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.
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.
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.
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
Oh. Making something illegal illegal again? That’ll be effective.
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.
It’ll be super duper illegal
Yeah because pirates are notorious for giving up immediately when you make their jobs a little harder.
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.
You can’t legislate piracy away…
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.
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.
It’s much harder when all your ISPs and the world’s largest DNS resolvers block the IPs or resolving the DNS, which is what this dystopian bill proposes. Make no mistake, this is Orwellian censorship masquerading as piracy protection.
is anime a form of Piracy?! One Piece I guess?!
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.
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?
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.
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
I checked it again and its STILL at 0 Cosponsors and sitting in the committees inbox if it wasn’t already rejected.
Even if it passed making piracy super extra illegal+ it’s targeting google and cloud flare to block access to sites within 15 days that could still easily be reached outside their boundaries. It’s political theater for mpaa riaa etc industry association lobbyists to show they got something for their bribes.
Oh no!
Anyway.
Brilliant. Make murder illegal now.
