That's stupid. I know you know it's stupid, so I don't know why you said it.

The point is that earlier you described a zero-day copying files as stealing the files, but now you say that copying data cannot be theft.

If buying things at the store was as painful as watching stuff on streaming services, and shoplifting was as low risk as torrenting, and my stealing an item didn't make that item disappear from the store, I'd probably do it there too.

It's not comparable, because copying a bread with a bread copying machine should be completely fine.

Thank god they overturned Butter Krust v. Jesus Christ!

And I thought religion of pirates is pastafarianism.

I don't think analogy is comparable either though. With a bread copying machine, the baker of the original piece is not involved in creating the new piece of bread (other than the recipe), so it is more acceptable (though maybe not completely, if you consider that the recipe is also being copied) that the baker is not compensated for the new piece of bread produced by the copying machine.

With digital media, the creator is expecting people to pay to view the content. By making a copy and viewing it for free, imo, you are stealing the content.

If I am telling you a secret word, expecting you to pay to hear it, and you are telling it to someone else, it may be lying, it may be bad manners, but it's not stealing.

Digital content is information.

I can name at least one country in the European Union in which torrenting copyright content for personal use is legal, people still do very much use spotify and netflix.

Gabe Newell got it right from the very start, piracy is a service problem.

Depends on where you live.

Whereas theft of physical goods is generally not.

Penalties for copyright infringement differ between countries as well.

Shops aren't there yet, but ISPs are. Where can I pirate the internets?

Netflix and to some level spotify drowned piracy for a time. But then a lot of companies tried to rap the same "winings" splitting the ecosystem and trashing the user experience.

- ¿could we watch x movie? - let me see. no, it in this other service beside the 3 we are paying.

At some point I'm willing to just pay a few dollars for a movie. But even then you cant get them all in one place! And they like to charge a premium for some. Im not paying a premium for anything I've already seen a while back.

The particular service that has the movie may not last or they may lose access to the movie. With a streaming service you aren't "buying" much.

> Im not paying a premium for anything I've already seen a while back.

devil's advocate. what's the point of a producer expending money to have a premium version made? it takes money to go back and rescan film to higher resolution, and the rest of the work flow involved to create that new final version.

sure, it's easy to not have sympathy for hollywood producer types, but to meet modern standards for legacy content takes time/effort/money. of course they are going to want to get a bit of that back.

I don't care about that. By premium I just mean a popular movie. Sometimes all the Clint Eastwood films are free for example, but one or two big titles are $9.

Give me $2 or $3 movies with a huge catalog and I'll watch several.

> I don't care about that.

That's precisely my point.

Even for these $2-$3 dollar non-premium movies to be digitized and made available for streaming costs money. Let's just say at a minimum $50k (which is on the low end), 50,000/3 = 16,667 people willing to rent/buy that movie for that $3. Is that a guarantee? No, especially when it is not "premium". Out of curiosity, how many movies do you rent/buy through Apple/Amazon type rentals? There are many times where the math of renting from a platform is much cheaper than going to the movie to see it. It is still hard for me to do it since I'm already paying Apple/Amazon a monthly fee. That's for the "premium" content, so it would be hard to convince me that 16k people would be willing to spend for non-premium at all.

But this is the insane bit - there is clearly a market for this. People do want to watch old stuff in new formats, and they're prepared to pay a reasonable amount for it. There is a perfectly reasonable business model in here.

How sure of that perfectly reasonable model are you? Are you willing to find a movie that you think this would be a solid bet, contact the content owner with the money to finance the necessary steps to get the content streaming platform ready? Would you put your money where your mouth is on this?

Edit to add more food for thought. Let's take a non-premium feature film as an example. Let's assume that the title you've chosen has a decent copy of the 35mm film available. To have it scanned at 4K is going to be the first expense. You then have to decide if you're going to clean any of it up with and post production. Color correction will be necessary as well. Something else to consider is do you have any the clips with text on them have and are textless clips available. How much will it cost to get a textless version. You will need to see what audio is available. Hoepfully something other than mag. Do you have just the final mix? Is it stereo/mono? Does it need to be remastered to deal with expired music rights? Do you have elements to do a new mix? Do you have any subtitles available for it? Captioning? Those cost to have made too. Do you have rights for the international versions, and is that content available? Does your streaming platform really want the dubbed audio available? Subtitles for that too please.

Well this is how the "unofficial" streaming services make money, basically.

They don't have the production costs, obviously, so there are some numbers to crunch there. And I don't have answers to any of your questions, because I am not in the industry. I suspect these are a whole bunch of trade-offs, as in most technical questions, and there is a version of these trade-offs that are economically viable.

But people are willing to pay to view stuff, and willing to take risks to view stuff. There is a market there, there's money there. We know this because there are people making money on this.

I am in the industry, and I'm giving you a simplified formula which answers why more titles are not available. You just don't want to accept the reality of it from the content owner's perspective and only see if from the "I deserve to see anything I want anytime I want" perspective.

Yeah, fair point.

I counter that I can go and see anything I want, if I'm prepared to accept a bit of risk and some morally dubious justifications.

The reality that the content owners face is that there are people making money off their work because they're not giving the paying customer what they want, and those other people are. That's a viable business that they're not profiting from. That's the reality. I'm not sure why it's not visible from the content owner's perspective.

In the beginning, Netflix was great. Then they became a media company and suddenly EVERYTHING they push on you is THEIR stuff. Gone are the days where you could remember a cool movie and pull it up on Netflix like Fandango or Corvette Summer. I remember going back and watching several seasons of the original Miami Vice back when nobody knew who Michael Mann was.

Not its exactly as you say, you want to watch something but its not on any of the streaming services you're already paying for. I've started to just think of a movie I want to watch, go out to Pirate Bay, download it and then stream it. When I'm done? Delete it.

Its good to know I'm not the only one who has gone back to downloading movies.

My understanding is that this isn't Netflix's fault. They were king when they were the first major streaming service, and studios and networks were happy to get extra income from hosting their content on Netflix. But Netflix knew that any success it has would be mimicked by those same studios and networks, and that they would pull their own content to their own services as soon as they have them up and running, and so Netflix started making its own content in preparation for that day. And that bet paid off.

This is the way. As the studios decided they could make more money by becoming a streamer than they'd ever make with licensing deals with Netflix, they quit making those deals. As the deals would expire, Netflix would start removing them.

I always thought Netflix probably could have made licensing deals on their CDN. Lots of early streamers had issues (still have) with their CDN. Then again, the studios would probably want a clean break because they are so good about every thing they do (yes, that's sarcasm).

As the saying at Netflix used to go back in the day: we need to become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix

If the production quality of Netflix was close to HBO it would be nice. HBO has some absolute classics: The Wire, The Sopranos, GoT, White Lotus, The Last of Us, Alaskan Killer Bigfoot. Almost all bangers.

I'd argue Netflix productions started out almost as great as HBO, but quickly took a dive when they started pushing quantity over quality. Now finding a quality Netflix production is about once a year. Maybe that's the same rate as it use to be?

I agree that the quality went down, but I think it might be part of their strategy.

I think when they first started, they tried the HBO strategy of putting big money into big shows that try to win over broad audiences. But over time shifted to focusing on low budget shows that appeal to specific, smaller audiences. Which makes sense, if your goal isn't to have 70% of the total market as paying users but rather 90% of the market as paying users.

The problem is the bean counters running Netflix didn't want to pay the cast and crew their due, so their shows ended before the cast and crew could unionize, specifically so they couldn't unionize, leaving Netflix with no HBO-grade shows. Pennywise, pound foolish.

I lived in a country where Netflix never bothered to open up (until very recently) so piracy never went away for the 100 million people living there.

Netflix also often only buys the first seasons of an existing show. And of course they love to cancel shows they produce themselves which for me has significantly lowered my loyalty over the years.

Don't forget censorship-free

I swore off streaming services when they started pulling episodes of comedy shows and editing out scenes because they were worried someone might be offended

Fair to be upset. Just noting that has been happening for about the whole history of televised comedy:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smothers_Brothers_Comedy...

They also often time have versions of old movies and shows that have been modified due to silly things like license agreements on music expiring! I have felt gaslighted when I rewatch and old movie and some scene isn’t how I remember.

I was so surprised and bummed when I discovered this was a thing. My wife and I started watching the original Beverly Hills 90210—a sort of ridiculous snapshot of American pop culture in the early 1990s—on some streaming service, and after a few episodes I noticed the music was just...super wrong.

Reading online, I learned that a lot of the original music had been licensed only for the original run of the show, so even when it went to DVD in the early 2000s they had to remove a whole bunch of the original music. It's terrible on two fronts: one, the show is an awesome snapshot of 90s music, with tons of great stuff featured both as background music and in extended live performances, but they cut whole scenes and entire episodes that had too much of it, and two, whoever managed the process of picking replacement music clearly did not care at all, and used awful generic music that sounds like it came from a file called "BeachRiff.aiff" on a $29.95 CD library of royalty-free 60 second stock music samples.

I admit to finding a source of video files patched together from various sources with the original soundtracks intact, and it's simply MUCH more enjoyable. It seems, though, that some episodes of live performances are lost to time—or at least lost to the corporate owners who'd rather sit on the tapes in a warehouse somewhere than make them available.

I hate that kind of destruction of what I think should ultimately be considered property of humanity. When you create something, you're free to destroy or ruin it. Once you share it with somebody else, you should need their consent to destroy it.

The social responsibility for ensuring that things could be shared falls on libraries. You might check a few libraries for old copies of vintage media.

My sore spot is the original Rust In Peace album. It was rerecorded and the rerecording is horrible. Any copy of the original is treasure to me.

> The social responsibility for ensuring that things could be shared falls on libraries.

That's a fair point!

That's the thing: I don't feel like the studios really own something once it is released. It almost becomes the property of the viewers. Things like changing Star Wars is horrifying to most. It's almost as if the public should have to vote on any changes (e.g. I'd probably be willing to vote to remove some flubs, like a mic dangling in frame).

When the Bobs sold Back to the Future they put a clause in the contract that the movies could not be remade or altered in any way without their approval. They nixed the 3D versions that Universal was planned when 3D TVs were in vogue.

This feels like a terribly entitled way to view someone else’s work.

This feels like an entitlement to disappoint people. If you plan to ruin the experience, don't waste my time on it.

Back in the 90s, people just had no concept of today's media offerings. Content was edited specifically to work with the only home media they new of at the time, and that was interlaced TV at frame rates of 29.97 or 25. There was no concept for progressive displays. The only home video format that was in wide use was VHS, and TV shows just didn't find their way there. That was something for theatrical releases. TV shows were much more concerned about trying to make it to syndication. When it came time to licensing, that's all the producers had on their radar.

What's the point? This was much less a malicious thing than it is made out to be. Once the licensing ran out, that's it. They can't just YOLO their way through it, or they'd have been sued. It's possible they tried to negotiate new terms for the music, but terms couldn't be agreed. When it came time to release on DVD, the person involved for the music might not have been available or interested in doing it again. At that point, the music would never feel right when replaced. The last point being these producers would be doing this on the cheap, so your <$30 CD library wouldn't have been far off, except the music libraries would have been much more expensive than that. Decent royalty free music has only been a thing within the past 10-15 years.

Edit: one more thing about the music, it is a large expense for the production. the studios are usually willing to pay for it to air, because they know how much ad sales they have and build it into part of the per episode expense. negotiating for DVD release with no known amount of money to earn makes it difficult to negotiate a license for "real" music

Everybody knows all of this, and nobody thinks the companies doing it are doing it "maliciously." The point is that it is stupid, harmful and unnecessary, not a consumer complaint.

Of course these people did not want to sell a broken product; they sold a lot fewer copies because they were forced to by goofy laws and their financial circumstances.

You can no longer get Rocky&Bullwinkle episodes with the original music. The replacement music is so awful it is unwatchable.

what's really pointless is how they released the beavis and butthead episodes without the music videos. even the replays on mtv or mtv2 back in the 2000s couldn't play the music videos.

the DVD/streaming releases of Daria suffer from this. i used to have old TV rips of the show with the original contemporary MTV soundtrack but i'm not sure what happened to them. the stock music just doesn't carry the weight of the times.

google “The Daria Restoration Project”

I was literally complaining to my partner about this exact thing last night -- we ended up torrenting a collection of what look to be old VHS rips and really enjoyed them.

Mission Hill as well. If you want the original one, with tracks by Moby, Looper, the Toasters, and more, the only option is a fan made restoration project

If you want 4k, that fan restoration project is also the only way to get it

Or sometimes the licensor just doesn’t feel like paying for it. Netflix famously removed the iconic version of “Fly Me to the Moon” from the ending credits of their copy of Neon Genesis Evangelion and even more weirdly stripped the vocals from the similarly iconic ending credits theme of Naoki Urusawa’s Monster, both because they didn’t want to shell out the cash for the rights.

The TV series Scrubs was hit really hard by this — The soundtrack and sound-design in that show really drove home the emotion in the episodes, and when replaced, it really doesn't hit the same mark.

Ugh, the music licensing issue is horrible. I sold a movie to Netflix many years ago and they "couldn't afford" the awesome soundtrack so they switched it out with garbage which makes a so-so movie into a total turd.

> They also often time have versions of old movies and shows that have been modified due to silly things like license agreements on music expiring! I have felt gaslighted when I rewatch and old movie and some scene isn’t how I remember.

1990s Beavis and Butthead episodes seem completely bizarre/pointless without the music.

When Mike Judge started releasing new episodes back in 2012-ish, it's noticeable how he mostly avoided music clips and focused on satirizing reality shows that were on the same network (MTV.) I assume this was to avoid licensing nightmares.

That's a problem that predates streaming.

There's at least one ALF ('86-90)episode that you can only get the uncensored version via piracy.

(Episode in question is Try to Remember. ALF originally got an electric shock. It quickly got censored in reruns to have ALF slip and hit his head because the network worried kids would get shocked emulating ALF.)

I hate the censorship. But when some groups are willing to kill if you don’t censor then I can’t blame others for not wanting to be martyrs and put their lives on the line for it

What groups are you talking about

Publish a cartoon about the prophet Mohamed and some of the groups will make themselves known to you.

What does that very specific example have to do with broad censorship as a phenomenon in media? Like how often do you think TV networks and streaming services are removing depictions of Mohammed in the stuff they make or license?

removing "fly me to the moon" from the end of NGE has nothing to do with Islam.

the Islamic prohibition on the Prophet isn't new, is something they take seriously and always have, and is not happening at the whim of the studio execs.

Did you really not know the answer or were you asking just to force the answer?

I can't think of any answer that makes sense in this context (widespread tv show editing).

Not TV show editing, rather a satire magazine, but a now-deleted reply mentioned that Charlie Hebdo was pressured to censor and would not. They had staff members murdered because they would not censor.

That is a thing that happened.

But if it's what socalgal2 was talking about, then their comment was a non-sequitur. They saw the word censorship and rambled something almost entirely unrelated to the topic at hand.

That's why it's worth asking what they're talking about.

They were responding to a comment about piracy not self-centering extant works. I could see where the comment does sequitur, just barely. Perhaps he is pushing an agenda, perhaps he was making conversation. I can see far further OT comments all up and down this post.

My issue is less with taking a tangent but the way the comment is framed as if it's a justification for what services are doing. Maybe one south park episode can be half-justified that way, and basically nothing else.

I see what you're saying now. I'm not familiar with the South Park episode but I think I understand you.

There was also South Park's episodes 200 and 201 where they got a slew of death threats for depicting Mohammad. Funnily enough, Mohammad's depiction was the least offensive of all the other religious figures they showed in that episode, which was basically the point of the episodes more or less.

The funniest part of it all is that the network decided to not only remove the episode after the initial airing, it even censored Kyle's speech at the end of 201[1] about fighting back against intimidation. The censorship was done in such a way that it looked like South Park was satirizing the censorship itself too [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TMHIYDHMSE [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imj_pHXzJbc

I genuinely don’t know what socalgal2 is referring to. If everybody instantly understood cryptic posts we wouldn’t call them cryptic

Not directly related to streaming services, but this happened: https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2025/08/13/noisy-le-s...

I can definitely see how streaming services would adapt to bigots.

That part really aggravated me. I already pay a hefty premium for Disney/Hulu so the fact that I do not get full experience, because someone thought an episode I pay for with subs is offensive really irks me. I am slowly getting to the point of pulling the plug and each time I see an ad for hulu on disney, I am getting a tiny little bit closer to pissing off wife and making kid cry in one go.

If people stopped getting offended by literally anything. We wouldn’t have to deal with this bs.

Centralized services are low-stakes levers of power that encourage people to form outrage movements to pull them.

This can happen with piracy too. For example, I'm aware of at least one case where the highest quality option for a specific show edited out the gay scenes.

What was that specific show?

Sure, someone can upload a new edited version. But the unedited one doesn't get removed. That's not really censorship.

If you don't notice the removal and therefore don't have a reason to look elsewhere, it has the same effect

But that's unrelated to why tech. People advertising one version instead of another does not have a technical solution. The only thing tech can provide is the ability to keep copying the old version, regardless of what the original creator/distributor thinks.

You don't understand, it's terrible to censor movies but absolutely vital to make sure people can't make movies I disagree with.

edit: It's funny, I wouldn't be happy about a version of the old HBO series Rome reedited with anything gay taken out, but I'd be absolutely excited to watch a version of Queer As Folk with all the gay stuff edited out.

Calling removing scenes that you're bigoted against (and that's what it looks like in this case) "making a movie" is a large stretch. I wouldn't have a problem with it if it 1) was actually interesting in some way; 2) didn't pretend to be the original (i.e., different name in title). It's a problem if someone thinks that they're getting the original show and then gets something else, especially if it isn't obvious that it's something else.

Tech can provide a signature of the original to verify that it hasn't been tampered with

The DnD episode from Community (S2E14) can't be seen on any streaming services because one Asian character wears black makeup while cosplaying as a drow.

One of the best episodes in my opinion, and an excellent introduction to DnD for people who don't know what they are getting into.

The list of Sunny's removed episodes from Hulu is insane to me:

- Season 4 Episode 3: America's Next Top Paddy's Billboard Model Contest

- Season 6 Episode 9: Dee Reynolds: Shaping America's Youth

- Season 8 Episode 2: The Gang Recycles Their Trash

- Season 9 Episode 9: The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 6

- Season 14 Episode 3: Dee Day

They're all in my home server, though :)

Disney+ doesn’t have The Simpsons S3E1 because of Michael Jackson’s UNCREDITED appearance.

That seems like a bad reason to swear off streaming services. Do you not shop at stores because they don’t carry offensive clothing?

If a tshirt rental store was renting me my favourite tshirt (not available to buy) for two decades then decided it wasn't available any more because other people don't like the shirt design, I would be pissed and not want to support the tshirt rental industry any more.

That’s a bad analogy. It works against your point. It seems entirely, entirely reasonable to avoid a clothing store that refuses to stock hip styles simply because they’re “offensive”. For an example using the cliche, many people find a naked ankle to be completely acceptable.

Yours is wrong. Yours would work if you liked all the clothes there but then one day they stopped selling Kanye West’s Nazi shirt that you liked because people found it offensive. And then you stopped shopping there because of that.

The analogy requires you giving up what you want because they stopped carrying something others find offensive. Not that they don’t sell what you like all up. In which case it makes perfect sense not to shop there.

That's a really awkward analogy. A better one would be: Would you buy an album with all the curse words bleeped out? A lot of people would, but others would prefer the uncensored version.

That’s a worse analogy. The other guy doesn’t want to use a service because they don’t offer content he wants because people are offended by it. There’s a bunch of clothes not sold at most retailers because it is offensive but you can buy them online directly from the manufacturer.

The analogy you gave would be better if they edited the content to be semantically equivalent but they aren’t. The content just isn’t available.

Now maybe the argument is that you’re paying for the service. In which case it would be like Costco where you have a membership and they definitely don’t carry offensive material.

The biggest problem IMO is that they are picking and choosing what is offensive. I can watch over 100 episodes of very offensive (to someone) episodes of Always Sunny episodes on Hulu. However, they decided 1 concept from 1 scene of a handful of episodes is more offensive than everything else and removed those. I think an analogy could be Home Depot sells a dimming light with 10 settings. Some group of people can’t deal with 2 of those settings so the manufacturer removed 2 of the settings and now everyone gets a lower quality product because of this decision.

Is there anything offensive that Home Depot shouldn’t carry? Or should they carry everything?

This was what made me cancel Netflix 10 years ago.

They decided to remove stuff that cost them nothing to have in their library like Gone with the Wind. I'd never watch it but it was clear then they had decided they would be gatekeepers of what people can and cant watch.

> cost them nothing to have in their library

I cancelled Netflix too, but it's not true that it cost them nothing to have it in their library. Everyone in the movie still needs to get paid and simply having the show in the library costs them money.

They are choosing not to host a movie on their service, which I think is a bit different than say, Disney not allowing anyone to access Song of the South.

Nature is healing ! https://nofilmschool.com/disney-butt-in-splash

especially when Advanced DnD is like the best Community episode

For me, it was when a movie wasn't the way I remembered it. Then I found a pirated copy.

Turned out the 'official' release was heavily edited, with tone, characters, and even some plot had been completely reshaped. I've found this to be increasingly prevalent, and not just in a "made for TV" or "adapted for Flying" type modifications.

2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release.

Arguably higher. For example, fans of Star Wars have scanned the original 1977 theatrical release with very high quality film scanners and created a 4K release complete with film grain and the original scenes intact which is not available through approved channels.

Wow. I thought it was impossible to watch the original release of star wars. I need to hunt this down.

"4k77" should get you to the right places

Yup. Team Negative One are doing some very important work in terms of film preservation/digital archeology.

4k80 was finally released last year as well. Some notes on why it took so long: https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k80/

Legend thank you

There's also a DVD release of the theatrical versions. Usually goes for $50-75 for OG trilogy.

DVDs are 480i, the parent comment described far higher quality than DVD.

DVDs support progressive scan and most movies were encoded in 480p; the player then just sent half the picture on one field and the other half on the other field.

Your point still stand though, these modern 4k editions are far higher quality.

The DVD releases of the original theatrical versions of Star Wars were encoded in 480i non-anamorphic, drawn from analog video masters intended for Laserdisc, which employed an early version of DNR that created a bunch of ugly temporal ghosting artifacts. Blown up onto a modern display it looks really bad.

I watched the PAL edition and I don't remember those artifacts, but it was a million years ago so my memory could be wrong xD

The PAL release was an NTSC>PAL conversion, so throw upscaling artifacts onto the pile as well. e: Actually thinking back on it, it may not even have been PAL at all, but 480i/60hz Region 2/4.

There's a good chance you watched it on a CRT given that even on a flat panel LCD fom the late 2000s the low vertical resolution was quite noticeable (effectively ~272p, not counting deinterlacing artifacts from it being sourced from a video master). It looked somewhat acceptable in that context but aged very quickly once CRTs started becoming obsolete.

I remembered that I borrowed the collection from my uncle and he still has it. I will ask him for pictures of the box, maybe it was the "updated" editions.

The re-issues used the same masters.

Yes, there was the official DVD release that included the original versions as a bonus. But the quality can not compare to 4K77.

That's a bit of an edge case, powered by the absolute, lovely turbo-nerdery of a few dedicated souls. They are called 4K77 / 4K80 versions for people looking for them.

There’s also a number of movies where the best quality publicly available is a pirated rip of an HDTV broadcast from a Malaysian TV network or something similarly odd because the rights holders never released a BD and the official DVD release was a transfer from a crappy VHS or similar.

In cases of TV shows, fans have gone to the lengths of producing the best quality release possible by patching together video, audio, and subtitles from myriad sources, sometimes even splicing individual cuts when their quality varies between sources. It’s so much more effort than you’d see from any official restorations.

The criterion collection being the one noteable exception, and they have their own standalone streaming service that is pretty good:

https://www.criterionchannel.com/browse

Ironically, signing-up to Criterion isn't available in Australia:

--------

Request Access

Sorry. This is currently unavailable in your region. Type in your email below and tell the producers you want it in your country!

Try a VPN, I think it was easily circumvented

I'm a subscriber, but the Criterion apps do downloads right some of the time if you're lucky, the choice of subtitles is usually English or English, discovery is Netflix-level bad, they can't be bothered to create any interactive info, and most of the actual Collection is not available for streaming.

I still pay them every month because they have the goods but it's so frustrating that the people with the most film-buff oriented catalog and their hearts (presumably) in the right place have so little ability to deliver on UX.

(I used to subscribe to MUBI as well, which is stronger for new indie films, but didn't have time for both, and MUBI app was so bad it could have been a fork of the Criterion app.)

Yeah, IIRC NHK broadcast some movies, like 2001, in 8K scans that are hard to find even on the high seas.

And there are one or two movies that have leaked in DCP 4K, which look absolutely stunning if you have the hardware to play them.

It's really infuriating how many TV series are only (legally) available as horribly over-compressed and interlaced DVDs outside of streaming platforms.

> In cases of TV shows

Can you give me some examples of those guerilla remaster ? I know of the various Star Wars projects (Harmy and the likes) and the remaster from "La Classe Américaine", but I don't know any others.

A French movie that bungle together several excerpt from classic Warner movie to tell its own humorous story. A cult classic for French millennials. The director later on went on to make The Artist to universal acclaim.

Right now it's usually CINEPHiLES remuxes, that pick absolute best sources available, and sometimes splice the video to get each shot the best possible treatment from the available bitstreams

Many other groups do this; look for the HYBRID tag.

A couple I can remember off the top of my head, since I can't check my server right now. Scrubs with original music, since they didn't have the license for the original songs for streaming (or the DVDs, I can't remember). Daria with the original music for the same reason. I can't think of any fan visual remasters of tv shows though.

It’s great but do you know of any others?

Harmy's Despecialized Edition(s).

all of Star Trek Voyager

Care to expand? I assume the result is still 480p or have they actually done more than that?

All of the 90s Star Trek series were filmed on 35mm, but all of the post-production work (editing, SFX, etc) were done on tape, at 480p. There's no 35mm copy of the final result to scan and color-grade for a "normal" HD remaster. For the TNG remaster, what they actually did was re-do all of the post-production from the original 35mm negatives. VFX were re-composed, some were re-done in CG. They finished the TNG remaster just as streaming services were ramping up and Blu-Ray disk sales declining, and sales were disappointing given the amount of work that had to go into them.

Paramount will never remaster DS9 or VOY because they don't expect to make the money back, because neither was as popular as TNG. And it's worse for DS9 and VOY because they extensively used CGI effects for things like ship battles, which were originally rendered at 480p. If the original assets could be found, they could be re-rendered, but in many cases, they would have to be fully re-created.

Fans have created AI upscales which are generally better than watching the horrible 480p releases that were on Netflix and are now on Paramount+. But they are also sometimes uncannily smooth and unpleasant.

Is there a name that these upscaled releases fall under to easily find them?

Star Trek in particular (I was watching voyager yesterday) the quality is always pretty depressing when shown on a larger TV. Been recently thinking about trying to find the best quality I can find but it is always a lot of trial and error. But if there is a common name and tag I could look for that would be great.

Just "<series name>", "upscale", and "complete" or "S0<n>", will work, I believe.

Ugh no thanks, AI upscales are exactly what I don't want and not something that should be mentioned in the context of fan projects like the 1977 star wars restoration which take great care to restore the original content instead of hallucinating higher resolutions.

My main problem is that the publicly available non-streaming releases are NOT 480p but 480i (actually even worse than that, partially interlaced and partially telecined) with horrible compression artifacts. With access to the production masters you could surely produce a better release than that.

Your "never" is also a needlessly strong word - people would also have said TOS and TNG remasters would "never" happen before they did. Also keep in mind that just because a company says something is not profitable it doesn't mean that they wouldn't make the money back - it could also mean that they just wouldn't make as much profit as they would doing something else. That means that even small changes to the equation or just someone pushing for it hard enough can sometimes tip the scales. Blu-ray sales declining are also not really an argument as streaming services didn't kill production of new series either. But we were also lucky that the trek remasters we got were faithful to the originals which is not guaranteed to be the case so maybe we are better off without more remasters in the current climate.

While that's the best option, there's always AI upscaling and frame gen. These of course won't be as good as native resolution and can sometimes make more errors, but they can make a big difference on low resolutions when you got a big screen.

To be blunt, upscaling is pretty shit and doesn't belong in a discussion about quality. The quality-obsessed piracy world we're talking about here would shudder at the comparison.

I full agree. I'm not trying to compare high quality naive source to AI upscale. That is a ludicrous comparison. Native will always be better.

But truth of the matter is that many times you don't have access to a higher quality source. Sometimes you only have something that's been re-encoded over and over or something that has degraded through the passage of time. I would not suggest overwriting the source, but the truth is that many people will find this a better viewing experience. Truth is that many of those remasters will use similar technologies, though with much more thought and care than your one click and it's done act like it is magic programs. Truth is that people do enjoy it in videogames and existing streaming and movie systems. People do prefer better native high resolution, but when that is just unavailable, what are you left with? But the truth is that most people are happy with lossy encodings and lower bit color schemes (most people don't even have a 10 bit monitor and (real) HDR isn't prolific).

If it is a choice between shitty quality and AI upscale, I'll choose AI upscale more times than not (but not 100%). But instead, if it is a choice between shitty quality, AI upscale, and high quality native, I'm choosing high quality naive 100% of the time. It's not even a question! But the point is that there are choices and not all of them require deep knowledge. I'm not arguing replace native with upscale, that's idiotic. But for an at home player where more people are going to have to make choices about storage spaces and won't care if it is lossy, then the option exists.

We're also talking about streaming services. Streaming services force the AI upscaling on you. Hell, even in some TV's it is hard or impossible to turn off (mine turns itself back on!). Let's let people decide, because we know that the incentives are too strong on the streaming service for them to hand you raw.

While that’s the best option to eat chocolate, there’s always eating shit. If you put it in the right form it might even resemble chocolate.

They release better products than trillion dollar corporations.

There are piracy groups out there who are known to source frames from multiple different blu-rays in order to create the best version of a work.

Imagine caring so much about something you compare different releases frame by frame in order to select the best ones so that you can splice them all together to form the highest quality ultimate version of a work.

Meanwhile corporations are perfectly happy shitting out some butchered streaming slop with compression artifacts in 90% black frames.

Eh Stremio's episode chooser leaves a bit to be desired, when jumping back into the middle of a show.

People just don't realize just how garbage even 4k streams are from all the services. It's not in their interest to give you real bluray quality.

Yes! Someone came after me on here because I said there really is no 4k streaming.

I’m going to develop 8k streaming - it’s just the normal low bitrate shit, but if you pause it sends a full quality 8k frame.

Nobody will figure it out!

When your source material shows fast sweeping motions you'd certainly get away with that.

The marketing of a resolution really won out. People will fight you if you suggest a high bitrate 1080p encode can look better than a low bitrate 4k.

Bitrate aside, the marketing stopped making sense long ago:

- 720p/1080p is counting vertical pixel resolution

- 4k/8k is counting horizontal pixel resolution

- "4k/8k" is not actually 4,000/8,000 horizontal pixels

- Suddenly the "p" becomes irrelevant (Not that most people even knew what it meant to begin with)

- 720/1080/4k/8k totally disregards aspect ratio

- Consumers already have a way to compare, and they're called "megapixels"

- 2.1MP (1080p) and 8.3MP (4k) etc. is a lot more consumer friendly since it's already used for cameras.

Marketing really won at making this a mess.

That's not even including HDR and the fake 4k upscales.

I don't know, 4k HEVC at 15,000mbps looks plenty good to me.

...what service offers 15Gbps stream?

None. No matter how much you pay, the best you'll ever get from streaming services is a bit-starved encode with fake film grain in a bullshit codec that'll look worse than 720p DVD rips you'd find on Zamunda yet still require more power to decode...

Sorry my unit was wrong 15Mbps is pretty common for the highest nitrate streams

Commercial 4k Blu-ray’s are twice that all the way up to 4x or sometimes more. And I’d say even on the best mastered disks there’s still obvious encoding artifacts.

And that is good for you, giving you the benefit of the doubt that you meant 15mbps, but I know I can personally tell the difference between 15mbps and 50mbps. Seeing more detailed film grain and seeing less artifacts in fast moving scenes are two of the most noticeable.

The Star Wars project is a bit of an outlier in terms of the insane work and dedication that's gone into it.

However, in the quality-focused corners of online film piracy, it's still pretty routine for people to combine the best features of every retail release available to produce something that's better than what you can get even by just going out and buying a Blu Ray. For example, maybe the best picture quality available anywhere is from a Blu Ray that was released to the German market, but a US Blu Ray release has an extra commentary track, while the best audio track is actually from an old Laserdisc release (crazy but it's happened before).

In the live action world it's pretty rare for a video track or an audio track to be spliced together from multiple sources, though it does happen. But in the anime world it's pretty common and they'll do stuff to fix picture quality issues or localize Japanese text to English on signs or whatever (and they can do it slick enough that you wouldn't even notice).

The most bizarre part of all of this, though, is that people put in all this work only for the communities themselves to be small and fiercely private, meaning it could be hard for most people to actually access the end results (though the popular stuff tends to trickle out). The best place on the Internet to download movies bar none (better than all the major streaming platforms put together) is an invite only site with under 40k members that's extremely difficult to join these days.

What's the name of the Star Wars project? You know, so I can avoid those darn pirates more effectively.

The one they were talking about (based on scans of original film prints) is called 4K77/4K80/4K83 for the three films.

I believe the first project of this type for Star Wars was Harmy's Despecialized Edition but I think these days most people prefer the 4K77 versions, although it varies by film and by person.

Thanks!

This is crazy. Going to surprise my wife with a watch night of these soon. Are these film scans pretty easy to find?

> Who knows, we don't know how much this is worth because nobody is even trying to offer it.

Note that this was the original concept of Netflix's streaming service. The service got steadily dismantled as copyright holders demanded higher fees.

Which means that we do have a good idea how much it's worth; it should lie between the range of what Netflix was able to sell successfully and what they weren't.

Also doesn’t track user and send a bunch of telemetry

Except for our ip address, timestamp and torrent metadata

https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com

All of which could be solved via a VPN of Seedbox.

The point being, my movements around the homepage aren't tracked and used for pushing more ads. My microphone isn't being recorded for AI training or recommendations algorithms. The intricate ways I use the platform isn't being sold to some third party data company. I just open the film, and it works..

Your IP address being logged in a bittorrent swarm is far less concerning to me than the 100 page privacy policy which explains how they will take rectal scans and sell them to cancer research agencies or something.

Fair point about it being less invasive than adtech sites, but my comment was just addressing the claim that piracy doesn't “track users and send a bunch of telemetry”. Torrent-trackers broadcast ip-addresses, timestamps, and torrent metadata; even if you consider it minor or mitigated by VPNs/seedboxes.

I was going to say.. does not seem to show much. That said, fun idea and very privacy inspiring.

Privacy is undervalued.

Your characteristics are you. Businesses already having that data allows them, specifically, to market their junk in a way they have an advantage over other businesses.

It's imbalanced: it screws the economy, and can be used to influence you -- to show you information which encourages conformance/lowers diversity. Freedom of choice is diluted by unknown leaking of your personal characteristics.

So don't use torrents. Usenet is still alive for this stuff. Though you need a indexer and Usenet subscription so it's a wash for privacy.

That has like a 50% precision rate for me. Around half of the reported torrents is stuff I've never seen.

Yeah, according to my router, my IP address hasn't changed in 8 months. But this site has me torrenting a bunch of anime, porn and Russian audiobooks ... while I was sitting on a beach last week in Hawaii.

(And I know I'm not being used as an unwitting seeder).

What's actually happening, it looks like, is it's finding any hits on the same Class C subnet as mine.

This ends up more looking like a precursor for some "I know what you're downloading" bitcoin extortion.

Subtitles is a big one for me. I can stream something in Japan, that I have seen other places has english subs, but due to licensing I cannot see them.

I know I could vpn around this, but why should I pay even more just for subtitles?

In the end I'm paying for Netflix, Disney and Amazon. My son uses those as he is bilingual, I just pirate what I want to watch personally.

This one is particularly janky!!!!!

Watch anime on Netflix at home with English subs. Fly to japan. Open Netflix, now you cannot watch with English subs.

The workaround is to pre emptively download the show, then put your device on airplane mode so Netflix cannot phone home, then watch the show with the English subs as snapshotted at home.

It’s frustrating when languages are locked behind regional restrictions or selective availability, and it borders on being an accessibility issue. That said, things have improved compared to the past, at least when it comes to consuming foreign media from outside its home country. In my case, that means accessing Japanese content while outside Japan.

In most cases, I suspect the limitation isn’t the fault of the streaming services but rather the content owners. On Netflix, for example, expecting English subtitles for anime in Japan is about as hopeless as expecting Japanese subtitles for U.S.-made films while in the United States.

To Netflix’s credit, their original shows are often subtitled and dubbed in a wide range of languages, which has significantly increased the availability of non-English content worldwide.

The same trend can be seen with music, at least for Japanese music. Until around ten years ago, almost nothing was available abroad. While some regional restrictions remain on certain tracks, the vast majority are now accessible outside Japan.

You're correct (in the things I have checked) when viewing Japanese content outside Japan. But inside? No, it's never licenced (or available, I'm not sure).

I live in Japan, so we'll fuck me otherwise, right? xD

Well, my point is that what you’re experiencing with anime and other content from Japan when accessed within Japan is actually quite normal. It’s the same reason I can hardly ever find content here in the U.S., especially from major movie studios, that includes Japanese subtitles or dubs.

I’m sorry you have to deal with that limitation. I can relate, since I also want to enjoy media in Japanese. Fortunately, having lived here long enough, I can at least comprehend it without subtitles.

Am I happy about it? No, but unfortunately, that’s the reality for now.

From a cursory search, there are browser extensions to display your own subtitles on sites like netflix. At least for firefox.

This is kinda what netflix was for many peak for a brief moment in time. It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty great, it had most of what you wanted to see. Then EVERY studio wanted their own meh streaming system, and fragmented the system again.

Also in any language. I am so tired of reading a list of audio/subtitles languages available, only to find out that they don’t work after purchase. Am all platforms. Good lord. Just tired of that bs

Apple is the most egregious of them all. The times I wanted to watch a foreign language film only to discover the subtitles are not available in English!

Same. I am just tired of buying a movie and then torrenting it 5 min later. Once even bought twice on two different platforms. Still broken languages. It is not that hard. WTF.

What gets to me is exclusivity deals. Wanna watch this? Subscribe to that. Wanna watch that? Well itnisnt available on this so you'd have to subscibe to that. New streaming service launches with promotional exclusivity of something you like? Gotta get on that too. And don't get me started on sports!

Streaming was OK when it was fighting cable, because it was cheaper and on-demand. With the constant greed, we're back to paying more than we used to pay for cable, it doesn't make sense anymore.

It's a shame https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P.... was never applied to streaming services.

In addition to inconvenience and cost, this is a problem because the technical implementation of most services is poor. For example, Comcast's streaming service as of a few years ago went VERY out of its way to block Linux.

This might fall under 3/4 but to me the biggest issue is being able to watch without having to turn my vpn off! I had already accepted the rest

Why would you need a connection at all to play local content that would need a VPN? Are you using one of those players that "streams" the torrent? That always seemed like a novel idea once bandwidth was available for that, and I guess plenty of seeders. It could also be the stereotype I've built in my head that the people that torrent lean towards hoarders adding to their local inventory.

I think the point was that streaming services freak out if you connect from a disapproved IP address.

Plex is phenomenal software

Jellyfin is shockingly good now also

Jellyfin + Infuse is so easy a baby can use it

Plex is garbage spyware. You cannot use the client/server offline, go ahead and reatrict your Plex server to lan only and try to log in from a client.

Jellyfin is an excellent solution right now. I'd say the desktop and mobile app is early Netflix quality now. Completely open source, and has click to run binaries for almost any OS.

> 2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release.

I paid for Disney+ to watch Andor at 4K, only to find out that you can't - Disney+ prohibits anything over 1K on computers whether you use the app or a browser. Went back to piracy very quickly after that. More fragmented experience is annoying, not even being able to get the highest quality as a paying customer is insane.

I went down a similar rabbit hole when I bought my OLED monitor, finding that you can neither stream UHD nor play UHD Blu-Ray (it was possible on a few generations of Intel chips before SGX was deprecated because it was not in fact secure; 10th-gen was the latest)

Well, okay then -- chump don't want the money, chump don't get the money

Amusingly if your have MakeMKV and patched firmware, you can rip them without even blinking.

The firmware flashing story for the drives is even funnier because some of the really common LG bluray drives that get used for ripping UHD blurays doesn't support reading UHD discs "on the box", but if you flash the firmware from a different drive it reads them without skipping a beat.

The 4K standard didn't bring any new disc formats to my knowledge. It just started using the higher layer count formats that were already available but the firmware on the cheaper drives wont read them.

Yep. As is often the case the DRM screws over the paying customers. At that point I certainly wasn't going to give them money for a disc they didn't want me to let me play

Also the content doesn't disappear on vacation, it has subtitles for all languages and audio track is actually high quality.

Don’t forget that piracy allows for front ends that actually want to make the user happy and have good UX.

I use Plex and it shows what I’m currently watching first. So continuing to a new episode is easy. If I sub to 50 episodes they just show up on my first line. Hulu makes me scroll down a few rows to continue watching.

It also shows cast and crew and other movies with the same.

Prime Video keeps starting the wrong episode when I click on "Continue Watching". That's infuriating in particular because that often makes me watch advertising 2-3 times: When starting, when clicking into the middle of the episode to confirm I indeed have watched it already and then again when switching to the correct episode.

It blows my mind what slow momentum Amazon has for a company with such vast resources. Kindle, for example, lacks so many features to enhance the reading experience. Jailbreaking my kindle and installing KOReader was a game changer.

They just don't care enough. User experience only needs to be "good enough", mostly determined by the question of users will tend to terminate the subscription without the feature or with the bug.

Plex’s recent changes have been garbage and it’s still better than the experience on a lot of streaming sites.

You also get many other features:

1. Automatically downloads subtitles, can pick between multiple available voice versions

2. Calendar with notifications when new series are available

3. Integration with various services like Trakt.tv, Letterboxd, etc

4. Automatic collection and organization of content

5. Metada, IMBD ratings and other movie details

6. Foreign content, Anime series (oh and of course let's not forget 4k porn...)

Point 6 grow a lot, with the recent UK chances requiring people to hand over their Identity to see xxx rated content. Privacy was a issue before but its getting worse and worse.

Point 7 ... see the recent EU law about chat services needing to provide access to users chats. Also links to UK recent laws etc ...

The more the governments and companies go crazy for your data / privacy, the more a personalized solution becomes a need. All the other benefits that such a platform offers, become icing on the cake.

I think thats the issue most people missed with Piracy the first time around - it wasnt even the cost (free) - its that the experience itself was just so much easier.

I have several streaming services and its always a struggle to find out which one the show I want is on. And then maybe I don't subscribe because its something random.

Streaming took off originally because the experience was just smoother and easier than torrenting

For me it's being able to fully browse movies and tv shows, along with their universal rating and not some vague "You'll like it" nonsense.

And don't forget, not "remastered" with content changed and/or removed.

Piracy also offers:

0. Ability to watch offline!

1. Ability to fix subtitle issues with minimal tweeks like change size or moving location.

1.2 Ability to get subtitles if they aren't offered (or offered in your language)

2. Ability to normalize audio.

3. Ability to buffer videos when on a poor connection.

4. Ability to create collections, organize, and track your movie as you wish

5. Arbitrary number of user accounts

6. Multicast streams to watch the same show across different devices regardless of if someone has an account or not (see JellyFin's SyncPlay)

7. No big organization tracking you and selling your data to the highest bidder

There's more, but honestly pirating is just a better experience. I can't tell you how many times Netflix has fucked up the subtitles so they are covering half my screen. There's tons of little issues like that that are just random and the only option is to just not watch Netflix (or pick your streaming service) that day.

Besides that, for the price of a yearly subscription you can build a NAS that can do all this for you and you get to keep the movies. Instead of having a monthly fee you can progressively add more drives and this can also be used for all your other things. Pictures, home videos, games (you can make a Steam cache), your local AI models, or whatever else you want. With $1k you can build a pretty good system, though that's 3 years of 4k Netflix, so not the cheap route in the short term.

Subtitles are often a very dumb failure point, especially when English subtitles aren't available in half the world for basically no reason.

Similarly annoying is when original language subtitles aren’t available in your region for some reason, even when the audio track of the same language is. Really puts a damper on using foreign media for immersive language learning purposes.

One of the streaming services (I forget if it was Netflix or Amazon) had the original German audio track for Deutschland 83, as well as German subtitles, but the German subtitles were machine-translated from the English subtitles. Maddening!

Max has an anime and we stopped watching because even though English subtitles and English dubbed audio was available the original Japanese audio was always strangely delayed by days or weeks and the only way to tell it had been added was to check manually.

Lazarus?

Yes. We figured it was a mistake and watched a single dubbed episode and it was terrible. IIRC when I googled it I found out it was an intentional decision and of course people were talking about just pirating the original.

Edit: It has been some months, but I also vaguely recall the episodes getting the Japanese audio out of order, which is why we thought it was just a mistake for that episode until we 'caught up' to the newest episodes.

And don't miss the situations where the subtitles are baked into the stream: HBO Max is very fond of just not letting you remove subtitles at all for at least a few non-english series.

I have another problem, which is that my wife is Japanese and I’m American, and if we watch a French movie then I want the English subs and she wants the Japanese subs. Making that work with streaming services is very painful.

I had never thought of this before. What is the solution? Can any video software show two subtitles at once?

I developed a tool (https://github.com/smacke/ffsubsync) which can sync subtitles against each other (or even against an audio track), and this can be used in conjunction with other tools such as https://pypi.org/project/srt/ to combine multiple subtitle streams into a single stream. I've used this strategy to good effect to get both English and Chinese subtitles up at once.

VLC, mpv, and SMPlayer all support dual subtitles, with varying amounts of fiddling.

https://old.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/hnle2o/dual_subtitles/

https://superuser.com/questions/1255487/how-to-get-vlc-to-di...

For Netflix and YouTube I actually use a language learning chrome extension called Migaku, that has this feature - but if there don’t exist subs, can also sometimes pull it off with a chrome extension for dual subs - forget what it is called but I can download SRT files and load them up alongside a stream. Both are not reliable and require significant fiddling.

Anecdotally, for a long time dual French and German subtitles was the standard in Swiss cinemas when movie was shown in original language. So your usecase is not that unusual !

Same in Belgium, top line was Dutch, bottom line was French

Until recently, 3. (poor connection) has been a huge issue for me and streaming services. When there is a download/watch later, I sigh with relief.

7. is only sort-of an issue, IMHO. Anything that is pirated is usually fairly benign content and I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy. I just wish I could know how many times I've watched it too.

I would add: Piracy offers the ability to remember content that isn't popular enough to remain in streaming services. I just searched "Big Trouble in Little China" and Google Play wants me to pay $3.79 to rent it or the full original price to purchase it. Tell me, does the original cast get any of that or is it just adding pocket change to Google's coffers?

> I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy.

I come from Germany, from East Germany. And some people there wanted to know if you had seen certain films and how often. And ‘Idiocracy’ would have been very high up on their list.

Not all films were banned right from the start (‘The Legend of Paul and Paula’ [1]), but right from the beginning the Stasi found it very interesting who had watched the film.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Paul_and_Paula

This. Privacy does not matter until it does.

Thanks for your example, qrios

What if I have recently watched The Lives of Others?

(Which everyone in the US should.)

‘The Lives of Others’ is an outstanding film. However, it is a reappraisal of East German history and was made seven years after the collapse (the director grew up in West Germany and Western Europe).

US-America has looked at the subject of surveillance of its own population and its own (possible) collapse many times and often in a timely manner.

"The Conversation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation

"Enemy of the State": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)

"The Siege": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege

"In the Heat of the Night": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film...

"Eagle Eye": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Eye

If you ask publicly, ‘What if I've seen XYZ?’ then it's actually already too late.

The collapse being the collapse of the DDR? The Lives of Others must have been made way further beyond that than 7 years. Closer to 20, I'd figure.

TLOO came out in 2006, 16 years after the DDR collapsed.

I wondered if GP was thinking of another movie so I asked ChatGPT, which told me: "The German film you’re thinking of is "Good Bye, Lenin!" — released in 2003, exactly seven years after the formal end of the DDR in 1990." (My emphasis.)

So much for GPT-5.

Right, I missed a whole decade. (For me 1989, the Mauerfall is the official end of GDR)

That's hilarious. Imagine going back two years and showing someone GPT-5? They might think the Pause AI movement had won. It makes you ponder an alternate timeline where the OpenAI brain trust wasn't dismantled

Which version did you use, though? GPT-5, GPT-5-Thinking, GPT-5 Pro, GPT-5-Mini, GPT-5 with Thinking (reasoning effort=high) or one of the other 18 options? Did you tell it to think harder? Maybe you are just holding it wrong?

Making what is essentially a router dispatching queries to the smallest engine susceptible to answer a question was maybe a good optimization from a techical and business pont of view.

But branding that router "GPT5" is a huge marketing mistake, because now, every time a smaller model says something stupid (as they often do), it seems that's the best OpenAI has to offer...

Linguistically it's an ok association. If you look at it unconsciously, you can find it plausible too, add 7 but in reverse.

GPT-5 fell into a coma and missed a few critical years.

A perfectly grammatical and plausible sentence. Those words all seem quite likely to occur in that sequence. Another LLM success.

I’m confused. It was a great movie and wildly applicable to what the right wants to do to the US now. What is too late?

I mean it may be too late to save us/US but it still bears saying.

Trivia about that movie: The spying devices used were authentic and from the era depicted.

Interesting. There isn't one sentence in that article (English) which describes the political controversy of that movie. A single sentence mentions the film almost being banned for its 'political overtones'.

The English article is incomplete. The banner is there. I guess I could try to complete it but it’s highly my work would be struck out by an angry editor feeling territorial for a reason or another so maybe not.

The French article is a bit better - I don’t understand German sadly.

The controversy stems from the protagonists values. They put their love for each other and their search for fulfilment above other commitments which was seen as dangerously non communist. The film was cleared by the head of East Germany but the censors still imposed a tragic ending.

> Tell me, does the original cast get any of that or is it just adding pocket change to Google's coffers?

Google will have negotiated with the “owner” (in this case I think Disney) for a wholesale price and then adds its retail markup (eg 20%). Disney pay the industry standard SAG/DGA union negotiated residual agreements to cast, writers and directors

I find myself wishing for a lower-overhead approach to this. 20% already gets the price from $14.99 to $12.49. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the cast gets less than 50% and lawyers get more than 40% of that. If true, that's less than $6.25 to the folks that actually made the movie and $8.75 (or more) of pure, unadulterated overhead. Finally, clicking on "where to watch" shows prices within $0.20 of each other. It's not ... not price-fixing, but it kinda is.

Also, "wholesale" is such a strange way to look at this. There is no way the digital asset is sent to them more than once. It's some kind of strange fiction for me to imagine, "here are X downloads of movie Y at a discounted rate. If you want more, you need to come back and purchase another X downloads." It's as if a download itself is a consumable that Disney provides.

The actor residuals are much less than 50%, but the remaining goes to the studio/funders who own the rights, not lawyers.

Wholesale/retail makes more sense if you think of google having to deal with consumers, providing a website/apps, advertising, collecting payments etc. whilst the movie company makes the content and negotiates deals with broadcasters and streaming companies around the world.

> I just wish I could know how many times I've watched it too.

I exported all my private data from Netflix and it had very detailed information on exactly when I (or anyone else in the household) watched what.

Sadly it only went back a few years. Either they do not keep older data or they pretend not to. My Spotify data seemed to be complete for all years I have used it, listing the exact time and location, what device etc, I listened to any track there ever.

>isn't popular enough No that's because it's good enough to get rented regularly. Why sign a streaming deal if your IP prints money?

What do you mean by audio normalization? Aren't you talking about compression?

Some movies have portions that are really quiet and others that are quiet loud. Depending on your taste you may prefer to not have the experience of turning up the audio so you can hear a quiet conversation, then having your ears blown out by a loud explosion or whatever. Director's tastes be damned, I'm trying to relax over here!

In audio processing, the more precise term for it is compression (dynamically adjust gain). Normalization usually means that the gain is adjusted so that the highest volume meets a certain level. (Like what YouTube does)

But compression is ambiguous because that could also refer to compressing the video stream to reduce the size of the movie.

> compression is ambiguous

I think the unambiguous term for this is "Dynamic Range Compression"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression

Compression is an entirely different thing.

Compression isn't just gain adjustment - it's a specific type of audio processing that increases perceived "gain" (loudness) of the entire source audio by "compressing" the levels of loud frequencies & increasing the levels of quiet frequencies.

Normalization increases gain of all frequencies at any given point-in-time while reducing gain of all frequencies at other points in time. It doesn't reduce dynamic range.

Sorry but you really misunderstand what normalization and compression means. "quiet frequencies" :D

I assure you I don't.

I'm not sure what the scare quotes are about but if you point out what I'm misrepresenting I can try to explain it a little better.

You don't need to explain, I know the subject.

Compression acts on the amplitude of the entire audio signal, not "quiet frequencies". You can start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression

Normalization as it normally is used is offline process where you up the gain of the whole audio so that the loudest noise is 0dB.

I think you're describing a multi-band compressor. "Normal" compressors do indeed do gain adjustment. They usually do this without regard for the frequencies present. Only the amplitude matters for normal compressors.

Not specifically talking about multiband.

Normal compressors do effectively do gain adjustment - it's not really the same as a typical amp since their core function only reduces gain, then makeup is applied to the entirety to compensate - but yes the result is effectively gain adjustment.

As for doing it "without regard for the frequencies present", if you compress a mix with a base guitar & high vocals, the impact of the compression on the base will be different than on the higher notes. This is aside from (/in addition to?) attack & release applied on a per-track basis & more just about the natural effect of dynamics within frequency ranges.

Are you referring to psychoacoustic effects? Something like perceived loudness is only determined by waveform amplitude, but also affected by frequencies present? Or maybe the vocal and bass parts have transients at different times causing the other to be attenuated when it was already relatively quiet?

Other than that I'm not sure what else you could mean. Maybe we've been using different compressors. I've used a small handful of hardware and software compressors and haven't found them to sensitive to spectral content when used "normally". Meaning no extra filters or side chain configuration.

> Normalization increases gain of all frequencies at any given point-in-time while reducing gain of all frequencies at other points in time.

When you do that then the difference between the loudest and the quietest part of the audio gets reduced. That's dynamic range reduction.

True. But.

While normalization is usually one-way, if you're doing DSP normalization & have a record of the level offsets you've applied, it's reversible. This is never the case for compression - you can't increase dynamic range of a compressed file (short of AI-generating something that never was)

It's not the same thing. Normalization is scanning to see what the highest volume scale you can use without introducing clipping, then multiplying every sample by that scale.

Compression is very different. The volume scale isn't constant, and the original sound is distorted significantly. I often use a compressor to listen to video game streams because they tend to have the game audio be way too quiet. Having the compressor on causes the game audio to become louder with some minor distortion, but distorts the streamer's voice significantly.

I know about this. This is why I asked

Offline watching is a thing with streaming services, too.

Also, there is no reason for a paid streaming service not to implement 1 (but not 1.2), 2, 3 and 4. It's not like these features will affect their bottom line. They just don't see value in implementing and supporting them.

  > these features will affect their bottom line. They just don't see value

That's the problem. These are useful features. Look around you, people are... using them. I got a ton of upvotes for my comment. I'm not saying that to brag, I'm saying that because it is evidence that these things are in demand.

The issue is that most of this "what has value" is just as made up as anything else. Most people don't even know what they want. They get features and then they know they want it, but often not before. So it is affecting their bottom line, but the problem is group think.

Sorry, I meant that "implementing them wouldn't affect their bottom line in a negative way". I agree with you that they are useful features.

That's what separates these bullet points from the others: Others will never be implemented because they won't help them make more money.

I'm still not convinced it would affect their bottom line in a negative way.

There's a thing I hear a lot from other engineers. They always talk about value. Here's a dumb example. Why when migrating over to Apple do I have 3 copies of holidays in my calendar? I got one from Google, one from Microsoft, and one from Apple. You are telling me you can't regex that out and just display one of them for me? You don't need to remove the events, just don't show me multiple copies. Have the failure mode be showing dupes, that's fine. It's what, an afternoon's work for an intern? But pushback I get is "where's the value", by which it it is always clarified that they mean money and profits. I can't come up with that, any number would be made up, right? A poor estimate at best. Everyone recognizes this. But why is this not the same for a ton of other bullshit features? We got features on teams with budgets of millions of dollars that are clearly going to fail from the get go. They then fail but became too big to fail and so they keep sinking money into it because it turned into politics. FFS, it's engineering, sometimes ideas just fail, it's not a big deal! But you're telling me that we can sink tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into this bullshit but not an afternoon for something that clearly will make a better user experience? Before I got most of these dupes solved my calendar was just unreadable.

The same is with the rest of this. It's easy to sit high and mighty with your user data acting like people don't want these features. But the problem is you aren't even measuring that desire. If anything, you should be looking at what the most popular features are in platforms like Jellyfin and replicate them. That way you at least know there's existing demand! But the reality of it is that when you write programs you are writing an environment. There's on one-size-fits-all product you can make. You can give good sane defaults but the rest, it's just too noisy. Letting users have flexibility reveals a lot of things you'd never have been able to figure out on your own. It's very hard to know what users are frustrated with and honestly, most don't even know themselves. But open platforms allow for a small set of power users to fix those problems and make everything better for everyone else. That's the whole reason computers and smartphones have been so successful.

But the same is for any program you write. It's the same reason everyone uses ffmpeg. It's because ffmpeg didn't just build a product, they built an environment. It's the same for Jellyfin. 99% of Jellyfin users are just using the platform as is and don't touch code ever. A good portion of those will install plugins like intro skipper. But your powerusers are the real win with this system. In our out of touch business structures we look and see that powerusers are a small portion of the userbase and dismiss them and their wants because of this. But they miss that these people also drive a lot of innovation of their products. That it makes them a lot of money. But the problem is, it's hard to measure a counterfactual. You'll never have in the spreadsheets "we would have made x profit if a poweruser made y feature for us". I mean it took god damn years for the fucking flashlight app to become a native app for both Android and iPhones. Yet, it was an app available within months and is to this day something everyone uses and uses frequently. I don't think anyone could even tell you how many dollars that generated. But I also don't think anyone can really tell you how many dollars Siri generated. Or your newest reskin of iOS or Android. Or the value of fancy features like AI magic erasers and stuff.

So stop asking for value. The value numbers are just made up bullshit. It is politics. Just make good fucking products. Especially as an engineer. Your job is to make the product good, the business people's job is to make the company profitable and sustainable. Without each other, companies collapse. But when the business people take over they die much more slowly. It's not about value. It's not about better products. It's not even about the god damn profits. It's all politics. So just make the god damn product better.

/rant

most streaming services i use do not allow offline watching on a computer, only mobile

This is a case study in why competitive markets are important in general.

Copyright is a government-granted monopoly but the monopoly is hard to enforce. It works because most people actually want to support the creators, not because DRM is effective or anything like that.

So you have the uncommon situation in which a monopoly (the copyright holder) is operating in parallel to a competitive black market for content distribution (pirates). And then the competitive market -- even though it has to operate underground and makes hardly any profit -- provides the better experience.

Lesson for anyone who thinks market consolidation doesn't lead to consumer harm.

The black market is only more competitive because it doesn’t bear the costs of actually creating the content.

Alfred Hitchcock's movies aren't missing from Netflix because Netflix couldn't afford to pay for their production.

The non-black market produces an intentionally inferior product so they can maximize their rent-seeking behaviors.

None of them are paying the cost to create the content for movies and TV, except for their own original shows. I also have no problem paying a company to watch their original content…that’s completely fair. I also have no problem paying toward the “cost of creating content” as you say.

I have a problem with how media is carved up to make sure you have to use multiple services and maximize profit. I have a problem with the ads they want to force me to watch…and charge me to watch them. I have a problem with their ever increasing prices for worse and worse catalogs. I have a problem with, despite paying for the right to watch it, they still decide how and when I can watch.

None of those things are the “cost” of creating content.

What do you do instead to make sure the creators are fairly compensated?

Apart from visiting the creator and physically handing them a wad of cash, you can't. There is no way at all for you as a consumer to ensure the creators are fairly paid. Simply put, the people you're paying for access to the content take most of the money and the creators get next to none.

Why do you think it's better for studios and labels to be allowed to extort artists this way?

The artist isn't getting fair pay in any situation, so why would you want to make things worse for everyone by continuing to encourage this rent-seeking behavior?

I like to watch old movies and don't think dead creators need compensation. Their descendants are entitled (maybe!) to inherit their wealth, but not to earn an aeternal rent doing nothing.

Go to shows and buy merch.

Ah wait, that's the other set of streaming services that also don't pass on the profits to creators...

The problem here is that distribution companies have always been a wedge between creators and customers. There have been attempts to provide better ways. I subscribed to eMusic until Sony came along, raised the rates and cut out the indie bands.

YouTube was great for independent creators until Google took it over and slowly squeezed the life out of it. Now it's a janky system that's milking creators as hard as possible.

Hopefully we will get a new system that will work for creators until they are crushed by the system.

Often this is the only way.

The predatory nature of the industry isn’t much different than current laws on the service industry wages and tipping. For anyone not a big name movie star paid millions for their appearance, they are getting (comparably) below-minimum wage pay and hoping for tips (royalties, if any). The industry puts a lot of the real risk on the lowest levels who have no decisions, but they take the highest reward while blaming those people for bad decisions. That doesn’t sound fair to me.

It’s also a lot like our grocery supply chain…layers upon layers, each trying to take their cut of revenue as it passes from distributor, to distributor, to distributor, to… most people have no idea how many different companies are taking a cut while the farmers are squeezed. Not much different for content creators.

The problem isn’t that goods and services are expensive, it’s all the companies adding little or no value, or underpaying creators, just to maximize their own profits from the creations. YouTube sells ads, demonetizes the creators, but still run ads and keep all the revenue. Spotify just decides not to pay creators who don’t make enough while they sell ads that run before and after their music.

People are happy to pay toward the creation of content, otherwise Patreon, Twitch (I know…as bad as YT but at least a decent amount goes to the creator), and other “direct” (relatively) to creator sites wouldn’t exist.

> For anyone not a big name movie star paid millions for their appearance, they are getting (comparably) below-minimum wage pay and hoping for tips (royalties, if any).

This really gets to me, you hear about folks complaining about Spotify but they don't seem to get that before Spotify unless you were Guns and Roses, you did not get any royalties. 0.1c per song is actually better than people were getting via radio plays in the 80/90's. In fact back then you probably owed if they played your song.

Creating the content is a sunk cost.

That said, the evidence on content creation and financial incentive is quite blurry - there's some relationship but there are also lots of people who create lots of things without tremendous financial incentive. And the genesis of copyright wasn't to protect authors, but publishers who had significant costs for producing first editions compared to those who might just copy a first edition.

> The black market is only more competitive because it doesn’t bear the costs of actually creating the content.

That only explains why the price is lower, not why the experience is better.

Kinda? I'm not actually sure what profit is being made if I'm just downloading from qbitorrent and never visiting a site seeing ads.

But also, I still will buy movies and pay for streaming services and pirate the shows on them. Why? Because the pirating experience is just better. It is also just easier to download a torrent than it is to rip a blueray. I don't really feel bad about this because I'm paying for the content like anyone else, I'm just getting a better viewing experience. Maybe only thing being hurt is the watch metrics on the streaming platform. But if they aren't considering the metrics from piracy too then they're being idiotic.

I really want to support the creators! But by paying for movie tickets or streaming services, very little of the money I pay goes to the creators. It mostly goes to the executives and financiers, or the megastar actors that I don't really care about.

Piracy gives zero money to the creators.

It also gives zero money to scum-sucking studios and labels and worthless bureaucrats that only give the author a 2% cut.

Not always, it has generated cult classics that have built a valuable fan base of support for many cases. Downstream it can increase in person popularity that wouldn’t otherwise exist.

Ah, this is like the "trickle down" theory of piracy.

It was the explicit policy of Bill Gates and others in regards to Asia.

On the subject of artificial monopoly, it's interesting to compare video streaming to music streaming.

Music streaming platforms (Spotify, deeper, apple music, tidal etc.) Generally work a lot better than movie/series streaming. It seems that competition between them works quite well, prices are reasonable, and more importantly, any subscription gives you access to pretty much all of mainstream music. There's hardly any content exclusive to one platform, so you can essentially get any of them and be done with it

Contrast that with video streaming, where content is pretty much exclusively tied to one platform. As a consequence, people routinely have several subscriptions instead of one, and platforms compete on library more than on price or quality of service. Overall experience is much worse

I wonder why this difference came to be, although these are very similar services (with basically the same copyright mechanism)

Or more generally: the ability to use a video player of your choice, which can have whatever features and interface that you want.

> With $1k you can build a pretty good system

1. The hardware you buy for these activities, has still residual value after 1, 2, 3 year. Unlike the streaming service you pay for.

2. Its cheap to upgrade / expand over time (if its not a all in one solution)

3. It opens a door to not just store movies/music/images, but as emulator, streaming service, or game streaming to one or multiple.

4. The content will not arbitrarily vanish.

5. Your bookmarks / last viewed / ... will not arbitrarily vanish. Do not get me started on this and how annoying it can be when a services removes content!

6. It serves not only as a device for "linux isos" or other gray zones but also as a legit backup of your own personal data.

7. Saves you from needing "cloud" storage or other cloud services.

8. Can be enhanced with programs that offer image conversion, pdf conversion etc, all private!

9. Run your own chat server for the family, no US/EU "we want to know what you are saying" issues.

10. Can act like your own VPN, to route data from your phone or other devices outside your home.

11. Provides service if you are in area's with horrible internet connection with its ability to "cache isos" at night slowly.

12. Your control over the media means you can stream 4k to your PC. Netflix kuch kuch ... No, its not 4k.

13. You can gain the FULL bitrate of the media. You do not get a washed down version of the supposed media based upon how busy a streaming service their servers are or other limitations.

14. It can be used for so many other activities like programming.

15. Did i mention home automatization?

And so much more ... People are probably doing things with NAS setups that i can not even think about.

Your not investing into a machine for "illegal" stuff, your investing into a machine that frees you as the end user from all those cloud, streaming, and other services their lackluster service. And then provides all the added benefits on top, that a 24/7 running PC can provide.

Lets also not forget the future where LLM's are a thing. Having your own open source LLM that runs at home, can be a major benefit.

But ... it does require more knowledge, especially as you step up beyond simple storage. So that is the real downside, not the money, the time and knowledge buildup.

You completely forgot to mention home automation :) Home Assistant FTW

Making all this work is not difficult with docker once you get past the steep learning curve

> The hardware you buy for these activities, has still residual value after 1, 2, 3 year. Unlike the streaming service you pay for.

With mine I am cracking on 14 years with some of it. It still 'just works'. I ripped all of my stuff so I can manage it as I have too much of it. The home streaming has been quite nice. I would upgrade just for '4k'. Not sure if I want it or not. One major roadblock has been finding a decent wake from power off not just s3 and works with an IR remote. 14 years ago media center was a thing so most manufactures put CIR into everything. Then suddenly they didnt. If I could get past that one roadblock I would update it all.

I agree with everything here. But I want to do a little nitpicking here

  > 7. Saves you from needing "cloud" storage or other cloud services.

One thing that frustrates me about cloud services is that they want to be the only host of my data. I want a 321 system[0]. That means I want a copy and I want a copy somewhere else. But most of these storage systems don't make it easy to do API calls and just rsync everything[1]. Yeah, I know about rclone but Google photos isn't storing my photos in their original quality and I don't trust them to not change the data.

So it means really the only solution is just buying a storage box. You can treat it as safety so doesn't need much egress, just to sync. But you should have something off site and "cloud" makes that much easier. But also, depends on how important that is. I'm not doing that with "pirated" content but I am with my content.

[0] 3 copies, 2 locations, 1 off-site. (All these are "at least")

[1] How is it easier to write a small bash script through termux to rsync to my home and another location than it is to do this with professional tools? For the love of god, it is a fucking trivial script and I can make it do whatever I want, like only backup on WiFi, only through tailscale, or even a specific WiFi SSID. Hell, I can get it to issue a command to my home server to sync with the remote server checking to make sure things match. For what, not even 100 lines in bash? It's a joke

I think my favorite thing of not even piracy, just ripping my DVDs, is the ability to watch a random episode of a show. There's some shows like The Simpsons that I don't want to watch in production order any more, nor do I want to manually select. Now I just tap some buttons in Kodi and it randomly picks a recently unwatched episode.

Funnily enough, ability to watch offline is something the Netflix app for Windows (yes from their app store) lets you do. It is my favorite reason to install Windows apps instead of just using the browser, really handy for a trip when you have a real screen to watch movies from.

GOG used to have a small selection of DRM-free movies that you could buy to download and that would then make all those things possible to do in a way that would be legal or at least able to do locally in a way that would have a zero risk of being discovered even if it violated some EULA. Announcement from 2014:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree...

Sadly http://www.gog.com/movies now redirects to http://www.gog.com/games and the movies link that used to be on the front page is gone. Based on a comment in that announcement thread it looks like the movies were silently removed already back in 2023. I only noticed it now. They never seemed to really add any new movies and the existing ones were mostly game-related documentaries.

Also the trust that your favorite music will still be available to you if the streaming service goes bankrupt or cancels its content licensing deal or decides to jack up prices unaffordably or makes its player incompatible with your OS or introduces a service-ending software bug.

1.3 Ability to make your own subtitles so your Klingon grandma can watch the movie

1.4 Ability to edit the video so your 10 year old can watch Top Secret! without gross anal sex jokes

You shouldn't need to spend anything like $1k to get yourself going with a simple Jellyfin server running on a $50 TinyMiniMicro and a 4 tb external HDD. $150? 8 months to match Netflix. Substantially less to replace two services.

Nice zero indexed array.

In addition to these and what you replied to, there is also the ability to downgrade the video quality in case you do not need the highest quality (e.g. in case you want to reduce the disk space and bandwidth requirements), and you might have a better UI (and otherwise use your own implementation of various software).

About subtitles, something else I sometimes want to fix is adding an outline to the text and adding a translucent background (many use a opaque background (making it hard to see the picture) or a transparent background (making it hard to see the text)).

It really bothers me that they don't really (reliably) release new Blu-rays anymore.

NOT THAT I WOULD EVER ENDORSE BREAKING DRM BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE A CRIME, but if I had a Blu-ray I could fairly easily break the DRM of the movie with MakeMKV or something and watch it anywhere I want without pirating it.

It's too bad it's illegal to do that, it sure would be nice to be able to have all these features without piracy.

Piracy also offers the ability to use the software of your choice.

You get to use mpv instead of the streaming company's obnoxiously shitty video player.

You get to use Linux without some asshat in a suit taking issue with the fact he doesn't fully own your computer and deciding he'll only stream you 720p video as punishment.

- Not having to watch ads after you've already paid for a subscription

Nn. Also you can code up your Own Video Player interface, if you like to.

Ever get frustrated because you can't determine if you're selecting a button or if the button is always outlined/large ish, fix it yourself!

i pirate stuff even after i've paid for the streaming service that offers it. i just want to watch things on plex - it's already installed wherever i want to watch, and it stores and syncs my watch history. unlike if i watch a show on amazon, and then it leaves amazon for netflix, and nextflix starts telling me it's "unwatched".

I found that people around me pick movies a lot less of what they want to watch and more of just what is available right now on Netflix. Maybe having an unlimited library also means you have to be lot more picky of what you watch and developing your taste a lot more.

Well that's also the point of building your own library. You get to choose to store only the things you like, and not store/delete things you don't like. Nothing gets pushed to you, you are in charge.

I pay £22 per month to rent a seedbox and I would happily pay more.

I had a Plex server for years. It just got to the point where it wasn’t worth the time or effort to find a high quality rip. If I can’t find what I want on streaming service I just buy it or rent it on iTunes.

For movies, if you buy it from one of the major movies studios that participate in Movies Anywhere, it is automatically added to your library in Amazon Prime, whatever Google is using these days, Vudu etc.

But to your other points.

2. If you can find a high quality rip

3. All the streaming services work on iOS, Android, Roku, AppleTV, Windows and Macs and whatever Google device that Google decide not to abandon this week

4. I had a Plex server and 1000Mbps u/d and it still wasn’t as reliable when I was on a plane, outside the country etc

4. Plex lets you cache stuff locally for a plane or when you’re traveling. That’s usually what I do when I’m going somewhere. I did try streaming from my house to a hotel in India a decade ago… it technically worked, but I had to set the resolution so low that it wasn’t fun to watch. I assume that’s better now, but I just cache stuff before I leave now.

Use the right browser (not built/funded by ad tech companies) and all Ads can be blocked in 2025.

Those companies own half the internet and they make sure the right browser is always slower and shittier than theirs

I recently bought music from the iTunes Store, because it was easy and DRM free. I can do what I want with the music after I buy it, and don’t have to worry about what happens if Apple shuts down the store. I’m not aware of a single video platform that can say the same thing. This is the core of the issue for me. In 25 years, I want to know that I can still watch my favorite movies and TV shows. Outside of buying DVDs and ripping them, there is no way to do that without venturing into piracy. I actually bought an external DVD drive recently (while I still can) so I can still rip music and DVDs when discs are the best/easiest way to get some content.

While piracy has a huge library, when it comes to stuff that’s not popular for the long-term with the mainstream, if a person doesn’t grab it while they can, it can be very difficult to get. Of course, these same things aren’t available at all on streaming services, so…

If I could buy DRM free movies and TV shows, from a single source, with a quality library of every show and movie, I’d be down. That doesn’t exist.

And a player that doesn’t suck. How many times have I hit rewind only to go back 30 min instead of 10 sec because the service lost track of where I was.

Pressing rewind is akin to Russian roulette, to the point where I’ve mostly given up, lest I risk ruining the mood while trying to scrub back to where I was.

Amazing how what was table stakes in the 90s seems like unattainable tech these days.

Let's not forget:

No advertising.

I think, particularly now after having the luxury of ad blockers for so long, that many of us are extremely triggered by advertisements and see them more nakedly as the awful propaganda they are.

Disrupting a cinematic experience with garbage propaganda ruins it. It's an insult to the creators, and none of us should tolerate it.

I'm glad streaming services adopted a better model, but then they reverted back as they increased prices because the money is too good and people put up with it.

I'm sure somebody else has mentioned this, but if you're willing to buy physical media, it's not difficult to rip even 4K HDR blu-rays yourself and stream from a self hosted platform like Jellyfin.

I'm able to find most of what I want to watch on physical media in either HD or 4K, with the exception of more obscure anime. Some TV shows can be expensive to pick up and more laborious to rip, though.

Older TV shows are often also only available on DVD which is much lower quality than what streaming services (and thus pirates) have for them.

Where does one safely pirate these days to avoid authorities

I'm not going to name any names but depending on your budget and jurisdiction you can probably figure out a setup where you either torrent, possibly through a reputable VPN, from an invite based tracker, or you pay to play with one or two Usenet accounts.

If you are willing to spend a bit of money you can get what's called a seedbox in a suitable jurisdiction and do rather innocous seeming tunneling between your home network and there.

Torrenting is a bit messy, usually it's not 'one tracker fits all', instead you'd likely want one for movies and one for music or something like that. Perhaps Limewire is a good fit for your needs, or perhaps you're more of a power user willing to endure weeks or months of research and interviews with tracker admins.

Usenet is a bit more involved, and you pay for access and bandwidth. The network traffic doesn't look as suspicious as torrenting, however, and if something turns up in a search it's yours, you don't have to beg for people to seed and so on.

With a bit of effort and technical savvy you can automate a lot of piracy these days, with tools like Sonarr and Radarr tracking releases and automatically pushing them into your self-hosted streaming service.

Usenet? Is the alt.binaries hierarchy really still around? how active is it?

if you have good indexer you have access to almost anything.

If you pick decent indexers and buy enough traffic it's absurdly good. Especially if you're into less than mainstream material or tend to try many things out before you settle on a binge, because if it's in the search result it's almost sure to be on your disk within minutes and you don't need to keep a cache for days or weeks because of hit'n'run rules.

Politically I prefer torrenting, due to the social character and openness and so on, but Usenet has none of the fuss beyond a bit of setup and configuration.

pay for a vpn, get an open-source client like qbittorrent, and go to sites like yts.mx and 1337x.to.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/movies_and_t...

Maybe I'm just lucky with where I've lived, but I've literally never had problems pirating without obfuscating my traffic in any way whatsoever. I've been torrenting since I was a kid, too, and I torrent literally everything you can possibly torrent from software to music.

Do people really get hounded for piracy in other countries?

But you can check out fmhy.net, it's a great resource (unaffiliated, it's just a genuinely great resource for piracy :p)

Apparently this depends on where you live. It's pretty well known that in Germany, if you're found torrenting, you will at first receive an angry email from your ISP demanding you pay them €100-€1000. If you ignore this email, they will take you to court, and the judge will order you to pay the same fine plus their legal fees and the court fees. If you don't go to court, this will be directly debited from your bank account. If you don't have the money in your bank account, it will be garnished from your wages. This will happen, 100% of the time. Not even "someone hacked my wifi" is an excuse (even when true), because even if that was true, you would still be liable because it's your fault for not securing your wifi better.

Meanwhile in some other countries - even EU ones - nobody gives a shit and people can receive 10 copyright infringement notices a day and throw them all in the metaphorical trash.

I use torrent with private trackers for over 20 years now, no VPN. Never had an issue.

With regards to point 2, in some cases piracy offers better versions than have ever been commercially released. Look at the mission hill restoration project, the Ed Edd and Eddy restoration project, or the various "despecialized" Star wars cuts

It also offers:

- Watch movie before deciding if it's worth paying, or if it was propaganda for a particular ideology.

- Watch original movie. Companies like Disney often change content to match a trending ideology.

- Avoid subscription services.

And your personal data won’t be sold off!

A Netflix presentation to invite advertisers actually boasted how well they could target you for adds.

I think the key thing it misses though (usually) is that you usually have to go grab things. I'm not willing to go download something in order to view it. Not even spending a few minutes time grabbing a whole season of a series and then storing it somewhere, even if viewing it takes many hours.

Spotify's convenience killed the mp3, and Netflix is hyper convenient compared to most piracy. No one (to a rounding error, but let's say no one) is _really_ interested in file organizing, bitrates, buffering, whether a show disappears in 5 years etc. Everyone (again, to a rounding error) just wants to watch that latest season of that latest show and then forget it.

What's now making old-school piracy return is that while Netflix is convenient, having 7 streaming services is really _inconvenient_. Not to mention expensive. But the inconvenience is horrible.

I wish just 1-3 of the large streaming services would cooperate on some standard which lets me see and manage all my content in one place. Then devices could natively support browsing that "rss for streaming" instead of having N different services. Once a few do, the pressure on others to join the standard would increase.

It's been super easy to stream pirated content for more than a decade (Popcorn Time) at this point, especially of late with the billions of pirate streaming sites that all pull from 20 different sources.

It's funny in a sad way how much better the UX of a lot of the piracy sites are, too.

It's still hit & miss. You still get shit content interspersed with the good there. There isn't perfect curation so you can have a missing episode, a version that doesn't allow removing the spanish audio track, a duplicate of a movie or whatever. I'm not sure if that's solved yet (i.e. that you can somehow subscribe to pirated and well curated content) but at least last time I checked it sucked.

Curation tends to be better with private sites and their trackers than with public trackers.

It's a point of member pride to assemble complete seasons with consistent quality, sizing, subtitles, and audio, etc.

Yes but pirate site 1 does that for shows A, B, and C while pirate site 2 does it for show B, C, and D now you have rivaling versions of B and C etc, and worst case one of them did a poor job. If you just choose one source you have decent curation but not all the content. If you choose both you get duplication. I don't get how it solves the fundamental problem of getting everything curated with good content and no duplication? Perhaps this is a solved problem - but I just haven't tried recently.

I guess the best answer to that is it requires a touch of "smart customer" insight, they kind that people develop food shopping, buying hardware, etc.

Scene files are named to rules that name the content, the source, the video and audio encoding, and the release group.

  SeriesName S03E12 EpisodeName 1080p AMZN WEB-DL DDP5 1 H264-NTb
  SeriesName S03E12 EpisodeName 1080p HEVC x265-MeGusta

The first is by a group -NTB that are known for 'direct copies' (by various indicated methods) of streaming sources; here it's episode 12, season 3 of SeriesName as a WEB-DL copy and sourced from AMZN, video encoded with H264 and DDP5.1 audio.

That'll be a larger file and an "as viewed" copy.

The second is probably derived from the first, re-encoded using HEVC H265 to create a smaller file. The audio stream may also be transformed to be smaller in size, perhaps fewer channels. The compression may have introduced jagged chunky artifacts in fast moving scenes, or moire patterns in panning shots across chain link mesh basketball court fences.

So, it's a "solved problem" in the sense of it's not hard to learn to read the labels and understand different brand strategies.

Again, good private trackers that have been about for a good while now typically have complete seasons in a fully consistent form as a single multi episode torrent- all the same source (eg: BluRay release, or DVD, or from digital channel, or upscaled reconstruct, etc) all by the same release group.

Good private trackers also tend to have request forums, anything sought and not held can be requested and admins or users with multiple accounts tend to fill requests and often like the challenge of a hard to source rarity.

From the end user PoV they can also join multiple private trackers and use tools (-arr suite, etc) that can search across multiple trackers and present sorted and grouped results with easy selection of some or many for download.

My personal solution is I've pretty much always "curated as I go", making notes or filing stuff as I consume it - books, film, TV, papers, things built or designed.. anything I circle back on may or may not be worth chasing up a better version, I'd have to have liked it and want to share it or experience it again in better form- I'm happy buying digital media that I can own if it's available for things I enjoy, for things not available over the counter I can search for the best version available ATM by polling trackers .. failing that by joining forums and asking about.

RSS doesn't support such aggregation?

You just fetch all your rss'es from N sources and the client can show a merged one.

This whole thread shows many people don't mind spending time building their own content library and making their own little Netflix on their NAS. I think this is just the beginning.

I have been a happy user of JellyFin for a couple of years. Then when Spotify raised its prices again I realized I mostly listen to the same songs, most if not all I still own the CDs.

So with Navidrome and a couple of Python scripts to transform playlists, I made my own little home Spotify as well (Homify? Hopify?)

Works perfectly. No fees. No ads. No stupid email at the end of the year bragging about all the data Spotify collects and stores about me. Perfect.

I’d add an additional point to this list: Piracy offers control over the particular edit of the film you’re after.

I find it so infuriating when streaming services only offer the extended edit of the Lord of the Rings films - these scenes were edited out for a reason! I pretty much only want to watch the the cinematic edits.

Same for Bladerunner. There’s so many different edits and the streaming services rarely declare which edit they offer, let alone offering options to choose your preferred edit.

hey, maybe you’d never heard of https://ororo[.]tv this is exactly what you describe, at lease for movies + shows…

just in case - not an ad, not affiliated with them anyhow, just use it for years with all my friends and family.

there are subtitles is 20+ languages, direct download links, no ads, and new episodes come out pretty fast (usually <24 hours from official release).

The saddest part is that there's clearly demand for a service that just works across devices, countries, and catalogs

#4 is huge. I happily paid for all the streaming services, then I moved out of the US, and most stopped working even on VPN. Most things I’ve just stopped watching, but it’s annoying where I’m trying to pay and still can’t access.

Cost was/is a non-factor.

> I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads, because that's pretty much the least important attribute to me.

In 2001, Joel Spolsky wrote:

Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like “Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music” and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it’s interesting because it’s peer to peer, completely missing the point that it’s interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

And in 2003, Apple started "selling" songs for 99 cents. They were incredibly successful, demonstrating that people weren't "pirating" songs to save a buck, but pirating songs to escape the deeply enshittified DRM shenanigans the industry employed, like installing rooting your PC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

There is a very large market of people who want no fuss, no muss access to movies, shows, and music. I personally think that many people who "pirate" shows do not want adware of any type, especially if it surveils them, and also do not want to stream certain shows and deal with issues like region locking, the shows vanishing when the streaming service retires them, and so forth. But that is a small quibble.

History agrees with you that "piracy" is not about the price, it's actually about the shitty experience that the music, TV, and film industries impose.

For flights, I don't even try to "download" videos on the apps I do pay for anymore. I've been burned too many times by blurry downloads or videos refusing to play. I just find a copy elsewhere and use VLC.

Piracy also offers audio description, allowing blind people to enjoy described media, for shows movies that don't have them on streaming services, like Doctor Who. An audio description site offers audio description for the original and revival series. Streaming offers none of that. They also do third-party audio description cause studios can't be bothered.

It also offers video games that can be emulated, and with OCR nd AI image descriptions, can be played by blind people. It also offers EBooks in many different formats which can b loaded onto accessible apps or Braille displays and read, without needing apps which may or may not be accessible, but which will always need connection to a phone or computer. And you can read all this offline.

So when I find companies, like Big Finish and Graphic Audio, which offer their stuff in downloadable, DRM-free formats, I pay them good for their stuff, because they respect me.

No one is offering that service because it would be completely illegal.

You can't just offer all the content ever created without the rights holders to that content agreeing.

(I expect many will say those rights holders deserve zero compensation because they are large greedy corporations. Conveniently ignoring that piracy also means the creators of the content also get zero compensation for their work.)

> No one is offering that service because it would be completely illegal.

It would be technically possible to decentralize distribution while still paying rights holders for each download. Laws could be rewritten to accommodate, encourage or even require this.

My biggest gripe with streaming services is that you literally can't legally own the content you paid for. You can only "license" it. Amazon, Google, Apple, whoever can revoke your access at any time and there's nothing you can do about it. There are plenty of examples of this already happening. The rights holders are protected, but the consumer is fucked. It's untenable, in my opinion.

> I didn't even mention that it's free

It depends. If you're fine browsing torrent sites, choosing a download, loading in into your client, waiting for it to download, then plugging your laptop into your TV. Sure it's free.

If you're out to recreate a better streaming experience then it's certainly not free. Software licenses, server hardware, electricity costs, Usenet access, etc. Not to mention the time/effort to getting everything running so smoothly to the point that it is effortless to request and then watch.

I mention this because for a certain crowd (myself and likely many people on HN) it's not about being free. It's about not having to fight crappy software. Or not paying for the privilege to have ads shoved down your throat and being tracked. Not needing to remember which app Mr. Robot is currently on or having it suddenly vanish due to some licensing expiration. The list goes on.

Do I still pay for content instead of the tools to circumvent it? Sure! My city has a huge video rental store. It's super fun to go browse, find weird stuff, and help out a local business. The owner(s) are clearly huge movie nerds and seem to have spent a good amount of their earnings on some very cool movie props they put in the store. I love it.

I have a Plex/Radarr/Sonarr setup on my home server. I've made a landing page so it's extra easy for my parents and friends to add media.

It's been really wonderful, everyone knows everyone by one degree of separation (me) and are adding to the library like a sort of group project. You can just hop on and see a somewhat currated library in the sense that someone you'll probably run into IRL thought this was worth watching.

So just to add to your point, you can't get this with a streaming service.

To really sum it all up in one place, check out the absurdity of the official guide on where to watch the Pokemon cartoon: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...

And that doesn't even actually list the movies, which are even more fragmented.

I have seen this before, but I never realized that was an official product! Thought that started as a joke by a disgruntled fan.

Thanks for sharing OP, that is just ridiculous, makes cable looks like a sane option.

With cable you didn’t get this fragmentation cause you also didn’t get many options.

Watch at 8am or at 6pm, whatever episode airs that day, probably a rerun or a skipped.

Different cable providers each had their own bundles and individual paid channels, so you kinda got a choice, with a lot of fragmentation.

I mean you didn't get to watch as many Pokemon show options as those linked in the parent comment, you got choices for channels as you said, but not seasons/shows.

Wow. It's like an advertisement for torrent sites... I had no idea it was that bad out there...

I wonder if they will eventually go the LEGO route and host their shows on youtube while also letting streaming services have them.

And I thought the problem was (just) limited to fragmentation of complete IPs between services. I'd love for someone in the know to explain how you get to this stage.

It it some kind of hedging strategy by The Pokémon Company to account for the number of different streaming services (thereby actually making the problem worse)? Was there some kind of timed exclusivity deal that's forced them to put different things in different places? Did one of the streaming services come along at a later time to try to undercut the earlier ones but the earlier licencing deals haven't expired? Anything else?

Another possibility is that every streaming service wants "Pokémon" and parents don't care which season.

So each service buys a single season to tick that box.

This. Pokemon likely has an a la carte menu and platforms can choose which seasons they want.

Streaming services have a limited budget for kids content so they can’t catch em all without sacrificing other kids content. They need pokemon they need action they meed rainbows and princesses and they needs stuff for babies and toddlers.

What's the problem with that exactly? Legacy catalogs having some incomplete coverage? That the Pokemon Company can't make a good list if pressed? These are all not new or streaming Problems

The gist is here, that the complete first four season are on YouTube for free and the 5th is being added as we speak? (200+ episodes)

https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialPoke%CC%81monTV/playlists

There was nether the expectation with streaming that third party content doesn't rotate.

If you want a bit more persistent access you can buy them on Apple TV (Season 1-5 and 10-25)

Oh Boy, Pokemon is really not the example I would bring up here, when the aim is completeness on official channels:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_episodes_removed_...

It’s pretty obvious that no one wants to subscribe and look for some content on 5 different platforms.

While the pirate goes to his or her favourite torrent site and downloads it all, with the added bonus of having offline, permanent access.

with a sample size of one, there is no obvious problem.

presumably any given household wants to watch more than just pokemon, though and this is where things become unstuck. suddenly, to satisfy the demand for the range of things people in the household want to watch they are forced to make subscriptions to multiple services, perhaps sometimes for one-offs.

scale this up, and you have a population forced to make multiple subscriptions to multiple streaming providers to satisfy their demand for content.

or people just choose a couple of them and that's that. either way it seems that there is a symbiotic relationship between the content authors and the streaming companies.

but wait, read the page carefully, multiple seasons of the same thing spread across different streamers forcing consumers to subscribe to multiple streamers .... and now we are into Phoebus cartel territory.

That's not how streaming worked, ever. You had to deal with what Netflix had to offer and that was it. These were the happy monopoly days. It was simply the lack of choice and nobody felt left out at watercooler talks.

The paradox now, is that if you're FOMO inclined you feel the need to subscribe to multiple ones at all times to satify all needs in a household. You don't have to. You can keep baseline Disney if you really have to, but everything else can be easily rotated or just cought up on for a month or three on the usual discounted offers. The social pressure was not some invention of the streaming companies.

Also pirating has a hardware and energy cost, that's not trivial and mostly subsidized by parents. On a ROI basis of adults with disposable income "buying" (aka personal licenses, ideally shareable with some other accounts what some might call a family) 4-5 movies for like 5 dollars on platforms like Apple TV each a month is actually cheaper than pirating. Streaming is not everything. And don`t kid yourself that your DVD or Bluray collection is worth something or usable in 20+ years. That's a niche hobby. Go visit a flea market. People are that lazy when it comes to couch and home entertainment stuff.

You think pirating videos will raise your electric bill by $25 / month?

Storage isn't free. running a 50 Watt anything 24/7 costs like 10 Dollars a month in Europe already if you don't want to be an anti-social leacher or want the convenience of an netflix-like media server.

Your comment is a bizarre tangle of different concerns, of which none make even a tiny amount of sense.

- If you download without uploading much, what does that have to do with the costs of piracy?

- If you upload as well as download, how will that increase the amount you pay for 50 watts of electricity?

- In what possible sense is storage not free? You already have the storage. Putting things on it is free, unless you get to the point where you need to buy additional storage. You don't need to retain the things you pirate any more than you need to retain the things you stream.

-- Even if you decide to do that, storage is an utterly trivial cost.

- Stipulating that 50 watts a month costs $10, your network stack draws less than 25 watts. Given that storage will never add up to any amount you'd notice, it will take less than one month before piracy blows rental out of the water on costs, after which its lead will increase forever.

They're saying if you keep things on to seed it'll use more electricity.

But yes you can fit a torrenting machine into 25 watts. Or fit a reasonable amount of uploading into the time your computer is already on.

And yes storage is somewhere between free and $30.

5W with a Mac mini, 50W with a typical PC tower

I never understood (even in homelab circles) why people insist on running these toys 24/7. Just turn it off for the night, or use one of these timer sockets.

Now you are delving into small intricacies and "gotchas" which are just meaningless.

The problem is simple. People don't want to switch between 10 different streaming services, pay 10x a month, swap every second month, unsubscribe from X and re-subscribe to Y after going through a torturous process of unsubscribing. Different sites with different DRM, some might block Firefox, some might not work on an older MiniPC, some might not work or exist on the built in apps on my TV.

We as consumers shouldn't have to go through all these hoops just to watch stuff. Originally, I would buy a DVD (or even rent it) and then plop the DVD in the DVD player and it would work. It would work 10 years from now (assuming no disc-rot). It would work on my PC's DVD player, it would work on my TV. It wouldn't tell me my OS is out of date or that my internet connection is unstable. I could then go give you the DVD and you could watch it. It was simple.

For the sake of your argument, even if piracy was 100x harder and 10x more expensive than Subscriptions services (which its not), watching the entire series of Pokemon is still a pain and is still stupid and deserves to be called out for it.

> On a ROI basis of adults with disposable income "buying" (aka personal licenses, ideally shareable with some other accounts what some might call a family) 4-5 movies for like 5 dollars on platforms like Apple TV each a month is actually cheaper than pirating.

Yes, and I still pirate. It's more expensive, but the user experience is substantially better. It has always been a supply issue,

read the page carefully

And it doesn't even reflect availability outside the US it seems as my Netflix catalog does't have some of the seasons that list says it should.

Holy mother of God, that’s insanity. How could someone come up with that and get it approved is beyond human understanding.

The problem with Pokémon isn’t that it’s fragmented across streaming services, it’s the anime itself where by Advanced you’re getting enough of the same formulaic bullshit it can drive even a kid crazy. I was that kid.

Except for some slight deviations, such as the beginning of Best Wishes (Black & White), you can put on a sequence of any 10 episodes from any season and it doesn’t matter what streaming service it’s on. By the end of the episode, Team Rocket is blasting off again.

> of the same formulaic bullshit

Sounds like every single mainline game until SV/PLA which tried the open world a bit. People still like it.

The games actually change though in a way the anime never really did no matter how many characters or Pokémon they cycled through.

Well, "Gotta Subscribe 'Em All!"

>More fragmented Prime Video has it all which doesn't sound fragmented to me. It seems Prime Video is for old seasons and other services are fine for watching the current iteration of the show.

For reference:

Season 1: Amazon Prime Video (also, Netflix)

Season 2: Amazon Prime Video Channels

3-5: Prime Video

6-13: Prime Video Channels (with 10-13 also available on the Roku Channel)

14-19: Prime Video (with 17-19 also on Netflix)

20-22: Prime Video Channels (and Hulu, and the Roku Channel)

23-25: Prime Video (and Netflix)

So, they're all on Amazon in some sense. I was aware that there was some kind of concept of Prime Video Channels, but when I tried to find an explanation on Amazon's website, I failed.

Following up, "Prime Video Channels" seem to be an Amazon offering in which you have your subscription to a separate video service (the "Channel") billed through Amazon, for "convenience". (And you can also watch their stuff on Amazon's website.) So Pokemon has licensed about half of their series to Amazon, and they reserve the remaining half for people who subscribe to the Pokemon Channel.

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" -- Gabe Newell [1]

And I think he was largely correct, although the term _service_ seems like it now has to do a lot of heavy lifting as it now encompasses:

- Availability by Company

- Availability by Global Region

- Stream Quality

- Advert Policy (why does the lowest tier need to be ad supported? What am I paying for aside from being upsold?)

- Quality and availability of captions, audio description and any other media accessibility options

[1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-pir...

It's almost like the corporate culture of being a bunch of greedy control freaks will push customers away when they have an alternative.

> service problem and not a pricing problem

Indeed. Recently we purchased season 1 of a reasonably popular U.S. produced show via Apple TV. When played, it is available only in dubbed French in our region (Canada.) None of the info available beforehand said anything about this. Guess where I obtained the subsequent seasons? I will pay for content but not if you lie, or make me jump through ridiculous hoops.

That reminds me of some passengers I sat on a flight next to once.. they tried to watch something on their iPad, but because we were about to depart from a country foreign to theirs, it got region-blocked...

Not that I pitied them, they were obnoxiously late and boarded with 5 bags (the stiff rectangular bags boutique stores have) of shopping...

In a weird quirk that must be a bug, you can watch the first season of the Good Place in French in the USA but not in Canada.

That quote is literally in the article you didn't read.

Absolutely right!

A week ago I downloaded a couple of movies and shows from Netflix for my 6yo daughter, to watch on a 3hr flight. Worked nicely!

Today we made the return flight. She opens Netflix, and ⅔ of the films have now "expired" with no notice and she can't watch the one she wanted.

For the next flight I'll remember to pirate!

Getting 'em started early. You arr a great dad!

I tried to download something from Netflix recently. The download wouldn’t process. It got stuck partway. Not an issue, I’ll just delete it and redownload.

Nope. There’s a limit to the number of downloads on some content. I wasted mine trying to get the download to even work.

I remember a few years ago when our niece came to visit. One evening, we started watching a movie on Netflix together.

We only made it halfway before bedtime, but since she was coming back in two weeks, we decided to save the rest for her next visit.

Two weeks later, she returned, bouncing with excitement to finally see how the story ended. We opened Netflix, ready to hit play - and lo and behold… the movie had vanished from the catalog.

Be a cool uncle, be a pirate.

> She opens Netflix, and ⅔ of the films have now "expired"

I have given up saving Netflix titles in advance of travel because this has happened to me too many times. What is bizarre is you can only "download" them a certain number of times, despite being expired. So I now cannot download some shows ever again.

Nobody loses money if I cache a Netflix show to my device. The limitation is bizarre.

> Nobody loses money if I cache a Netflix show to my device. The limitation is bizarre.

It wouldn't surprise me if some executive has an irrational fear of millions of people passing ipads around their family and friends with a downloads of movies/series as a way to avoid paying subscriptions.

That's the problem with DRM in everything. Once the levers of power are there, it takes one overeager bean counter or paranoid executive to use them to squeeze out more revenue or exercise additional control. In the era of physical media none of this was possible - I could lend my DVDs to as many people as I want without approval from Reed Hastings.

I've lost access to YouTube premium features just because my phone was not the United States for a couple of weeks.

As soon as I was back on a US ip, features just came right back.

Last I checked, background play with VLC just works regardless of where you are physically located at the time.

Why make it complicated? Service means the user experience. If the user needs to do anything other than click pay click play, you done goofed, simple as that.

I cancelled prime when they told me they were putting adverts on

Went to resubscribe, no option given for no adverts, no money from me.

This is what did it for me too. Why would I pay for a crappy UX and ads? But all these companies need numbers to keep going up, so they keep tightening the screws.

It still exists. I'm currently paying for the ad free add on and often cancel and resubscribe to it before I'm about to watch anything.

Annoyingly though, even with that, it'll still show you skipable ads about other shows they have once before you start something in a session.

When I click "subscribe" on my TV it gives me three options, all with adverts

Maybe I could subscribe and take a risk that I could then buy something again, but it tells me they don't want people paying money, they want people watching adverts.

As such the rare amazon exclusives (mainly clarkson's farm) I will get elsewhere.

Compared to say Paramount, which I once again subscribed to through apple-tv a couple of months ago. I watch new Star Trek and South Park episodes, then unsubscribe, suits me fine, far cheaper than how I used to watch Star Trek in the 1990s.

Likewise I'll subscribe to Apple when for all mankind and morning show come back.

If they want me permamently subscribed, they should go back to making 26 episodes a year.

Love how this same quote was used in celebration of streaming back in Netflix’s early days as the solution, and now to show the new industry found on those very same ideas as the problem.

Service problems are usually pricing problems. Advert policy is because people refuse to pay more so to make more money they put in ads. Fragmentation by content/region is also because each service is trying to spend as little as possible on content. If you want to watch unlock video content youd have to pay $100+ a month and people refuse to do that.

Yes but price has also become a huge part of it netflix raised prices like 5 times in 1 year lol

Ehh, while I agree its 70% about having a way more user-friendly experience, theres still 30% which is that the content needs to justify the price. And HBO and Netflix have missed that mark in my opinion.

I cancelled HBO after their price increase a year or two ago after being pretty happy with their service for a long time (though also the service quality had gotten worse). Too many people share my netflix for me to cancel it.

> "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem"

Maybe so, but if media companies invested in fixing the service problems, the pricing problems would remain, and those keep people away just as effectively, so they're not going to do it.

People don't want to pay what the media companies want to charge, at any level of service.

Not necessarily true, as the success of streaming shows. The problem comes when the unbounded greed of the billionaires in charge leads them to inflate prices beyond their customers' ability and willingness to pay.

Streaming was cheaper than what existed before, and still is. Inflation-adjusted, movies and TV were insanely expensive back then, yet people willingly paid. And the movies were better. Who's greedy, companies wanting to offer nonessential entertainment for a price, or people who want it for free?

Most people do not want it for free. It's just that they are fed up with streaming platforms fragmentation and anticonsumer practices.

Nobody I ever talk to cancel Netflix because it’s too expensive. They cancel it because it runs out of content they care about. Including me. I’m not keeping a sub for that one week a year I find something I enjoy.

It’s absolutely a service problem.

What you described is the same as cancelling because it’s too expensive, you’re just describing the value side of the equation.

That's one way of framing it (pro provider). A pro consumer way of framing it is that it's a service problem.

Since I'm a consumer, not a provider, I side with consumers.

Streaming sucks today -- I should know, I'm subscribed to most platforms.

Really voting with your wallet there.

Anyway I’m not taking platforms side just stating that “I don’t get enough value” and “it is too expensive” are the same thing.

> Really voting with your wallet there.

Sadly, you're right. But it's a Catch-22 here, if I pirated everything people would accuse me of being part of the problem, etc.

I enjoy the moral high ground of paying for everything yet still supporting piracy (with caveats, and not for everything): it makes my position unassailable.

And I disagree with your last statement, as I said it's a framing issue and framing matters. I'm pro consumer, and therefore, it's not the same thing .

Yeah, it's too expensive because the _service_ is too poor. If the service was good, it would be a fair price.

… if it was offered for the same price as the current service.

No? I would be willing to pay more if it actually had things I wanted to watch. Right now it's technically cheap enough where it's not painful when it lapses for months where I don't use it, but it's still a waste of money so I finally cancelled it about half a year ago. I'd be willing to pay a lot more if it had and retained a sizeable library. But it keeps rotating in nuggets of gold with a deluge of cheap trash. At least in Norway, I am aware it varies wildly by region. Not my problem as the customer, that's theirs to solve.

It's both. I canceled when they increased their pricing again (a few months ago), because there's no way I'll pay more when neither the service nor the catalog gets better. I would have kept my subscription if they hadn't increased the price, regardless of any changes to the catalog.

> Nobody I ever talk to cancel Netflix because it’s too expensive.

Frankly this says a lot about you and not much about everyone else

This is absolutely not true.

I pay an ungodly combined amount of money to various streaming services, but must still occasionally resort to TPB. Which "just works", unlike said streaming services.

Within reason, it's not a money problem (within reason; media conglomerates would love for me to sell my kidney in order to watch their premium shows, but that's not going to happen).I would rather just pay for the problem to go away, but Netflix, Disney et al just disagree.

Gabe Newell, founder of the largest video game DRM company. Find a way for anyone to download video games for free without risking malware or compromising online play, and see how many people still pay $60 for a new game on Steam.

That's a big if.

More importantly, Gabe is fundamentally right. I'm subscribed to most available streaming services in my country, and when I still cannot find what I want due to obscure reasons (e.g. region locked, or Disney decided to not make it available anywhere for who knows which reason), you can be pretty sure I'll be sailing the seas of the corsair.

It is a service problem.

People can and do download games for free all the time and Steam is still there. People pay for Spotify when music has been openly free since Napster was the zeitgeist.

It's not really possible for MP games, and it's increasingly hard and also dangerous to pirate an SP game. Idk who still does this.

And Spotify is way cheaper than iTunes, which is cheaper than CDs. Neither of them created piracy, but they did have it as leverage.

>Idk who still does this

Not my fault you're out of the loop.

It's honestly wild that in 2025, you can still find better accessibility and quality control in a well-seeded torrent than on half the major platforms

I actually think pirating encourages a healthier approach to watching TV/movies. I've fully made the switch to pirating instead of subscribing to any streaming services, and it's led to me thinking more critically about what I want to spend time downloading and watching rather than just flipping mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage on a streaming service.

I do still have Kanopy though, which is great for me but obviously depends on your library.

Not always. Now I just flip mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage on my jellyfin server instead.

Then don’t be a hoarder and only get what you want to watch

I have my watchlist hooked up to *arr so it pulls that stuff automatically. Once I watched it and it’s not something I want to show to others, I delete it.

> Then don’t be a hoarder

Of course. Why didn't I think of that?

Why not purchase the discs and copy them yourself? At least artists can get paid that way.

Most shows don't get a dvd release anymore.

And then sometimes you have to deal with a bunch of bullshit changes because of music licensing or something.

Or current streaming doesn't have the license for the original music or soundtracks. Thus it really is a different product.

I haven’t bought a lot of DVDs lately, but the ones I have all were from used DVD stores. I think the artists were paid once.

I prefer physical media. However, it can sometimes be a chore to start the movie! Each disc is different. Some discs use non-standard methods to access the home menu. Some require that you at least skip past all the previews at the beginning. The worst discs require several minutes of fiddling in addition to finding and inserting the disc before you can watch it. Compare this with double-clicking an mkv and having it just...start.

Nobody said you couldn't do this too.

Why not buy them used or better yet check them out at the library and save myself some money in the process? Piracy is more convenient.

Ehh sounds like an automation issue. Buy another hard-drive and just have everything new auto download.

For me, I only seek out media I plan to actually watch. Rather than flipping through what is available and choosing from there. Currently it is stargate sg1/atlantis what I am watching.

Also, a lot of movies/series are only available dubbed here. (I really effing hate "Sie" in dubbed media. So much so, that it's one of the major reasons I go for subbed in english, at most)

When i first used netflix at my friends house, I immediately used the search bar and looked for Jurassic Park... what kind of movie service doesn't have JP, i thought. It must be around 10 years ago, and I never used it once afterwards.

They've had Jurassic Park repeatedly over the years since then, and I've watched it a couple of those times.

But when Netflix was new to streaming they had so much more content; it was great. Then all the rights-holders decided they didn't want just a cut of Netflix's rates, they'd rather have all of it. Since then, the services have seemingly reluctantly agreed to license some of their stuff, some of the time, to other services, often with temporary exclusivity. If Netflix wanted it all back, they'd need a friendly blue genie and a monkey to defeat a multitudinous Jafars.

> led to me thinking more critically about what I want to spend time downloading and watching rather than just flipping mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage

For me it's a bit different. I have the *arr stack fully automated (with 22Tb of storage for now maaaaybe it's overkill), for friends and family too.

And the experience is nice because it makes content "crowd sourced". If something is on the server it means someone else purposefully added it, so you can still browse, but it's curated based on your friend/family circle.

But also the automation part can be a bit "mindlessly click download on everything even stuff I probably won't watch", but disk space constraints force you to delete it if nobody's watching.

Radarr and Sonarr are my two favourite pieces of software ever. Together with Plex I get an experience FAR superior to any streaming service. For the record I would be happy to pay for such a service, but they're so greedy they'll never offer such a unified service. Instead they keep making the direct to Netflix content worse. Removing content without any notice. Making the app UX worse, including removing useful reviews from the platform, and making content auto play when browsing. The best example of this clusterfuck is the Pokemon where to watch guide: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...

i wish we could go back to a pre-streaming version of netflix.

the near-infinite library and lack of algorithmic nudging resulted in an era where i had healthy view habits. reasonable levels of screentime and VERY diverse content.

i add so many movies to my queue with the best intentions of watching them someday, but always put them off because something about staring at that endless scroll of options makes me crave something light and simple.

the disk-in-the-mail era was "remember that three-hour subtitled classic film you always said you should watch but haven't? well, today's the day you're watching it." and i always ended up being glad i did.

the streaming era is "ugh, i don't have the mental bandwidth to watch that three hour thing that's been on my queue forever. lets just rewatch some background content to zone out" and i always lament wasting hours of my life in front of the screen.

I relate to this. Also, I am not the best person in the world, but recently this hit the point where I decided because of these very same thoughts + nudging from my much better partner to donate to NPR, to cancel Netflix and move that money to NPR. Now no more Netflix, which is sort of a relief in ways, and I have to be more intentional about what I download / consume.

I was wondering recently whether someone could conceivably start a disk-in-the-mail Netflix again, now that streaming sucks so much and every publisher seems to want their own streaming service. My understanding (possibly wrong, I'm not an expert) is that it's perfectly legal to lend out physical media without any special permission from the publisher under the first-sale doctrine, so it seems like the only way to build a library that has content from many different publishers.

(of course, this could only work as long as publishers keep producing physical media)

Scarecrow Video does this in Seattle. Their library is amazing.

https://scarecrowvideo.org/rent-by-mail

We have these guys in NZ, they're amazing. + overnight delivery. https://www.aliceinvideoland.co.nz/

and the wonderful https://arovideo.co.nz

The pirates version of blockbuster is still alive and well at your local library.

Slim pickin's, but, yeah.

Library. I order DVDs to my local library all the time. Maybe your library system is terrible, but if it isn't you certainly can do this. There are hundreds a big wide release films with, effectively, are only available on DVD from a library (legally).

Bonus when I go I can still get that browsing the aisle experience like in an old video store (but in this case I am lucky, my local library has a large DVD / Blu-ray collection to browse)

Before someone comes in and says something moronic (because physical media isn't a VC funded B2B SaaS business), I'd like to remind everyone that Redbox was going strong until Chicken Soup for the Soul bought them. Even in the late 2010s when streaming was really taking off, you could often go down to your local corner store and rent a DVD or BluRay out of a Redbox machine.

The only reason people went to streaming in the first place was that Netflix was cheap and, arguably, a heavily subsidized monopoly in the streaming space.

So yeah, some kind of DVD/BluRay business could very well work in the US and Canada.

For a few years Mubi solved this. They only had 30 movies at a time. Every day the oldest movie left and a new one was added. All well curated and movies you'd remember. No empty calories. Because of the timing it had the same effect as you described. While Mubi is still one of my favorite platforms it now has a regular catalog.

There are still services. Here is one:

https://www.dvdinbox.com/

Haven't used them, but I am planning on setting up a dvd player,

It's no longer as convenient with dozens of streaming services; the streaming bitrate is also subpar, and audio is compressed to the point it feels flat. If you want to be mindful about what you are watching, it will be really hard with Netflix, Prime, and Disney compared to your own media server. When I had a streaming subscription, I was constantly shocked by what was popular in Poland and what people were watching. It took me some time to accept that I am not their target audience.

The quality of shows is also subpar. And there aren’t many shows on Netflix at a given time: Probably 80 things to watch, all categories included (with 70% of overlap in content).

I feel like we've had at least two lost decades of good content. It's probably somewhere, I just haven't found it yet.

In my humble opinion, some "good content":

Netflix:

* Dark

* Fisk

* Adolescence

* Ripley

* The Queen's Gambit

* Ozark

* Baby Reindeer

* Easy

Apple TV:

* Black Bird

* The Studio

* Severance

* Shrinking

* Ted Lasso

HBO:

* The Wire

* Oz

* True Detective (S1 at least)

* The Sopranos

* Big Love

* Rome

* In Treatment

* Succession

* Deadwood

* Insecure

Misc:

* Colin From Accounts

* Black Sails

* Mad Men

* Breaking Bad

* Better Call Saul

I don't know, there's plenty. It just absolutely gets washed out with a lot of chaff.

In India, people classify movies as “mass” or “class”. Netflix and Prime are doing a lot more “mass” and for good reasons.

I guess I wasn't thinking "series", but "films".

I know I have a lot of series to catch up on (although from the above, I found Severance disappointing, oh well).

Off topic: Black Sails is amazing, I've watched it through a couple of times, and every now and then I lament that I'm not watching it again yet...

On topic: Black Sails is about actual piracy.

P.S. Fisk - you're a fellow Aussie I take it?

Paramount+

* Star Trek everything (except Section 31 - worse than Star Trek V)

* South Park specials

* Frasier sequel

* Beavis and Butthead revival

> When I had a streaming subscription, I was constantly shocked by what was popular in Poland and what people were watching. It took me some time to accept that I am not their target audience.

Now I'm genuinely curious

If they were willing to sell movies and tv shows WITHOUT DRM, I’d happily buy what I want and put on my Jellyfin server. I don’t pirate music because I can buy what I want on Bandcamp (and even mainstream music on apple and Amazon without drm).

But since I can’t (and you can’t even find physical media for a lot of things), I feel like I am left with no options.

I am not even trying to get stuff that is recent, as I prefer to wait, especially for tv shows, to finish its run before I decide if it is worth investing my time in.

I mostly go to the library every week and pick up movies and tv shows on Blu-ray and rip them so I can watch them on my schedule. I often delete them afterwards if I feel like they don’t have replay value.

I think Jellyfin also provides a much better interface than any of the streaming apps, and I like to be able to know if I am going to watch them on my theatrical version or some extended version.

> If they were willing to sell movies and tv shows WITHOUT DRM, I’d happily buy what I want

So much this. I take the simple moral position that I won't pirate things I can reasonably buy. That includes almost all music, and almost no movies, TV shows, comedy specials, etc. I still largely avoid pirating things and seek out alternatives instead, but I don't feel bad about it when I do because it's an industry that doesn't consider me a potential customer anyway.

I know this is pedantic but it is so annoying: downloading shows is not piracy. It is totally nuts to conflate unauthorized copying and sharing with the violent act of going on somebody’s boat and killing/threatening them until you loot their stuff.

Calling it piracy was funny during the early Internet when it was all pirate and ninja memes. But really letting them conflate this very minor crime with violence was a big propaganda loss.

Some words are overload with more than one meaning. That’s like, a thing in many languages.

You are a couple of centuries late: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#%22Pira...

the irony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Ferdinand_Keppler_...

You're not being pedantic, you're being wrong.

Agreed. I do my part to avoid using the word at least since seeing it on gnu's words-to-avoid page several years ago.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy

I don't usually get too many weird looks with "unauthorized copying".

Oh, that’s funny. Actually I feel a bit Stallman-y when I point this out.

No one is conflating piracy with raid boats, killing people and physically stealing items.

Ignoring the nuance is just ignorance and pedantic.

As a matter of fact, most people likely don't even associate piracy with pirates or boats. It's almost universally used to describe obtaining digital content for free.

I think this is the more nuances understanding of the conversation. Using a word associated with violence and theft to describe something like copyright infringement is just over-the-top and ridiculous.

Sometimes words have multiple meanings, and that’s ok.

As a participant in English, I’m pushing back against a pair of definitions that, I think, conflate two very different concepts in a way that is damaging to the conversation.

Fair enough, but if you torrent a show - which I assume most people pirating something do - you also share something, unless you explicitly turn off seeding.

Black markets are usually the result of failed markets, and i think its no different here. Copyright is a monopoly so there is no competition. Sure different streaming services compete with each other, but they essentially sell different products. It'd be like if only one resturant was allowed to sell hamburgers. There might be other resturants but they arent really in direct competition.

The streaming services are relying on enforcement to preserve their business model.

This only works as long as there's no other nations with significant digital infrastructure that can be used for VPN egress points who don't care a whole lot about US copyright enforcement (or copyright enforcement in general).

Our government just pissed off a lot of other governments. Enforcement is good within the US, but not outside, even nations which the US has a lot of control over.

This mirrors my experience as well. I used to pirate everything, it was relatively inconvenient to get the exact thing you wanted on physical media. Then streaming, Steam, and app stores came about. I pivoted 100%, it was sooo much more convenient than trying to find legitimate and quality copies of content and managing a set up to do so.

Then the streaming side started to fragment a bit, but I just grabbed all of the subscriptions (HBO, Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, etc). It was getting a bit iffy on value, but at least it was still convenient. Now it's just ridiculously _in_convenient. Search around to see which service might have the thing you're actually trying to watch and use this device with this app to get a decent quality version of the content delivered, all while hoping it doesn't force automatic quality "for your benefit". With Steam it's a bit less severe, but it did reach the "and the games you want are split across 5 services in exclusivity" and "DRM is getting to be an extreme pain on some of these" stages.

I'll choose your comment to agree. I was a pirate in the 90s and early 00s, even though it took forever - it was "free"! Several years ago I was guilty of calling people out by saying that the real reason they pirated things is because they simply didn't want to pay. Fast forward to now and I can afford several services but it is just getting out of hand. My less tech-savvy family will hear about a show or movie and I have to google where the hell it is even available, and are we already subscribed to that service. Then I had a friend setup the whole AAR suite, and it has been a breath of fresh air. I'm not sure what the answer is but I am just about done having money extracted from me every month...

I've always chosen piracy for the privacy. I don't need a bunch of services building a profile on my viewing habits and tastes, then sharing that data with other businesses and governments. If I want a recommendation, I'll ask a friend, not an algorithm.

This to me is the biggest feature I’d love to see in paid services. It skeeves me out to know that everything I watch or listen to is recorded.

That and owning the media.

I'm fine with recommendation algorithms if it was truly anonymous. The problem is that when you're paying for these streaming services, they have your identity, and most likely also sell your watching preference and habit data to data brokers.

It's creepy when you're influenced in ways that are insightful, because they know you deeply from your behavior. It's unfair to you.

Privacy is undervalued.

For me worse than the can't pay is the lack of options. In the VHS time I had more good movie options than in the current streaming services. I remember when I bing watched Kurozawa or Mario Monicelli's movies. Now it's very hard to find non American cinema. The tech is there, but the System fail us.

Criterion Channel and Kanopy are very good (not perfect) for international films.

Even many American movies are no shows on most streaming platforms. Sometimes I'm like: "Let's take the top 30 movies that critics loved the most in US in year X".

As soon as it's earlier than 2005 you're gonna find less than half available across most streaming platforms, unless for renting/buying.

"Gold Diggers of 1933", "Stella Dallas", "Marty", "The Snake Pit", "Casablanca", ... I could go on.

Yep. I swear I liked the old Netflix with DVDs better. I could rent pretty much any movie I wanted.

Netflix found that while it was a nice advertising tool to boast about the broadness of its catalogue, most customers rarely ordered the more niche stuff so it wasn't particularly profitable.

That’s what happens when you have a big library. The usage is going to be some 80:20 rule. A small slice drives the numbers. Yet it is nice to be able to consume some long tail content. Without the DVD catalog, access to the long tail has disappeared from mainstream providers.

> most customers rarely ordered the more niche stuff

I'm sure that's true, but the flip side is that the niche stuff is what pulls in the hardcore film buffs. And guess who those of us who aren't big film buffs turn to when picking films and services? The hardcore film buffs we know.

They may not generate a ton of revenue if you look only at "how many people request obscure movie X", but having those movies pulls in the people who will, in turn, influence others.

Want the DVD-by-mail business still available until 2-3 years ago? It seems that faded silently away and there wasn't even a whimper when it died.

We don’t have that problem with books for the most part, why do we have it with TV shows and movies?

I suspect if book sellers were as data driven as Netflix, then we would have that problem.

I suspect they're (like Netflix used to) creating an illusion of choice of a wide range of options as you walk to the big shelf in the middle of the shop that has 100 copies of the book that's currently selling well.

Also the fact that physical book shops are still somehow a thing helps. I guess people like the experience.

That may be true. But for those in "the long tail" Netflix could have been the only game in town.

Amazon was that way for me. I went to record (music) stores to buy my music in the 1990's. I started buying music from Amazon in 1996 because they had the stuff I couldn't find in the record stores.

Even after the DVDs, Netflix had a much bigger catalog before everyone else decided they needed to copy Netflix and launch their own service, then IP rights got restricted and redistributed.

Streaming was great when I only needed to subscribe to a single service to watch most everything I wanted. It's not so great when I need to subscribe to 5+ services and still not have everything I want to watch.

Yeah, monopolies are bad but the way IP is distributed right now across so many different services just ends up being worse for consumers.

MUBI is a good option for the more high cinema stuff, one of the few subscriptions I'd feel sad canceling.

Same. We rotate through services but Mubi and Criterion are fixed. I do sometimes miss when Mubi would only have movies for 30 days. It helped me to actually watch the movies I wanted to watch. I'd guess that at least half the movies that from the last ten years that sometimes pop into my head were from Mubi. I've probably watched entire series on Netflix I don't remember anything of.

Have you checked out Criterion or Mubi. Lots of excellent foreign movies. Criterion seems to have about two dozen Kurozawa movies.

Thanks. Never heard about Criterion. I'm not in USA. These are very expensive to buy and don't have subtitles in my native language.

I'm complaining that the tech to allow me to stream every movie ever produced is here, but I'm not able to do so.

The streaming landscape is now terrible and no different than the incumbent CATV providers that it sought to replace. In 2011, streaming services were the hotness because CATV subscriptions were expensive. In 2011, people were subscribing to 1-2 or 2-3 services because they were all less than $10USD/month. That was still 10x cheaper than the alternative.

However, 15 years later, those numbers exceed or are the same as CATV costs combined with all the streaming/smart device headaches.

All we did was change the pipe. The providers didn't change except for consolidation and erosion of policy, both of which lead to worse outcomes for consumers.

A couple of months ago I was sitting at my desk when the kids were asleep and was going to put some show on the second monitor while I was doing some boring admin. I open a Netflix tab on the same machine, same browser, same LAN, no VPN as I've been using for years, from the IP where likely 95% of our household Netflix traffic is requested.

I'm met with:

> Your device isn't part of the Netflix household for this account

> Not <my email here>? Create an account to enjoy your own Netflix today.

> Create an account

> Did we get it wrong? Watch temporarily until you're back on your Netflix household Wi- Fi, or sign out.

> Watch temporarily

> Sign out

Neither of the options actually worked to escape the bug(/feature?) either.

So that's when I cancelled my subscription after 8 years.

One minor issue I've noticed with streaming is the quality. I went to watch A Bridge on the River Kwai the other day. I could borrow it from my library on Kanopy for free, but the audio was only in stereo. The $4 iTunes rental supported Dolby Atmos, which took advantage of my speaker system, and the video quality was comparably better. I ended up paying despite the library having it because iTunes offered a better experience that was easy to access.

iTunes movie rentals seem to almost always win out when it comes to streaming specifically. I don't know why I would want to watch something on Prime Video at a lower quality and sit through ads. I've also encountered a number of services such as Peacock that absolutely refused to run on my Linux laptop even though I was a paying customer.

Further, the iTunes versions of movies often come with special features (e.g. The making of the Lord of the Rings). They also earned a lot of goodwill from me when they upgraded a number of my HD movies to 4k for free.

I do maintain a Jellyfin server with movies and shows I have legally purchased because I didn't like how the digital version of my James Bond movies had the final movie on a different streaming app. It's really hard to beat that setup if you know how to configure it. My Jellyfin server contains an episode of community from the DVD I own that was removed from streaming services, and that's where it really shines. I also have higher quality versions of Star Wars than the VHS copies I own.

Nonetheless, I think iTunes proves what an effective model is in a similar vain as Steam is to gaming. Shame that unlike Steam's relationship with Linux, iTunes is much more tied to Apple. At least the Apple TV is genuinely a good streaming box.

About 10 years ago Netflix became available in the country where I was living back then. I was very excited about it, I was on their email list for years, waiting for the announcement. As I got the email that they are available, after work literally the first thing I did was to grab my credit card, and subscribe.

I found 4-6 movies I wanted to watch, but when I saw that they had Godfather 1 and 3 without 2, I had a good laugh. Then I watched all the Archer episodes they had, and tried to find something interesting for 2 more days before I cancelled my (still trial) account.

Though I stopped watching movies some years ago, until than I used to watch them on the same old pre-netflix way.

Of course I have heard that they have spent many billions on content since then, I'm sure they have some interesting stuff... but that came way too late for me.

Maybe I'm getting old, lol

If a movie has a Netflix label in it, it is a sure signal of a bad movie with a boring script made based on data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accolades_received_by_...

This includes movies "streamed or distributed" by Netflix. Like the parent mentioned, Netflix has streamed the Godfather.

If you click through the movies on that list, you will find that almost none of them were actually produced by Netflix.

Movies produced by Netflix are highly likely to be as described, with a small handful of exceptions.

I mean when your company has enough money to essentially bankroll the creation of a greater-than-average number of productions and simply pay the individuals involved in the production of these films whatever it takes to get them on board, isn't it sort of inevitable that you end up featuring in the list of awards a greater-than-average number of times?

Some of those are other networks shows that just happen to be distributed by Netflix. For example, Wallace & Gromit. This is not a useful set of data to draw conclusions from. Which is precisely the problem that Netflix has.

Yes, very damming considering their spend to not ever have won a best picture/actor/actress/screenplay.

The Academy Awards? Who the heck cares for those?

The only thing they say is "the powers that be in Hollywood chose to highlight your product", but surely the information content regarding quality is as close to zero as it is possible to get.

In all of that time there are two best directors and two best supporting actress wins of the major Oscar categories. That is not much considering how much money they have dumped into movies. Netflix has always been quantity over quality.

Based on data (and Twitter) part is true of any studio since a decade, in any case Netflix has produced or co-produced a good bunch of movies.

Also, some excellent documentaries.

We should coin a new term: "Straight to Netflix"

I don't know why you're being downvoted because you're absolutely right. I'd say for me Netflix movies have less than a 5% hit rate. They're an excellent place to start if you desire a suitably (and needlessly) racially and sexually diverse cast, the most bland cinematography and grading possible, and scripts explicitly designed for viewers who are paying more attention to their phones than the show[1].

[1] https://comicbook.com/movies/news/netflix-reportedly-has-biz...

That has been my experience as well. When I see that logo it's a bad omen on how the film is going to be.

Never left bittorrent.

I really wanted to embrace streaming services, prime really killed me recently, with introducing ads into a membership that I already pay for! and 90% of movies on prime I have to pay an extra 20 bucks to view ...why am i paying for membership?

Ads for a paying member? That is just... evil?

Don't they have ads on pay TV too? "Free plus ads" is not the norm. In some countries you pay tax for national TV and you still get ads. Sports matches are only available on paid services and they stick as much advertising in them as they possibly can.

It's like nobody has ever watched cable TV.

Fun fact: cable TV also started out ad-free. The sell was you'd pay a monthly subscription and got just the content you wanted to watch. Then came the ads. Enshittification as a phenomenon didn't start in Silicon Valley.

They only show ads for other shows on their own service (at least in my region), and they're skippable, but I'm not defending it, it's still bad and serves no purpose for the customer.

What bothers me more with Prime is that when I finish watching the latest episode of something, as there is no next episode, it starts playing something entirely different I have no interest in watching, which then ends up on my "Continue watching" list.

> Never left bittorrent.

Yeah, I got into low level private trackers before netflix got really big and here in germany it always had a rather lackluster library anyway. The enshitification began faster than I was willing to move. In the end i'm still just pirating everything except games and music. Games because steam is more convenient on linux than dealing with cracks, wine installers and all that stuff. Not that i'm unable just that it's literally worth the convenience to pay for it and music because spotify was better than the pirated music i had available. I'm thinking about changing that and taking the RED pill, if you catch my drift.

For music, you can only pirate to fill the gaps in Apple Music / Deezer / Tidal / Spotify / whatever.

Inb4 get a better taste in music but i've yet to find a gap in spotify that matters to me. I can think of exactly two songs that are unavailable.

Burial (the one from London) has few collab track missing from music streaming apps. Some are on YT but quality is meh.

All streaming services should have a pay per minute system as an alternative to the fixed monthly subscription.

That way, I'd happily use any service to watch whatever cause it would be convenient, instead of piracy.

And it would be a reason for them to really improve their recommendation systems.

A bundle of streaming services. That you can surf and choose one from and just watch. And a TV guide that tells you what's running where.

Gee...sounds a lot like Cable TV.

Sarcasm aside, the one problem folks had with Cable was the inability to upgrade without getting locked into another 2 year contract. Streaming solves that one problem while enshittifying all the other good things.

I thought the main complaint was "I'm paying for channels I don't watch!" while not realizing the channels they were watching were actually what they were paying for, and the rest of the stuff was just lumped in for nearly free to make the lineups look bigger and more appealing.

For some reason I always saw it in reverse, that I had to pay to subsidise a set of channels I'm _not_ interested in for the one I am.

Chances are that's not what was happening unless you were watching the channels nobody else watches.

I haven't looked into cable pricing for a while but i remember a few of the contract disputes that caused some big channels to drop off big cable providers in the 2010s. The price-per-customer those channels were asking the cable companies were significant chunks of what a package would cost the customer (eg upwards for $1).

Meanwhile some of the less common ones were a few cents per customer.

That means that unless you weren't watching any of the $1+ ones, you were mostly actually "paying for what you're watching".

I assure you that there are many people who do not need nor want ESPN and knew damn well they were directly paying it.

And those people were having part of their package subsidized by the people who were watching ESPN but not the other channels.

> .. the one problem folks had with Cable was the i...

and hardware rental fees

ads on top of your service

bundling a bunch of channels you didnt ask for and increase price

outages

the list goes on

> Gee...sounds a lot like Cable TV.

Honestly, Cable companies could make a comeback by using their relationships with producers to actually be a "one stop shop" streaming services. There's definitely a pain point to having to be subscribed to so many different services just to cover the gamut of shows and movies

> pay per minute system

And/or pay-per-episode, pay-per-season or pay-per-show. So I don't have to start thinking ahead too much about the _length_ of something and can just enjoy the thing itself based on some pre-determined price.

Pay per episode could be an ok granularity. Anything above that I'm not ok, there is too much garbage

Perhaps pay-per-episode with a discounted price for an entire series (and an option to buy the remainders taking that into account). It seems fair to be able to dip your toe into a series and try a few episodes before committing. On the other hand, that seems just a bit too consumer-friendly...

Would be fine with that. I want a demo before committing, essentially

Isn't this precisely what Amazon already does?

For the subset of Amazon-available content that isn't counted as Prime Video I think yes, but not for the rest of it. Apple TV+ possibly too, though they also have what feels like their own confusing model that shows some things as being available with the caveat that it's actually available through either a) a proxy with a subscription to a third party or b) a one-time purchase from them. I'd hate to be in the meetings where the details of these licensing agreements get hashed out.

Some Disney series are already 20mins about the show and 10mins credits/something else. Don’t give them new ideas to reduce the actual content…

I was thinking along the lines of how much I actually watch, if I only watched 10 minutes of your show, I only pay for 10 minutes, not the entire thing.

You're also saving on bandwidth.

Paradoxically, I'd still want to pay per minute of viewing time, if I'm watching the show on 2x the speed.

Isn't this just renting, which is already offered by Amazon, Apple, Google ...

Sort of, but:

- the price to rent is comically overpriced, to the point it makes no sense to rent, especially at HD or UHD.

- you still require an online connection.

- the quality is shit unless your playing it on the holy Privacy Violator 9000.

- they give you an absurdly small amount of time to view the movie or show. 2 days? Really? Family video did a week!

I think they know how many dead / inactive subscriptions they have.

That would only suit a portion of their user base and completely ream people who use Netflix to entertain/occupy their kids, who use TV shows to fall asleep, etc. Not to mention throwing away valuable subscriber dollars from idle users like me who maintain a subscription but rarely watch anything (mostly because there's nothing good on the entire platform).

Sling TV now has a "day pass" option for $5. (A weekend for $10.) https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/sling-tv-off...

What these companies would "sell" would be DRM crusty shit that wouldn't work on my devices. And the 'Authorization servers' would be decommissioned at some unstated future date. Hell, even Microsoft couldn't manage to maintain these DRM servers.

If MS cant, why would I expect any company to properly maintain them?

https://community.spiceworks.com/t/how-to-play-content-prote...

So, unless these are MP4's or MKV's with correct subtitling and appropriate audio, I'm not going to pay a cent here.

Lets go back to old good CD/DVD era.

That would incentivize services to make their shows longer. Maybe they play them back at 95% speed, maybe they add their own intro or credits to the end. maybe if they make their own shows like Netfliz does, they stretch them out.

Maybe the incentives would be better, but i also dont really want to keep track of budgeting when watching TV. I'm here to relax. I dont want to stress about how much i watched this month and if im going to blow my entertainment budget.

For movies at least it's usually no problem to find them for "rent", i.e. 48h for an absurd amount of money.

Idea for a service.

The service effectively rebroadcasts all the streaming services to provide exactly what you suggest. It’s still paying the streaming services, and users pay it.

Better not set it up in the US .

This is like cable with extra steps ;)

I think we are already seeing some packaged stream services and we will probably see more. It’s a lot of overhead to maintain a separate service to do the exact same thing (with only a different library and branding).

I think the NHL uses the streaming backend developed by MLB Advanced Media (they adapted it in 2015, not sure if still the case).

https://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/a-closer-look-at-nhls-pa...

Na, not like cable. It’s all on demand so you can watch what you want when you want. You don’t pay a cent for stuff you don’t watch.

You can pay by minute, or episode, or season or whatever.

Like Netflix but with the catalog of every streaming service in existence, better per-use pricing, no ads.

Movie shows will optimize for that by making half of the episode filler.

Yes but then it must be in the form of a subscription (e.g. 300 mins/month), because recurring revenue is critical for the valuation of most companies.

My main issue is that they're now slowly testing the waters to see if they can make you watch ads while still paying for the subscription, and at that point, might as well take advantage of Romania's lack of law enforcement and hit the torrent websites.

It's amazing how blurred the line is getting between streaming and cable TV.

It really doesn't seem like it has to be that complicated, yet somehow we've gone from channels with markedly anti-consumer fixed bundles to a massively fragmented ecosystem where it genuinely seems like the streaming services _don't_ actually want you to subscribe by the amount of the effort that goes into making things hard to watch or doing everything that could make the streaming experience worse (region availability, paid tier ads, lower bitrate stream quality, and so on).

It already came full circle some years ago when we started seeing new streaming services every year, and those companies pulling their content from other platforms to put on their own. Then you had to start thinking about what servces you need, whether you still want those services, etc. Just like cable!

Absurd.

True, although I guess this is sort of understandable. It's the "you're paying us, but here are some ads" that really gets me.

Either way, 5 bucks a month to Emby, a really easy to get membership to a large private torrent site, and a 16TB hard drive solves these problems for me, and will continue to.

Thanks for the tips! Could you explain how can one get about "getting a membership to a large private torrent site"? Also, why Emby rather than, say, Jellyfin or Plex?

The private trackers tend to be a pain in the butt to remain active enough on to keep your account, as they tend to require a certain amount of upload:download ratio. This can be difficult to achieve since so many members have high-speed seedboxes.

Just use https://1337x.to/ or any other public tracker. You'll be able to find 99% of whatever you want.

I was a Plex user, but gave up on it when it started to suck. This was years ago. Emby was the other option at the time and I'm a big fan of it. I've never tried jellyfin. If you want to, email me and I can get you an invite.

https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/Private_trackers

Paying 5 bucks to pirate seems to be missing the point of pirating for me IMO.

they are done testing the waters. its standard practice for the majority.

Thats what they said about cable too, pay for it so no ads. Then the ads came.

In a related vein, Ebooks. I have a Kobo e-reader that is fantastic.

I just ran into a situation where I really wanted to buy two e-books. Unfortunately, both are on Amazon. Amazon doesn't let you just download them to your computer anymore, you need to transfer them to a Kindle. A kindle I do not have.

I tried to find any possible workaround, but they've totally locked it down. So, I didn't buy either book. I really struggle to see how this is helpful to anyone. Does Amazon seriously make enough profit off of each Kindle to be worth it like this? Ugh.

Yeah, because you pay for the thing and you still can't watch it!

Last year they brought Andor to Hulu and every time I played it on my brand new LG TV, the video would be completely green while I could hear the audio underneath. It only happened to Andor because apparently they had some super special DRM, which ostensibly would restrict people who weren't authorized from viewing it, but had the effect of also preventing authorized people from viewing as well. So in the end, they can't even satisfy willing customers who have their wallets open. Of course they're going to turn to piracy.

Of course, the rights holders got my money and as far as they're concerned, their DRM move was great for the bottom line.

Fwiw the LG operating system kind of sucks. I got an Apple TV and it's been infinitely better. Paramount Plus was wholly unusable on the TV

I haven't bothered checking, but I assume the hardware sucks too - I'd expect the Apple TV SOC to be like an order of magnitude faster than any smart TV.

Recently, I also switched to Jellyfin. I still have access to Netflix and Disney through family plan. The service problem was the quality issue. I have the Ultra plan's while Netflix keep pushing SD (due to Widevine certificates). Simply cannot stand watching 480p on WQHD+ screen. For the content I have legitimate access, but cannot get good service, I don't consider it pirating.

Oh, I have a question to all of the people who pirate but live in a country where that’s illegal and punished (with huge fines, I assume). I’m very interested in listening to some stories of how it’s technically done (vpn, a seedbox, or you just keep things simple and don’t care). E.g. I’ve been trying sophisticated backlists of IPs, but I have no idea whether they work. But even more I am interested in a legal aspect, meaning how serious these copyright claims are. Do you know anyone personally, who was punished for downloading a TV show? Which country? Personally, I know many folks who do, but none who was fined.

With torrents you'll want a VPN. Usenet is generally safe just thanks to TLS unless you're uploading content. For that I'd use a VPN. But unlike torrent, Usenet isn't P2P so I can just download at my full internet bandwidth and don't need to hope there are enough seeders out there maintaining it or that I maintain some magic upload / download ratio.

What about torrents and Tor? Moral aspects aside. (Personally, I’d not do it, out of respect for the network.) Just curious about it theoretically, how this technology and its ‘moderation’ (let’s call it that) works.

Torrents and Tor aren't related. BitTorrent (the protocol) is about peer to peer file sharing and the metadata that enables it. Tor is a network overlay that helps prevent an actor from seeing both where a connection is coming from and where it is going to at the same time. If you're using Tor your ISP can see that you're using it, but not what sites you visit. Other agencies could see that Tor traffic is going to website XXX, but not which individual Tor users are making the connection. Just that they come from a Tor relay. It's not perfect and there are ways to compromise the safety Tor and onion routing is trying to provide.

Generally I don't associate Tor with pirating content. It's more about accessing published content or publishing content anonymously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing

Yeah, I know, and that’s why I mentioned that personally I won’t use tor network for downloading huge amounts of data, out of the respect for the network. It’s meaningful for countries where Internet is censored, and wasn’t invented for piracy, rather for censoring circumvention. But theoretically it’s possible to move your traffic through the network, that way nobody can tell you are torrenting, I assume. (Or at least what you’re torrenting.)

Personally, I know just one person who does that. We’re not close for me to ask him anything, though (a friend of a friend of a friend). For the context, he lives in Germany.

Argentina. Have been using BitTorrent directly from my home connection for close to 20 years now without issue, no VPN or anything. Never heard of anyone getting a fine, a warning, or anything like that. Never ran into transfer cap issues either; despite my ISP having a stated monthly cap of 250 GB down (although that was years ago; it may have changed), I handily exceed it every month, and some months I've passed 1 TiB without getting throttled at all. The record according to pfSense is 2.2 TiB in a single month.

I wonder why law enforcements in these countries do not fine people of torrents. It’s effectively a free money for them, it seems. Yet, more often I hear stories like these, especially from the not too first world countries. But not third world ones either, second world, maybe.

I don't even know what the law says in my own country, instead I use a country where is it not illegal to download (but is to upload) and has excellent global connectivity and got a VPS there. I installed Transmission, disabled uploads, and a few other tools and now I just click the magnet link on a torrent site and the media shows up in my download folder after a few minutes or sometimes hours. For anything a bit popular I get 300Mbps downloads on average.

The country in question is left as an exercise for the reader.

Minimize seeding on torrents. I've still gotten a few strikes from various ISPs though. Some ISPs seem to care more than others, in my experience.

In practice, what do these strikes mean? Was it some fine? Or rather just a warning?

Thank God for VLC, the greatest app ever created!

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

I pay for a pirate streaming site. It's nice, it has everything, it works, nothing ever gets memory-holed, I don't ever have to sign up for a different service to watch something because it got swapped in the middle of my binge, what I can watch doesn't depend on where they guess I am, I can access over a VPN, they have a support staff that actually listens to me and implements features users ask for, and I can download things to watch later drm-free. This isn't a money problem, as evidenced by the fact that I pay to steal. It's a product problem. I pay for this because their product is better and I want it to continue to exist.

How do I find it?

if you're LOOKing for a MOVIE or a tv show 2 download and you don't want to mess with DOT TOrrent files then there are plenty of options but it's generally considered uncouth to link to them publicly and directly

I LOOKed at the MOVIE, and so did my friend DOT, and we came TO the same conclusion that it's not working as specified.

you had trouble and your friend had trouble 2?

As with most things, I think we leaned in too hard to streaming services.

Part of the appeal of streaming services back then was being able to cherry pick what you wanted so you only paid for what you actually wanted to watched.

Because of how fragmented all the shows are, people sign up for multiple streaming services just to watch the shows the want to watch, and then wish for everything to be bundled together...again. Also, each streaming service charges a hefty premium compared to what you're actually getting, so it's not as worth the money.

The appeal back then was being able to get all the shows you wanted on a single platform. Netflix had all of Disney, WB, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc. at one point, including strong original content. Going all in on $10/month for all the TV I wanted to watch was a good deal. Paying $15/month times 5 for a worse experience... not so much.

I don't remember any cable tv packages that were $10/month except for maybe getting the local tv channels because you couldn't get good reception with an antennae.

Cable TV packages were $20-$30/month (base packages) for 200 channels, of which 10 of them you really cared about, then you had to add on another $10-$40 depending on what it was to get what you wanted. So, to finally get the 10-15 channels you actually care about you had to pay $50-$75/month for 900 channels.

Like, if all you wanted was Disney, you couldn't just get Disney channel(s), you had to pay for 250+ other channels too. Now you can just sign up for Disney+ streaming.

It’s not necessarily driving me to piracy, rather disengagement because the aggressive and deceptive practices have become abusive. For example, I pay for Disney+/Hulu and tried to watch Fargo (the series) and finally gave up after being constantly interrupted with the same exact unksippable ads every 10 minutes. With YouTube Premium, it seems like every streamer just switched to “sponsored content” to get around the no-ad experience. It’s very disappointing and just causes me to lose interest.

Coming from a country where piracy was the norm, I was very happy when Spotify and Netflix finally arrived. I even went through the trouble of accessing them via VPN just so I could pay for them.

Unfortunately, that excitement didn't last long. Shows started disappearing from Netflix, so we signed up for another service, then another, and so on. Prices kept going up, and I eventually realized I was paying a lot of money for very little in return.

At the start of the year, I cancelled everything. With the help of a few scripts, I've essentially replaced Netflix and the rest, without any downsides and at virtually no cost. I now have 4K streaming, instant playback, no device limits, offline viewing, and access to what's essentially the world’s entire media library.

The moment a company offers all that at a fair price (I’d even pay $50+ per month), I’ll gladly switch back.

I assume you are using torrent based services?

I was always wondering about how this approach could provide "instant playback". This is the one feature that keeps me ensnared to the big streaming services TBH. It's hard to get into the matter if one does not have much time to scoop information from the web.

If your internet isn't delivered in literal buckets then the movie will download before you're done peeing. At 100MB/s you can download 30GB in five minutes, which is almost full Blu-Ray rip.

Torrents yes, if you have access to ... certain websites, usually invite only (or some premium torrent caching services) and obviously, have a decent internet connection combined with the ability to choose where to stream the torrent from (beginning), the movie/tv plays as the information comes in sequentially.

Now I have everything automated, I use Plex as the player, then I have a simple script that listens to when I add a movie to the watch list, in the background it searches for that title and puts it in the download queue, then usually in 1-5 seconds I can hit play.

Biggest problem I encounter is with subtitles, they can be hit or miss, no problem for english shows but can be annoying for non-english ones.

And again, no difference between this and something like Netflix (other than the subs ofc), I can stream 4K, all my family members have access to it, I can stream on my phone, I can download things for offline use, yet I would still pay for this if there was a viable alternative out there.

There are a couple different streaming services that I subscribe to for different reasons but it gets harder to keep doing it.

CBC Gem - free public broadcaster, but I want to remove ads

Shudder - $50/year, cheap as chips

Netflix - cheapest way to watch WWE pay-per-views live

Crave - got a year for 50% off on a Black Friday deal. I don't know if I'll renew

TSN - only during hockey and football season

AppleTV - wouldn't subscribe separately, but they throw it in with my Apple One family plan

Honestly my Jellyfin server sees more action than any of them. The biggest reason to pay for streaming is live events, which I believe is why Netflix is pushing to get more into them. And I've been increasingly annoyed at how many things I want to watch are simply not available at all, or not available without subscribing to yet another service in the hopes they might have it. I'm planning a Sergio Leone spaghetti western binge. The only place I found what I wanted was usenet.

I spent last few days chasing down a Bravo/peacock show from outside the US trying to watch legally, only to find it on watchseries and realize how good the experience has gotten. It's not even released on torrents or nzb. Watchseries UI is kind of peak now. Nuts. Does anyone know how Watchseries manage to stay up?

It's been taken down plenty of times. They just host a mirror somewhere else under a new TLD.

By take down I mean have entire org steamrolled which we've seen with other crackdowns. Watchseries hydra never seems to fully die.

Tip: Watch Cartoons Online (search it)

Great place to stream cartoons and anime for free, no account. It feels like they have almost everything, as I found anime as far back as the 1970s on there.

When I discovered Food Wars was split between two streaming platforms, I hoisted the sails.

We need to shorten copyright just so that the classics stay available online.

50 years from first publication. No more.

I agree no more. If I had to pick a perfect number I’d probably go to 25 or 30

I think we have it backwards by attaching it to the life/death of the creator (or the works’ creation). People should be alive to experience the works they consumed in new and open ways. Creation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It builds on the collective works. There’s no point in a work becoming public domain if no one is alive from the time when it first had an impact on culture. Seniors should be freely able to listen to access the culture of their youth and experience it in new modified ways without restriction.

15 years or less from the date of first public consumption.

I still have streaming services, mostly because my family uses them. I’m slowly getting back into the self hosted ways. But it’s also pushing me to just stop watching altogether. I’m finding better ways to spend my time than in front of a tv. Or rather, I guess I’m spending it more behind a computer screen. Haha

Screw streaming. I bought a smart TV a few years back. Services discontinued within 3 years. No external commercial streaming boxes work because of HDCP issues. Back to piracy until the TV gives up. Streamers and smart TV people, you had your chance and you blew it. I'm not paying through the nose any more.

Luckily search engines like Yandex.com provide the easiest way to find unusual streaming sites. Using AdBlock saves us from the pop-ups and weird ads. If Netflix goes back to $9 per month with every show in existence, I will reconsider them. Until then, these streaming sites will continue to exist and thrive.

My most annoying experience has been some providers blocking VPNs. I pay for an account, I log in with my account, I use a vpn with ip in the country I made the account with and use my account, and still I am blocked. I don't want to stop my vpn just for the sake of streaming, I would rather pirate the content.

A second one is subtitles. Somehow the streaming services decides which subtitles I need and which I don't.

It is funny how we went from pirating content being normalised, then being frown upon, and now getting normalised again.

https://archive.ph/Q9lvm

I like the principled archive link, despite The Guardian having no paywalls.

The guardian does have a semi-paywall in that you can either share your personal data with them or pay. Which in my opinion is a breach of the GDPR but apparently the UK ICO has said it’s fine. Yet another toothless/useless organisation

My pet peeve is when streaming services only allow me to watch something in the language of the country I live in. I'm sorry, but why? Why would I want to watch a 1988 movie with horrible German dub?

Hey everyone,

The last 6 months I’ve been building what I believe is one of the best high-quality streaming platforms out there.

My inspiration was exactly the reasons listed here in the comments.

I’d love to get your honest feedback on the design, features, and overall user experience.

https://bingebeast.com

Thanks! GIzmo

For the love of God, or cake, or whatever - PLEASE remove the "smooth scrolling" code from your site. It completely fucks up all pre-existing expectations on how a mouse wheel or trackpad is to operate.

Will do in the next update. It has been problematic for a long time.

Thank you for your feedback!

> Spotify

> “enshittification” of streaming

I've been a happy paying Spotify user since 2010 or so. I'm still mostly happy with what I get out of it... they did try to shove podcasts down people's throats, but backed off pretty quickly. One thing that recently infuriated me though, was something they call "smart shuffle". Like, you press shuffle on your playlist, it starts shuffling. You press it again, it should turn off the shuffle, and just keep playing in order, right? Not according to Spotify's amazing designer team. With Spotify it's a tri-state switch. If you press it again, it activates a "smart shuffle" which has nothing to do with shuffling, instead it adds extra suggestions to your playlist.

There is a way to turn this "feature" off on mobile, and they've been promising a way to turn it off on desktop for many months now. As a paying user, being treated like an idiot this way definitely makes me resentful and is the most enshittified thing I've seen Spotify do.

I have been paying Spotify for 5 or 6 years now, and while I love how much amazing music it has helped me to discover, the UI is absolutely atrocious. The way it puts together artists, albums, individual songs and playlists in the same list, or the way it mixes your personal selection with their algorithmic recommendations, is extremely confusing to me. I am seriously considering going back to the high seas.

Now more than ever before, for me, it’s exclusively because of UX and not price.

The most recent example: every Star Trek (TNG, Voyager, etc) on Netflix simply doesn’t work on my Chromecast.

After a minute the video goes all screwy, split 1/3 across the screen and loses half its colour. But this doesn’t happen with Plex.

I started buying Blu-ray discs and ripping them to my computer, where I run Plex. Why? I had a long-time subscription to HBO Max, but a few years ago, I went to watch Westworld, and it was gone from HBO. I ended up buying a season on Apple for the price of a monthly subscription to HBO. I cancelled my HBO subscription. I realized that second-hand Blu-ray discs of shows were selling for dirt cheap. I spent $40 to buy the rest of the seasons of Westworld on Blu-ray.

Clearly, new shows aren't getting Blu-ray releases, so this won't work for you if you care about new shows. My wife and I are so over the dystopian view from modern science fiction that we started focusing on shows from the late 1900s (80s/90s) to get more of a positive outlook from our entertainment. We are now going through Stargate SG-1.

Are you over 40?

I ask because I'm over 40 and I've had enough of this too.

Also check out cafedvd.com.

Same. I'm 45 and lately I've been thinking about picking up a Blu-ray player. Not a drive to rip discs—a player to hook up to my TV. It's definitely an elder millennial thing, but I just want to own a physical copy of the movie and not have to worry about where it's streaming or whether the one I "bought" on iTunes has been quietly swapped for another version.

The sad thing is, I don't think Blu-ray is long for this world. But I at least want plastic copies of the classic movies I know I'll go back to.

Sucks that the Blu-ray experience is dreadful for 4K content. You've gotta find specific Blu-ray drives with specific firmware versions to do rips, or watch on a PlayStation or similar locked-down console. There isn't even a non-pirate way to watch on a laptop or desktop anymore since Intel SGX is dead.

If you want a fast and easy way to rip 4k Blu-ray buy a drive ready for it. People sell prepatched drives to rip with. They don’t mark them up much. I grabbed a couple and after two yeas I still haven’t worn through the first one yet.

There are quite a few devices these days that’ll allow you to capture streams by stripping HDCP so you can at least record it instead of having the service put it in “the vault,” to appease some bozo in a suit.

I have been trying to put my data hoarding data days behind me, but like the article, I’m being pushed back that direction. Doubly so since I use Linux and they restrict quality to 1080p. The only thing preventing me from it right now is a lack of a computer/server with ECC support (so I can run ZFS). Though encrypting a bunch of data and archiving it into Amazon Glacier seems more and more reasonable as time goes on.

> I went to watch Westworld, and it was gone from HBO.

Wait, isn't that their own IP? I get shows not running on 3rd party streaming services due to IP rights and stuff, but how/why would they be in a position to not stream their own IP?! That's like going to Netflix and not being able to see Stranger Things. It's insane!

From the geniuses who thought throwing away the HBO name in favor of "Max" was a way to unlock brand value

Insane is the understatement of the year. I appreciate their idiocy though. It pushed me to make the switch to ripping discs so I have my own drm free offline library of content now.

Pay a bunch of money to Disney+ to watch any popular release and get terrible streaming quality and functionality. It makes complete sense to me why consumers would toss their hands up and find better and more accessible options.

One friend, who is a film enthusiast, told me that he doesn't understand why there aren't more titles on the streaming services vs. the scale of albums on Spotify. He often download old and new movies via Torrent.

I rarely watch something off Netflix. And when I watch something I love watching in highest quality (4K HDR if available). If they'd let me pay-as-I-watch I'd be happy to do so, but I don't want to pay every month for a service I rarely use, and sometimes never for a few months.

Another reason is availability. Apple TV+, for some reason, isn't available in my country. I've heard great thing about Severance which is available only there. I can't legally watch it even if I were to pay it. I'd have to pirate it if I want to watch it.

This is true but also because most streaming services tech is doodoo butter.

For example, i wanted to watch the new south park season. I get paramount plus. It doesnt work on smart tv app. Ok fine shouldnt be using that anyways, hook up laptop. Still doesnt work. Use a different adapter and still doesn’t work. Airplay from phone, that works but i dont want to give up phone and website has major jank.

5s google search later and i am streaming on the 7 seas from smart tv browser.

To be fair, netflix is almost always solid. The rest are glitchy, slow, janky piles of dung.

A useful distinction is that upload is piracy and download is not.

True pirates maintain > 1.0 ratio

Neither is piracy, it is just unauthorized copying and sharing.

> unauthorized copying and sharing

Which is known in English as "piracy".

No piracy is theft done on sea.

3. The unauthorized duplication of goods protected by intellectual property law.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/piracy

I remember when netflix had the dvd by mail option and you could get basically anything that way. It was amazing. Even the local blockbuster had way more available than today's streaming services. I watched way more then. Now I watch almost nothing and only have a single streaming service because the family wants one...and doesn't watch much on it. We are loosing access because of the thing that promised us instant access to everything.

Maybe not something to ask here, but how does pirating work now in 2025? Last time I did it regularly wash during my teens (18 years ago). Is it still torrent? Pirate bay? I've probably lost my "sense" to distinguish fishing/virus/garbage from real torrent, so if things have changed and moved to new places it feels like a hassle (why I still use streaming, really)

I would say either private torrent trackers or usenet. Later I never tried.

I never had a problem with "garbage" on private trackers, and if they are "nuked" fairly quickly.

Both torrent and usenet can be automated. (Sonarr, radarr etc.) If you want to watch a specific series, new episodes will be automatically downloaded, added to the torrent client, maybe moved and renamed and you get a ping your discord server / telegram / whatever.

I was trying to watch The Big Short the other night, after checking 7 streaming websites I came to my senses and downloaded the 4k rip off the pirate bay

I was trying to put on a show for background noise this morning. Just two nights ago I was able to sign in with my cable provider and watch it. Now it's telling me there's a network (as in the channel the network is on) authorization error, customer support can't tell me why it doesn't work and they are not authorized to issue me a credit.

So I pirated that too.

And what the fuck is up with Netflix? Why do I have to install a browser extension to hide the games? I don't want games I want to watch The Big Short.

Fantastic movie by the way. Worth rewatching a couple of times

They are innovating where no innovation is necessary. And in the process they are making everything more shitty. Why change the UI every couple of months. It's fine, it's a UI for a media catalog, it's not rocket science. Why not work with other companies to collaborate and create a unified way to search catalogs but no that would be good for the consumer. Greed is an ugly thing.

Having multiple streaming accounts just to watch a couple of shows I like is such an unnecessary hassle. It's much more easier just to pirate.

It is annoying, I would much rather pay for the content I am consuming since I want to support content being made.

But with prices going up and there now being so many services, I find it hard to justify more than a couple.

I pay for Apple TV+ and Disney+ with zero hesitation since I get a large amount of content from both of those that I actually enjoy. I added Hulu to Disney plus because why not.

Outside of that I just can't bring myself to subscribe to Netflix, whatever HBO is calling themselves now, paramount, etc etc anymore. It added up too quickly and there are alternative solutions.

It isn't even necessarily about the cost anymore; I have spent way too much on the hardware for my media server and I am nowhere near any concept of breaking even. But I no longer need to think about where something may be accessible just to be disappointed that I can't stream it.

Is there an exhaustive list of methods people use in 2025?

Stremio, classic torrents?

What’s the current state of PopcorTime / successors?

Look up free media heck yeah.

I am absolutely astounded by the pirate streaming sites for a bunch of reasons.

First, I'm amazed that they exist at all. I don't understand how they do it for both legal and monetary reasons. Serving thousands of gigabytes of video daily cannot be cheap! And their domains continue to stay active despite what I'm sure is legal barrage from rights holders.

Second, the UX of these sites is better than any commercial service, hands down (as long as you use an ad blocking browser or VPN). The GUIs are super clean and provide all the features you'd want: Sortable lists, the ability to search how you like, clickable links for actor, director, year, etc. to get a list of just those shows, links to Trailers on YouTube, constantly updated new releases carousel and more. And again, this is content that's streamed straight to your browser - no torrenting or external downloading, etc. Just tap and watch.

Third, as mentioned in the article, the pirate sites have a catalog of every video and TV show/series you can imagine. Just about anything that's ever been on physical media or streamed, it's there. Every time I read about how such and such show or movie is unavailable on any streaming platform because of licensing disputes or other reasons, I go check my preferred pirate streaming video site and it's always there.

Bonus: There are live streaming sites as well dedicated to sports. Everything from BBC Olympics coverage to subscription only Soccer/Baseball/NFL etc.

Bonus 2: If you're impatient or too broke to see a newly released movie in theaters, decent quality cam recordings always appear within a day or so, and are replaced when the original is published.

Seriously, if any company were to provide the same level of service, they could charge tons of cash for it and have millions of subscribers. They're that good.

Again though, how do these sites exist!? Where is the data stored? How is the bandwidth paid for? Who is updating the sites daily with new content? So many questions.

Last night I rented the movie Sinners off of Google play and was beyond incredibly annoyed that the playback was 720p the entire time in chrome and Firefox, on both Linux and windows. I honestly feel like I got ripped off, and I got that 10 dollar Google gift card for free.

i for I, ... quit Netflix and Prime (and deleted AirBNB and UBER) because they are US companies, and second ... all of what ryandrake said https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44906021

> i for I, ... quit Netflix and Prime (and deleted AirBNB and UBER) because they are US companies

I have some unfortunate news about this website you find yourself on, my fellow HN user.

not paying here for anything, so totally cool with it

Sadly, a lot of good torrent websites have gone down in past years. Especially after the coof, the internet has not recovered from it and torrents were one of those things. Sure, there are still options, but it's slim pickings compared to pre-2020 era.

When I needed to download a free linux distro iso image, I realized I can use inbuilt search in bittorrent clients like qbittorent. No need for web trackers. There were even very recent releases.

All of these streaming services have started cracking down on family and friend account sharing to game their stock price. Turns out kicking off the broke college students doesn’t lead to them signing up for ~$80/mo. smattering of streaming services.

It’s also getting tiring of this massive fragmentation of streaming services as a whole combined with a weird game of rebundling various providers in either deals direct from the streaming platforms/their overlords, or rebundling all of these streaming services into “free” offers with other service providers and THEIR offerings.

Even my goddamn cable company does this now offering me one of the streaming services? with my Spectrum plan. I don’t even know which one(s).

Quite frankly, I’m tired of my Verizon plan trying to cram Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and crap down my throat, I’m tired of Walmart trying to cram Paramount+ at me with Walmart+. However, the market of ‘average (dumb) people’ seems to love this concept as “little extras” that eventually cause scope creep to their bill over time (and we all lose as a result).

There are services I already pay for that I'd likely save a handful of dollars on per month if I bundled them with my other services... but I can't bring myself to do it out of stubborn principle.

It's on AppleTV+ but only if you also have the entity formerly known as paramount+ or for 3.99 (14 to own).

Poob. Poob has it for you. [0]

0 https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/poob-has-it-for-you

>I’m tired of my Verizon plan trying to cram Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and crap down my throat

And of course when they do its never the ad-free versions.

I mean netflix saw a pretty big jump in subscribers when they started doing this so maybe it actually does work?

Except that so far results have shown that it does lead to a net increase in signups:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-subscriber-boom-th...

I'm just training LLMs with datasets retrieved over multiple peer-to-peer protocols.

Your LLMs must be great at regurgitating full linux distro images :)

Throwing my two cents in, the problem with all of this, is that we're dealing with artificially created scarcity, for content that can be easily duplicated. Artificial scarcity is a terrible thing to exist, and if got rid of it as a whole in society, we might end up with less high production content, but at least we would own all digital content that would be created. Services where consumers are paying for or perhaps even have sway over the creation of content, not the distribution, i.e. like patreon, are much more in line with nature of digital things.

My current strategy is account hopping and ad blocking. I pay for Amazon Prime but I'm happy to pay less and have Firefox clean out the ads. I've cancelled my Netflix subscription for the third time. I'm soon going to re-enable Apple TV; probably for 1 or 2 months. And apparently HBO Max and Disney+ are now finally entering the German market. I will never pay for all of those at the same time. The more this market fragments, the smaller the pie gets for all of them.

What baffles me in this market is that there is all this unmonetized content that remains exclusively locked up in archives that is still very watchable earning almost next to nothing. The notion of cross licensing content between these networks seems controversial.

Take Game of Thrones for example. Exclusive to HBO. Some people in Germany may or may not have pirated that back in the day. Because HBO was not available in that market and there was no way to watch that legally even though world+dog was talking about that. Now it's old news of course. But Germany is probably full of people that might have payed for watching that when it wasn't old news yet. There are decades worth of high value series that you can buy (in some cases) but not stream. And I bet sales aren't all that great. Judging from the lack of marketing.

In the same way the BBC is sitting on decades of quality content. Same for most public broadcasters. Very hard to get your hands on any of it. Why are there no multi billion deals with Amazon, Netflix, Apple TV, etc. being closed about that content. Netflix is back filling their catalog with cheap Korean action movies and other filler crap instead. And they are cutting the budgets of the exclusive content that made them big.

Another example is that movie studios have been publishing 3D blockbuster movies for about 15 years now. These are almost all very expensive movies that only ran for a short time in cinemas. 3D only kicked off with the first Avatar movie. None of the big streamers offer any 3D content whatsoever. What's wrong with content publishers that they are allowing a good investment to go to waste like that? It's not a technical problem. TV makers have been trying to flog 3D tvs for ages. But without any content (not counting obsolete things like blue ray) there never was a reason to buy those.

It is very sad the the entire BBC archive, or most of it anyway, isn't available to paying customers in the UK

Some of us never left piracy. It's just a better experience, and has been for a long time. Seems like most people would pay for a good service, but one doesn't exist.

What’s really amazing is the contrast with music.

Music has figured it out. I subscribe to one of the major services. In exchange for my money, I get access to music. For my purposes, I get access to effectively all music from that one service. When I want music, I open that app and play it. End of story. If I don’t like that service for some reason, I can pick a different one.

Obviously, the logistics for long-form video are not exactly the same. But still, surely this is possible.

So, with all the detailed breakdowns about the failures of platform services in this htread, and the (well justified) applause for pirating, do any of you feel like sharing your favorite/most ample pirate content services for shows and movies.

I'll start: Piratebay. Oldie but still good for most of the limited tv show and movie watching I do. I get the feeling there's a lot more out there though.

This is something that started a few years ago already

One of the major selling points of streaming was convince outweighed the cost. But cost keeps going up.

As tech companies that once prioritized “growth at all costs” try to become more and more profitable I expect you’ll see this in other spaces as well (it’s already happened to AirBNB, on demand services not far behind, nor is Amazon. And off on the horizon are AI-services)

I wouldn't have minded the newly inserted ads in Netflix or Prime Video. But they just throw the ads in during mid-sentence. Are they putting ads in using a random number generator? What happened to the accepted practice of putting in ads where they natural break occurs? It really throws out the flow of the moment. Major irritation. You know, how TV and Cable typically have done it.

I pay for Apple TV and I’d still pirate so I don’t have to sit through their shit “look at our new tv show” crap ad at the beginning.

I think that we cannot separate it from amount of free cash people have. Inflation, layoffs, etc. People simply want to limit their spending on less important things.

It just has to be cheap enough and you have to have enough free time to pay for media. Not something you can do when your utilities and taxes are 100% up from 3 years ago and you’re constantly boarded with layoff news.

About 7 years ago I was desperately trying to find a particular band's only two albums. I looked everywhere I could think of to legally buy these two albums. For the life of me, I couldn't find a place to do this. Eventually, my hat an eye-patch came out. It's almost like companies don't want the money.

I wonder if a business model where you buy movies for $x would work. You pay for each movie you want to watch, you get to download and keep the movie forever. A certain cut of the movie goes to the production studios. No ads, no device limits, no monthly subscription costs and you get access to the movie forever.

When content owners get too bossy their fans rebel, but keep in mind that pirates are also the largest buyers of licensed content. The pirates contribute monetarily but also serve as a warning that the pendulum has swung too far. When things get too tight piracy serves as a pressure release and a signal to loosen up.

In the end, people will use what is easiest to use.

The entertainment industries are going to need to come up with a solution fast.

If they can't find a way to make it so that you can sign up once and get all the content you need, they are screwed.

I cancelled Netflix years ago when they started blocking VPNs, limiting me to their extremely limited Australian library.

Streaming services surprised that customers left them like they left cable TV for them once they turned into cable TV.

  "" What's the point of robbery when nothing is worth taking?
  == Stuart Leslie Goddard

The only paid service I use is iTunes Movies/TV shows, because I buy them for $5 each. I have over 100 movies that I have "paid" for, knowing full well that they could be stripped from me in the future. But it's too damn convenient and works really well.

It makes sense. All of the streaming services have exclusive rights to certain shows in addition to their own shows, so you have to subscribe to every service out there to see everything, whereas you used to just need 1 cable subscription for it all.

Piracy is when your digital assets disappear from providers' locations available to use.

Torrent or unlock + a putlocker site and whstever you use to share from your device to a screen.

No commercials, bigger selection, no geo locked content, high quality, and you're not paying out the ass for 3+ subscriptions for just a curated selection/UI.

Some never left. I don't feel the need to torrent anymore because free libraries are consistently available for nearly all entertainment. Given the world is falling apart, maybe I should download some things to enjoy when things hit the fan.

I recently heard from a friend who is a Netflix subscriber that they felt they had to torrent a new Netflix show, because the Netflix app on their TV dongle just randomly stopped working for a few days. Sounds like a convenience issue to me.

Let's say I haul out my CD's I never got rid of over the past 30 years and my DVD's from the 2000's. I can still legally rip them, right?

If I took those ripped copies and wanted to stream them, what would be the best platform to do that?

Plex

Jellyfin if you want free, open source, and don't need special clients (like for LG TVs, Xbox, etc). Emby paid if you need the clients.

Skip Plex entirely. Their users are their product. They've partnered with media companies and push partner services over users media library. They like to claim that Plex Media Server doesn't send any information back to them, and its technically true; its the Plex clients that are sending the data back.

The only service I pay for is Criterion, which has done a great job at keeping vintage films alive, stuff I can't find on torrents, streaming services or even youtube.

Buying the Zatoichi box set has been one of my proudest purchases.

It’s because streaming services have brought us back to cable, which they had promised to free us from. So it’s as expensive as cable but worse because you have to deal with all these different vendors now.

While obviously this isn't realistic, I wonder if it were possible to start a streaming service on pirated media.

The infra is there already, just charge 5 bucks for high quality streaming. I'd gladly pay for that!

There are a few for $15-$20/month. Dig through torrentfreak news and you will find some services which are supposedly shutdown but they aren't.

I’ve heard people repeating these apparently random words: stremio, torrentio, real-debrid. Never tried googling them myself

I used to subscribe to every major streaming service, about 8 of them all up. As the prices increase and their libraries dwindle in size, they've been dropping one by one. Currently it sits at 4.

Plus my usenet subscription.

When billion dollar companies, which are praised and supported by governments, download pirated material and do not pay, why should ordinary people restrain themselves and pay? I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now. It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it. People also have a right to train their real neural network for free without paying.

The film and music industries really shot themselves in the foot when they got a tax on recordable media introduced in Canada.

OK, CD-R's and flash memory cost a bunch more now. Streaming is legal, because customers already paid the record companies for their music they downloaded and put on that media.

At least, someone explained this was the current state of Canadian law ~10 years back when I first visited.

Tax on recordable media is unfair because honest people who don't pirate anything also have to pay. As with the case above, honest people get screwed the most.

Nothing dishonest with pirating. You wouldn’t download a car? Well I would.

I can't believe people still fall for the 'piracy bad' propaganda in 2025

Wait a second, if I paid a tax allowing me to legally doenload/record..... what's dishonest in it?

It's basically a subscription.

This is basically the case right now in Spain.

We pay a tax on every piece of recordable media (don't think it's only SD cards or hard drives, it applies to phones, laptops, mp3 players, ebooks, even smartwatches). In exchange, sharing media for personal use is legal, and P2P is sharing media.

Doesn't stop corporations from trying to scare people off and complaining about piracy though of course.

The Netherlands has the same tax, but they managed to ban the "sharing media" part.

First they outlawed uploading media (you could make a copy for your own use, but as you didn't hold the rights you weren't allowed to offer it to anyone else), then they outlawed the downloading as well (you can still make a copy for your own use, but you can't obtain it from someone who doesn't have the rights to offer it to you).

You aren't even allowed to download a copy of a piece of media you already legally own, so the only thing left is making a copy of a physical disk - which is of course made nearly impossible by copy protection.

The organisation behind it is now even claiming that you should pay the tax when a streaming service uses storage space on your device to temporarily make an offline copy...

I guess we're going to have to go back to telling stories around a campfire....

Must have been a good while ago, as we're currently at $0.29 CAD for blank CDs and... nothing else. Nothing on uSD cards, nothing for floppies, hard drives and SSDs are levy-free,and blank Blu-Ray discs have no extra charge

I'd actually rather this than the million dollar settlements for torrenting Germans and Americans have. We have "Notice and Notice", which basically means the ISP sends us a letter with very little legal heft to it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

Plus the idea that if you pay someone to "purchase" and "own" (their terms!!) content, then it's yours forever. Unless, of course, they renegotiate something upstream and subsequently remove the content from your "library" or your device. Or perhaps they lock you out of those things altogether. This means it wasn't ownership, it was subscription.

So as they say, “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2023-12-08...

Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took.

Piracy is when you see something for free that everyone else paid money for. You watching doesn't prevent anyone else from watching.

Piracy isn't stealing: piracy only deals in intangibles. Stealing is for finite goods.

There's a whole "how do we pay to make stuff if people can watch for free" problem around piracy, but it's fundamentally a different thing than stealing.

Do you consider fair evasion theft?

Not a great analogy given fixed space on a bus or a train; in rush hours a fare evader occupies a seat that would otherwise be occupied by a a fare payer (presumably).

Media piracy is largely associated with either people that were never going to pay for a cinema seat or DVD, OR (and this is key) people that would likely pay for something were it available ...

I assume you mean "fare" evasion -- like riding a train or bus?

Yes, it fits. There are a finite number of seats on the train, and your gratis use of a seat (ostensibly) denies another paying customer. Even if there's excess capacity at the time of your ridership, the train operator is designing their capacity with buffer, so you're essentially stealing the capacity.

You could just as easily peg the theft to the incremental cost (electricity, gasoline, etc) it takes the train operator requires to move your incremental mass from A to B.

This is distinctly different from infinite, free copying & distribution.

> Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took.

People commonly use "steal" to refer to someone making a copy of data they are not authorized to have. Even you have used it that way: "I know my credit card company allows me to set a password to prevent unauthorized access from someone who might have stolen this kind of data" [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9001873

Language is complex and nuanced. Identity theft is an interesting edge case - your identity is an intangible, but it's also not something that someone else can use without harming you. They're effectively stealing your reputation. It's not a physical thing, but especially in the age of digital tracking, there's only one instance of it.

Regardless of the linguistic semantics, the campaign to conflate piracy and stealing was a manipulative mind game that tried to dissuade people from a common activity by overstating its harms. Pirating a movie is victimless, except for aggregated market effects where too much piracy can impact the financial viability of film production. It's very different than stealing, which has a discrete victim.

If you download a movie or a game without authorization, that's a societal no-op, unless it's a thing you would have paid money for. At scale, pirates do include people who would have paid, which is problematic for the film business. That's bad and worth solving, but it's not the same as stealing.

There were never any good moral arguments against digital 'piracy' to begin with.

I was in film school in the 00s, when the media companies were in the news for trying to bankrupt the families of high schoolers to make a point that piracy is bad. This was the "you wouldn't download a car" era, when they tried to redefine "stealing" to include piracy.

The executives of these companies would come speak to our class in the evenings. I didn't even bother counting the number of times one of them would be making elated chitchat before/after class about how he had just been on some flight and watched some series on his iPod. On the one hand, everyone is just people. The people at the heads of film studios are also out of touch grandparents whose grandkids show them how to use modern tech over the holidays.

But it was pretty disgusting to see the people in charge of the companies that were trying to ruin people's lives over widespread behavior, themselves participating in that behavior, and with no sense of irony or remorse. It never occurred to them that the thing they were doing in their personal lives is the same thing they were vilifying in their professional ones.

This is a good point. Stealing is a crime only for end users and not for companies. Why should end users feel any shame violating the DMCA when the government itself says it’s ok for companies to not honor it

You're not downloading a movie to watch, you are just "acquiring training material" and "reviewing" it to make sure you can use it to train a high-quality model.

You just want to train a neural network in your head to be more knowledgeable about confronting evil empires, space flights and laser weapon, I think it is a "fair use". It's not like I planned to enjoy it.

This is/would be a fun point, but the illegality isn’t around watching the pirated media. When I torrent a copy of Terminator, the illegal act is acquiring the material, not my watching of it.

I’m not a lawyer so I’m sure there is more to this definition.

Not a lawyer but the de facto law has always appeared to only care about uploading.

Torrenting gets you in trouble because uploading at least a little bit is inherent to how it (and some other P2P) is supposed to work, and that's enough for a case.

Cases against people just downloading have always appeared to be very rare/non-existent, at least from when I used to follow the news on this stuff more. I don't think I've ever seen a case of someone threatened for solely downloading off direct download services, for example.

Hold on. There are current lawsuits over this. The companies haven’t been exonerated yet

If only pirating a CBS show somehow meant getting back at OpenAI.

Real question... Is it actually legally tested to torrent any media, and claim its for training purposes?

> I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now.

I cannot see how these arguments could ever have been made. Intellectual property is logically reducible to monopolistic ownership of numbers. It's such a schizophrenic distortion of reality. It should be abolished.

> It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it.

It's not just "others", it's trillion dollar corporations!

In the end I don't even blame them... There's no reason why technology should be held back because of intellectual property nonsense. I want them to train AIs on the entire body of works of the entire human race. And when they're finished doing that, I want their AIs to get leaked and pirated so I can run them locally on my computer.

What do you mean? is this about AI training on copyrighted material?

Piracy did kill creativity in film just like people warned. Content is never going to be priced the way it used to be. The argument for respecting licenses when training AI is the same, if you make (or buy) something then you set the terms.

Piracy isn’t all that important to prices. Most people won’t bother.

My decision on this matter was made when MGM kept running the "ok, who wants SG-1 exclusivity this year?" Gauntlet.

I have to wonder if Amazon bought them just to stop playing the game. (I doubt it)

I think a lot of the services competed themselves into a pricing corner with low subscription costs.

Now the audience is used to that pricing and doesn't like pricing relative to the price of the content.

Also offers original programming without weird edits made later. Disney and Netflix seem to have done this quite a bit removing scenes and sometimes entire episodes .

I saw an Instagram post that showed how much it would cost for an American to be able to watch every NFL game this season. It was something like $1100/month.

Like the acquisition of Turner Classics Movies that was the basis for the Criterion Collection.

Transmission is peer-to-peer, being the ping to distributions hosting positivities.

The average European household now spends close to €700 (£600) a year on three or more VOD subscriptions. Why not buy a Blu-ray a week, instead?

Gabe Newell is still right. Piracy is a service problem.

I tried to watch some series on Prime the other day and they shoved 3 advertisements in one episode, then wanted to charge by extra to remove them.

What would you call that? self-un-advertising?

I just want to give one more example. I wanted to watch “Just Beyond” (2021 Disney), but it’s impossible to find anywhere. So what am I supposed to do?

I canceled my AppleTV subscription because every show I wanted to watch required me to "buy" it. But I already paid for the subscription!!

In the uk many people use illegal streams purely to watch 3pm premiership football matches - they are restricted from broadcast in the uk

This is true for me. I am using a offline music player, it is much much better, much faster and I can have a lot of underground bands on it.

It's nice to see some good news now and then.

All streaming services should just interoperate, Give me access to everything, and just charge based on title to who ever has it.

I’ve just given up and read books instead.

Instead of making their shows exclusive they should make them time exclusive (1 year?) then sell a license

How hard does hardware based DRMs like HDCP, TPMs, etc. make pirating movies nowadays

I recently started buying physical media and sticking it all on JellyFin. It’s been great!

This works surprisingly well on Chromecast Android TVs too.

I suppose you can't really complain when big tech pirates your IP to be used with AI.

I pay for Netflix and Prime. I pirate their content for the better viewing experience.

Oh, this one's spicy! Looks like the industry goons are back out with their swords.

piratebay/rutracker + apple tv 4k box + Infuse 8 app (which has icloud syncing of video timestamps) + a macbook/laptop with filesharing turned on = way better than buying 4 different stream services

Netflix has gone to almost complete shit over the past few years. One of the things that really stood out as a strange choice for them considering their long term status as the "tech" innovator coming for media has been segmenting plans on resolution. I don't understand why they don't want to always put their best foot forward especially considering I assume bandwidth is always getting cheaper? And we seem upper bounded by 4k for the foreseeable future.

I tried to watch a Marx Brothers movie a while ago, and I deeply regretted having abandoned my "pirate" library a decade ago. Opening Spotify, half of the tracks on my playlists are blurred out and unavailable. I'm not paying for a single streaming service, and for the ad's I get I'll boycott the advertiser. When I can make some time I will rebuild my own free library again.

The modern piracy experience is exactly what everyone hoped and was promised that streaming would be.

My husband is a non-tech person. I set up radarr and jellyfin, and now he has a website he can go to request any piece of media ever created, and then it magically pops up in the jellyfin app in like half an hour. He can watch it anywhere, at any time, for any amount and number of times. And there are no ads from the service we already pay for. Quality is better, streaming is flawless since it's on the local network. No one is monitoring his views and using it to profile him.

This is everything we all wanted streaming to be, before capitalism (inevitably) ruined it.

And honestly the fact that it's free is irrelevant. Most of us would happily pay for a service that operates this way. But such a business cannot possibly exist under capitalism so we must pirate.

But really, think about the experience of your favorite streaming platform. On radarr, you plug in a search term and you get a flat list of items matching your query and nothing else. The thing you wanted is always in the top three results. When you look at the library, you get a flat alphabetical list of everything available to you at that exact moment. No animated garbage, no endless multi-dimensional scrolling, no dickless executive trying to force you to watch whatever reality slop they're pushing that week.

Simple, respectful, and it shuts the hell up and gets out of your way. You can have anything that humanity has ever produced. There is simply no way for any business to compete. Capitalism just does not know how to make such a thing work.

Oh well, it's not like movie studios and record labels were giving that money to the artists anyway. I'd rather take $30 from Sony than give 15 cents to an artist and $29.85 to Sony.

I feel like Disney+ really cemented the decline here. I enjoyed watching Reservation Dogs, which I think I had pirated originally because it was one of those smaller shows with awkward distribution rights. I genuinely wanted to just go and buy the second and third seasons up front when they were airing. It's fine if it's unreasonably priced and it takes a day or two for the episodes to be available, I needed to absolve my guilt for pirating it. So I tried iTunes, which has basically everything if you bring cash, right? Used to, anyway. Not anymore. The only way to watch this show is if you subscribe to Disney+. I don't know why they make this hard, and I don't care either. Episodes were available immediately on TPB. I felt bad, but Disney made me do it. To be fair, Netflix does the same thing, but they don't have their fingers in so many places.

theres no point of pirating new games, movies and music, the aren't as good as the older ones

One thing that is becoming off-putting is not just the entshitification, but the price creep I've been feeling. I've been on Spotify for over 8 years now, and deliberately paying the cost in my resident country (while I could very well get a subscription in another, which is a lot of my peers actually do). But just today morning, I got the notification, that the price will increase by another 10% which is after a 10% increase only last year (or was it this year, I forget).

I get the inflation and all that, but honestly, I don't want to fund a business that is either squandering money or not growing, by paying more to it. And I have to admit, it is not getting any better either. The AI generated/ drone music slop is probably an industry issue, but the recommendation algorithm hasn't been able to work out that it isn't my taste.

Comments are full of people saying it’s a service thing and not a price thing.

I feel like that’s a bit disingenuous. You can rent anything on Prime for a couple £ (I focus on rent as the “buy” has the deletion problem) in multiple video qualities.

I am not disagreeing with the service issues, but a large part of the problem is people not willing to pay what studios deem as market value.

Case in point - early streamers had less fragmentation and still had the same service problem, but they could consolidate at low price due to vc subsidy. And piracy went down.

Let’s not forget Netflix and Spotify were not profitable for ages.

So my money would be on price actually being the cardinal problem.

is buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing :)

If there were an expensive but good service that aggregated the major networks - sorry, I mean, streaming services - then I'd pay for it. But managing 3-4 subscriptions is dumb.

Also the Linux experience for every streaming service typically sucks because of DRM, capping resolution to 720p.

Is it? NFLX is at an all-time high right now.

Honestly, this feels like déjà vu. We went from Napster to Spotify, from torrents to Netflix, and now the cycle is reversing. Gabe Newell was right back in 2011: it's always been a service problem, not a pricing one. Weird how the tech just keeps getting better, but the experience keeps getting worse.

Currently I only pay for streaming services that allow me to make local copies, either as part of the service or by ripping the network stream. Preferably a one-time payment.

I'm not interested in feeding someone else's lust for behaviour profiling and 'analytics', mainly, but I also don't want to be shut down entirely because there's a main power or coverage issue.

Though I'm considering making an exception for https://www.cultpix.com/, because I'd like to support their rather niche business.

Its like if I want to watch Alien, all four of those older movies they want me to have two subscriptions?

And then most of streaming services actually stream stuff, so if my internet is bad im gonna sit there annoyed. I have a small samsung projector and its literally freezing all the time (something to do with wifi and qos, i have other things in my life more interesting that sysadmining a router).

Then up until last year, i could not even watch Dr. House legally.

And then the content changes over time. I remember seeing a scene, that i no longer see. Like wtf?

Its 98% (made up number) that its the service fault.

Why do people try to justify theft? That’s what I’m expecting to see in all the comments here. Like everyone is trying to somehow spin the whole situation into some story that makes their act of theft morally correct.

Don’t get me wrong. I pirate my self. But I’m honest about it. It’s theft. I steal because I’m a cheap ass thief. Why can’t you admit that about yourself?

If someone makes their product annoying and hard to access that’s really their free will and desire. Enshittification is not a crime. When you choose to pirate that work you’re doing something morally unethical.

Yet every pirate here tries to justify it. Just admit it.

"Piracy" is not theft, it is copyright infringement. Calling it theft is not "honesty", it's just factually wrong. There's nothing to debate on this matter.

> Like everyone is trying to somehow spin the whole situation into some story that makes their act of theft morally correct.

Nobody is "spinning" anything. We're telling you what we believe and why we believe it.

Actual moral justification involves the realization that all intellectual property is not only unnatural but also fundamentally unjust.

First, copyright is a perversion of reality. The natural state of ideas is actually the public domain. Ideas are infinitely copyable and trivially transmissible. Copyright seeks to completely invert that reality.

Copyright infringement is just reality reasserting itself. It happens every single day at massive scales without people even noticing or caring. It happens every time someone sends a funny picture to a friend. There is no such thing as stopping it, for it is natural, and natural processes shouldn't be stopped.

Second, copyright is fundamentally unjust. It is a functionally infinite state granted monopoly on numbers.

It's absurdity is merely tolerated because it promises well deserved rewards to creators, thereby incentivizing them.

The original social contract was "we're all going to pretend we can't trivially copy your works for a couple decades so that you can turn a profit and then the works will return to the public domain where it belongs".

So when was the last time a work you enjoyed entered the public domain? How many times has copyright duration been extended by now? It might as well be infinite. We're all going to be long dead before our culture returns to us.

They've all made their fortunes a thousand times over but they want to continue their rent seeking and unlike us they've got the trillions of dollars needed to lobby governments and get what they want.

Why fulfill our part of the contract when the copyright holders constantly demonstrate they're not willing to fulfill theirs? There's absolutely no reason to do that. Just stop pretending. It really is that simple.

> When you choose to pirate that work you’re doing something morally unethical.

Nonsense. Copyright infringement is civil disobedience of an unjust law and arguably a moral imperative.

No. The entire games and movie industry exists because a segment of people don’t pirate.

All the technology created to support those two industries mentioned above are supported by people who paid for their shit.

Your view point twists reality because the financial realities don’t pan out. Who the fuck pays for a triple A video game if it’s morally right to pirate things?

If you pirate you benefit off of millions of dollars used to create the game while you pay for nothing.

Call it what you want. If it’s not theft then it’s not theft. But the gravity of the moral infraction is equivalent to theft so I don’t see the point of the word play here.

The fact of the matter is your “morality” here cannot sustain the industry. Like as bad as law around copyrights have gotten, piracy in totality is fundamentally unsustainable. Ideas cost money to create and someone needs to pay. If not the consumer of the idea than the producer of the idea pays and functions as a charity to the consumer.

> Call it what you want. If it’s not theft then it’s not theft. But the gravity of the moral infraction is equivalent to theft so I don’t see the point of the word play here.

No. As I said, we had this debate decades ago and your side lost. This is settled ground; you can shout into the void but you already lost.

You might pirate because you're a "cheap ass" (your words, not mine), but many others don't. They've explained their reasons.

You don't like those reasons? Fine. But don't go around accusing others of your own sin.

Most people just want to watch and play stuff in the most convenient, non-intrusive, frictionless way possible. It just happens that this is often best achieved through piracy, because most legally available platforms suck in some way or the other (or content is not available).

(Before you accuse me of anything: I don't pirate games like you, I have a huge library of Steam, GOG and Humble Bundle games. I also subscribe to Netflix, Disney, HBO Max, Apple, and a couple more I forget. And I pay for YouTube premium. And Spotify -- which removed vast swathes of music I listened to because why not. The streaming platforms mostly suck and so I must occasionally resort to piracy because it's goddamn more convenient!)

If you pirate you used someone’s work without their permission and you caused them to foot the bill for the creation of your product. That is fundamentally immoral. It is logistically impossible to support any industry with your logic here.

That is why axiomatically your justifications are wrong. It’s just not sustainable. On the other hand the owner of a certain IP can make his product as inaccessible as possible and EVEN then if he gets money and the infrastructure is sustainable then the system works and that’s what points to a system that is not morally ambiguous.

I’m capable of admitting my own faults and seeing my own immoral tendencies. Unlike you. I think in your eyes you must be morally perfect because even piracy isn’t wrong to you.

Why the fuck are you so afraid of being accused of pirating? Why do you have to justify to yourself by buying games and then pirating occasionally? I pirate every fucking IP I own. I don’t give a shit. Call me what you want but I’m also not blind to what I do.

People like You pay for all my games and movies. Thank you. If you feel piracy is moral then what I do is moral to you. Thanks for paying for my shit. I don’t think you’re making a smart move for doing that but to each their own… if you think it’s moral it’s not my problem.

Does that make your blood boil? That geniuses like you pay for me to enjoy all my entertainment for free because it’s moral? Then maybe pirates like me should be arrested. Or maybe pirating should only be legal for people who do it if it’s convenient and illegal for me.

Piracy is legal when convenient! Well it’s convenient for me to live a life where you pay for my shit. So why arrest me? We need to define convenient. Or maybe it’s just wrong all together? How about that? What do you think makes the most sense? Obviously all rhetorical questions.

> Why the fuck are you so afraid of being accused of pirating? Why do you have to justify to yourself by buying games and then pirating occasionally? I pirate every fucking IP I own. I don’t give a shit. Call me what you want but I’m also not blind to what I do.

Did you bother reading what I wrote? I'm not afraid of anything. I'm explaining why I think you're wrong even though I think people are justified in pirating because available platforms mostly suck and are anticonsumer.

I will summarize it for you again, then proceed to ignore you:

A- You lost this debate decades ago. We already had it, your side lost. Piracy is NOT the same as theft, either morally or legally.

B- You are the pirate here, not me (well, I do occasionally pirate as I argued elsewhere). Look at yourself in the mirror and answer your own questions about why you do it. Don't assume the rest are the same as you, or that they are cheap ass thieves like you (your own words).

C- It's a quality of service thing for most people.

> Does that make your blood boil? That geniuses like you pay for me to enjoy all my entertainment for free because it’s moral?

No, it doesn't upset me at all. Any other things you want to argue?

> So why arrest me?

I don't think you should be arrested. I suggest you take a deep breath and think who you're arguing with and what the actual arguments are.

> someone’s work

We don't recognize ownership of ideas as a legitimate concept.

Intellectual property is logically reducible to ownership of numbers. All information is a sequence of bits, and all sequences of bits are numbers. All numbers already exist. Humans performing intellectual work are merely discovering those numbers.

The entire set of laws supporting intellectual property boils down to making knowledge and transmission of certain numbers illegal.

It's illegal for me to write certain numbers on a piece of paper and give the paper to you.

That's just absurd and unacceptable.

> It is logistically impossible to support any industry with your logic here.

Not at all. Plenty of creators enjoy sizeable patreon followings. They get paid for their labor, not for the finished product.

Also, physical goods are naturally scarce. Therefore industries producing physical goods are easily supported. Your claim that "any" industry cannot be supported is trivially falsifiable if taken literally.

> On the other hand the owner of a certain IP can make his product as inaccessible as possible

Complete illusion. Only a single copy need ever be produced and sold. Once that copy is available, it can be trivially and infinitely duplicated.

If I have a file on my computer, say a book, duplicating it is as easy as holding down Ctrl-V. By doing that I can literally exhaust my computer's memory by filling it up with copies of the book.

There are no limits to copying other than the physical limits of the computers performing the copying.

Contrast that to the age of the printing presses. Sure, you could copy books by hand but that imposes hard limits to the scale of your operation. Printing presses gave you the power to infringe copyright at scale but you had to be a major industry player to even have one.

It is now the 21st century. Everyone on Earth has globally networked computers in their pockets. The costs of planetary scale copying and distribution of information are measured in cents. There's actually so much information being copied and distributed that determining what's true or false is actually becoming a problem unto itself.

Intellectual property is nothing but an unacceptable restraining bolt on our amazing computer systems, stopping them from realizing their full potential.

> Why the fuck are you so afraid of being accused of pirating?

No one's "afraid" of anything. We've simply taken it much further than you did.

You "pirate" because it's convenient.

We "pirate" because we believe computers are world changing technology that should not be limited in any way whatsoever just because of utter legacy nonsense such as copyright.

Computers are obscenely subversive. They democratized copying, thereby nearly wiping out entire sections of the economy off the face of this earth. They democratized encryption and privacy, thereby allowing normal people to defeat militaries, spies, governments, police, judges.

Computers are far too important to be allowed to be controlled, least of all for completely idiotic reasons such as preserving the failing business models of last century's entertainment industries. Let Hollywood and the games industry get fully wiped out if they can't adapt.

For the enforcement of copyright requires that they own your computer, and that is unacceptable tyranny which must be resisted at all costs.

> Why do you have to justify to yourself by buying games and then pirating occasionally?

No one "needs" to justify anything. Copyright infringement is natural. People do it without even realizing it. There is no need to justify natural processes.

We consciously choose to justify it, because we believe there are higher reasons for doing it.

> I pirate every fucking IP I own. I don’t give a shit.

Unlike you, we actually do give a shit. That's why we spend time thinking about it and debating the issue.

> People like You pay for all my games and movies. Thank you.

> If you feel piracy is moral then what I do is moral to you. Thanks for paying for my shit.

You're welcome.

Make no mistake, though. Our reasons for paying for games are probably not what you think. I usually don't pay for the games themselves. I pay for Steam's excellent service.

I guess I'm old enough to remember the time where people had to manually download and apply half a dozen incremental patches to their games in order to get the latest version and play online. Many times I licensed games I already had on Steam just to avoid that. Battlefield 2 is my goto example. I still have the boxes.

Steam was the first ever Windows package manager. Licensing games through it has always been worth it for that fact alone. Anything else just sucks. Gabe Newell is right: it's always been a service problem.

My Steam account contains many games which simply cannot be licensed anymore for any amount of money. Usually because other game companies are trying to push their shitty copies of Steam, just like Hollywood studios keep creating their own shitty streaming services.

There's nothing wrong with competition. The problem is they're competing for the wrong reasons. They don't actually want to create a superior Steam, they want to leverage their copyright monopolies in order to more efficiently rent seek. They create their own stores, then they pull their games from Steam and offer them exclusively on their shitty platforms that nobody actually wants to use. They force people to use their shitty services in order to get access to the games instead of just offering them on Steam.

Well if it's not on Steam, I won't pay even one cent for it. It's quite literally that simple.

> Does that make your blood boil? That geniuses like you pay for me to enjoy all my entertainment for free because it’s moral?

Not at all. Your enjoyment in no way deprives me of mine, nor does it offend me on any level whatsoever. Had you asked for it, I would have simply given you a copy myself.

> Then maybe pirates like me should be arrested.

Absolutely not. "Piracy" should not even exist as a crime. If it does, it should not cause anyone to be deprived of their freedom.

The truth is in the name chosen by the monopolists: "piracy". Copying is a crime so victimless, they have to compare it to high seas piracy in order to get people to give a shit. It's just asinine.

> Well it’s convenient for me to live a life where you pay for my shit.

Relax. Copying is literally victimless. There is no "your shit", it's all just files in a computer. The ownership notions of the physical world do not really exist in this realm. The scarcity is completely artificial. It's not real.

> The entire set of laws supporting intellectual property boils down to making knowledge and transmission of certain numbers illegal.
It's illegal for me to write certain numbers on a piece of paper and give the paper to you.

That's just absurd and unacceptable.

Your bank account credentials are a bunch of numbers, would you be willing to share those? Surely you wouldn't bother changing them after the fact, I mean, literally victimless if someone copies them for their own use right? ;-)

That argument is completely unpersuasive. These are not the same things at all. In multiple ways.

First, there is no way do duplicate bank account contents. Bank transfers are transactions: adding to your account subtracts from mine. The bitcoin ledger is infinitely copyable but doing that gives no one extra bitcoins.

Contrast that with intellectual property which is the complete opposite: information can be losslessly duplicated infinitely at no cost whatsoever to either party.

Second, bank credentials are secrets. The information is not actually meant to be widely distributed, it's meant to be known by as few people as possible, ideally one person.

The secrecy exists precisely because once information is out there there is no way to control what will be done with it. Contrast that with copyright: the monopolists want to distribute the information world wide and simultaneously fully control what people do with it. The tyranny necessary to enforce such corporate control is utterly unacceptable.

So your bank account argument in fact supports my world view by exposing how utterly schizophrenic the copyright monopolists are. They actually think they can control public information that has been disseminated far and wide. It's so out of touch with the reality of things they might as well be put out of their misery. Just abolish copyright straight up.

>The secrecy exists precisely because once information is out there there is no way to control what will be done with it. Contrast that with copyright: the monopolists want to distribute the information world wide and simultaneously fully control what people do with it. The tyranny necessary to enforce such corporate control is utterly unacceptable.

The idea wouldn't exist if such tyranny didn't exist in the first place. What causes a drug company to invest billions into creating life saving drugs? If all ideas are open source then there's NO incentive for ANYONE to invest billions into ideas.

That's why copyrights and patent laws exist. To function as incentive in the creation of new ideas.

Pick and choose: Either you can only interact with the idea under monopolist rules. Or the idea doesn't exist period. Overall, humanity (aka the actual "we") has picked the former over the later.

> Overall, humanity (aka the actual "we") has picked the former over the later.

Did humanity really pick that? I doubt it. Copyright infringement happens too often and too normally for me to believe people care about copyrights. Politicians bought and paid for by lobbyists picked that.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and expicitly pick the latter over the former. I would rather have the nonexistence of ideas over infinite monopolist control. Let the entire copyright industry go bankrupt if necessary.

Mercifully, it will not actually be necessary. Platforms like Patreon and GitHub Sponsors are the future. They work independently of copyrights. They are how creators should be funded for their valuable work. As a society, we need to figure out how to normalize and increase their use as much as possible.

Also, nonexistence of ideas is incompatible with human nature. People will create, profit or not. They must. The creative output will significantly decrease but it will not be wiped out. As a free software developer, I am living proof.

> What causes a drug company to invest billions into creating life saving drugs?

Patents.

I am not as strongly opposed to patents as I am to copyright. Unlike copyrights, patents actually expire in reasonable timeframes. Patents have none of this lifetime plus a trillion years nonsense. They also typically apply to physical goods and inventions.

So even though I believe all intellectual property is fundamentally absurd, I would compromise at patents. They are absurd monopolies, but they are tolerable. Their absurdity will end well within my lifetime. The ideas will be freed. Generic versions of the drugs will be made.

Nintendo selling people the exact same Mario ROMs half a century after the fact is nothing but pure unadulterated rent seeking. They have already made their fortunes several times over. Let the works enter the public domain. They should have to continuously create new works if they want to keep making money, not strike gold once and live off the rent for all eternity.

>Did humanity really pick that? I doubt it. Copyright infringement happens too often and too normally for me to believe people care about copyrights. Politicians bought and paid for by lobbyists picked that.

Let's focus on the overall idea. IP. not the instantiations of the idea like patents and copyright. You're against the very idea of ideas as property. And YES humanity chose the concept of IP. It's encoded into the laws of government which people trust. Additionally entire businesses and corporations building civilization changing technologies ONLY exist because of IP.

>Also, nonexistence of ideas is incompatible with human nature. People will create, profit or not. They must. The creative output will significantly decrease but it will not be wiped out. As a free software developer, I am living proof.

Human nature is prehistoric instincts for hunter gatherers. Capital, profit, business and centralization of power is responsible for the ideas responsible for human civilization as we know it.

How do you mobilize thousands of humans to create a boeing 747 which is unionization of multitudes of people crystallizing ideas and focusing human effort to creating a feat of an idea that no single human can create? Capital and centralization of power.

You need to pay people, you need to take advantage of their need to survive and get a living wage to motivate such endeavors. You need the incentive to make them rich to have a person coordinate others into creating things like spaceX or google or openAI.

Obviously I am talking about the non-existance of MANY ideas. Not all ideas. And those "many" ideas make up almost all of human civilization itself.

You are a free software developer. You live off of charity. You're fringe. You're a side effect. Business engines drive profit and people get paid and that excess money is charitably given to you. If the business engines didn't exist you wouldn't. You are the exception to the rule. A massive exception, don't get me wrong, but still an exception. Open source would not exist were it not for closed source.

>I am not as strongly opposed to patents as I am to copyright. Unlike copyrights, patents actually expire in reasonable timeframes. Patents have none of this lifetime plus a trillion years nonsense. They also typically apply to physical goods and inventions.

In principle they are the same. Medicine that saves lives wouldn't exist if it wasn't for patents. You tolerate patents but the essence is you think it's wrong, that is the issue I am addressing. If patents didn't exist most big pharma medicines wouldn't exist.

Do you tolerate the non-existence of life saving technologies created by big pharma in order to satisfy their own human greed? Covid for example. Think about the thing that drove big pharma to create these vaccines. 80 to 90 billion in profit is what drove these companies to develop these things at a speed and scale that won't exist without closed source.

What mobilized the smartest minds to work together in such synchrony to produce the vaccines? You think patreon could do it? You think a future surviving off of donations from patreon would motivate all the smartest minds to spend years on training to develop the expertise necessary to stop the pandemic and then finally come together for patreon? lol.

> You're against the very idea of ideas as property. And YES humanity chose the concept of IP.

Humanity chose the fruits of intellectual property. More books. More movies. More music. More art. More inventions. More technology. More everything. Humanity chose wealth.

Time limited monopolies were merely the means to bring about such wealth creation.

Monopolies are universally understood to be a bad sign in every economic sector. They were grudgingly implemented in this specific area only because nobody managed to come up with a better idea. Even then, laws were made so as to contain the damage as much as possible by limiting the duration of the monopolies.

It was absurd but it was the only way. People took care to ensure the nonsense did not last even a day longer than necessary.

It is now the 21st century. Humanity must evolve past this.

> It's encoded into the laws of government which people trust.

Laws that were pretty much written by industry lobbyists. Anyone who trusts that is foolish.

Intellectual property is supposed to be a time limited monopoly, yet copyright is functionally infinite in duration because the industry kept lobbying for extensions.

The people were systematically robbed of their public domain rights. Seriously doubt the people chose that.

> How do you mobilize thousands of humans to create a boeing 747

By actually manufacturing and selling aircrafts to airlines? 747s are not infinitely copyable. Discussion has now shifted from ideas to tangible objects.

> You are a free software developer. You live off of charity.

I don't work in the software industry. My aversion to intellectual property and licensing is a big reason why.

> You think patreon could do it?

Remains to be seen. There should be no functional difference between raising hundreds of millions from venture capitalists or crowdfunding. We just need to find ways to raise these platforms to the billion dollar scale.

>By actually manufacturing and selling aircrafts to airlines? 747s are not infinitely copyable. Discussion has now shifted from ideas to tangible objects.

The raw materials used to create a boeing 747 are not rare at all. They are easily accessible. The aggregate value of material cost of a 747 is significantly less than the actual value of the 747 itself meaning that much of the worth of the 747 is in the crystallization of the idea of what a 747 is. The 747 is at it's core an idea, that's what separates it from just being a just a mishmash of random materials. It is at it's core an IP.

Yes it's not infinitely copyable so it doesn't suffer from the ill effects of software. But they are one in the same, it's just that the 747 has additional protections of the "idea" being encrypted into the plane itself and the people who make the plane. Software the idea is fully crystallized into a single place: the source code and it suffers from being easily copied.

This is where IP law comes from. The idea of a 747 is by nature not easily copied, so people didn't need to instantiate the concept of IP because by default it's just harder to copy. IP was invented because of the distinction between ideas that are easily copied and not easily copied. People wanted to bring the properties of the 747 to software.

>Remains to be seen. There should be no functional difference between raising hundreds of millions from venture capitalists or crowdfunding. We just need to find ways to raise these platforms to the billion dollar scale.

I think we're in agreement. We agree on the benefits and downsides of IP. You just think that altruism could function just as well as the incentives created by IP and it seems you're clear that there is currently no evidence to support your hypothesis other than a smattering of freak anomalies like Linux. Whether that evidence will materialize in the future remains to be seen.

> You just think that altruism could function just as well

Not at all. I'm no proponent of altruism.

I proposed crowdfunding as the alternative. As in, entire nations worth of people investing money to make something happen. Decentralized investors.

Once intellectual work is done, the value of the intangible product trends towards zero. Selling things that have infinite supply makes no economic sense. Society needs to find a way to pay creators before the work is done. Creations must be treated as investments rather than products.

Crowd funding already exists. The biggest and most powerful corporations on the planet are all crowd funded. They have entire markets dedicated to crowd funding. NYSE, NASDAQ, etc.

> Human nature is prehistoric instincts for hunter gatherers. Capital, profit, business and centralization of power is responsible for the ideas responsible for human civilization as we know it.

You state this as fact, but the anthropological consensus doesn't agree with this.

Early hunter gatherer societies are thought to have been communal, with no notion of property. It's not "human nature".

> How do you mobilize thousands of humans to create a boeing 747 which is unionization of multitudes of people crystallizing ideas and focusing human effort to creating a feat of an idea that no single human can create? Capital and centralization of power.

This is an ideological argument, which is fine, but nothing anywhere close to "the truth", and especially, not the only or best way to organize things.

You want to have this argument, fine, but you'll have to step down from the teaching desk and accept your belief is not universal.

>You state this as fact, but the anthropological consensus doesn't agree with this.

Yes it does. This is anthropology 101. In hunter gatherer societies wealth doesn't really exist. People eat and get resources off the land without ever really accumulating wealth. For civilization to form, first wealth must evolve into a form where it is abundant, identical and useable like coins.

So like grain when extremely abundant naturally maps into something like coins where people instead of bartering can "pay" others with grain and save up on grain. If humans begin farming and then grain becomes very abundant in society, something changes.

It then becomes possible for the accumulation of resources by a central source as in one person owns more grain than another person. Wealth inequality so to say. When one person is much more wealthy than another, this allows him to gain a sort of artificial power over others by employing others and paying them a salary. This CAN only exist if some static countable resource exists that can function in place of a monetary denomination.

This is ultimately what causes people to coordinate. No amount of leadership or charisma is going to herd humans into a organized team of hundreds to build projects as complex as a boeing 747. You HAVE to pay people for this to happen. You have to offer them something that benefits them that's more then just your charisma.

These are the projects that define civilization.

This is IN FACT the anthropological consensus on how civilization forms in academia. I'm not making this up. Go read up on it, this is how they believe advanced civilization formed in some places and didn't in others. So places that are really tropical tend not to form advance civilization because things like grain rot. This prevents anyone from accumulating resources which prevents wealth inequality which prevents a single individual coordinating other individuals to create the public works that define modern civilization as we know it.

>Early hunter gatherer societies are thought to have been communal, with no notion of property. It's not "human nature".

You're describing tribes and hunter and gatherers. I'm describing civilization. The next step. Mesopotamia. The progression from tribes and cavemen to civilization involves the steps I describe above.

Also I'm not calling "civilization" natural. Nothing of the sort. The times we live in are not natural at all. Modern civilization is NOT natural. But. Capitalism, wealth inequality and business DOES form the basis of civilization as we know it. In short, IP is fundamental to civilization, but it is not necessarily natural. I am more appealing to whether you value the idea of civilization itself, and less to whether something is compatible to human nature in its earliest form as these are two orthogonal concepts.

>This is an ideological argument, which is fine, but nothing anywhere close to "the truth", and especially, not the only or best way to organize things.

Ideological my ass, there's barely any evidence of complex projects forming out of pure communal goodwill. The only time I've seen people do something like this of equal complexity out in the wild is Linux. And it only happened because Linux is uniquely a software project which is very cheap to develop for. And EVEN then open source developers for linux need corporate jobs in order to get paid a living wage so that they can afford to have spare time working on a charity project like Linux. Linux exists because developer time working on Linux is paid for by FOR-profit corporations.

>You want to have this argument, fine, but you'll have to step down from the teaching desk and accept your belief is not universal.

It's not a belief. That's what you're missing. The logic composes into a singular conclusion. I'm right. You may not agree with me now and that's just part of human nature. Maybe think about it for a couple months and eventually you may hit the realization that your idea of how the world works was a little off. Yeah I know I'm an asshole for sort of bluntly burying everyone I see with the brutal truth, but think about it for a bit.

So now we have established that not all numbers are "just numbers" that can be copied victimlessly.

Consider that maybe it is because some numbers represent something more than just numeric values. Maybe they represent economic value.

Said economic value having been generated by your hard work.

Now maybe you can see how that line of thought leads to the concept of intellectual property.

Information covered by IP is "public" simply because there is no effective way to keep it secret, precisely because it is so easy to copy. However, as the bank account example shows, ease of copying "just numbers" has nothing to do with the effort invested into creating the value represented by those numbers. And IP laws exist precisely to account for that.

We've established nothing of the sort. Secrets can be copied just as trivially as any other information. That's why numerous measures are taken to avoid their revelation.

If I tell people my bank credentials, I have nobody but myself to blame when money is transferred out of my accounts.

If I upload my secret encryption keys to some cloud service, I have nobody but myself to blame when others gain the ability to decrypt my data.

Yet I'm expected to feel sorry for would be monopolists who publish works and expect to dictate what you do with them? No.

The effort invested into creation of value is often completely irrelevant, even in copyright law. Many countries do not subscribe to the "sweat of the brow" doctrine, USA included. The ones that do seem to reserve its application for specific contexts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

Originality is the key factor in copyrightability, not the effort required to generate the content. The number must be unique and not derived from other numbers.

>We've established nothing of the sort.

Oh no we have. Your original these was based on the premise that "just copying numbers" is not "victimless". So now why is there even a concern that money is being transferred out of bank accounts or data being decrypted without consent? Aren't they "just numbers"?

>The effort invested into creation of value is often completely irrelevant, even in copyright law. Many countries do not subscribe to the "sweat of the brow" doctrine, USA included. The ones that do seem to reserve its application for specific contexts.

I know. But even if you had inherited the money in your bank account through no effort of your own, you would prefer to not share your credentials.

So maybe you want to think about why you're OK with others' "numbers" being copied around but why you're so concerned about your numbers being copied around. I mean, "just numbers," right? :-)

You also seem to be misunderstanding what "publish" means. I hate that it has come down to dictionary meanings, but here's what https://www.dictionary.com/browse/publish says:

"1. to issue (printed or otherwise reproduced textual or graphic material, computer software, etc.) for sale or distribution to the public."

Note the bit about "for sale". Just because it's made available does not mean it's available for free.

There are no contradictions.

I don't think of passwords as my personal private property. They are merely secrets that I keep. I don't have a monopoly on them. Any number of people could have the same password as I do and I wouldn't even know or care. They are just random numbers of no particular value whatsoever.

The copying of passwords does not cause direct harm. If it did, then the publishing of common password lists would be harmful and criminal. The real crime is the act of breaking into someone's bank accounts and draining their money which actually deprives them of real scarce resources. In other words, theft.

The copying of a password alone is likely insufficient to cause real harm due to numerous layers of security such as multifactor authentication.

The usage of passwords is well aligned with reality. People don't deliberately publish their passwords and then act surprised when others use them. That pathology is exclusive to copyright monopolists.

Exercising control over cryptographic keys is realistic. Ideally, only a single copy will ever exist in the entire universe. I have purpose built cryptoprocessors which help ensure that. In the event they are leaked, they are merely discarded and new ones are issued.

Cryptography is fundamentally built on math. At no point do they deny reality. Cryptographers know that numbers are trivially copied, that's why keys are supposed to be kept secret, not published far and wide. They don't impose laws prohibiting others from copying or deriving the numbers, they know such things are unenforceable. Instead, they design their systems so that such things are not an issue. The whole point of cryptographic keys is that they are secret and cosmologically impossible to brute force. They went beyond making it illegal, they made it mathematically impossible.

Meanwhile, exercising control over copyrighted works requires that corporations control every single one of our computers, lest some user order them to make unauthorized copies. In the event that even a single copy escapes their closed system, there's no stopping it anymore and it's all over for them. They still try to stop it by doubling down on monopolies, passing unenforceable laws, trying to usurp control of our computers and generally increasing the overall tyranny of our society. A heavy cost, and they still fail due to the basic fact that they are trying to control public information.

So even after careful consideration I conclude these things are not even remotely analogous to each other at all.

> The copying of passwords does not cause direct harm. If it did, then the publishing of common password lists would be harmful and criminal. The real crime is the act of breaking into someone's bank accounts and draining their money which actually deprives them of real scarce resources. In other words, theft.

1. So now passwords (just numbers) and 2FA (just numbers) are "protecting" money (even more just numbers in a database) or your private data (yet more just numbers), the loss of control over which you clearly consider harmful.

2. When a bank account is drained, no "tangible good" is being "taken" but somehow NOW it is theft? ;-)

I think the key disagreement is the unwillingness to accept that numbers can have economic value because that undermines the premise that "just numbers being copied is victimless". Without that there will never be a resolution to this thread ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

>We don't recognize ownership of ideas as a legitimate concept.

Who is this "we" you're referring to? As far as I know it's you and your 2 or 3 online pen pals because the rest of the world recognizes it as a legitimate concept such that it's been encoded into law and billions and billions have been invested into said said ideas on the assumption that those laws will provide the idea creators with "ownership" of said ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_abolition

I have no "pen pals" from this site. Anyone replying to you is doing so independently.

Recognition of intellectual property is just an illusion. They have vested interests, of course they're going to recognize it. Doesn't change the underlying absurdity of the system. Doesn't change the fact they constantly run smack into reality on a daily basis. "Their" works are mercilessly copied, "their" inventions are reverse engineered, AIs are trained on "their" creations, generic versions of "their" drugs are made... It's a constant unceasing fight against reality, completely senseless, and they still can't stop any of it. Because it's not actually real.

The idea of exchanging paper for material goods is also absurd. There are also vested interests that rely on maintaining this illusion. They want people to believe that something like a tesla can actually be exchanged for worthless paper. None of this is real so there's endless fights against people who try to make illegal copies of the paper. It's an endless fight, because it's not actually real.

The entire economy is an illusion. But it works because most people buy into the hallucination. IP is much of the same thing. If there's only a few people creating IP laws it doesn't mean anything. It only works because the majority of people respect said IP laws. IP exists because the majority hallucinates it into reality.

Even the concept of "laws" are illusions. They are total fabrications created by mankind. Your entire life is built upon thousands of fabricated concepts and illusions that are in many ways incompatible with your ancient genetic biology. So saying that IP isn't "natural" is meaningless.

I don't even disagree with you there. Pretty much every human concept is made up by our own minds. The economy as a whole is an especially hilarious case since fiat money is backed by literally nothing since 1971.

However, I do draw a distinction between reasonable enforceable laws and schizophrenic unenforceable laws.

Most laws are pretty reasonable. The vast majority of people are peaceful. Relatively few people commit cold blooded murder. When one does happen, criminals are caught and imprisoned so that they are no longer part of society. It's a manageable problem.

Intellectual property is not like that. Infringement is as easy and normal as breathing. It happens every day at massive scales. It happens every time you download a nice photo from some website and send it to a friend. There are so many infringements taking place you cannot hope to ever punish them all. Often you cannot even catch perpetrators. The law is essentially unenforceable against the common man. There is no point.

In my country I've seen copyright infringement figures at over 80%. As in, 8 out every 10 people has infringed copyright at least once in their lifetimes. People talk about downloading music like it's nothing. Copy shops get set up literally next door to universities to help students copy entire books and course materials. Video game consoles are bought already modchipped straight from the stores. Every town has an informal market where copied media is sold cheaply, there's one less than 10 minutes away from me. Is this really a crime? Maybe it's actually a custom, already part of our culture.

Intellectual property is quite useful when used by corporations to attack other corporations. Companies are juicy targets for lawsuits. There are also less of them, their numbers are manageable. Leveraging intellectual property against normal folk though? That fight is unwinnable and I really wish they'd stop trying.

You have it backwards. It's a relative minority that recognizes it as a legitimate concept. It's just that this minority lobbied for the laws.

(As a curiosity, these same minorities lobby for the opposite, or turn a blind eye, when it's contrary to their interests. See the current LLM craze, and also... did you know Hollywood was founded on copyright infringement, and that its location was chosen to enable this? Put that in your pipe and smoke it).

(Or also: many AAA game developers played pirated games in their youth. It was part of their formative years. )

Most people don't believe in the concept. You don't either, regardless of your protests here: you admitted you pirate everything. If you believed this was deeply immortal and harmful you wouldn't.

Your actions speak louder than your words.

> As a curiosity, these same minorities lobby for the opposite, or turn a blind eye, when it's contrary to their interests.

> See the current LLM craze

Excellent point. Watching the corporations engage in AI washing of massive scale copyright infringement was extremely disgusting.

I don't even fault them for doing it, technology should not be held back due to intellectual property nonsense. It's the "rules for thee but not for me" nonsense that's offensive.

> did you know Hollywood was founded on copyright infringement, and that its location was chosen to enable this?

Plenty of industries were. Samuel Slater, the so called father of the american industrial revolution, memorized british designs before immigrating to the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater

I used to have a small collection of examples just like this. If I remember correctly, some drug companies chose specific European countries due to their stance on intellectual property.

Infringement is only inconvenient when others do it to them, never when they do it to others. Every monopolist was once an infringer. They always climb the ladder and try to kick it out so the next guy can't touch them.

> Who the fuck pays for a triple A video game if it’s morally right to pirate things?

Yours truly.

I have been a proud Steam customer for over 20 years. I have licensed over 200 games on Steam alone. I own multiple video game consoles from multiple generations and have quite the collection of titles for them.

Not a single person can accuse me of not supporting creators.

> The fact of the matter is your “morality” here cannot sustain the industry.

The fact of the matter is the industry shouldn't be sustained. It is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create a product whose price trends toward zero due to infinite availability. When that obviously fails, they get upset and invoke copyright in order to distort reality until they're profitable.

The simple fact is creators need a new business model. And that business model is patronage. It's the labor of creation that's scarce and valuable, not the finished product. Therefore creators should be paid continuously for the act of creating itself, not the finished product.

Macaulay’s 1841 address is the most vigorous defense of copyright I've ever read:

https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...

And even he realized that copyright was a monopoly, tolerated only due to the fruits it bears.

He rejected alternatives such as patronage due to fear of suppression. Rich patrons would of course decline to fund works that they didn't like.

That concern no longer exists. We now have technology in the form of platforms like kickstarter and patreon which democratize funding and patronage, greatly reducing or eliminating the risk of suppression. There is no longer any need for copyright.

>Yours truly.

What is this? Did you drop the mic? Think about what you just admitted. It's morally right to pirate. So instead of doing the moral thing, you pay extra money for No fucking reason. Congratulations.

>Not a single person can accuse me of not supporting creators.

But people still can accuse you of being stupid. Not saying that you are stupid, but it's open season in this area. Make sure your arguments are legit.

>The fact of the matter is the industry shouldn't be sustained. It is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create a product whose price trends toward zero due to infinite availability. When that obviously fails, they get upset and invoke copyright in order to distort reality until they're profitable.

So get rid of the entire movie industry and gaming industry? Makes sense. How many billions of dollars and jobs just went down the drain?

>The simple fact is creators need a new business model. And that business model is patronage. It's the labor of creation that's scarce and valuable, not the finished product. Therefore creators should be paid continuously for the act of creating itself, not the finished product.

Holy shit. This makes total sense. But then why stop at creators? Why not make the entire economy based off of patronage? Right? If it makes sense for "creators" well everyone in the economy creates shit, so let's do it for everything.

You work for a company? Why is that company paying you? Your work should be OPEN source and free! You program right? So all you're doing is creating ideas. The company shouldn't pay you fuck shit, and the only people who can pay you are people who sign up as patrons.

Here's a genius idea. If you stand by your ideas so much, why don't you start executing on them right now! Go tell your boss, "Hey my work is public domain! you don't need to pay me a dime! but if you want to support me here's my patreon link! Thanks bud!"

Look. Honestly if you don't see how what I suggested makes zero sense and how what I just said completely applies to ALL creators then you're out of touch with reality and human psychology.

> So instead of doing the moral thing, you pay extra money for No fucking reason.

"No fucking reason" is false. I wrote about the reasons why I pay for games on Steam.

> But people still can accuse you of being stupid.

I'm okay with that.

> Make sure your arguments are legit.

Testing my world views is the reason why I come here.

> How many billions of dollars and jobs just went down the drain?

Not a factor. Jobs that depend on intolerable monopolies shouldn't exist in the first place. Society will adapt. It must.

> But then why stop at creators? Why not make the entire economy based off of patronage?

Because we're talking about artificial scarcity of ideas, not tangible goods which follow natural economic principles. None of this applies to car manufacturing or food production.

> Your work should be OPEN source and free! You program right? So all you're doing is creating ideas.

I don't even disagree with you. That's why I barely even bother with licensing. I just pick AGPLv3 to maximize freedom and leverage.

I'm more radical than Stallman in this area. Stallman believes in and relies on copyright. I don't.

> The company shouldn't pay you fuck shit, and the only people who can pay you are people who sign up as patrons.

It's not that easy.

I work on my own projects because I personally care about them. They are rarely aligned with and might even be opposed to company interests.

I get to do whatever I want, however I want, whenever I want. I also get to walk away at any point for any reason, including no reason.

I'm not an employee. I have no boss. I have no deadlines. I have no obligations to anyone, least of all corporations.

If companies want developers to work on their stuff on a regular basis, they have to pay for it. Why would anyone care otherwise?

> Here's a genius idea. If you stand by your ideas so much, why don't you start executing on them right now!

I don't work in the software industry. My aversion to intellectual property is one of the reasons why.

I do have a GitHub Sponsors. For about a year, I had exactly one sponsor. Now I have zero.

I am also opposed to advertising in general. I try very hard not to talk about my own projects unless it is socially acceptable to do so. Others have independently submitted my work here and on other sites. I was also invited to post about one of them on reddit once.

Well you’re an outlier. Your refusal to participate in society makes almost everyone on earth disagree with you.

You’re suffering from the blowback of your own choices. If society adopted your philosophies, then society would be the one suffering.

I didn't refuse to participate in society. I refused to participate in activities I personally believe are wrong. I don't really plan to take advantage of monopolies if I can avoid it. Whatever privileges I have that allow me to make this choice, I hope I can maintain them indefinitely.

I'm suffering nothing. There is no "blowback". I'm merely explaining to you why I don't believe in intellectual property. Because you asked.

>I didn't refuse to participate in society. I refused to participate in activities I personally believe are wrong. I don't really plan to take advantage of monopolies if I can avoid it. Whatever privileges I have that allow me to make this choice, I hope I can maintain them indefinitely.

If you refuse to participate in activities that you personally believe are wrong then based off of what you told me, you in actuality refuse to participate in society from an OVERALL perspective.

>I'm suffering nothing. There is no "blowback". I'm merely explaining to you why I don't believe in intellectual property. Because you asked.

This is the blowback:

>I do have a GitHub Sponsors. For about a year, I had exactly one sponsor. Now I have zero.

Negligible economic gain for your open source work. You may choose to personally not classify that as blowback, but my language is not referencing your personal opinion. You can think of it as saying: separate from your own opinion, basically everyone on the face of the earth things you suffer from "blowback".

Not that it means anything of course. Only your opinion really matters. I'm just communicating my thoughts. Like you.

I don't think my lack of sponsorships are at all attributable to my personal views on intellectual property.

I think it's far more likely it's because I'm unknown, because my projects are unfinished, because my projects are bad or any number of other possible reasons.

Your lack of sponsorship is the result of your own choices of doing work and expecting altruism to pay you for the fruits of your labor. The blow back is the wasted effort of not getting paid because of the reasons you stated.

Piracy is not theft.

We already had this debate decades ago, and your side of the debate lost. It's not "theft" by any reasonable interpretation of the word.

It may not be legal, and it may be many other things, but it's not theft.

As to why "people justify it", what's the point of even asking when the article and many comments here explain the reasons? You may disagree with the reasons, but they exist and they are coherent.

> We already had this debate decades ago, and your side of the debate lost. It's not "theft" by any reasonable interpretation of the word.

That's only true when you ignore many, many common usages of the word "theft". I would hazard a guess that your interpretations are along the dictionary lines of "depriving a person of their property." However, here are some commonly used forms of the word (supported by wikipedia and government sites) that don't fit that definition:

- Wage theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft

- Time theft: https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles...

- Identity theft: https://www.usa.gov/identity-theft

- Theft of services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services

- Theft of trade secrets: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=TRADE+SECRETS

- Attention theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_theft

- Data theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_theft

- Electricity theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_theft

- Joke theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_theft

- Stolen valor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_valor

And here are more colloquial usages of theft of abstract things:

- Credit card theft (it's really just the number that is "stolen")

- Password theft (usually "stolen" during a data breach, more numbers being stolen)

- Bitcoin theft (even more numbers being "stolen".)

Here's a very simple explanation for this: In common parlance, "theft" generally means taking something of economic value -- either physical, like property, or abstract, like labor -- from someone without giving any value in return against their wishes.

If you extend this line of thought, you'll see why IP laws exist and why these abstract forms of theft are illegal.

And when examined from that perspective, those coherent reasons are basically just different ways of saying "because I can get away with it."

As I said, we already had this conversation ages ago and your side lost.

Shout until you're blue in the face, and you'll be just as wrong.

I've already stated my position, and "because you can get away with it" is no part of it. You must be confusing me with someone else in this conversation.

Half your examples fail to make the point you intend, and are not at all analogous to watching a pirated TV show. A lot of the rest use an informal (not legal, and highly subjective) definition of the word "theft" -- but you knew this.

It's exhausting to keep repeating this. Please read what's been said (hint: these are decades old arguments, we're not going to rehash them here for your benefit).

All of this harkens back to even before the days of the silly "you wouldn't steal a car" (2004) antipiracy campaign. I hope I don't need to explain that stealing a car and pirating a TV show are nothing alike, neither legally nor morally.

>As I said, we already had this conversation ages ago and your side lost.

I had a conversation too. Several conversations. And I won those conversations so YOU lost. In fact, just imagine every single stance you've ever had on any topic and just know I had a conversation about it in the past, and you lost.

My point is. Nobody cares about your conversation especially when ALL of those conversations you're referencing are utterly wrong.

>It's exhausting to keep repeating this. Please read what's been said (hint: these are decades old arguments, we're not going to rehash them here for your benefit).

Who the hell is "we?" How about this. Whoever you're referring to, however many decades you guys spent talking about it... you're all wrong. You wasted decades and came up with a wrong outcome.

I didn't mean us two. I meant the collective consensus.

You didn't win. You lost. Read Free Culture by Lessig.

> My point is. Nobody cares about your conversation especially when ALL of those conversations you're referencing are utterly wrong.

Who the hell is "nobody"? Everything you've said so far is "not even wrong", it's utterly nonsensical. Go read what's been said about the topic for the last two decades, then come back and debate from an informed point of view.

Go back to pirating your games while decrying the harm it does. Your position is so inconsistent it makes no sense to debate you.

>I didn't mean us two. I meant the collective consensus. >You didn't win. You lost. Read Free Culture by Lessig.

Who you had a conversation with is meaningless. The winner is what most of the world follows. Not who you personally define who "we" is.

>Who the hell is "nobody"?

Most of the modern world. Most readers on HN. The overwhelming majority of people on this earth are against your opinion.

This "we" you're referring to is an overwhelming minority of opinions.

>Go back to pirating your games while decrying the harm it does. Your position is so inconsistent it makes no sense to debate you.

My position is consistent. I take the role of the villain. I'm a serial killer who is aware that killing is wrong. But I want to be wrong and I don't care for being right.

You're the one who is inconsistent. You're the one rewiring reality to fit your immoral actions. You can't handle the fact that you yourself are a self fish actor.

You want to help the world. Yet you justify paying for things you didn't create because it's more "convenient".

[flagged]

> As I said, we already had this conversation ages ago and your side lost.

Repeating that does not make it true.

> A lot of the rest use an informal (not legal, and highly subjective) definition of the word "theft" -- but you knew this.

Yes, all the examples I gave are exactly of that. I think we are in violent agreement here.

> It's exhausting to keep repeating this.

I do agree it's exhausting, because neither you nor the decades of arguments (where I have repeatedly brought it up, but well, the Internet is a big place) have addressed this point. Let me lay it out in more detail:

1. All society and trade is based on exchange of value. This is true since the oldest days of barter.

2. When somebody provides something of value and gets something they value in return, that is a fair trade. The exact amounts of value are negotiable (including zero, cf. creative commons, but again this is based on the provider's consent.) This is the fundamental basis of trade.

3. So when someone takes something of value -- physical goods or abstract things like services or TV shows -- without giving its provider something of acceptable value in return, it is considered unfair and morally wrong. Which is why society has decided to make it legally wrong as well.

So whether it's stealing a car or pirating a TV show, it is essentially taking something of value without giving any in exchange, for which the word "theft" is perfectly fine.

> So when someone takes something of value

> it is essentially taking something of value

Intellectual property is not "taken". It is not a tangible good that can change hands. Copies are made instead.

Having a copyright means having the right to make copies.

To infringe someone's copyright is to make copies despite the right to make copies belonging to someone else.

The words are self-explanatory.

Real property logic and words do not apply to intellectual property. Insisting on their use is bad faith argumentation. It is an attempt to convince others by shock and manipulation. Virtually nobody is moved by such a nebulous crime as copyright infringement, so the words theft and piracy are substituted in its place for greater impact.

Sigh, I knew the word "take" would invoke pedanticity...

So when you "take interest" or "take advantage" or "take a look" or "take your time", what tangible good is being "taken"?

When you "take pleasure in something", like say a TV show, you are deriving value from it. What tangible goods are involved here?

When somebody provides you a service -- say washing your car -- you are still taking value from it even without a single tangible good being given. Or would you not pay the person because no "tangible good" has been given to you?

English is a rich language and pedanticity does not help this debate. Instead, you may want to address the core argument: when someone provides value (again: goods AND services) to another party and does not receive acceptable value in return, it is considered immoral, which is why society has made it illegal.

And yes, the word "theft" is prefectly suitable in this case. Otherwise you should explain why all of these involve some loss to party and are immoral / illegal without a single tangible good being "taken": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44917565

It's not "pedanticity", it's that the facts matter and you are wrong.

We've seen this tactic before: proponents of draconian copyright laws intentionally conflated "copying" (as in the digital world) with "theft" (as in "you wouldn't steal a car" -- are you familiar with this campaign from 2004 that largely backfired?).

So that's why words matter. You are misusing them in a way that has been weaponized in the past, which is why I and many others are vigilant and quick to correct you.

>We've seen

This is what bugs me about you. Who is "we"? It's like you're calling "we" the rest of the free world. Be real, most people aren't on your side.

"We" in reality is just a small group of fanatical FSF members vs. The rest of the entire world.

"We" refers to people who agree with us, and that includes the Supreme Court of the United States.

Refer to my other comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44921015

> Theft, meanwhile, emphasizes the potential commercial harm of infringement to copyright holders.

> However, copyright is a type of intellectual property, an area of law distinct from that which covers robbery or theft, offenses related only to tangible property.

> Not all copyright infringement results in commercial loss

> the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1985 that infringement does not easily equate with theft

> Judge Kathleen M. Williams granted a motion to deny the MPAA the usage of words whose appearance was primarily "pejorative"

> This list included the word "piracy", the use of which, the motion by the defense stated, serves no court purpose but to misguide and inflame the jury

We're citing and discussing the precise definitions of specific legal terms. Your counterargument is to point out the colloquial and out of context usage of words.

I already replied to the argument you cited. It's already been explained to you. Even the Supreme Court of the United States disagrees with you.

If I really wanted to be pedantic, I would start claiming that it's all the english expressions you cited that are weird and make no sense at first glance.

I don't "take pleasure in something", I derive pleasure from something. The pleasure is obviously not contained in the object or activity. It's not even a real thing that can be taken. Pleasure is just the way my mind reacts when I engage with an object or in an activity I enjoy. A feeling spontaneously generated from something else.

I don't "take interest in something", I develop an interest in something. The subject did not contain the interest, it just spontaneously appeared in my mind after I considered the subject, leading me to want to know more.

The detail that makes these expressions work is the word "in". The places pleasure and interest are taken from are actually left unspecified. What this means is people "take" pleasure and interest from the intangible abstract world and place them in their minds over the course of engaging with an object or activity. I can definitely empathize with the thought process that produced these weird colloquial expressions.

But who am I to question the meaning of english words anyway? I'm not even a native. That's why I cite authorities such as the Supreme Court of the United States. They say copyright infringement is not strictly equivalent to theft. Courts have ruled that it's not even strictly equivalent to commercial loss. All that makes sense and I believe them.

This really should mark the end of this discussion.

You are not "taking" anything. It's not theft.

This conversation was settled, whether you like it or not.

It's as frustrating as debating whether slavery is moral or D&D is satanic. We've had this conversation, it's settled.

Piracy is not theft.

Wait, I thought we decided we were using the word "theft" informally. Like all those examples I posted above and you agreed with. What is being "taken" in "wage theft" or "identity theft" or "joke theft"?

> This conversation was settled, whether you like it or not.

Ignoring salient points does not settle a conversation. I laid out the case point-by-point for why not returning fair value when taking something of value (remember: services are not a "thing" and yet provide great value!) is immoral and illegal and often considered "theft". (Again, if you want to nitpick over the word "theft" look at the long list of examples I posted above.) I notice you have not shown any flaw in that logic.

Maybe this conversation frustratingly never ends because this point has never been refuted.

> Wait, I thought we decided we were using the word "theft" informally.

Nope. We were discussing with someone else (before you chimed in) who argued it was exactly theft.

When shown this was false, the person argued it was morally equivalent (this was also false).

> Again, if you want to nitpick over the word "theft" look at the long list of examples I posted above

I'm not nitpicking, you're factually wrong.

Have you read important works about the distinction, such as Lessig's "Free Culture"?

It's frustrating because this is akin to discussing, yet again, the moral panics of the olden days, long settled but (apparently) brand new generations without an understanding of the past want to resurface them.

>When shown this was false, the person argued it was morally equivalent (this was also false).

This is an utter lie. Not just false. But dishonest. Nothing was shown. What happened was, the person (me) stated regardless of whether or not it's theft or not, none of your logic works. It doesn't matter if it's theft, it's just pedantic bullshit on your part, so why don't we just go with it to move the argument forward.

Why did you lie here? Obviously because you're wrong and covering shit up.

>I'm not nitpicking, you're factually wrong.

Whether or not your nitpicking, when everyone sees you talk you look like your nitpicking and being overly pedantic about everything. Let's keep the argument moving forward and just say what you're doing is morally and ethically equivalent to nitpicking. Whether it's actually definitionally nitpicking doesn't matter.

>Have you read important works about the distinction, such as Lessig's "Free Culture"?

Yes, I’ve read Free Culture. But have you read the works of Dr. Emilia Hartmann (‘The Myth of Cultural Lock-In: Reassessing Intellectual Property Narratives’, 2009), or Professor Takuya Nishimura’s ‘Property, Commons, and the Illusion of Freedom’ (Oxford Review of Law and Policy, 2013)? These, along with Michael D. Carroway’s ‘The Economics of Restriction: Why Free Culture Fails the Creative Class’ (Cambridge Digital Law Journal, 2015), systematically dismantle Lessig’s assumptions. Even more directly, the anthology edited by Sophie R. Klein and David M. Torres, ‘Beyond Free Culture: Regulation, Autonomy, and the Digital Public’ (2017), is often cited as the definitive rebuttal.

I mean if you read even one of these things, you'll know you're severely misinformed.

>It's frustrating because this is akin to discussing, yet again, the moral panics of the olden days, long settled but (apparently) brand new generations without an understanding of the past want to resurface them.

The past is the one that's irrelevant. Times have changed. You're still walking 10 miles to get to school while the rest of the world now drives cars. Wake up.

> The past is the one that's irrelevant. Times have changed. You're still walking 10 miles to get to school while the rest of the world now drives cars. Wake up.

You have it backwards. The modern world is naturally copyright-infringing. Computers and the digital are copying devices. It's you who, applying an outdated lens of "theft", are stuck in the past.

You know you're wrong. After all, you admitted you pirate everything.

All your arguments are assertions or appeals to authority with no logical reasoning supporting them.

I invite you again to pinpoint the flaw in this very brief 2-point reasoning (with a number of supporting links above) that nobody over the decades has (maybe you could find something in Lessig's works, but good luck with that):

- Society and commerce is based on exchange of value (again: goods and services)

- When one party gets the value from the other party without returning an acceptable value, it is considered immoral and wrong, and informally called "theft" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44917565)

Just two points. Very simple. Otherwise no point in continuing this thread.

The proper legal term is copyright infringement. Robbery and theft cover real property, not intellectual property.

"Common usages" of a word are irrelevant. We can't discuss legal concepts without precise terminology. Only the correct words and their precise meanings matter.

Equation of copyright infringement to theft and piracy is propaganda. People do this deliberately in order to draw on the negative connotations of the words. Good faith cannot be assumed if people insist on using these words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement

> Theft, meanwhile, emphasizes the potential commercial harm of infringement to copyright holders.

> However, copyright is a type of intellectual property, an area of law distinct from that which covers robbery or theft, offenses related only to tangible property.

> Not all copyright infringement results in commercial loss

> the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1985 that infringement does not easily equate with theft

> Judge Kathleen M. Williams granted a motion to deny the MPAA the usage of words whose appearance was primarily "pejorative"

> This list included the word "piracy", the use of which, the motion by the defense stated, serves no court purpose but to misguide and inflame the jury

We're not discussing legal definitions. From the original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44908809

> It's not "theft" by any reasonable interpretation of the word.

That is the standard under discussion.

Personally I could trivially afford to pay triple for all the media I consume but I still mostly pirate it.

In Switzerland the media companies just make it so hard, and piracy is so easy. And I'm just not willing to jump through hoops for this shit.

If it's a small independent filmmaker I will make _some_ effort to try and pay for it but usually it's just not worth my time.

Gimme a website where I can hand over $10-$20 and easily watch a film on my TV and I'll happily pay. This was easy with 2000s tech. But the industry is too up it's own arse to deliver something this simple.

if buying aint owning then pirating aint stealing

My thing is that we are expected to pay in perpetuity for the privilege of accessing content. It's rent, and it is just tiresome.

Yes I understand that we have content available on far more devices than 30 years ago, when all we had was the TV in the living room. But should I have to pay in perpetuity to show my kids Moana?

No. Go buy a Moana DVD. USD 9.99.

https://www.amazon.com/Moana-Ron-Clements/dp/B01MAZGH7Z/ref=...

In the UK you can get it second-hand, including postage, for £2.07. And it's been expertly refurbished!

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/292095014239

It is easier to download from a torrent or illegally stream.

What a surprise, it’s easier to steal than to pay content creators. (I know, someone will now chime in and say it isn’t really stealing, etc etc.)

Actually I disagree though. Software and UX for torrenting is a pain. It’s easier to buy a $10 DVD.

> What a surprise, it’s easier to steal than to pay content creators.

They make it this way.

Buying a second hand DVD does not give any money to content creators, and I still get to watch the movie.

Devil's advocate: buying a second-hand DVD puts money back into a first-hand buyer, who may use it to buy first-hand again from the creator.

> Actually I disagree though. Software and UX for torrenting is a pain. It’s easier to buy a $10 DVD.

You probably haven't checked back in in the last 5-10 year then. Honestly the UX is almost too good.

Almost every digital movie provider has a rental option. Moana on Prime Video is 3.99 to rent.

So, I would have to subscribe to amazon prime to rent the movie. Or another digital movie provider. Now we recalculate the price...

I don't think you have to subscribe to Amazon Prime in order to rent movies. Same thing with Apple TV (formerly the iTunes store). For whatever reason though this distinction is not well made.

Honestly it's much cheaper to just pay for a VPN and setup a homelab ... And the best of all : no damn ads!

Driving back???

That's quite an accomplishment that studios and distributors have achieved, after piracy was down for a few good years. But greed and the urge for enshittification won't be stopped.

Well, duh!

Back?

For our household, it's not even the cost or inconvenience of streaming services. It's that their constant A/B testing optimization seems to be leading them to actively shovel content we're less interested in at us, thus making it harder to find the little they have we are actually interested in. I'd be fine paying Netflix $20 a month to conveniently discover and watch the one or two things a month they have which I actually want to watch. But they seem convinced they must get me to watch more than a dozen things a month or I might cancel. So they use dark patterns to hide what things are and try to trick me into watching things I probably won't like very much. I guess that's why they replaced edited trailers with non-representative clips, choose misleading thumbnails and feature vague descriptions. Here are the sites I use to find which content is actually new, see an accurate description and watch a real edited trailer.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/browse/movies_at_home/

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/browse/tv_series_browse/

Note: Use the filters at the top to select the networks and streamers you have access to as well as your genre and rating prefs. They'll be stored in a cookie.

Using Netflix's own program guide, I keep watching less and less on Netflix because I can't easily get a sense of what anything is and value my time a lot more than $20/mo. And now I'm seriously thinking of canceling after being a sub since the discs-by-mail days because they're actively making it harder to identify IF I really will like something before watching it - and wasting my time is the one thing certain to make me cancel. I remember back when Netflix was running contests to optimize their recommendation algo to be as close to psychic as possible. I'd seriously pay more for a service that was that psychic about my preferences but also honest enough to occasionally say "Hey, sorry but this month we've got nothing you're really gonna like, so out of respect for your time, come back next month when we'll have two movies we're 91.5% sure you're gonna love."

Based on what Netflix is doing, I assume I have a significantly higher bar for content quality and fit to my prefs than most of their viewers, that I value my limited entertainment time more highly and I have much lower tolerance for content which isn't a fit. I'm not very price sensitive and I don't judge a streaming service's value on hours consumed but rather on the quality, suitability and convenience of finding the content I do watch. I'm also unusual in that if I'm watching media, I am 100% focused on it with no distractions and never have a second screen active - I guess that's one reason my quality bar is so high. This also makes me hate when they "stretch" content for longer running times, like padding three hours worth of tight story into eight hours of glacially slow script. I find myself increasingly 'self-editing' by skipping forward past scenes that should have been edited out. To me, just ONE really good thing which respects my time and that I didn't have to hunt for is worth far more than a dozen unknown things with a hit/miss ratio that averages to "meh".

The biggest issue yet is paying for stuff that pushes woke crap on you.

My decision had nothing at all to do with affordability, and everything to do with monopolistic capitalism. That said, most of my family media server’s content came from legit purchases, and most of the piracy came from those legit purchases being anchored to some idiotic DRM or unnecessary gatekeeping.

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