Torrent site Kickass.so has domain banned
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
With torrents, I'm able to find a vast selection of movies and shows that really aren't available anywhere else. Obscure cult classics, pre-Code movies, and so on. This really seems to be a power play by Hollywood executives that is more based in making profit for them than supporting creative artists.
Edit: it's interesting to see this get downvoted. I'm curious what peoples reasonings for downvoting it is.
Linux can run Silverlight applications in general using Moonlight. (Broadly speaking, Moonlight:Silverlight :: Mono:.NET). However, the DRM is not available on Linux, and was non-trivial to get working under Wine until November 2012, when someone finally published a straightforward way to patch Wine to run Netflix.
Nowadays, Netflix has also switched to using HTML5 DRM when possible, so it is possible to watch Netflix on Linux using Chrome (not Chromium). However, it's worth noting that many distributions ship Chromium instead of Chrome by default, as it is proprietary software. It is still not possible to watch Netflix on Firefox, as they have not yet implemented EME (HTML5's DRM). Because of the way HTML5's DRM works, there is no way to produce a fully FOSS browser that can watch Netflix; the DRM extensions have to be purchased uner a proprietary license.
OP's wish was to be able to access Netflix or a similar service while using only FOSS software. That is still not possible, and I don't see a way for it to become possible anytime in the near future, at least until the MPAA finally gives up DRM (the way the RIAA did).
[0] Not impossible, but definitely a pain.
You'll need to provide evidence that downloading actually leads to lower profits before anyone can tackle that question.
The hypothesis that "People who download content buy less because they're getting TV shows for free. If they couldn't download they'd buy instead." might sound fine, there are some problems with it.
* People might be spending 100% of their entertainment budget on TV shows already, so they couldn't buy any more if they stopped downloading. Stopping those downloads would lead to zero additional profit.
* People might be downloading everything regardless of what it is, including a hell of a lot of things they'd never buy (hoarding mentality). Stopping those downloads would lead to zero additional profit.
* People who download might be fanatical about the TV show, downloading shows to watch as early as possible. Stopping those downloads would lead have a negative impact on profit because those are the people who do the grass-roots evangelism that drives hype.
* People download because they believe the content has zero value. Without downloads they'd just watch something else. Stopping those downloads would lead to zero additional profit.
The question of whether downloading actually harms industry or not had not been answered.
I suspect this is the most frequent camp, and it's the one I'm in. If you want to take my money, downloads are irrelevant, just allow Netflix to have better stuff.
Of course. But if they want to have that say then they should do whatever they can to protect their work. If they fail to protect their content and let someone upload it then that's their fault. It's not my place as a consumer to help them to protect their work by not downloading it. Morally speaking I have no duty to help the content creator.
This is kind of ridiculous. I think we all know that it hurts the industry. Only in your third scenario does downloading actually help the content producers. And you're leaving off two groups that hurt your case:
* people who would watch the show on TV but instead download
* people who would buy DVDs but instead download
Based on people I know who torrent, the second group is actually fairly large.
Your argument is like "people who go into a store and steal a DVD shouldn't get in trouble because they probably wouldn't have bought that DVD anyway." Which is clearly a ridiculous argument.
It's not quite the same as saying that. It's more like, "people who go into a store and steal a DVD shouldn't get in trouble because they probably wouldn't have bought that DVD anyway and the way they're stealing it means the store has exactly the same number of DVDs as it did before the theft."
DVDs don't operate in a scarcity model. Stealing a DVD really is almost equivalent to pirating a movie. The fact that the store is deprived of a physical item is pretty much irrelevant to the argument; they probably would have disposed of many unsold copies of the DVD anyway.
Profits seem to be much more strongly connected with quality/popularity rather than the rate of piracy.
My other random perspective on torrenting/piracy is this: the industry will often use the price of the digital good * number of downloads as the figure for the loss of profits. However, this gives them way too much credit. They don't have the magic oracle or the distribution system to price each sale individually so as to extract the maximum amount of money from every buyer (Alice thinks the movie is worth $6.82 while Bob thinks it's worth $9.13). I argue that if there is a million downloads of a movie off a torrent site, that does not mean a million lost sales. I imagine it's closer to 0 than 1m. Basically, if most of the people downloading the movie couldn't get it for free, they simply wouldn't pick that particular movie.
However, the MPAA doesn't want my money. I'm not going to go buy a DVD player and go down to the store to rent a DVD with unskippable piracy warnings and only be able to watch it on the TV every time I half-fancy a movie. It's not even the price, it's just that the hassle isn't worth it. Therefore, the MPAA can suck it.
I feel completely morally justified in downloading a movie when the creator/distributor won't make it available to me, in the same way I think it's fine if someone from a country that doesn't support a payment system I use pirates my software.
I don't believe the Netflix execs haven't thought of this.
1) Nobody cares about you, the customer. You are a number. You are one in millions. Nobody cares whether you can get the entertainment you want. The entertainment you want is going to be held hostage, and people as a whole will demonstrably pay the ransom. If you're in charge, there's no problem in sight.
2) Your job and bonuses are tied to keeping numbers high. The industry isn't in a catastrophic tailspin (yet), so the safe thing to do if you want to keep your job is to keep doing what worked before, which is hold tight to content and punish those who "steal" it. Business as usual, and it seems to be working.
3) The law around this is extremely complicated. You need a team of lawyers to navigate the minefield of licensing, and nobody wants to do anything too risky (see point #2). The wrong licensing deal can quickly ruin your multibillion dollar enterprise. Even if you wanted to create an awesome product like the one you propose, it would be a herculean effort to get everyone together for it. Not worth the risk, not worth the effort.
The solution seems simple until you look behind the curtains.
So people turn to alternative methods. Not because they can't afford it, but because it's often the only way that they can even access it.
On the disc it said I'm not allowed to copy it or RIP it however they put a lot of effort into revoking any decryption key in the wild a free and open source player may use to play the content.
After about 6+ hours of trying to get the BD+ virtual machine to work on VLC i gave up and just torrent-ed the damn thing.
I own the discs and I could probably RIP them but it's so much easier to just torrent it.
DRM is a complete waste of time and the only reason they still insist on having it is so the can control where the content gets played and prevent free solutions from being able to play it.
They get to charge you for the content and the company making the players for the right to play Blu-Ray discs the cost ultimately being passed on to you again.
Gabe Newell
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe...
This, a million times.
I have Amazon Prime, a NetFlix subscription and an AppleTV.
I'd have happily paid $5-$10 to watch 'Interstellar'. But none of these services offers it in my country. On BitTorrent it was just one click away, so I watched the BitTorrent version.
It goes like this for almost all new movies. I really don't understand why they don't want my money.
May be me, you and some others have the benefit of doubt that we will be good Samaritans, we won't resort to piracy unless the payable content is not available.
That really doesn't absolve tons of other people who abuse free content through piracy while having alternatives.
There's effectively two models:
* The Netflix model, where a large group of people effectively pool a small amount of money each month and buy a big batch of content. You end up paying for some things you don't care about, but you also probably get some stuff you do want for cheaper than you could get it by yourself.
* The iTunes model, where each person decides what content they want and pays for it directly. There are no bulk-discounts, so individual content pieces are more expensive.
Your argument seems to be that you want the unlimited content selection of the iTunes model, but you want to pay for it like the Netflix model.
Which is fine in the "I want a pony" sense, but seems to ignore economic reality.
They usually redirect all their old domain names to the current one, so they would need to change that, it didn't happen by itself.
They are both owned, but they all redirect to whatever is the main one at the time.
I bet Kickass is back up before the next one goes down, seems a bit more like Road Runner and Wile E Coyote.
Well that is sort of true. But that makes it harder to keep up with if you aren't tech savy / into the pirate scene.
The media companies just don't another Napster situation where everyone and their mom knew how to get all the songs they wanted.
If we look at morals...
I always enjoyed the story in the bible where Jesus broke several loaves bread and a few fish and shared it with a massive crowd. No one cared about the poor fishermen or farmers. Why then is it morally objectionable to share software in the same manner?
In other words, unless people fine it morally reprehensible we will always have something like this going on.
(BTW, Jesus is dead, his father was some schmuck who knocked up some girl that we now call "Mary" for some reason, and there is no God.)
There will never be a parable that makes people care about piracy.
Today there really is no excuse. If you are a game dev looking to break into the industry, you do need a lead - something good to show off what you can do - but really all you need is a demo of your capabilities, and with something like Unity you can get something out the door really quick. You just need to demonstrate competency. And you should probably give that one away.
Then if you actually intend to make a legitimate project, of scale, with huge developer costs et al, go kickstart it. If you don't have the finances to gamble on if or if not enough people will voluntarily give you an arbitrary amount of money effectively as a donation for making the game after the fact, find out if they are willing to give you a fraction of it beforehand. If not, your game would not have sold anyway.
And if you say something along the lines of "they have no audience, how can they kickstart?" then I ask you how they can sell their game in the first place, if they have no audience. For better or worse most digital media sales are not about quality or effort but are about publicity and consistency. Fundamentally piracy does not mean you would have or not had a succesful launch - the pirates are just users who mostly would not have paid at all, and you won't get an order of magnitude more sales from somehow making it so you cannot transmit data online freely anymore.
The entire story of my independent career would take much longer to describe than is profitable for either of us.
Evolve or die, as it were, and since I'm not yet gone I am in yet another stage. One where I've whittled own the number of people, and disciplines, I need complete my endeavor.
That's not to say it's easy. Talent of a measurable worth is not always ready to go when you are.
Not that piracy is OK in my eyes, but failing to protect oneself from it is outright ridiculous.
Of course, in actuality, piracy is demonstrably benign. Isn't it strange that in the age of digital piracy, indi-game developers are more successful than at any other time? Movie studios are making more money than ever before, HBO continues to completely destroy the likes of Netflix in profitability despite producing the most pirated TV-show of all time. The fact is: pirates are mostly people who've already paid or would never have paid anyway. I think we can all agree that piracy is ethically wrong, but I think it's also pretty clear that it's not very harmful.
We launched in 2009, and were feature by Apple over 9 times. While we wanted to monetize on episodic content IAP wasn't yet a possibility. The programers, who already had jobs, were dissuaded to continue and for sweat equity my options were 'nil. Kickstarter had literally just launched as a website, I'm not sure it would have mattered much for us back then.
All things aside, I blame no one, but I am finding it incredibly hard to get back into the industry proper, even with my incredibly established group of contacts.
No one deserves to be paid for their work in a creative field. In life we evolve or die. It just smarts when you're dying with over seventeen years experience.
So how will this play out? The companies will figure out, sooner or later, that if they provide a reasonable service then people will pay for it. Until then, TPB / bittorrent will remain the only source for a rather large group of people.
I'm probably going to get down voted for this but when your excuse for piracy is you can't watch some TV shows your excuse is weak. Not being able to see those shows is going to have very little impact on your life. Certainly not enough of an impact to justify theft or copying without permission. TV shows are not a 'tool you need'.
I'm fortunately in a country where most stuff is available. There is still a lot that is not though and occasionally I may turn to piracy (until it is available at which stage I buy it). I don't try to justify this though as it is a poor justification for piracy.
I don't know. Maybe the creator didn't want people in a certain country to view the material. Maybe it hurts their feelings that it's being pirated. Maybe they have a release planned 6 months from now in a certain country and their sales will be down for that. There's no way to know for certain you won't be causing harm.
Harm must be proven to receive civil redress. Potential, unrealized harm is not actionable.
If your neighbor digs a bottomless pit in his backyard, and posts trespass warnings, you cannot sue to have him fill it because your kids might fall in. They would, after all, need to trespass in order to do that.
But you could tell your insurance adjuster, they could apply a risk premium to a policy, based on the presence of the hole, and you could sue your neighbor for that.
The argument against piracy is essentially a neighbor saying that 40 of their kids accidentally fell into the hole, except they also somehow lost all the birth certificates and forgot the kids' names. There's just no way that anyone can prove that sort of harm.
But if the content industry ever tried to take out an insurance policy for sales lost to piracy, that would be a reasoned, independent, and measurable assessment of their harm, and they couldn't make up those BS numbers about how many dozens of their non-existent children fell into the pit, lost forever, even to the public records and the memory of their parents.
As long as TV-shows are broadcasted on television you can't expect all shows to be isntantly available in your region. Some will, somw won't, depending on distribution/broadcast agreements.
I believe TPB and kickass proves this statement false.
I don't know what 'region' I'm in, and I don't care.
If you want to see it in action in a setting where we don't get derailed so easily by its implications, consider vaccination.
People don't need to speed in cars, or run red lights, or roll through stop signs.
etc
(They generally do so because the cost to them is low 99.9% of the time)
True, I'm not sure why it annoys me so much. I would be much happier if people just said, "Sure, I pirate some stuff I don't need. There is no excuse for it but I do it anyway." The end result is the same.
The same way "I want to get home faster" or "i'm careful" is also a silly and false rationalization for the speeding/rolling through stop signs/etc.
I'm bracing for the downvotes here, but I really don't see copying for personal use as a negative. To me, it's illegal in the same way that violating traffic laws to keep up with the flow of traffic is illegal (technically, but (sufficiently small values of) nobody actually cares or is actually harmed by it).
Would love to see some arguments to the contrary that aren't straight out of the media cartel fallacies playbook :)
Your point? Slavish adherence to the law makes you obedient, not noble.
That is not very much justification.
There is no such tradeoff - there is only the existence of the law and its enforcement. An unenforced or almost never enforced law need not exist and is treated as same.
I don't have to pretend to respect the copyright lobby to gain the benefits of not being murdered in my sleep.
Copyright infringement is a much more complicated calculus.
Should we ignore those laws that codify the opposite of our beliefs? Many people would say yes. Many of our heroes are lionized for doing this.
In your first response.
>Should we ignore those laws that codify the opposite of our beliefs? Many people would say yes. Many of our heroes are lionized for doing this.
First, this defeats the purpose of law. Everyone has their own beliefs. Imagine what would happen if everyone started selectively obeying the laws that are compatible with their beliefs. Believe me there is quite a diversity of belief systems out there. Secondly, those many people that would say yes, should try to change the law instead of ignoring it. I can also accept a code of ethics that accepts ignoring the law, as long as it waives the rights given by law.
Normal people and police do this every single day with usually little ill effect. Police are not obligated to pursue every instance of a violation they see, a person is in theory obligated to follow every applicable law, but in practice, they do not (and the sheer volume of law ensures that it's impossible anyways), and the world hasn't come crashing down.
The idea that ignoring wrong or inconvenient laws leads to social collapse rings quite hollow, in light of that.
If we treat all laws as equal because they are the law, then a person who drives over the speed limit has logically done just as bad as someone who kills another.
Can we agree that this suggestion is absurd on its face?
If we instead acknowledge that some laws are more important than others, the more difficult question has to be asked "what defines that importance?", which logically means that there are some laws that are not that important at all, who's violation has little to no negative societal impact. Like going a mile over the speed limit.
Or more to the point of this discussion, like downloading a movie from your favorite torrent site.
If morals drive laws and not the other way around, the moral consensus seems to be shifting towards the fact that copyright infringement is morally neutral, or at least not that bad, on the same level as going a mile over the speed limit. It's technically illegal, you could be made an example out of if someone really wants to, but the chances of that happening are all but nonexistent.
No accounts, no logins, higher download speeds, worldwide availability. The fact that is free is just bonus.
We can argue if that perception is right, but I think this is the reasoning that justifies piracy in the eyes of many pirates.
Devil's advocate: so? Why should anyone have to provide you with the entertainment that you want? Why shouldn't they be able to exercise their right to sell their product to whoever they want - and leave out whoever they don't want? What possible justification could there be for that level of entitlement? What moral justification could there be for saying: sell me your product, or I will take it? How far does this go with IP? If a web designer refuses to sell me their design, am I free to take it? At least with tools like Photoshop, you can claim you "need" it to do work and make a living. Nobody needs a TV show.
I pirate TV. Some of the shows I could (and do; I also have Netflix) get legally and some I couldn't, but the fact of the matter is nobody "owes" me their TV show and I could just not watch it. And I would just stop watching, if the cost of all the TV shows I wanted to watch ever exceeded $10/month and piracy was too difficult/risky. I'm not kidding myself, the reason I pirate is because it's both cheap and convenient.
Honestly I'd probably be better off not watching TV anyway. :)
A: Pirating is wrong!
B: But I have no alternatives
A: So what?
You are right, of course: so what? But if "so what?" is an option, then the entire discussion becomes:
A: Pirating is wrong!
B: So what?
B doesn't care about this discussion in the first place. A wants to make a point. That means you can't use "so what?".
This is what lultimouomo meant when he said "the excuse is weak, but the fault itself is also considered weak." [para]
Again, not saying I disagree. Of course; so what? But, in that case: people pirate. So what? You're the one making a point. If your point is just "it's illegal": everyone knows that already. So what?
You're right that nobody owes us their TV show. But on the other hand, I don't see why we owe them assistance to enforce their wishes.
/s
HINT: drugs won.
That's why everyone is busy writing SaaS apps instead; they're harder to pirate.
In my experience, adults generally don't steal things, even if no one is going to catch them and even if they really want it. And consequently most people grow out of piracy. Not everyone of course, but enough for me to believe there's still a future in selling IP.
If you could pay a fee and get whatever show/movie you wanted, whenever you wanted, without region restrictions, and in the original language, I think we would see a drastic reduction of piracy. Some people will download pirated movies just because, of course, but I think we would see a drastic reduction of piracy if paid content was just more convenient.
In other word, distributors need to shape up. Of course, it's easier to blame consumers and try to enforce stricter DRM instead of improving the quality of service...
I'm in that camp, now. I'll just pick another show which is available on Hulu/Netflix/Amazon, or I'll play my Xbox, or I'll take a walk. Not a big deal.
My company has a pretty impressive black "market" for US/UK TV Shows, Movies and selected software. We also have a party-disc where everybody can upload their mp3 collections. Especially TV Shows are a run pretty much everywhere. My girlfriend shares Shows with her yoga group. They just switch USB sticks.
We grew out of Game sharing and porn. But who downloads porn illegally these days anyway...
Also pirated products are genuinely better - games can be modded, no activation. Tv shows are simultaneously released and so on ...
Of course we have some attempts at cloudwashing software, but I doubt they will be successful. The benefits of cloud are tiny compared to the freedom of having code run on hardware you control.
The question is: is that a bad thing? Because in that case, a download does not equal a loss of sale.
I know people with 5-6 TB of music on their drives. Or books - that is more that a person could consume, ever. So counting them as lost sales is absurd.
I have pirated a lot, but with steam available I both rebuilt my pirated catalog - their sales helped a lot, and rarely bother with piracy lately - my backlog is so big, that I can literally wait a couple of years for the game to come to 90% off.
For example, I'm 26 years old (so one of the younger generations), and I think it's absolutely immoral that copyright terms prevent me from using art that was produced more than 50 years ago. I strongly oppose any copyright term longer than 28 years; and I'm only open to one longer than 14 years if a strong economic (statistical) case for it can be made.
http://www.opennicproject.org/
EDIT Anyone that thinks the U.S. Government didn't pressure the various governments involved to do the actual takedowns is naive.
Then yesterday I used kickass torrents to download Mac OS Mavericks, because Yosemite is a piece of shit but Apple doesn't make Mavericks available any more, and torrenting was the only way to downgrade my OS.
It's excessively dumb that Apple makes it this hard, but it can be done.
https://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools
The VMs you get from there "self destruct" after a month or so but thats good enough for most testing purposes.
The people whose salaries are generated by not admitting their jobs are pointless?
If TPB being a honeypot scares you about using it to find content, you shouldn't be using public torrents period.
EDIT: Never mind, looks like there was a cached 301 redirect on kickass.to, which kat.ph points to. Clearing the cache worked.