My entertainment experience is so much better than my friends’ because of piracy. I use torrents, and store my media and it’s made my life so great since I got into this a little over a year ago. I’ve seen shows that none of my friends have seen. Lately I’ve been into police dramas and there’s an incredible series from France called Le Bureau des Légendes, which is phenomenal. There’s one from the UK that I just finished called Line of Duty that was also great. I saw an Estonian period film that is entertaining called Apteeker Melchior – it was freeleech for a short while, so I grabbed it.
My friends who pay for Netflix, Disney+ and all the the other streaming channels watch the all same garbage TV. I can see that too, but I get access to these other amazing films and shows. I’ve not even mentioned the books, audiobooks and music.
The pirate’s life is a great life and it’s the life for me. Arrrr.
For anyone else interested in Line of Duty…
Best part is that if you include the free space in the center it actually has the exact number of boxes for a full bingo card.
A bingo card is 5x5=25, meaning 24 squares plus the free centre. That card is 4x7=28 squares.
It’s a great format. 45 minutes of procedural intrigue, then a load of guys in balaclavas bust in and fuck everything up for the last quarter hour
Honestly I don’t think piracy is great. I would rather pay a fair price for easily discoverable content, own it forever on all mediums, and have the bulk of the money go to the creatives who made it so they can pay their bills and feed their families. I don’t watch a lot and the little I do should be affordable. I don’t feel compelled to collect it all.
But then I go to introduce one of my kids to all the age appropriate comics/graphic novels I bought on Comixology for an older sibling. But Comixology closed down and all the content moved into Kindle with a heap of all ages content, not all appropriate. And Amazon are too cheap to offer family sharing outside the US. So hundreds of dollars in Bezos pocket with no way to put it on a device for my kid. I could waste time breaking the DRM or pirate but I am leaning towards a return to dead trees.
Netflix is crap and getting worse, jumped ship ages ago. Disney is killing genre movies and tv with all their marvel/star wars IP. Both are driven by algorithms and greed and recycle IP instead of taking risks.
Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. E.g., when Netflix was actually a good value proposition (i.e., high quality and quantity of content for the price), it was incredibly popular and nobody complained about their pricing. Now that barely anything looks like good value (thanks unfettered capitalism!), piracy is a more and more attractive option. That’s why the big corpos are trying as hard as they can to shut down piracy, so their customers have nowhere else to turn while they keep bumping up the prices for a shittier and shittier selection of content.
In a wide-ranging interview, Gabe Newell dishes about Steam, piracy and Half-Life 3.
The CEO and cofounder of Valve is never short on opinions. As the creator of some of the most beloved games titles (Team Fortress 2, Portal, Half-Life) and owner of the most pervasive online gaming portal for the PC platform, Gabe Newell has earned the right to express them. In an interview for the University of Cambridge’s school newspaper, Newell said that the way to end piracy is to provide a service that’s more complete than cracked software, and that restrictive DRM only encourages more piracy.
“We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”
The proof is in the proverbial pudding. “Prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become [Steam’s] largest market in Europe,” Newell said.
Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Piracy-Is-a-Service-Problem/
There will always be the hoarders. You can’t collect everything on any sort of wage/salary and live. If you have a compulsion then piracy is a reasonably harmless past time. You aren’t depriving anyone of income for something no normal person could reasonable afford.
For regular content consumers it is simply free market economics working. Companies innovate and offer great products and value and they take people away from the black market. Then the companies get greedy, form loose deniable cartels and start fixing prices prices at higher levels and cutting quality and consumers go elsewhere. They want the profits from a free market but don’t want to play the game and compete on value and quality. Sucks for them. The government grants them a legal monopoly on monetizing their IP but it doesn’t give them a clue on how to build successful businesses.
I’m curious, here in America all the police dramas on TV are largely pro-police narratives, with storylines that paint defense lawyers, internal affairs, those who invoke their right to silence or a lawyer, etc, as people who make the good guy’s job harder rather than a system to combat police abuse of power. Are European police dramas any different in that respect? I don’t know the differences between how police operate in the US vs in European countries, but I’m curious if it’s still largely an overly pro-cop narrative
It’s been an interesting full loop. The first rise of P2P file sharing was obviously much more convenient than the combination of broadcast TV and slow-to-release and expensive physical media and the legal fight against it proved pretty useless, beyond shutting down the most obvious for-profit services. Then streaming tipped the scale of convenience, where it was simpler and easier to have an affordable Netflix account than it was to dig through sketchy sites to seek out torrents and only find out later that half of them were actually gay porn.
The history is well known, the question, I guess, is what the next loop around the enshittification path will look like. Are we always doomed to run in circles seeking the optimal experience or can we agree on what it is and deliver it in a somewhat stable fashion at some point?
I get the feeling it’s going to be constantly running around in circles. The corporations are constantly looking for ways to enshittify things to improve profits, but too much and people don’t want to deal with it. They’re constantly looking for that balance in a landscape that’s constantly changing, and so constantly experimenting with what they can get away with.
Me too! The sad thing is that the whole system is set up to prevent people from being able to really choose what to watch. Even within a liberal framework, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the optimum system would be something like ‘person decides they want to watch a show with x characteristics, they discover options based on user reviews or a Wikipedia deep dive or w/e, then they click play and the appropriate rights holder is compensated’. It’s never just been about compensation though. They can’t have users going straight for the good stuff, otherwise what will they do with all the slop?
It makes me very sad tbh. My Dad watches movies all the time, but it’s always some average-to-poor Netflix original, because that’s what the app surfaces for him.
