It is impossible to ban piracy. The whole concept is that it’s not legal to begin with.
I bet Lars Ulrich is so proud that he killed music piracy back when he killed napster.
Except wait…no he didn’t he killed A service. Meaning singular. The concept of piracy moved on. We got limewire and torrents.
The ONLY thing that has slowed (if not stopped) music piracy is making the content readily and easily available in a convienent consumption method at a reasonable price.
Shocking, I know.
The invention of iTunes CHARGING money for music in a (at the time) new more convienent method of music consumption at a reasonable price did leaps and bounds more to destroy piracy than Napsters downfall ever could.
Now if only video services would learn this lession. Because it’s the same lession. I don’t know how they missed the memo on this.
Put your video in one centralized place. Make it hassle free to watch. Charge a reasonable price. Piracy dies overnight.
And just to prove it, show of hands. Who here would go through the effort and risk of pirating, if Netflix had everything you wanted to watch, for $5 a month? Who here would say no, and still pirate? Reply below and tell me if you would still pirate with those conditions?
But instead, netflix is pushing $20 a month, and the video hosting is fractured among multiple hosts, all of which overcharge, AND want to serve ads.
Oh hey, right on cue. It’s a skull and bones flag approaching.
I would still pirate. I like to have the files instead of proprietary apps
What if they gave you the files, with an easy download button ( with rate limits on downloads per user to avoid mass abuse )? Then, Netflix is basically providing a debrid service, which many people who pirate already pay more than 5$ for. Your VPN for torrenting is likely more than 5$. It’s already trivially easy to rip a movie off a website ( even with DRM ), so this is not a real content control loss for them.
If they offered a service like GOG for movies I think it would be worth it. I don’t have much time for movies though so I actually will buy several films a year on UHD Blu-ray. I only really pirate films that are either out of print or not available in my country on disc.
Funilly enough as somebody who has been using the Internet since being a working class teen in a poor European nation in the early 90s and thus knowing all about pirating, GoG is what made me stop pirating games (and even after they came up with GoG Galaxy I still kept downloading offline installers, plus my purchases in Steam have always been pretty limited in comparison to those in GoG exactly because in Steam my access to install a game can be removed at any time) whilst things like Netflix never stopped my pirating of Movies and TV-Series exactly because it was a streaming service which I would have to pay forever to maintain access to the Films and Series I liked rather than a Film and Series store were I could buy to keep (and, adding to this, during the peak period of VHS tapes and DVDs I actually did buy a lot of physical media).
Anecdotal, I know, but it’s funny that my behaviour over the years almost perfect matches what you describe.
I want to like GoG but their Linux support can be pretty awful at times. It took over a week for X4 to update the Linux version on GoG compared to steam that in the end I refunded it and bought on steam. Also proton is pretty nice to have.
Yeah, GoGo need to improve their Linux support since at the moment they seem to just “go along with it” without putting any effort into it
That said, with stuff like Lutris (can only speak of that since I never used Heroic) which can use GoG’s API to access your account and download games and has GoG-specific install scripts, it’s also a reasonably seamless experience to game in Linux from GoG and none of it is tied to a proprietary vendor solution like Steam + Proton, so it’s a lot more flexible and friendly for those who want to do their own tweaking - for example all my games in Lutris run sandboxed using firejail for extra security and blocking network access, but I can’t do that for Steam.
GoG is pretty much a totally open solution (you need not use their API and can just download an offline installer and install it however you see fit) whilst Steam is tracking and controlling your installs, game launching and in some cases game playing, so that means gaming with Steam is much more tightly coupled to both their code and their servers and thus Steam is always going to be more ill-fitted to the traditional hacker ethos in Linux than GoG.
Finally, keep in mind that Steam’s enhanced Linux support is just a natural consequence of their strategy of trying to protect themselves from any Microsoft funny business with Windows by creating their own Windows-independent ecosystem, with Linux being a natural shortcut to do so cheaply.
Oh I would prefer to use GoG, the problem is that it up just isnt so good. But been playing FOSS games a bit lately so haven’t been using either.
Same tbh. I like having a hard data copy of the things I enjoy, and have pride in my offline music library, which has been neatly filed with all the proper metadata tagged on. Now I can boot up Audacious (Linux) or MusicBee (Windows) and pick the genre I’m feeling that day. Or I can go out for a walk with one of the iPods I’ve restored and leave my phone at home.
Yep exactly.
They’ve pushed 6+ services now so it cost that cable used to so people are unsubbing and “cutting the cord” again
About 10 years ago, I signed up for a seedbox for torrenting purposes. USD 15/month, which was roughly the same as Netflix at the time. Since then, Netflix has repeatedly raised prices, dropped content, and added ads. On the other hand, I’m still paying $15/month for that seedbox, and they’ve upgraded my storage capacity and bandwidth allotment multiple times.
I would pay for the sub, but still seed for my friends in poorer countries where $5 USD is a hell of a lot of money.
I gind it kind of ironic that if the streaming services were federated and your subscription applied proportionally to the services where you watched different shows this problem would solve itself
Word… this is why I used spotify for a long time, when it used to be a good service… pirating wasn’t worth the hassle.
now almost everything is worth the hassle
I remember as kids we shared music by Bluetooth or copying files on a memory stick. You are not stopping that.
Video services involve bigger files, subtitles availability, streaming load less evenly spread over hours.
But I personally think there are ways involving chunk encryption (one key for many users for the same chunk, but not the same key for everyone ; obviously in the end it’s decrypted and decoded at user’s machine, so opportunity for piracy is not avoidable) and something like bittorrent to make commercial video streaming both convenient for users and not such a technical challenge for distributors.
We only pirate TV because it’s easier and cheaper. If you actually had a catch all service (like old Netflix) for a low price, people would stop. Oh wait, we had that but greed got in the way again…
I used to be perfectly happy with Netflix and Google music + YouTube Red, but corporations were too greedy
I now use a mix of free Kodi TV, patched YouTube apps, rip music off tidal, and self host media on a lifetime premium Plex server.
I miss my $8 a month google music + YouTube red… I wonder if people got to keep the legacy price for YouTube premium
If you actually had a catch all service
I believe this used to be called cable tv.
But before you reply, yeah, I know cable didn’t get everything. And you had to pay extra for Disney, HBO, etc. And on top of the exorbitant price there were always tons of commercials. That’s all true.
But I do remember a time right around 2005, when everyone was saying “if only there were a-la-carte options, for people who only want sports, or only want movies”. My point being, there’s no winning and the grass is always greener somewhere.
And for what it’s worth, I basically agree with you. I use Plex, I have a few friends who also run Plex servers and we all share content. That’s the best catch all I’ve ever found.
The problem with cable was it was not on demand and contained ads.
I would never, ever pay for cable even in today’s world if it was $10 a month because of the overwhelming amount of ads.
Oh. Making something illegal illegal again? That’ll be effective.
If you read the bill, heavily sponsored by the MPA, part of it is about forcing ISPs (and presumably US based VPNs) to block the DNS/URLs of “foreign criminal” sites.
It’s laying the groundwork for a Great American Firewall.
Freedomwall
Wouldn’t be the first wall he put up in the name of freedom
So many long games are being played now, it’s like everything is laying groundwork for something else. Would be nice for laws to just do what they do.
If you use a US-based VPN, you fucked up yourself.
Viva la Mullvad. I was sick of being bullied into buying more to get a deal. It may not be the cheapest, but I love that it’s the same price across the board.
Plus, the only way you’re going to get anything cheaper is by locking into a 1-3 year plan when you may not even need it every month.
DoH!
It’s a slippery slope. Soon they will make doing illegal things a crime.
But not if they’re the ones doing the illegal stuff, apparently.
They could take it a step further and threaten penalties for doing illegal things.
It’ll be super duper illegal
Yeah because pirates are notorious for giving up immediately when you make their jobs a little harder.
Make something people want to buy. That will help more.
EDIT On the anime and manga. Quite a few Japanese companies don’t or refuse to officially release stuff in the west. Most of the ones who do, get fucked with by bad localizers.
The people who create these services will always be more clever and quick to implement workarounds than politicians. It’s a futile battle.
Want to avoid piracy? Make getting things easier and more convenient.
Back when Netflix was £5-10 depending on tier, had a load of content, and an account could be shared between a few trusted people, I practically gave up pirating. Now it’s £18 per month for 4K (and due to rise), and doesn’t have those other positives going for it, I’ve abandoned it in favour of Radarr+Sonarr+Plex, and am having a better experience.
For video games, I predominantly buy from Steam, because it’s a good service, and so far I have not seen any evidence that Valve are going to fuck me over. They’ve made gaming and all the things ancillary to it a lot more convenient. So I happily pay. If they embrace enshittification, guess what I’ll do?
The only games I do pirate are Nintendo/Sega games that haven’t been sold in decades. Why? Because there’s no feasible other way to buy them and keep them!
I don’t pirate music because Spotify. For all the issues I have with it (and boy do I have a few), it still has almost every song I search for, is fairly priced, and hasn’t clamped down on account sharing in the same way Netflix/Disney/etc have. I’m part of a family where we split the cost. All the music I could possibly want for £2.20 per month? Fine by me! If that goes away, I go away, yarr harr.
Not to mention Valve spearheaded major development for making Linux gaming like 200% better than it used to be, with development of Proton and everything, and giving all those work back to the entire gaming community as open source products entirely for free, bring in momentum for an entire industry.
That’s a company you support.
I’m so fucking glad Valve isn’t beholden to shareholders.
Sounds like their strategy is to force US companies to block access to piracy sites.
I already run my torrent client through a non-US VPN so this can literally be bypassed by adding this to my prowlarr docker compose:
network_mode: service:gluetun
What VPN do you recommend?
I don’t really have a recommendation atm, I used to use mullvad but for torrenting I feel like the lack of port forwarding (once they removed that feature) was hurting my ability to seed so I switched to proton. I also recently added Usenet into my mix and since many providers bundle a VPN subscription - and mine in particular supposedly also supports port forwarding (usenetdirect bundles a ghost path VPN subscription), I’m gonna try to get it to work with that so I don’t have to pay for a VPN separately but I haven’t tried it yet.
I have had pretty good luck with airvpn, but the ultimate is mullvad as I understand it, though relatively speaking it is much more expensive than airvpn.
Thank you, I’ve been using my own docker image that adds in the PIA scripts and creates a Dante SOCKS5 server which works decently but I’d like something a bit more provider agnostic in case I want to change.
You can’t legislate piracy away…
But they can make up excuses for their arsenal for whenever they want to ban a site they don’t like from common eyes.
“It was banned because it was pornography”
“It was banned because it was displaying pirated content”
“It was banned because it harmed the public good”
They want control over what the common people can see, hear, say, and think.
Yeah, but for every dictator there’s countless intelligent revolutionaries. Especially when it comes to the internet.
They’re really shooting themselves in the foot trying to deny us/force overcharge the very thing they use to make us complacent in the first place: media.
If they were smart they’d ignore this bill. It would just bring attention to their attempt to essentially seize the internet and for what? For us just to get around it again anyway?
Not to mention if they enforce US VPNs to conform it’ll just result in more currency leaving the country. No wonder this fucking floundering economy is all our fault.
Governing is like holding a marble to the table with your thumb. The more you press down, the more likely that marble is to shoot out and break your shit.
It’s good to know I’m not the only one who thinks this way. That marble analogy is on point. The US is built on mutually beneficial structures. When one cabal of structures starts targeting others, the functionality of the whole country flounders and rebellion is legitimized.
Do they not know the concept of piracy? That’s like Walmart and Target backing a new bill to stop shoplifting.
They could just make a better service. Between the password sharing, and everything being scattered everywhere, what did they expect? I’m going to pay for half a dozen services and still not get to watch what I want? Or I may be able to watch it and pay for the privilege to see ubskippable ads? You can only beat us with so many sticks before we stop feeling it. Come back with a carrot.
We have literal Nazis stealing all our private information right this second…but THIS is the bill that gets to the floor?
Fiddling while Rome burns.
Been sailing the seas since 98. No intention of stopping. One thing I can promise is that you can’t stop it.
Pirates always…uh…find a way.
In fact, when streaming services came out and were super affordable, it actually became a bit harder to find pirated movies/shows because people actually opted for the legal option. If the government wants to pull this garbage, it’ll just bring many back into the fold and make it easier for me to sail the seas.
I started using pirated software in 1990, back when my first PC was gifted to me. All software I had was copied because I could not afford jack shit on my own. It is thanks to pirated (and open source) software that I have the career I have, and can afford to spend thousands of dollars on legitimate software, music, movies, books, etc.
Provide product people want and prices they can afford, and they’ll buy them rather than pirate them. Don’t persecute consumers of pirated products and most of them will eventually purchase legally.
It’s like Gabe said (paraphrased): “Piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem.”
Make it easy to buy stuff and people will. But the more barriers you put up, the more people will pirate. Granted, there are persons like you (and I counted among those at one point) who cannot afford things from time-to-time, but we’re a minority. Every game I’ve ever pirated from those days I have made sure to purchase once I was able to.
Make it available for easy purchase and people will buy it.
I still usually pirate when buying requires jumping through too many hoops. Being in a sanctioned country, ahem, adds some just impractical to go through.
I got my first computer, an Apple II, back in the 1980s as a hand-me-down from my (much older) brother when he left for college and I was just 6.
All but one disk was pirated.
is anime a form of Piracy?! One Piece I guess?!
Corporate legislation, making America Great as always.
Best laws money can buy!
Same with freedom lol.
Not in this particular case, not yet, you can view it’s status HERE and it’s still at 0 cosponsors.
Hard to discuss this bill since the text isn’t even on there yet. But apparently companies expressing approval have seen it.
Difficulty aside, it’s currently a non-bill as far as anybody should be concerned. There is a lot going on and this isn’t really something until it gets more representatives behind it.
I mean ffs the new admin struck down Net Neutrality already, where are the people concerned by that?
This is dumb considering that these types of streaming sites are how I actually discover anime and become a fan enough that i want to purchase merch. I pay for Crunchy Roll, but sometimes I want to check out stuff from other services. If I had to rely sheerly on legal services I wouldn’t watch or discover half of what I did.
Legal services are also pretty inferior. I wanted to watch A certain Scientific Railgun… Season 1 was dubbed, but season 2 on the service wasn’t… I literally had to track it down on some streaming site to get access to what I’m paying for.
crunchyroll is the most infuriating they were a piracy streaming company that went legit
kick the ladder down
