piracy is legit the one example where the free market truly balances itself out.
However, since it is technically illegal, this means we should legalize revenue losing practices against large corporations similar to piracy, such that we can simply fix capitalism once and for all.
Anon got it backwards, networks noticed how profitable Netflix was and bumped the price for Netflix to stream their stuff. Netflix responded by producing their own content rather than leasing others’ at exorbitant rates. Then Netflix later got greedy and bumped their prices, lowered their quality, and cancelled all of their good shows.
I think it’s a bit of both. Netflix knew that companies choosing to pull their content would be a threat, so they prematurely started producing content (famously starting with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black). Whether because they saw this as a threat or because of the perceived greater profitability of their own platforms (probably a bit of both), other studios started pulling their content from Netflix and setting up their own streaming sites.
And naturally, other companies pulling their content accelerated Netflix’s desire to produce their own content to ensure they weren’t left in the lurch.
Yall are overcomplicating things. Let me simplify.
Capitalist corporations + infinite greed = cannibalism
It’s remarkable how people can see right past what was actually happening and only see what they want to see. Netflix was never trying to be the good guy. Netflix didn’t offer low prices out of the goodness of it’s hearts. It doesn’t have a heart, it has a ledger. The reason why Netflix offered a lot of content for a low price is because the company was trying to disrupt traditional cable. It was always the plan to increase prices, Netflix didn’t become greedy, it always was. It’s just that for a time the companies greed aligned with the publics greed. Once that relationship was no longer beneficial to Netflix it raised the prices, that was the plan all along.
Yeah I consulted for the cable industry around the time that everyone was just starting to try to build their own services to compete with Netflix. It wasn’t a secret that production companies would be pulling their content. There were licensing agreements signed that had expiration dates.
So it was more like a race on both ends. Production companies were like “we get exclusive streaming rights to our movies back in X months, so we need to have our own platform up and running.” And Netflix was like “we lose streaming rights to these movies in X months, we need to make some content to replace it with.”
Unpopular opinion, but I wasn’t a fan. Was it a bad show? No! Did I enjoy it? Sometimes. How it developed the cult following that it has, I can’t quite piece together. Fantastic voice acting and sound design can only pull so much weight!
Fantastic acting and production quality can elevate any media but especially TV shows. Look at Shrinking for a prime example. It has the production quality of Dispatches From Elsewhere but it’s essentially a three camera sitcom like Modern Family or hell All in the Family. And it’s KILLING right now.
People like the humor of Inside Job and the fantastic quality made it so much better.
Except people aren’t necessarily going back to piracy en masse
Torrent sites are dwindling, even the big ones have sad membership numbers compared to 10yrs ago
A large amount of internet users access the internet via devices that are openly hostile to or outright disallow anything that would enable piracy. The devices are then connected to an internet that is further hostile and aims to steer you away from anything deemed unsavory
Phones and tablets are cumbersome and unintuitive to navigate. In the case of apple torrent clients are not allowed to be listed on their app store and sideloading is involved and kind of a pain. Chromebooks and windows 11 are better obviously but less utilized then you’d think
But that leads to the second point, which is kind of angry old man yells at cloud, but people are just less tech inclined now. It makes sense because modern tech is designed to oppress the user whereas tech in the late 90s and early 2000s was more to empower them. They don’t bother to figure out how to install applications, use the file explorer, change settings, etc. the very basic steps needed to pirate shit (you obviously don’t need to be a super hacker). They don’t need to. The command prompt or a terminal is something that makes them think you’re hacking shit
They download applications like steam and then their browser auto opens the installer, then steam handles installing games and mods from that point on. They are safeguarded against having to deal with the icky filesystem and their hand is held every step of the way. Or they just download stuff from the official MS app store and even more hand holding. It’s okay because they’re only gonna install 5 streaming apps anyway and then use the browser to visit the 6 approved websites that google or bing search sends you to for basically any query.
And that’s only if they actually have a proper computer. If they have a tablet or phone they either are pushed extremely heavily towards the above scenario, or in the case of apple they simply have no other option
10 years from now the internet will just be 2-3 social media sites, a few shopping conglomerates, wikis, and streaming sites. The devices used to access will no longer let you access the filesystem directly, apps will be unable to be installed if they aren’t code signed by apple or google or ms or whoever, sealed in epoxy, and draconian drm everywhere. 40 years from now your grandchildren will think you’re weird for complaining about how you used to have autonomy and authority over your devices once you owned them and they’ll remind you it’s time to pay another $400 bezobucks to rent the google chrome ar internet hub for another month because you’re not allowed to own it and it’s a federal crime to take it apart
Direct download piracy and streaming is surprisingly popular.
With a bit of effort you can stream any movie directly to your TV for a few moneys a month (or free, but paying for the essential bits removes the jankiness)
Basically you select the movie, a system finds the torrent or DDL, a service downloads it (or has it cached) and you stream it to your device.
With a bit of effort you can stream any movie directly to your TV for a few moneys a month (or free, but paying for the essential bits removes the jankiness)
Something I learned back in the day: “Never pay for warez”. Pirate all you want, the moment you are paying, pay the creator of the product you’re interested in, not someone who pirated it and wants to profit from distributing it without a licence.
Except the value proposition still needs to make sense, so resigning to just pay the creator license holder exorbitant rates for ever-more-enshittified services is learning the wrong lesson.
They have used their control over the system to grotesquely distort copyright from its original intent of getting more cultural works into the public domain for people to use and build on, to instead lock everything away for lifetimes. Don’t buy into their lies and propaganda that they have any moral high ground.
While I agree with the trend for the average person, I think in pure numbers there are always going to be more tech savvy people in the foreseeable future.
Sure, 80% of people online in the 2000s and 90s were all tech savvy hobbyists, but their numbers was low (let’s say a million).
Now only 0.5% might be tech savvy, but that is 0.5% of a billion people, which would be 5 mil compared to 800k above.
I obviously picked convenient numbers but the point still stands, there are lots of tech savvy places today and it’s growing, just not as fast as the non tech savvy crowd unfortunately.
I am personally still friends with two people who even know how to navigate their filesystem beyond clicking the downloads or my documents link in the start menu. I hope you’re right, but all I see around me at work and personal life is ignorance. People can’t even figure out how to use their phones beyond the basics.
Yeah, on average you will find less and less tech savvy people in real life moving forward.
But if you were to ask a programming question on the most popular coding site, you would get more responses today than 20 years ago.
I’m also inclined to believe what the other person was saying, because nowadays like you say people don’t know how to use their devices to their full potential, but then I remember there used to be a time when I was the only one with a smart phone and everyone else was looking at me like I’m a weirdo for being on this phone during a commute for example, something that today is normal.
The nerdy people are still there and know how to use these tools, the general masses are still as clueless as always, they are just late adopters that never learned anything past what the walled gardens feed them. At least that’s my feeling.
I hate you. Because you’re not really wrong in most parts. Ownership of devices pisses me off for what feels like an eternity now. I can’t imagine how sales would go for PCs if you would get not admin-access anymore. But I smell that future coming. At least if we had not all switched to Linux by then. But even if, then the war between corpos and community would be on the “you can’t access amazon from this insecure decice”-front.
Me, personally, currently live at the peak of piracy right now. The pinnacle I’ve dreamt of days back when selling wares on CDs for triple digits was a thing. Sonarr/radar/etc makes it so easy and awesome now. Enter a movie’s name, wait a minute, watch it.
As to your Netflix/streaming-point: add that only muricans had it THAT nice. Some countries had to pay full price yet only got access to like 30% (Romania, Italy,etc.). The rest got filled with local crap. You saw the shit when using search but then it was gone. I had Netflix for a year or so. When it was more comfy than wares. And then it gradually became worse but also more expensive. The usual enshittification
I think the end is where some people are moving but I think its a bit too pessimistic. While kids are becoming more tech illiterate there is always gonna be a certain amount of people that know a bit more than the masses and they are not gonna let themselves be pushed around.
What are they going to do? Manufacture their own silicon? The ability to make a computing device of reasonable power is fairly prohibitive and as things move forward manufacturers seem intent on doing things that are more and more hostile to consumers. You say people won’t let themselves be pushed around and that sounds nice but people have consistently done exactly that to date.
Our power as individuals is minimal here; we can vote politically and financially. These companies do amazing financially so voting with our wallets doesn’t work. Voting politically also hasn’t done in terms of enacting regulation aside from some small wins in a few states with right to repair (and big losses in many more states as well as federally). And given the fact that those wins are small and fragmented with only a very small handful of states having any policy (like less than 10) it’s likely that big tech will push back hard rather than simply comply. And we are heading into political times where regulations will likely continue to erode.
So as things worsen the people who “know a bit more” can have the choice of using cutting edge hardware that is more locked down, or being a stallman type that uses relatively ancient hardware full of compromises because it is compatible with an ideology. That is just but it also means they will be constantly hampered and the problem will only be compounded as technology becomes more advanced, which is inherent and constantly occurring
This is also not just a generational thing to be clear. People my age, younger, and older, who were into this stuff have become tech illiterate as time progressed because they’ve allowed themselves to move away from their computers and go to their phones which have become a reddit/youtube/tiktok/pintrest/amazon/twitter/instagram/etc box. The etc is whatever skinner box game they’re playing at the moment, because most of them who played actual games don’t even bother to play games anymore. They’re so caught up in the cycle of “engagement” that they don’t care about much else. they come home and doom scroll then complain about how they feel aimless and anxious all the time and never get stuff done
You’re right that there exceptions, but they seem to be dwindling
tbf, there are alternatives to torrenting now. I usually recommend fmovies, sudo-lol, or other streaming websites because the barrier to entry for those sites is just knowing the URL and having ublock origin.
I agree with you though that today’s young adults are not as technologically inclined as young adults of the early 2000s where torrenting was rampant. But everyone understands a website.
Torrenting is hard compared to a visiting a website. Not only do you have to vet each torrent, you have to download a second piece of software (torrent client) to make sure it works, all the while making sure your router is set up correctly. And even if they set all this up correctly, they’ll get a letter/email saying that they downloaded a file illegally since they didn’t use a VPN. That will scare a novice user and stop torrenting.
Real-debrid is a weird one, it’s clearly you paying for piracy, but they’ve been around since forever.
I personally don’t have too much of an issue for paying for piracy. It’s money I would pay to Netflix if their catalog was decent.
Servers cost money.
If anything, these assholes streaming companies should see people paying for pirated content and say, “We should do better” instead of “ThEy ArE sTeAlInG oUr CoNtEnT!”
Edit: I looked up Real Debrid. Their website is sketchy. What exactly is it?
I think your doom and gloom scenario is a little dramatic considering we already have Linux. The free platform where you have full control over your technological experience already exists and has been well maintained for decades at this point. Sure, proprietary software not working on Linux sucks and will continue to be an issue, but there’s typically FOSS alternatives for the useful programs.
It’d be more accurate to say we’ll have two Internets, especially since that’s expressly what Google wants. The ignorant people will all flock to the corpo slopping trough, and people like us will be using Linux devices to access federated sites like this one.
This is true but is only applicable as long as manufacturers still allow alternative OS to exist. It sounds crazy now but the idea of not being able to use an alternative is something that manufacturers are clearly toying with (see the x elite laptops with locked boot loaders, hp secureboot, etc).
They’ve seen the control they can exert over users with mobile devices and they want that across the spectrum. Then it goes back to a point I made in another comment; Linux/foss users can and will still exist but they will be restricted to ancient hardware that prevents them from working on certain tasks. This already occurs: look at a true foss idealist that will only use hardware that can run coreboot/libreboot. You’re generally running hardware well over a decade old at this point. If you want to work on any computationally complex task (ml models, high poly 3d modeling, anything requiring a modern discrete gpu really), you’re out of luck unless you compromise your ideals
The thing is Linux users and other power users think “if manufacturers lock the bootloader there will be a huge outcry and people won’t buy it”. And there is truth to that, there will be a lot of noise online. But most users won’t care and they’ll still buy the stuff. And apple/google/hp/lenovo/etc will push/pay their buddies at facebook/reddit/etc to downplay the discussion/outrage so it will blow over quick and become a normal thing. Then all it takes is a new dmca extension or modification and now overriding a manufacturer lock on a bootloader is an illegal modification
Right but you can still build your own PC. I already don’t bother with a laptop or any of that other garbage because they are just worthless tech garbage. Sure, the new MacBook/Chromebook/etc will be locked down, but they’re already a bitch to get a different OS running on so I’d argue we’re already there.
Essentially what would be required is DRM from Intel or AMD on their CPUs to prevent you from ultimately installing whatever OS you want, and I don’t think that fits their business model. I think they just want to make a bunch of money selling overpriced silicone, and don’t need control of the platform. Sure, your software will be a few steps behind the cutting edge corpo stuff, but you make it sound like people will be trapped on their 2010 Thinkpad. You can still have a high powered computer, you just have to be part of a different ecosystem.
Linux is not on mobile. And before anyone says “Android/LineageOS is Linux”, 1) Android is proprietary (and AOSP is not a real substitute for Android), and 2) LineageOS isn’t a substitute for Android without microg, and also isn’t Linux (last I checked, app development on LineageOS REQUIRED ANDROID STUDIO for the signing bullshit).
Now, if anyone says “Linux is on mobile, I daily-drive my PinePhone!” (and is actually being honest), then congratulations and I respect the hell out of you but you’re more of a masochist than Drew Devault and that makes you a unicorn.
Torrenting is less common but thats because most piracy is just streaming now. Its more profitable to host a streaming site, youre less likely to get a virus streaming compared to torrenting now, and its easier to access and find.
The less likely to get a virus point is arguable but I get what you’re saying
Really the thing is private trackers kind of put themselves out of the game. Like let’s look at a common path to get to some of the more well known coveted private trackers:
Do an irc interview about the rules and culture of a site with a staff member. You will have to study, sit in irc for god knows how long for someone to be available, and pass. Alternatively, know someone already in who trusts you and will burn an invite
Then you’re in. Now you have to upload music, which is much less commonly pirated bc music streaming isn’t fucking stupid and fragmented these days (though pricing keeps rising so maybe we’ll see a return). To get to the point where you can be invited to sites that would actually have movies and tv and games and shit you need 25 gigs uploaded and a 0.7 ratio minimum. Also the sites been around a while and the people on it are meticulous music collectors so finding something to upload is actually challenging, when you do you have to make sure you meet the strict guidelines, etc
That’s a lot! Like learning to use a torrent client is easy. Asking a 2024 tech dummy to learn irc? Come on. At the same time the filter is needed, the people who truly want to be there are what make the communities so great, and the vetting process is what keeps feds out (for the most part they go for low hanging fruit sites like rarbg)
Try the 70s.
That was when VHS and cassette tapes started to hit the market and there was no copy protection on those. Following that, people copied floppy disks enough that they had to make that “dont copy that floppy” jingle.
There was a brief period with the switch to digital and CDROMs where piracy stopped, but then CD burners hit the market and it started again.
It turns out in every era, copyright is a sham. Information in its natural state is free - our legal system tries to change that.
The laws around copyright are designed to prevent citizens from doing things.
The laws around human rights are designed to preventing the government from doing things.
The later expands your agency while the former restricts it.
Yall left a big ol’ giant hole in your simplification about these itty bitty things that have an equally outsized impact on all of our lives :
Corporations.
Does this make Marion Stokes this most prolific pirate of all time?
sony v universal still stands, afaik. fair use.
even at that scale, she did it privately for non-commercial purposes.
Anon: 2007
The music industry ca. 1981:
Also the book piracy that existed in universities through photocopying and sharing pages.
This is making a comeback with scanning.
Amazon was the place to buy manuals(art,hobby, do it yourself etc.). Now authors have pulled their books from print and expecting people to sign a subscription on patreon. Now there are sharks overpricing any remaining physical print second hand by 2000%.
pirates have scanned these books and selling access to uploaded jpgs for a fraction of what the manual would have cost had it just stayed in print.