A majority of context online these days is just ads. You watch something seeking informative context and it's not till you're halfway through you realize the entire video was just a garb to plug in some sponsor product. It's getting harder and harder to discover solid, well research content that is made for the sake of making content.
Watch a {Google ad} to watch a {Universal Pictures ad}.
The last mile device ad interposition is going to keep pushing the boundaries until it's limited by law.
Which would be something like "hardware/software platform companies cannot own ad businesses* and must allow equal+ access to any ad bidder who wants to run an ad"
*Defined as anything more nuanced than bulk sales of ad space
+For some definition of equal
That we ever let platforms own ad businesses is the cause of so many current failures.
Yes, then an ad bidder must have access to all the personal information that the platform provider has.
Then the EU steps in with another 10 chapter 99 section law “GDPR 2.0” that inflicts another banner notice that causes us to endure a cookie notice to allow cookie notices to allow cookies.
I am going to go the extra mile to make sure my kids don't watch ads as much as is humanly possible. I concur. Every time I check reality without an ad blocker I get sad.
Given how popular youtube/twitch/google is, and that pihole doesn't do anything for those sites, I'm surprised that people didn't notice the ads before.
Surely capitalism, and more specifically demand, is the reason? If the current companies paying them millions of dollars per gig say "sorry, we decided we don't like ads and don't want to charge our viewers more, so forget the millions we've now got a $200k offer for your next TV series season Mr Famous Actor" they'll take a job with the first company that once again offers them millions.
I also enjoy APIs, and I also have started to revert back to flying the jolly roger if there's not a reasonable ad-free paid means of watching things. I don't care enough about most of this stuff to be tortured and abused to experience it.
Hell yes I'm gonna get exactly what I deserve. Because I actually pay for these crappy streaming services and what I get is horribly compressed "high definition" video loaded with artifacts on even 90% black frames that I can't even download to my device which means service is interrupted if I lose my internet connection. Meanwhile the "pirates" are getting DRM free extremely high quality Blu-Ray encodes they can watch whenever they want on a player that doesn't suck such as mpv.
Nope. You can easily find subtitles for literally anything on the internet. Some players even download them automatically. "Pirates" in the anime community pretty much invented this subtitling technology. You bet this data is included, either in the container file or as separate subtitle files.
Meanwhile HBO lacks english closed captioning for most of its content. They give me subtitles for spanish sometimes even though it's not my native language. Not to mention the obnoxious censorship and inaccurate translations.
You're right, I think I misunderstood the comment. I'm probably too angry to reply coherently right now so I'm gonna disappear for a while. I apologize to the person I replied to above.
Here's my average Netflix experience: I want to watch X. I search X on Neflix, and learn that Netflix doesn't have it because they only have a few thousand movies which is abysmal. I then spend the next two hours aimlessly browsing the Netflix catalogue searching for something kind of similar to X, but nothing is and I have to give up having watched nothing.
Here's my average pirating experience: I want to watch X. I search X on TPB and find exactly what I want with a few seeds. Half an hour later I am watching X.
Your experience is completely different than mine. I find one slow seeder that doesn’t have what I want or find a low quality rip in a language I don’t know.
Or I can just search on Google and usually find it either on a streaming service I subscribe to or it will give me a list of places I can rent it.
I will gladly pay three bucks not to have to deal with bit torrent
Honestly that's pretty weird. Most pirate sites have high quality 4k rips. I'm not sure where you're looking if you're only finding low quality rips with one seeder.
Yeah, in my experience it's common for streaming sites to have worse quality than is available to a pirate.
A concrete example: I want to watch Sharpe. Netflix doesn't have it, which isn't surprising because they never have anything I'm looking for. Amazon has it for $4 an episode at SD quality, and I have to watch it in my browser with their shitty webplayer because they're afraid I'm going to save it to my harddrive (lmao.)
So instead I pirated it and got 720p for free. It's now on my hard drive and I can watch it with my proper media player. Pirating being free is really just the icing on the cake, I might have paid $4 an episode if they would give me a DRM-free 720p downloads, but that simply isn't an option. Why isn't it an option? I can and do buy DRM-free albums from Amazon. Albums which are smaller and easier to share than movies or TV shows, yet are still offered DRM free. The TV/movie industry get away with offering inferior crippled products because not enough people know how to pirate movies. But I do, so I'm not their chump.
No, music is DRM free because Apple had a stranglehold on digital music purchases. The music industry wanted Apple to license its DRM and Apple refused and came up with the alternative of letting everyone sell DRM free music.
Here’s my average work experience: I go into the office and have to deal with annoying customers. Then I have to respond to emails. Finally, I get my paycheck and it isn’t even that much money.
Here’s my average fraud experience. I send out a few thousand scam emails and money starts pouring into my bank account.
Do you think this analogy can guilt-trip me into paying for a product that doesn't give me anything I want? Think again.
It's a crap analogy, not least because you don't actually have the experience you describe but I do have the experience I described above. You have not lived a life of crime, probably because you don't really believe it would go as well as you suppose in your analogy. Do you really believe that crime would be more profitable for you in the long run? Career criminals work harder and make less. They do this because they can't cope with some aspect of regular employment, like staying off drugs and showing up on time. They get caught eventually and their life becomes a ruin. If you really think you have what it takes to become one of the rare successful robber-barons who can steal your way to luxury, then you're probably mistaken. But I can get the movies I want to watch, but not with Netflix. Netflix doesn't have what I want, so I'm simply not going to pay for it. Throw all the insults you want, none of it will change anything.
I actually get better quality streamed sports games over VLC network streams than the NBA can offer me for money.
I did pay for a League Pass. I still watched the illegal stream instead. The streamer would even play music over ads and put gifs and images over the in-game ads during free throws and the like.
In this case it's as if you can only drive on certain roads if you have a Honda Accord, and maybe in the country you're in the Honda Accord isn't even available to buy legally but there are still roads you can only use if you have one.
I just don’t get it. You (collectively) hate the TV industry but love TV shows and can’t live without them? Is that the basic idea?
Do you think you can still get the TV shows you love if you evade the TV industries monetization mechanisms? Or is the plan that everyone else will continue to pay and so it’ll all be okay? Something else? What’s the end game here?
FWIW I don’t watch TV. Not because I hate the industry or out of principle but because it’s just not very entertaining to me.
I would be interested to see the relationship between subscription revenues and production + delivery costs. Newspapers, for example, could never sustain themselves on subscriptions and purchases alone. Those that seem financially well off are likely subsidized by some rich guy or whatever.
I mean, I kind of agree but Amazon does it well IMO where they show one ad at the beginning and allow you to skip it. Realistically they probably don't charge enough to be able to get rid of all ads and I doubt consumers want to pay the "real" cost of content.
You must live in the US? That streaming service is the most expensive one where I live, for basically no ads. Or at least it used to be. Just checked and it’s ~8 bucks a month. Before that, it was almost 25 bucks a month.
I'm not in the US, and I have about the same subscriptions (I also have Netflix). YouTube Premium, while expensive, granted, is the streaming service I get the most joy from. Netflix I would cancel in a heartbeat, if they crack down on sharing of logins, I only maintain that because my sister and sister in-law use it. HBO... My wife likes so, we keep it.
There is NO WAY that I'm going back to ad based streaming, or TV for that matter. If I forget to login to YouTube, or have to watch local TV programming with ads I get super angry, it is god damn awful. It's offensive and obnoxious.
One interesting thing I have notice, in regard to YouTube: While some channels are absolute garbage, professional YouTubes have better storylines and better editing that national broadcasters in Denmark. There's one or two good shows, but modern programming on Danish TV is terrible. There's no sense of storytelling, there are jump-cuts everywhere and camera handlings is subpar to be honest. I am amazed what some YouTubers are able to produce, it's well researched, it's filmed beautifully, storytelling right on point and the editing is just beautiful. Not saying that there isn't a lot of low budget and low quality, but when a channel like Bald and Bankrupts was able to outshine a national broadcast on all measures that matter to me, on a weekly basis, there's something wrong.
If you're using an ad blocker I assume you're using your browser to watch? If so there are multiple plugins that will add sped up playback to Hulu. Some of them are just generic HTML5 video adjusters.
I don't get this. You say you're perfectly willing to pay to watch media that is ad free, and you do. So then why do you feel you have the right to pirate shows that are not ad free? Why don't you just watch ad free media that you pay for instead of pirating media that forces ads? Is there not enough media that is ad free for you to watch, such that you need to resort to piracy?
>Is there not enough media that is ad free for you to watch
There's a bizarre assumption in the wording of this sentence. If I can not pay to watch a specific thing I would like to watch without ads, I am going to pirate it, regardless of what volume of other things there are to watch.
> If I can not pay to watch a specific thing I would like to watch without ads, I am going to pirate it
But why? Why does your desire to want to watch something override the creator's right to distribute their content how they see fit? The fact that you have other options means you don't have to be subject to ads if you don't want to. So it seems to me the choice is watch media and not be subject to ads, or watch other media and be subject to ads. You seem to imply there is a third option, that you get to do whatever you want regardless of anyone else's rights or desires. If everyone thought that way, society wouldn't work.
I do not believe that I do or do not have the right to download a movie I couldn't find elsewhere, because I believe that "right" is a meaningless word in this context (the context being colloquial/moral, of course - not legal). This arises when an object becomes "hyper-available", as most digital content is - i.e. near-zero reproduction/distribution cost/friction. I wouldn't say, "I have a right to pick this flower from of a field of wildflowers", or "I have a right to sip water from this waterfall", because the framing is nonsensical. "Right" is simply a too-dramatic word for what is actually being described.
It would be like if people tried to restrict the functionality of Star Trek matter replicators for entertainment purposes. It makes sense economically for those individuals, but it's fallacious in a "common sense" context.
You do believe you have a right because you do so contrary to law. You can frame your actions as moral and rationalize your lawbreaking all you want, but you’re still breaking the law. Imagine if everyone acted this way? I can get metaphysical about all kinds of things I’d like to do contrary to the law, and create all kinds of rationalizations like “no one is hurt by my actions”. But that’s not quite true because if everyone acted in such a way, society would break down. At the end of the day it seems like you’re just rationalizing selfishness.
I imagine paid services may improve to compete. Regardless, the actual implication is fallacious. "One should only do what would cause no harm if every human did it" is not only unrealistic, but moot as long as not everybody is actually doing it. There's no intrinsic [im]morality in it.
You're still conflating morality with legality. Piracy being illegal has no basis on whether it's moral.
> Imagine if everyone acted this way?
This is basically deontology by Immanuel Kant. Not everyone is a Kantian though, so this is why you see a clash of your personal ethics with those of non-Kantians. I don't think you're going to convince anyone through messages on HN (similarly those who are non-Kantians will not convince you, as you are seeing in your replies), just as I would not be able to convince an anti-abortionist about the opposite views.
These ethical frameworks are so basal to our belief structures that if one disagree with someone else on these grounds, it is basically irreconcilable.
IMO that's up to the agreement between the creator and the person they sell/license their creations to.
I offer product "A" with defined conditions attached. It may be as simple as "it's 100% yours for $X", and anything beyond that. If we both agree to the conditions, you get the product. If you disagree with my conditions, then you don't.
That's where piracy falls apart ethically, IMO. Proponents argue "well it's not technically 'stealing' by the definition", "I would buy it if [it were cheaper; it were released sooner; it didn't have DRM; it didn't have X restriction, etc.]", but in the end all those arguments fall apart for the very simple reason stated above. Namely: the creator has the right to sell it with any conditions they see fit, and if anyone disagrees with them, their resource is to not buy/enjoy the product, NOT to take it by other means.
This is over-simplistic. Physical property has the intrinsic concept of having (you have it - now I take and and I have it, and you do not have it). The value is in the having, and the having is mutually exclusive to some degree. Not only that, but the transference of having has a non-negligible expense.
Intellectual property does not have this same set of properties to the same degrees, and it is not useful to equate the two implicitly without attempting to account for this obvious and monumentally large difference.
What is left is the realm of pure money theory, which certainly has real effects and is worth considering/debating. But it has nothing to do with "that's my property", except in the legal context, which is static at any given point in time and can not be argued (i.e. we can't argue whether it is illegal to distribute IP without permission - it's a fact).
They didn't shove the content in your face. They made you aware of it so you can decide whether you want to pay for it or not. This is such a dangerous line of thinking. Do you feel entitled to people wearing revealing clothing too? They're also planting an idea in your mind.
Are you saying that X provides a value to you that you are unwilling to pay for at any rate? Not even something like 1 cent with minimal transaction friction and no ads or tracking? Not even if the ask was for something non monetary like saying thanks in a guestbook?
I recently canceled patroon support for an author and there is absolutely no content they could create that would make me willing to buy their content at any price.
I also lost interest in their content, but in theory if I still had interest I would think nothing of pirating it.
I pay for several subscription services and also pirate a lot. I’d prefer to watched the pirated copy and it looks better, works better and is all in one app.
Family members use my subscriptions far more than I do.
The notion of private property fails when it comes to things that can be multiplied in quantity practically for free, by a practically unlimited amount.
What I mean when I say private property "fails" is that it is not a useful concept to us as a society in cases like this. The consumption of goods of the aforementioned type are nonrival, meaning my consumption of it does not interfere with your consumption of it. That's why it doesn't really matter.
Okay, that's a nice rationalization, and it seems to mirror what the sibling comment said, but it's just a rationalization. You still don't have a right to pirate anything, and the moral argument falls down completely when there are plenty for-pay options available that have no ads whatsoever. With all the options available, it seems to me like selfishness to say that you get to do whatever you want, laws and rights of others be damned. Seems to me if you believe that this model of society is not useful, you should work to change things through legal channels rather than just doing whatever you want to fulfil your desires, regardless of others rights and desires. Would you agree that's also not a useful model for a society?
Copyright isn’t some inherent property of the in inverse, it’s up for debate. At best you can argue the right to restrict access to content the same way people used to argue in support of slavery.
Should libraries be allowed to purchase content and then ignore DRM? How about watching YouTube videos of video games you haven’t purchased. This stuff doesn’t have some universal answer everyone will agree with.
PS: As for pay for value, people also create value for me by living their life and paying taxes, that doesn’t somehow create an obligation for me to give them money.
> Just deciding for yourself that you get to break laws…
In practice that’s how all laws work. What percentage of people always drive the speed limit? Hell what percentage of laws have you actually read? In practice people just don’t care about most laws.
> enslaving people doesn’t have the same moral implications as copyright.
Having different moral implications changes the debate but doesn’t mean you can skip the debate.
> Yes it does, through paying your own taxes that creates value for them.
That assumes we are in the same country. It’s easy to harm people by paying taxes where they benefit you by paying their own taxes. The world is complex with wars and pollution but also medical research etc.
Your entire argument rests on conflating law with ethics. Those are very much not the same thing. We can go through a litany of old laws that were unethical, and suggesting that those who lacked the ability to change those laws were thus morally subject to them is not only false, but extremely unethical.
Who lacks the ability to change the laws? Laws are changed all the time and there’s a process to do so. It seems that people here just want to do whatever they want, and I’ve yet to hear an ethical argument as to why that’s okay. The main argument seems to be that people don’t want to watch ads, which… okay, don’t watch ads then. But that doesn’t mean you just get to do whatever you want contrary to established law. There’s plenty of ad free media out there you can buy to satisfy your need for media.
Imagine if you managed to change the law and the companies decided to do whatever they wanted regardless. I’m sure you would complain about that, yes?
I declare all copyright laws are hereby abolished.
Of course laws are actually imposed on others, which is why they have zero moral weight. Laws are simply an imperfect reflection of society and all it’s issues.
PS: Do you think companies actually follow the all laws as written?
Are you eligible to vote? Can you run for Congress? Can you get involved in politics? If yes, that’s the power you have. In America, laws aren’t imposed, they are implemented via a democratic process, and that’s what gives them moral weight. Maybe in your country if things are different you might have a point.
To your PS, I do believe companies break the law, and I complain just as much when they do. IMO anyone pirating content, on some perceived notion that they are acting ethically, lose all standing to complain about lawbreaking by corporations or others who may rationalize breaking the law under their own ethical framework (e.g. it’s ethical to break the law if it means more profit for myself).
That’s a mismatch between how you want the world to work and how the world actually works. If you realize companies are going to ignore the law then getting update about it is no more rational than complaining about gravity.
> In America, laws aren’t imposed, they are implemented via a democratic process
Being the outcome of a democratic process doesn’t somehow prevent them from being imposed. As to voting or running for congress, residents of DC elect a non voting member of congress which has exactly as much power as you might imagine. They then can’t create local laws without approval from the members of congress who can actually vote.
Congratulations, you are a member of the least democratic democracy in the world today. So even by your standards it’s laws have no moral weight.
All I’m hearing are justifications and rationalizations for lawlessness and selfishness. At least corporations are transparent about their motives - greed. With piracy, the pretzels people twist themselves into in order to justify their actions are astounding to me. Why can’t any of there pirates here admit they are just selfish and feel like they are above the law? At least it would be honest.
There is nothing selfish in doing things that harm nobody. I am very much in favor of abolishing copyright because of the vast harm it causes society rather than any personal benefit. When Disney appropriates old stories and adds a feel good spin people get even further from reality and the valuable lessons these stories could actually teach. Now magnify that across every medium and it’s no wonder people have become so utterly divorced from reality.
Trying to dismiss arguments without backing them up just shows how hollow your argument is.
You have decided for yourself that what you are doing doesn’t harm anybody, which is very convenient for you. Others have decided that’s not the case, and went through the democratic process to enshrine their position into law. As far as I’m concerned, their position is far more legitimate than yours, because they followed the law and Constitution. You, on the other hand, rationalize lawlessness and selfishness and do whatever you want.
I’m actually in favor of drastically limiting copyright. But when pirates engage in such lawless behavior and rationalizations, it makes the idea almost impossible as a credible political project. Piracy does far more harm to reforming copyright than you apparently can see. You’ll never be able to build a political coalition through insolence. Because I can guarantee you, the insolence doesn’t end even if copyright was successfully reformed to meet your expectations. Pirates would still engage in piracy, because it’s never been about principles; it’s about pirates not wanting to pay money for things they want. They would still rationalize their behavior with self-serving notions like “I’m not hurting anyone”.
You seem to be under the mistaken assumption that I pirating anything when I don’t. I have a well justified moral argument which you again try to ignore.
I don’t want to reform copyright I want to end it because the harm exists if copyright is for 70 years or 70 days the same incentives exist. Look at divorce rates for an idea of just how harmful copyright is.
As to the law being some meaningful moral guideline read up on civil asset forfeiture or slavery both of which where enshrined by the near democratic institutions you hold up as somehow an arbiter of what is just.
People enshrined slavery into law as well, and that law was unethical even before it was overturned. Your argument easily fails, no matter how many times you repeat it.
Youtube Premium is very worth the money IMO. You’re missing out on being able to click around easily, I couldn’t get by with just YouTube-dl. But it is a good hack to get around ads. I’m a huge YouTube user though.
The other nice thing about premium is that you can background play on mobile.
I’d pay 3x for these features. I guess I shouldn’t let YT know that though.
The US is absolutely infested with ads. Visiting from Europe turning on the hotel TV is unwatchable. Also a fair amount of the ads are outright scams.
"Buy this rare silver dollar by calling a phone number" LIMITED SUPPLY!!
Making money by any means necessary even by scamming people who don't know better. The worst thing is that Americans I asked about this thought it was perfectly fine and normal.
Living in Australia, we get a lot of US TV, and it was weird when there was this weird pacing cut within a TV show. Then you realised that it was put in as a US ad break, but AU rules didn't allow as many ads so it just sort of faded to black and then came back again.
Contrast that to UK TV, which we get a lot of too. The pacing and breaks are much more in line with what you're allowed for ads in AU, so there's no weird interruptions in the middle.
I always found it a fascinating mirror to the broader cultural differences writ large.
I watched the Ironman world championships for women the other day (the men's race are happening right now) and it was so full of ads. Not only are the race named after a sponsor, even the aerial photography was "courtesy of Qatar airways", even when it was clearly from a helicopter and a cable mounted camera. The hosts took every opportunity to talk about their sponsors, at the podium ceremony the sponsor's car was more prominent than the winner, etc. And this is an event where the price of entry is more than $1000 for the thousands of participants, and they have to qualify by doing at least one other event from the same organisation previously.
Same thing with other American sport events, every single thing is "brought to you by x". It permeates everything.
It's different though. I get what the OP is saying. It's happened in Aussie sports too - the commentators announcing any replay as the "Harvey Norman replay" during the NRL, as an example. Sponsorships of features of a programme stand out much more than sponsorship logos on jerseys, probably because you're much more actively focused on the commentary audio than you are on the particular images on a jersey of a player.
I got the men's event on now. Instead of "look at the time" it's "look at the time on the Wahoo Element" (a Wahoo Element is a particular sports watch). Instead of the swim leg it's the Roka swim leg (Roka makes wetsuits). There's a Vinfast logo on screen all the time (Vinfast is a car brand and the title sponsor).
It's not just the commercials (I've seen a beer commercial so far) or the brand logos on the athletes, it's the fact that every single thing is "courtesy of x", which means that even between the ad breaks the commentators has to talk about sponsors.
This is different from soccer games, cycling races live Tour de France, most world championships, etc. But I recognize it from UFC and various clips I've seen from NFL and other American sports.
The quantity is one thing, the quality is what shocked me. The US has Hollywood making movies and the cheapest ads I’ve seen compared to European offerings. Think the difference between the ads that run on your average clickbait page compared to what you’d see on cnn.com, just worse.
I guess there’s a race to the bottom when you have a lot more TV channels to fill with ads, but it’s quite jarring.
I know 50 years of Americans since I am one and no one thinks it's ok...but it's so common I suspect we are expert at ignoring it, which is a slippery slope, to your point.
I ditched all my subscription services a year ago and now use the DVD rental place on the other side of town. It has 120,000+ titles, including TV shows.
Sure, I don't get to watch the latest trends, but it is superior than streaming for my needs. (I was using Kanopy, which is fantastic, but has a limit per month of 6!)
I think we need to return to this model because streaming services have completely effed it all up.
EDIT: Which is ironic, because I really thought streaming video would be the future, instead it is just a bunch of scammy charges for content you don't own, and hoards of crappy shows because major studios are too greedy and repetitive.
How does your local video rental place have 120K+ titles?
We used several video rental stores around the time the Netflix DVD service debuted. The reason we switched and never looked back was that frankly, none of our rental stores had ever been very good. The selection was always limited and spotty, and if you got unlucky it might be checked out already even if they owned a copy.
This streaming thing we've got now doesn't match Netflix in its heyday, but it's still miles better than anything we had pre-Netflix.
At least the local rental store has (edit: had) the incentive to have things people want to watch, because they're pay per view. Streaming services seem to have a perverse incentive to be full of stuff you actually don't want to watch, because you pay per month and every time you watch something it's an expense to them.
I don't completely get this comment, to be honest. As a matter of empirical fact, many video rental stores sucked. Your sibling comment addresses the case of Block Buster, but I remember going to our one truly independent store and not being impressed by it either. So there's that.
But addressing your second point, I think we must have different viewing habits. I figure out what I want to watch, then I subscribe to it and I watch that show. If that increases my total subscriptions beyond what I'm comfortable with, I cancel the least recently used service. At no point do I use the in-service search function, so it really doesn't matter to me what else they offer. If they have one great show and a bunch of mediocre fluff, I'll watch that one show and leave. Maybe this sounds crazy, but if I'm careful about it it's not even that much more expensive then video rentals were back in the day.
> Streaming services seem to have a perverse incentive to be full of stuff you actually don't want to watch, because you pay per month and every time you watch something it's an expense to them.
On the contrary, their incentive is to have as much content as possible, to keep as many people subscribed as possible. Quantity instead of quality, because few really good shows/movies won't keep millions of people subscribed once they've watched them, there needs to be other content remaining.
Any video rental shop still in business today must have an excellent collection, otherwise they'd have gone the way of Blockbuster 15 years ago (they had a truly abysmal selection towards the end, as you describe. But in the glory days of VHS rental, independent rental shops often had amazing collections.)
I guess in principle I get this. But unless the store is physically huge, which seems unlikely, then it's a bit hard to imagine how an independent store would have enough selection to compete. It seems much more likely to be that the store would focus on aggressive curation. Which is to say, it would be highly dependent on both the store and your personal tastes happening to line up in order to of any value to you.
That was my experience with the one truly independent store we had in town: I guess it could have been a fine store, but I wasn't in a position to tell since they very clearly did not cater to my tastes. They're gone now along with Blockbuster, so I guess the market spoke on that one.
I don’t mind this, it was the forced bundles of traditional cable I hated. I’m perfectly okay with discounted bundles so long as I can still pick & choose smaller pieces as well. I add & drop them all if the time.
I had HBO Max for 3 non-contiguous months this year. Netflix for about 8, and Disney+ all of the time. Even digital streaming cable is significantly more convenient: I just picked up Sling for $25 a month, that I’ll only keep for a month, so that I can stream MLB playoffs on my phone, home computer, work computer, large screen TV, etc. with included 50hrs DVR. That’s a PITA and often not possible with for some channels with the traditional cable I cancelled. Overall I spend about 1/2 of what I was on regular cable and have no reduction in available content.
It’s also easy to start and stop these, much much easier than it ever was to add and remove cable tv options (when I cancelled cable tv it took me almost 2 hours and 4 different “retention specialists” in increasing levels of authority forcing me to listen to their reasons for staying and potential discounts)
It’s still a dynamic marketplace, and consolidation could bring back negative things for consumers. But for now the presence of individual offerings along with their discounted bundles seems like a win for consumer choice.
The UX of piracy is simply incredible compared to streaming services.
I visit one website that has everything I'd ever want to watch, download and start watching with one click, in 4k, with no streaming degradation, in a video player I like, with features like upscaling and which works offline.
UX of my weed dealer is also better than my local dispensary, and I don’t have to pay any taxes. It’s easy to have better experiences for yourself when you just ignore laws and other people’s rights in order to do whatever you want.
It sounds like you're making a favorable comparison, since marijuana has historically been perhaps the number one most famous example of something that most clients partake in harmlessly despite any illegality, and that has had the most senseless and damaging laws surrounding it. But then you go on to imply that your comparison is intended to demonstrate the opposite position.
If a community or society decides on boundaries as to the consumption or distribution of something, it doesn’t matter that you personally decide those standards and laws don’t apply to you. You can try justify your behavior by saying “no one gets hurt” but really all you’re doing is rationalizing selfishness, which seems to be what everyone is doing here w.r.t. piracy. You want what you want, rules and laws be damned.
If laws are made via societal consent, sure, that's a fine assertion. However, laws like marijuana possession are not based on societal consent. In fact, there's this famous quote by Nixon's Chief of Staff who literally admits the drug laws were created for targeting groups, not because the drugs themselves are bad:
> You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
So too with copyright laws written by corporations.
I know the quote. A lot of people voted for Nixon, and a lot of people agreed with him and his administration at the time. I don’t like it but that was the process, and we’ve spent a long time changing it, using the same process. For the most part that movement is working, and it’s working because the outcome of the process is respected. If you thumb your nose at the process when it doesn’t go your way, you can’t use it to get your way.
Corporations have a right to participate in the process just like you and I. Don’t like the outcome? Then do the hard work to change it.
Some people are more rules-oriented than others. It seems like you are, but many are also not. Think of people in the 90s saying "fuck the system," or hippies in the 60s, or civil rights leaders in the 20th century. It's not always the case that the system can reform itself. Sometimes explicitly disobeying the system is what leads to its change. I'm sure you can fill in the gaps with examples, of which many abound.
And sometimes disobeying the system delegitimizes the movement and prevents critical-mass political coalitions from forming, which in turn prevents change from happening. Likewise many examples abound, of which copyright reform is one.
From what I know about pirates (and I've been a part of many communities in which pirates engage, and am friends with many pirates), piracy is more about satisfying desires without paying money than it is a matter of principle about copyright reform. Lots of pirates spend seemingly infinite time cataloging, collecting, sorting, tagging, and distributing pirated media, not to mention figuring out how to get around DRM. But you won't find so many pirates expending the same energy to affect political change. To me, that's telling about their true motives.
Until pirates can convince people like me (supporters of copyright reform but not piracy), that their lawless behavior would end after successful political reform, a coalition to enact such reform will be impossible. Based on the comments in this thread, it seems like the main concern pirates have are getting what they want, how they want, when they want, without paying, regardless of anyone else's wishes.
Back in the day when the options were DVD or Cable, piracy had more legitimacy IMO. Pirates wanted better resolution, lower prices, to play media on their devices, to have on demand access. Today with the advent of ad-free, on-demand content at a low subscription price, continued piracy looks more like selfishness than activism or civil disobedience.
The resolution of media is far beyond what it was in the 00's, but still isn't good enough. The prices are much lower but now low enough. They can stream to any device they want but it's still not enough for pirates. The dream of the 00s pirates is alive in the 20s, but the 20s pirates still act like their piracy is a form of freedom fighting. It's not. Instead it lays bare the true intention the entire time was that pirates just wanted media but didn't want to pay for it.
> And sometimes disobeying the system delegitimizes the movement and prevents critical-mass political coalitions from forming, which in turn prevents change from happening
This is much rarer than its opposite, as I had mentioned. The number of revolutions that happened peacefully is much lower than those that happened violently, to give a political example.
> but still isn't good enough
It was good though, but now it's not anymore, that's the problem. There are two distinct groups of pirates that we should separate, because both are not the same and to discuss them as equal doesn't bring about the whole picture.
One, the serious pirates. These are the people you are talking about, who want higher quality and easy access. These are the people, like me, who download 4k rips to watch on their OLED TV and organize their Plex servers to auto-download new media that comes out. They may even have terabytes-large NAS. You will never get a cent out of these people, because, like you probably have experience with, they are not in the business of paying for media. Their act of piracy is itself what is satisfying. For example, I gain more enjoyment out of the fact that I can watch at higher qualities than paying customers can, than I do actually watching said media. I have not once in my life bought a movie or TV show (although I will go to a theater because that is an incomparable experience to watching on a TV; and I do buy software sometimes, especially if it's a creator I really like and wish to support). However, these types of pirates are extremely few compared to the second category:
Two, the casual pirates. Most pirates are not like me or others in this thread, they do not download 4k rips to watch on their OLED TV, they do not organize their Plex servers. The vast majority of pirates are those who search "{movie} watch online free" and click the first link. Their needs were well met when Netflix came onto the scene, where with one service at a low price, they could watch whatever they wanted. Same with Limewire being usurped by Spotify. Now with multiple streaming services, more people are searching "{movie} watch online free" because they don't want to sign up to yet another service. Piracy is a problem of convenience for most people.
Look at piracy statistics before Spotify and Steam, and look at them afterwards. Most casual pirates stopped pirating songs because they have an easy to use interface with 99.99% of all the songs they could want. Contrast that to Netflix 10 years ago versus today. The meme is real: https://i.redd.it/d3423w2g5ur21.jpg. With more fragmentation, don't wonder why piracy is coming back among group two.
Content creators cannot treat groups one and two as equal because one is rigid, they will never pay, so don't even try to convince them; but two is malleable, if your service is good enough, most of them will pay.
That's an even better example then, because it shows that most people will and do go for the weed dealer. UX matters regardless of laws in terms of what people actually do, not just what they say they would do.
I'm using rarbg as my main source which has magnet links that qBittorrent detects on click. I use mpv with Anime4k for animated content or an Nvidia Image Scaling glsl filter which is a decent upscaler/sharpener. I also use SVP for frame interpolation with an RTX 3080 which supports optical flow, and I assume it'll be even better in the RTX 40 series given their DLSS 3's frame interpolation exclusivity. It all looks incredible on my LG OLED TV/monitorm with 4k HDR 10 bit support.
Imagine doing all this on Netflix, it's simply not possible unless you have the physical media files, and for that reason, even if I had Netflix, I'd still pirate.
Curious to hear your stack. I assume something with Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, etc? I like looking for files manually so I haven't set those up since I'm not sure how to precisely select for the file with specific 4k/HDR support.
Mine setup is as you describe.
Sonarr and Radarr have quality filters that allow you to choose file size limitations, and they work almost 100% in my experience.
Cable was bad because of long contracts, ads, and forced bundling. What's wrong with optional bundles? From my view point streaming is still better than cable in every way.
It was easier for me to cut all my streaming services than it was to cut my cable TV subscription. The TV subscription was bundled with internet. Except for Amazon Prime, the streaming subscriptions weren't bundled with anything else.
The only workable solution is to eliminate exclusive distribution. Content producer sets a price, any distributors gets to carry it for that price. Then businesses actually have to compete on price and service instead of content library.
You're on the right track. Producers owning distribution was outlawed through antitrust legislation in the 1940s. It's now come back but it'll be outlawed again.
The problem is that nobody wants to be solely a distributor. Every company in the pipe business eventually succumbs to the sweet profit temptation of being in the water-making business, and then they only want to pipe their own water, to the detriment of consumer choice.
I hope this can be outlawed but antitrust enforcement in the US is a pale shadow of what it once was.
Yes because in the 1940s the cost of distribution was high and production was high. Currently there are over a half a dozen large streaming services in the US.
If we are going to apply standards in the 40s to a completely different era, let’s apply laws that were meant to govern horses to cars.
All of these are wrong. The cost is building your own streaming platform which is what all film studios have done. It's many billions in tech and operations.
You asked if you as an individual content producer wanted to distribute your own movie how much would it cost. Sony for instance spent $0 on its own streaming service and just licenses out to the existing players.
Yes let’s stop local channels from being able to produce news, television networks from having exclusive late night broadcasts, ESPN from producing “ESPN Tonight”, newspapers from paying for reporters and editors, console manufacturers from having exclusive games, website owners from commissioning writers, etc
Yes this was done when the only method to distribute movies was through a limited number of theaters. Now there is no monopoly on distributing media.
Also, video and audio recording and editing equipment was expensive. Now many people carry around a device capable of recording 4K video in their pocket and can get video and audio editing equipment free that producers could only dream of when those cases were adjudicated.
With the plethora of streaming services, there is no “monopoly”.
Do you also think we should apply rules to automobiles that were relevant to horses?
No one is claiming there is a monopoly. The vertical integration between content producers and distributors means that pricing is based off exclusivity rather than the fair market value of the service and goods being provided. We claim to live in a market-driven economy, so we should put rules in place that live up to those values.
A market driven economy means there is plenty of competition between Netflix, Disney, Peacock+, AppleTV, Amazon PrimeTV, Paramount+, Discovery+/HBO Max etc to deliver content that can convince people to pay.
But there is less competition that if you break up vertical monopolies of content+distribution, that's the point. Content producers must compete on content, and distributors must compete on distribution.
So the government should step in because there is not enough competition with eight+ streaming services? They are already competing to get content deals from producers and studios.
How is it a “monopoly” when there are more than half a dozen players. A “vertical monopoly” is another HN fiction. Are all game console makers a “monopoly”? Shouid the local TV stations not be allowed to produce news only on their channels? Should ESPN not be allowed to produce “ESPN Tonight”?
Are you saying that it should be illegal for any distributor to also produce shows?
Let’s not stop at TV. It should also be illegal for websites to pay writers to produce content and newspapers to hire reporters and editors to produce exclusive content.
> So the government should step in because there is not enough competition with eight+ streaming services? They are already competing to get content deals from producers and studios.
You're missing the point. The proposal is to split competition in the single integrated market of content+distribution into two separate markets, one for content and a separate one for distribution.
The point is that by bundling the two of them together you're reducing competition, because just by simple mathematics there are fewer companies capable of both compared to companies that specialise in one. Content production is a hard industry, so is distribution.
> Are you saying that it should be illegal for any distributor to also produce shows?
The proposal is that distributors will have to split their business into two independent businesses. If there's a local news channel, then it gets split into a local news producer and a general distributor that also distributes other things.
The internet has already done that for the most part though, it used to be that newspapers were the exclusive distributors and thus could maintain a local monopoly on local news. The internet swept that away and now anybody could get local news from anywhere else on earth.
The linked article is lamenting that the trend is reversing, such that distributors are once again the same people as the content producers.
> Let’s not stop at TV. It should also be illegal for websites to pay writers to produce content and newspapers to hire reporters and editors to produce exclusive content.
That's a strawman. Nobody's saying it should extend past TV, please debate the idea on its own merits.
> That's a strawman. Nobody's saying it should extend past TV, please debate the idea on its own merits.
Yes, because it’s utterly stupid when you think about it and say that no content distributor should be able to fund the production of their own content. No one wants to be a commodity and that doesn’t make sense any market to not have something to differentiate your product.
Streaming content and being a pipe is the definition of “undifferentiated heavy lifting”. Both Netflix and Disney run on AWS infrastructure and now anyone with the money can throw money at a company like BAMTech to set up the infrastructure. Then you just have a monopoly on who actually carries the traffic. What’s to stop AWS, Azurs or GCP from just offering their own streaming service and undercutting the competition?
In other words, what you suggest now leads to a monopsony - where you have many sellers of content and a few buyers with more power and it would lead to consolidation.
Currently if a producer wants to create a show, he can negotiate with 9 different sellers.
Look no further than music distribution, you have basically two major players in music streaming - Spotify and Apple Music - and it’s a shitty business to be in as a standalone business
I’m suggesting that it’s an entitled position that you want to control how other people distribute content that they pay for. If you don’t like it - create your content. You probably have a 4K video recording device in your pocket and a computer at home capable of editing said content
Protects it against what? GPL is itself a way of using the system against itself, with an end goal of replacing said system.
I guess If copyright seized to exist you could take GPL code and modify it without sharing back, but the users would also not be required to pay you for using it, so…
actually no, a big part of the GPL3 these days is fighting "tivoization" which is not really protected by any "system" the same way as copyright. the only system protecting that is a cryptosystem locking it to manufacturer-authorized stuff.
also GPL is mostly trying to fight closed-source code which is just as possible without the current copyright system, it can still be kept private like any trade secret. GPL relies on the system to force releasing source.
Yea because I’m sure you’re struggling because you can’t watch the latest blockbuster the way you want. Should Netflix or the other companies not be able to fund exclusive content?
So what you’re saying is that you didn’t need the nanny state to step in and you were able to make your own choices what to do with your money and your time?
What I am saying is that I would like government to control some of that corporate rampage. After all you do not mind when it works the other way and those companies can sell their non material product because "nanny state" protects them by way of recognizing and enforcing copyright, IP laws etc. etc.
Still I am an adult and yes would vote with my wallet regardless.
Yes because it must be way too hard for you to use your own free will so the government must step in so you can watch the latest blockbuster since it really impacts your life negatively
Would someone with more knowledge explain how Usenet has managed to be resilient to legal and/or technical shutdown in the face of rampant piracy that has seemingly always existed there?
Before the industry caught on that content were being shared via USENET you could download a film off an usenet provider with no issues. Maybe some PAR2s to repair a broken download but mostly ended up at 100%.
Nowadays the industries launch DMCAs, the provider complies. Providers, to fulfill the requests tend to remove parts of the archive rather than all. If can't download rar part 22,23 you can't complete the movie. They've done their part.
The movie "The HackerNews" has 20 rar parts, usenet provider #1 has 1-18 rar parts and 19-20 rar parts are missing. usenet provider #2 has 16-20 rar parts but missing 1-15. Combine two or more backbackbone providers and you can grab all files.
PAR2 is a godsend, and usenet is a hidden cave of treasure.
Thank you for the insight. If I'm understanding it correctly, this implies that some of the USENET providers are not subject to DMCA. Is that the primary reason piracy has not been stamped out there, in your opinion?
Usenet works with the holdng company, the backbone provider and the reseller. Where the company is based would be if an DMCA has to be complied. As backbone providers normally serve usenet servers in the NL, and the USA. USA we all know; the Netherlands, "best effort" hence deletion of rar parts.
It costs money, is not very convenient, and the companies operate with plausible deniability similar to digital locker sites (eg. megaupload). Actually, come to think of it usenet is basically digital locker sites of yesteryear, with steeper barrier to entry.
isps stopped providing it years ago and it's way too obscure to be mainstream. torrents are lower barrier to entry so they get the heat though nzb indexers sometimes get killed.
Sadly for consumers, no one did what Spotify did for video. Spotify has 99% of of the content 99% of users want. Maybe because of the success of Netflix, content owners saw dollar signs and video streaming balkanized.
This. I want a streaming service that has more or less every movie and TV show ever made before, let's say ten years ago.
Fair enough if Disney etc. want to keep new stuff exclusive to them. Also, fair enough if certain big evergreen content is kept exclusive (Star Wars, classic Disney movies etc.).
But, seriously, why can't I go to one service and watch every Cary Grant movie, or every movie directed by John Ford, or every episode of Remington Steele, or every episode of Matlock or whatever.
I've been buying DVDs for ... 20 years now? I have quite a few old movies now.
I wrote an app that is playing them (according to a schedule I created) on a Raspberry Pi from a 5TB drive (they're ripped to drive). It's kind of fun to walk by the TV downstairs and see the original "The Fly" or whatever on. No fast-forward or pause, but no internet required either (no ads, of course).
What about the music industry allowed Spotify to happen? Is licensing set up in a way that made it possible whereas Movie/TV makes it impossible/unlikely?
(I remember Classic Netflix, where I could get 99% of what I wanted … or, in many cases, over 100% of what I wanted!)
There are only three major studios and music costs a lot less to produce. There are also various release windows for movies where studios can get paid multiple times.
Also Spotify is losing money and can never be truly profitable with 70% of everything they make contractually going back to the labels. Subscription music is a sucky business and it only makes sense as a feature for a larger platform
Spotify didn't do anything special. Most of the (mainstream) subscription music streaming services have similar content. I assume it's mostly a function of the fact that music royalties were quite centralized so that once streaming became viable it was a pretty natural shift given that pay per play was already well entrenched with radio etc.
Video was much more fragmented and a lot of older content licensing never envisioned non-broadcast availability at all.
(The numbers also probably don't work. I'm guessing a hypothetical all-you-can-eat subscription would be in the hundreds of dollars a month.
Pandora was a fair bit older but not quite the same thing. Rhapsody was older as well.
ADDED: The basic point is that there was a pretty natural path from radio to personalized radio streaming to streaming that brought a modified version of the same royalty system along with it.
Spotify has a large amount of popular music, but if you end up niche bands like Transiberian Orchestra, for a long time they didn't have most of their music.
They still don't have have 90% of filk songs.
The irony is I was introduced to this through YouTube and Grooveshark (which was still better than Spotify is now), if it hadn't been for these pirate services I wouldn't have known about Julia Ecklar.
Even then, Spotify is far better than the TV streaming situation.
I don’t know if their intent was to mock this, but I’ve heard people brag they don’t pay for much streaming and then end with “except for Netflix, of course, and Prime, and Disney through my phone service…”
I unsubscribed with relative ease. The difficulty is finding the one - ever chanhing - link during checkout that doesn't resubscribe you. Resubscribe links are plastered all over the place, some of them deceptive.
I have had Amazons video streaming service and unsubscribing was no problem, this is not their Prime service though. I don't think I had to jump through any hoops either because that would have left a negative impression on me and then I would never use it again, now I will just resubscribe when I find something I want to watch.
Because if you tried doing it, you'd discover it makes you go through four confirmation screens, and on each one the correct button is in a different spot and a different color, and if you screw up on any one of them you remain subscribed.
Still a whole lot easier than ending your comcast subscription, where you have to talk to someone on the phone, who will spend a consuderable amount of effort trying to get you to upgrade instead of cancel.
Yes, my workflow to find settings in tons of apps is to use Google. I could hunt for the right checkbox, or just as easily ask the question and get a directed answer immediately.
I don't see anything wrong with this either. I mean, tons of times when I need to do something specific in my car, for example, I just google it and get a detailed YouTube video explaining it. Better than hunting in a manual.
What cable does is force you to buy basic cable, plus a bunch of regulatory recovery and other fees, to get cable's real equivalent to streaming services which were the pay movie channels.
I'd rather pay $80/mo. for Internet, then jump in an out of STARZ and other services for $10/mo. instead of paying $80/mo. for Internet, $100/mo. for TV+basic cable (which I don't watch and TV is free OTA), and then the movie channels on top of it.
Plus the streaming services work on my phone which is pretty neat when I'm stuck somewhere.
> Plus the streaming services work on my phone which is pretty neat when I'm stuck somewhere.
FYI, that’s true of most cable networks now as well. They’ve all developed apps that are hybrids of (legitimized) IPTV streaming of their live broadcast of the channels available in your package, plus VOD catalogues of seemingly-random seasons of shows (i.e. the ones they happen to currently have licensed for syndication at any given time.)
At least with streaming we have tools available to mitigate the ads, though it's a constant fight. A few months ago I added ublock origin to all my family's browsers, but recently some of the streaming services have noticed and won't play unless I disable it. I'm trying out NextDNS now. On Hulu it doesn't skip the ads, but does block them, but something about watching 30s of black screen knowing there's supposed to be an ad there but isn't is still satisfying...
Who's suffering ads? I get ads on free services that's it, fair play IMO. The real reason I switched was because of the godawful remote controls and laggy and shitty interfaces. It would take me full minutes to navigate to whatever I wanted.
Lately I've been getting ads on Hulu even though I subscribe. To be more precise I get 90s of blank space where the ads would have been, because Hulu's ad-blocker detection is totally FUBAR. First it complains even when I have my ad blocker turned off, then it continues anyway after the prescribed time. The two kinds of brain damage almost cancel each other out. The net result annoys me slightly on principle, but not enough to make me turn to even less convenient ways of getting that content.
Amazon Prime and Sky (or after their forth rename in 5 years, now they are called: "Wow" here in Germany) have ads for their own shows in front of paid content.
It's crazy to me that someone would pay for Verizon's highest-cost phone package that includes some streaming package when they could get a cheap cell phone plan like Pure Talk USA, Ting Mobile, etc. and buy the streaming package, both for less.
I’m one of those people. I went from paying $75/mo for T-Mobile and $40 for streaming services and Apple Arcade to paying $90 for the top Verizon plan. Why? I needed coverage where T-Mobile doesn’t have it and also need non-ridiculous terms (looking at you AT&T) for international roaming, and it effectively saved $15/mo. On top of that, bringing my unlocked device got a credit that paid for 7 months of service.
Have you looked at other MVNOs? $75-90/m for phone service seems incredibly high to me. I pay $20/m for Mint (T-Mobile MVNO) and there are similarly priced services that are Verizon MVNOs.
An aside, but I really hate how the tech and media industries have so many unintuitive acronyms.
I am highly tech-savvy, as I would assume are most people on Hacker News. I have no idea what FAST and AST are in your comment. By context of you saying “ad free” I can guess that “AS” may mean “ad-supported”, but I have no idea what the F and T are and why they’re different.
Yes, I know I can “just Google it!” But by virtue of Google being useless these days, Googling “fast acronym” is all pages about strokes.
This is how tech shoots itself in the foot (yes, this is a general rant.) Use a bunch of acronyms no one understands, and then build a search engine that makes the meanings impossible to find.
Hopefully this will be better in the future. But I am not sure it will if people continue to use acronyms so frequently.
All through the 80s and 90s there were people asking for a la carte cable service so that way they could get only the channels that they cared about. That time is now and I hear a lot more people complaining about how many subscription services that are out there. The general public responds to bundle deals.
It used to be that you got a bundle with a ton of channels but only a few played shows worth watching.
Now, you can pay for individual channels, but each one has only 1 show worth watching. Anytime a new show becomes popular, it gets its own “channel” that you have to subscribe to.
When I signed up for Netflix it had a huge back catalogue, and I could rewatch so much stuff I didn't remember or that I missed.
It didn't matter to me that Buffy had been in syndication for 10+ years. I never saw it back then, so I got to enjoy it. The same with so many other shows.
When I canceled my subscription, it had less than 1/5th of the shows and cost over 50% more.
That is what people are comparing and complayning about.
If I could only receive streaming sports networks and cartoon network, it would fulfill 90% of what my household watches TV for. Throw on netflix for toddler shows and I'm golden. I'd save more money by renting videos from Prime or Youtube whenever I have an urge to watch a specific show.
people who brag about pirating remind me of a guy I used to live next to who bragged about breaking the comcast junction box, bringing a splitter and accessing cable through their neighbor.
it's a shame that there are so many services, but ultimately the creators/companies want to be paid. my personal strategy have been to unsubscribe from all except YouTube, note which things are good on each service, subscribe for a single month to watch all of them and unsubscribe.
it's unlikely to happen, but I'd rather pay a fixed amount and access all of these streaming services and have the money proportionally be divided on my watching patterns.
> ultimately the creators/companies want to be paid
Oh please, enough of this "poor creators" narrative. These copyright monopolists are worth what, trillions of dollars? How many millions are they spending on government lobbying to rob people of their rights? Maybe it's billions?
The vast majority of content creators are not millionaires or billionaires, nor are they usually the ones responsible for enforcing copyright on their work.
How is it their right to hold a functionally infinite state granted monopoly on easily copied information?
How is it their right to push back the expiration date on their copyrights whenever they're about to expire, effectively robbing the public of its public domain rights?
How is it their right to abuse DMCA take down process to destroy the concept of fair use?
> How is it their right to hold a functionally infinite state granted monopoly on easily copied information?
It's their right because we've decided as a society that it's often useful for people to have that right. There's no physical reason that knockoff publishers couldn't have printed dirt-cheap paper copies of Harry Potter as the books came out, but I think things ended up better without them being allowed to do that.
> How is it their right to push back the expiration date on their copyrights ... [and] to abuse DMCA takedown
These are a completely separate issue, and are less so "rights" than "practices which powerful players do and sometimes get away with".
> It's their right because we've decided as a society that it's often useful for people to have that right.
> These are a completely separate issue
No! The original social contract was we'd all pretend their stuff wasn't easily copyable for a few years so they could turn a profit and then it would enter the public domain.
Not only is it obvious that they have zero intention of keeping up their end of the bargain, they keep stretching out those few years into functional limitlessness. About 5 years is more than enough for these creators to make their money back and then some, but we're all going to be dead before the works we grew up with become part of the public domain.
So why should we recognize copyright as legitimate? It's not. It's just monopolists and rent seekers and there is absolutely no reason for us to accept any of this BS.
This was never the “social contract”. From the beginning of VHS tapes and at home distribution, there was Macrovision. When copyright was made the law, there was no method of mass consumer distribution.
Also, as usual HN wannabee lawyers have no idea what a “monopoly” is. There is no “monopoly” on creating video content. You can in fact do it from your phone
How could it not be? Public domain is centuries old.
> From the beginning of VHS tapes and at home distribution, there was Macrovision.
So what...?
> When copyright was made the law, there was no method of mass consumer distribution.
Yeah, and that's the only reason why copyright even made any sense. You had to own things like printing presses in order to infringe copyright at any meaningful scale. Now everyone has globally networked computers which make copyright infringement so trivial people don't even realize they're doing it.
> Also, as usual HN wannabee lawyers have no idea what a “monopoly” is.
> There is no “monopoly” on creating video content.
You're not even replying to my actual point, you're inventing a strawman to disprove so you can call me a "wannabe lawyer". Not even once did I claim there was a monopoly on any creative process. I claimed there was a monopoly on copying. That's what copyright means, it's literally right in there in the name: creators get a time limited monopoly on the ability to make copies of their work.
> Now everyone has globally networked computers which make copyright infringement so trivial people don't even realize they're doing it.
So because a law is easier to break that means it’s not relevant? You really think that most people who are going to bit torrent don’t know they are breaking the law? Even if that were the case “ignorance is no excuse”.
I can walk down the street if any major city and get crack and pay a prostitute to let me smoke it on her ass. Just because it’s “easy” doesn’t mean it’s legal.
Copyright dates back to the 15th century shortly after the invention of the printing press - meaning almost since the inception of technology that allowed copying media, government thought there was a reason to protect content creators.
> Not even once did I claim there was a monopoly on any creative process. I claimed there was a monopoly on copying
That’s an even worse take on what “monopoly” means
> So because a law is easier to break that means it’s not relevant?
Yes? What is the relevance of a law pretty much everybody breaks, many times without even realizing it? When people download random pictures and videos via the internet, it's copyright infringement. When my family and friends send me those pictures or post them to social media, it's copyright infringement. When people share books with each other via messaging groups it's infringement. At this point it should no longer be a crime but a custom.
What is the relevance of a law that requires literal tyranny to enforce? Because that's what copyright enforcement in the 21st century looks like. To enforce copyright you need to destroy free computing as we know it. You need to destroy everything a site like Hacker News stands for. The technology to do it will pave the way for even worse abuses such as the regulation of encryption and control of communications.
Computers are world changing technology. Why should their potential be crippled for the sake of creators and their obsolete business models?
> Copyright dates back to the 15th century shortly after the invention of the printing press - meaning almost since the inception of technology that allowed copying media, government thought there was a reason to protect content creators.
So does public domain. Even the US constitution says that these exclusive rights are "time limited". Funny how every single time it's this narrative about the creators and their protection and their profits. Everyone forgets that eventually their works are supposed to become literal public property after a set number of years. Copyright lasts so long now that the very concept of public domain might as well have been erased from public consciousness.
Yeah right. 1000 years is technically time limited, you may not like it but that's life buddy! Just accept our rent seeking and pay us our royalties for a thousand years because our grand grand grand children need to live comfortably off of the works.
What a load of total BS. We're doing them a favor by granting them artificial scarcity at all. We can easily make it last 0 years if we want. We have the technology.
Well the alternative is that they wouldn’t have created the content in the first place. How much free content have you created?
We have the technology to walk into a mall and kill dozens of people. Since when is “we have technology to do $x” the justification for saying a law is invalid?
People created blockbuster movies that they spent millions on computer special effects, computer animated cartoons or films at all before copyright existed in the 1500s? Before mass distribution existed you bought tickets to see plays in person.
You also don’t seem to know rent seeking means
> Rent seeking is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity.
Are the people producing the media not contributing anything? It seems the people who want everything for free are the ones who aren’t making a meaningful contribution
ngl me personally i never pay for media (except very rarely a good book i want for my shelf after reading it). if i can't pirate something i just don't consume it. like, there's so much media now no single piece is worth that much.
in other words nobody is losing out on anything because i pirate. the alternative (which sometimes happens when i can't find it) is they still get nothing.
i don't think people realize how much they spend on media, like lots of my friends are spending $25/mo on video streaming plus another $10 for music. like sports? add espn, another $10. like ufc? add more for pay per view. big reader? another $20/month easy. read lots of news? they all want "just" $10/month or whatever even though most people aren't reading all of one paper like they used to, just a few articles from each.
i mean i got really good at piracy as a kid so it's easy. i value it somewhere between the sale price ($10 or whatever) and what i'd pay (idk $1?). like, i don't feel like i'd pay more than $5-10 a month for all my media, it's just not worth more than that to me. because tbh i'm not a huge media consumer (mostly music and books, and a lot of that is old stuff i already have). so anything priced more than the percentage of my media consumption it represents times like $5 isn't worth it to buy.
so if i can pirate it i do, nobody loses. if i can't i just don't consume the media.
We got disney plus, netflix and switch between hulu/hbo/discovery, and plex to fill in the gaps, i dont give a crap about piracy they could just have made a proper collaboration at this point.
I have Youtube TV for football season and then cancel it when the season is over. At least shared logins work for streaming services, so I can be on a family's hbo max, etc.
I actually do, love UHD blu-ray, can’t compare to anything downloaded actually. Level of compression and haptics, physicality, etc.
That said, it’s not great for the environment, probably still worse even when comparing with the ecological footprint of data centre infrastructure (download-and-keep would be even better than streaming actually). Not everything gets a (timely) release either.
Sometimes a quick download would be great. FWIW I’m on a 400mbit/s connection.
Obviously DRM free versions would be the cherry on top and would guarantee “portability” into the future (I’d still buy the n-th version of The Terminator in 8K in any case ;)
you can get UHD blueray rips in great quality from the right sites. unfortunately the best are mostly invite-only trackers with ratio requirements that make membership a pain in the ass, especially when dealing with such large files.
Packages exist because its win win for everyone. People hate them because they think they can split them apart and pay proportionally for the channels they want. But that's not how it works.
Packages are never a win win. The reason they are not is because they are designed to get you to pay more.
Take an example of cars. Any user buying a new car would almost always pay for all the safety features if a “safety bundle” was available that had all the safety features. Instead they split apart all the features into different bundles along with luxury features to make you buy stuff that you don’t care about. Want blind spot detection? Great we have our pro bundle that gives you that with seat heating (driver only btw) and all weather mats. Want collision warning? Here’s our pro plus that gets you that with heated steering and seat heating for front passenger.
Cable bundles were exactly that. After spending $200/month, I still couldn’t watch all the football games from my couch and that was a travesty. But I did have 200+ Spanish channels. So it was a win win right?
Packages would be fine if they standardized an API and let me aggregate all my streaming services under a single client of my choice. Imagine if you were required to have half a dozen cable boxes for all your different cable packages. Remember, pirating is a problem of convenience, not price. As of now the fracturing accross different platforms and partial availability is what's stopping streaming from having universal adoption.
Packages can be a win-win, particularly if they are optional.
If you want more than one thing, and paying for both together in a package saves you money, or is a worthwhile convenience for the price, it's a win-win.
If you don't want all the things in a package, and the price is more than you'd pay for the things you want, it's not a win for the consumer.
I feel like streaming has shown it can work like that, at least somewhat.
The sports channels (ESPN, etc) are the most expensive but were bundled with anything more than the most basic package. With streaming they're split out.
The Disney bundle example in the article shows you can save by going a la carte.
Essentially, you are paying for the few channels that you actually want and the hundred of other channels are being provided for free. It's a win because you get free channels even if you don't watch them.
The thing is that there is essentially zero cost to providing channels to you that you are not watching. There are costs to sending the signals to your house but that doesn't increase based on how many channels you have access to. There also costs to producing content, but those costs are independent of the number of viewers. Add to that the fact these channels typically have advertising which is a good chunk of revenue, they aren't paid for by your cable service fees.
The result is that the costs involved don't correspond simply a cost per user per available channel. Consequently, it doesn't make sense to charge users that way.
Well, I'd say having the option to watch is a win because options are good.
But maybe you don't see it that way. Fine. Perhaps the availability of these other channels is neutral. I think they key point is that it's not a loss.
Cable packages are a win-win for everyone? This is going to be breaking news for the tens of millions of people who've dropped cable; please elaborate.
Because packages allow both sides to get the long tail of revenue/content. If it's individual channels with a price $X then those not willing to pay X lose the content and the channel loses the revenue. To make up for the missing tail each channel will have to be priced higher individually than their slice of the package revenue.
You're assuming the only alternative is a pay per channel model. How about a Spotify-like all-you-can-eat model where providers actually compete on what they actually have control over such as user experience, quality and customer support?
“Channels” are not uniformly priced. Some, like ESPN, are very expensive for the cable providers while others are cheap. But, those expensive (and popular) channels subsidizes smaller or niche channels.
I would gladly pay 3x the price to get TV that had no ads at all. Even if it only had like 30 channels.
I can’t even think about all of that content I really care about. Seriously. Have two of each of these channels to provide variety:
Left wing news, right wing news, alternative news and indie documentary news, cartoons, westerns and classic TV, actions, dramas, “daytime TV”, home improvement, discovery-like, sci-fi, movies, classics movies, history and documentaries, nature channel, comedy channel, reality TV, and I think that’s it. That’s 36 channels if there’s two of each. I’d unironically pay like $100 a month if I got a DVR and ABSOLUTELY NO ADS.
I’d rather not pirate but it doesn’t feel wrong since I’m perfectly willing to pay for no-ads products if they are available.
90% of my entertainment is from YouTube Premium and I love it. The rest is HBO and Hulu with the no-ads package.
I bought Hulu Live for a show, cancelled it immediately when I realized it forced ads.