The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee...
pandasecurity.com
The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee...::We analyze a new study where the EUIPO suggests online piracy is on the increase within the European Union.
Love how it doesn’t mention the fact that services are getting objectively worse content as they stretch thin, are increasing their prices across the board, and cracking down on password sharing which was previously touted as a benefit.
Exactly. There's too many platforms, not enough quality content on any one of them, and weaponized greed. Worse, these streaming services have "inspired" every asshole executive out there to make everything under the sun a subscription model.
The anti-piracy measures drive me to piracy, personally. There's no technical reason I shouldn't be able to stream 4K in Firefox, but Netflix won't let me. I have to jump through hoops just to get 1080p, even. Same with most other services. I pirate shit I'm already paying for.
Have done this several times for content on Disney+. I have an ultrawide, HDR1000 display. The movie I'm trying to watch is in 21:9 and available in HDR. Why in God's name are you delivering it in SDR and in a letterboxed 16:9 which is in turn pillarboxed on my display?!
This so much. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford enough streaming services to cover the majority of what I want to watch (although that's changing for the worse over time). I just want to pipe them all through Kodi or some other software into a unified interface that is media source agnostic, that can also stream the content in the best quality available for my screen.
At that point the content is already paid for, I don't need to use your own individual reinvention of the interface that inevitably focuses on pushing uninteresting content instead of making it as easy as possible to continue what I've already started watching or to find what I want.
Also none of the apps have any kind of audio equalizer or range compression, so if you don't have an audio receiver then you're doomed to constantly turning up the volume for spoken sections. Absolute minimum viable product garbage.
For sure. Why should I suffer umpteen different video interfaces designed by separate entities who aren't really in the business of designing highly functional video interfaces? I'd much rather play everything in
mpv, which I can configure exactly the way I like it. I can adjust brightness and contrast, set up specific keyboard/mouse controls, adjust subtitle font/size/color/style/location, and I can even enable motion interpolation if I want to. I can fix those stupid hardcoded letterboxes with a keystroke. I can monomize or normalize audio. That's because mpv's entire reason to exist is to be a highly functional video player, and it's open and extensible.Fuck your proprietary bare-minimum video interfaces. Even YouTube lags like 5-10 years behind the state of the art for video players, and most other services lag years behind YouTube.
Do one thing and do it well!
Fully agree. Shit makes me so mad.
It's the same reason most car infotainment centers are awful. They aren't software companies so their software sucks
Yeah, honestly same. There isn’t much I’m not already paying for, but being able to watch it all in one app (Stremio) is so much nicer.
The push for more money, and no more password sharing, is just making me think more about cutting those services, but that wouldn’t stop me watching.
Enshittification. Every human who uses computers on a daily basis needs to understand this word.
Yep, the only thing I still pay for is Spotify, and as soon as they start carving up music into different exclusivity contracts I'll go back to piracy for that as well. I'm willing to pay $10-$20/month for one streaming service, but they want you to spend like $200 on services you don't even end up watching.
It's just greed, the way the streaming executives talked during the writers strike showed that. You could easily find an equilibrium that works for content creators and consumers, but the middlemen just want too much.
Or vanish.
Google play music merged into YouTube music.
I already had a Plex server so I just rolled.my.own music server.
And then with the emergence of plexamp... I don't need a streaming music service now.
Have they gotten better? I've not had great experience with PMS handling music, even when using PlexAmp, but I last tried maybe about a year ago.
Oh absolutely. Especially with Plex pass. Plexamp is a quality product.
My biggest pain points were that it seemed to do some kind of analysis (reading file information) on my library all the time, which wasn't good when I have it on a cloud drive. Guess I'll try it out again and hope they fixed all that :)
What I wish it had was something similar to Roon which would be a Spotify integration. If I search for something and I don’t have it in my personal library, let me just stream it from my streaming service subscription.
This fear is why I'm careful to maintain my old man MP3 and CD collection because I can't fully trust a business.
I think streaming music will be good for awhile at least, somehow, the fucking music industry got it right with streaming (At least on the consumer side, the artist side has been in trouble for some time now (esp with Spotify)). Most big services have most things and a handful of niche services to handle the gaps for the most part.
Xbox Game Pass otoh for Games is a wildcard, who knows where that shits going to end up lmfao people should get in on it now while it's still good lol
I mean, they're already doing exclusivity contracts for podcasts (eg. Joe Rogan on Spotify only), it's going to be a small leap to go to artists being exclusively on one service, and before you know the labels will all start their own streaming service, so you have to have different apps for Sony BMG artists, another app for indie artists, etc.
The enshittification is mostly pushed by wall street, who want instant bigger profits, and they're happy to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs in the process. Spotify is not immune to those pressures.
That plus actively removing older shows
No new ones..
Star Trek prodigy
People aren't also willing to spend as much on Oreo's due to inflation so it's also probably that if theres a game or movie everyone's playing, sailing the seven seas is tried and true...and free.
Exactly. That’s when I went back to the seas. My family across 2 states uses Netflix and I already paid for the $20/month high tier. When they told my sister that it wasn’t about to be more expensive, I put my foot down and said I’m gonna setup a plex/overseer box on my on PC. It’s been working mostly alright.
The shift really proves that Gabe Newell was right and that piracy is a service issue and that, for a time, the many services available were worth paying for.
It was honestly really crazy to me when I was excited to see a game on sale, only to remember how I used to pirate everything. Steam has made it legitimately easier to buy games in so many cases.
I sometimes still do pirate games, especially if it's from a publisher I don't respect or the cracked version is known to run better, but I buy almost all of my games now days.
I've actually started setting up a home server for pirated movies and shows and getting rid of the couple streaming services I have.
I know a lot of people idolize him, and that's probably not healthy, but he just gets it. Provide value and convenience for consumers, and consumers will stick around. Be an inconvenience while squeezing consumers for money, and we'll leave with a parrot on our shoulders and a one-finger salute.
That's what happens when you're not beholden to shareholders.
He's a weird case, Steam has always been good for pc gaming and Valve releases nothing but polished games without anything predatory.
He just seems to be interested in maintaining a successful business instead of squeezing more money out of people constantly.
Ehh... for as great as Steam and Gaben are, TF2 really seems to have been the catalyst for all the ridiculous lootbox microtransaction mess we have nowadays.
That shit was coming with or without TF2, even if it was the first (which I don't know if that's the case). WoW gold farmers proved the concept that people are willing to pay for advantages or conveniences in games (and that was just the first game I played where I saw that, I bet it wasn't the first), and buying packages with random content was done by MTG and baseball cards before that. It was inevitable that someone would put the two together.
cough CS2 cough
Counterpoint: Artifact.
(I mostly agree on everything else though)
I honestly forgot about Artifact entirely.
I think Valve would appreciate if everyone forgot about Artifact as well
Ah yes, that's the only reason. Not that streaming services are offering less content and functionality for more money, that can't be it.
I'm sure that economics is part of it. But I think the larger issue is the fact that you need 9 streaming services now just to see the shows you'd want. And then these streaming services are starting to remove the things people paid for. I set up a Plex server and just use that to watch things now.
Corporations don't want competition, they want monopolies. If the good they are selling is in unlimited supply, like music or shows in digital formats are, they create artificial scarcity through exclusivity deals.
Netflix has +9 million users in the past quarter
https://www.statista.com/statistics/250934/quarterly-number-of-netflix-streaming-subscribers-worldwide/
That's not enough growth. It's never enough. It literally can't ever be enough.
So they raise prices and pay for astroturfed articles blaming everything but the executives charged with infinite growth forever.
First thing that came to mind. I want to see back to back to back quarters of falling subscribers
As someone that went initially got back into piracy for the "no you just raised your prices for this one service I only use for this one show anyway, I'll download it instead" reason. I have significantly increased my piracy because it's honestly a much better user experience. For me to easily set sonarr/radarr to grab what I want and have a beautiful and customizable UI/UX like jellyfin to consume that content, which works on all my devices. Fucking Hulu, Disney, Amazon, peacock, max all suck in comparison from a pure UX perspective
The article wonders why would anyone pirate, let us give him the reason:
Is 14 really a thing? Or are you talking about having to buy a new smart device that may or may not be included in your TV and that in any case can be replaced but a separate device?
Yep. Very much. Translated to English it says "Netflix is no longer supported on this device. Visit netflix.com/compatibledevices for a list of supported devices".
This is when hitting the netflix button on the tv remote. Worked until a few days ago.
I'd chuck that up more to "smart TVs are trash".
They have crappy processing power and TV makers support them for the shortest of timespans. I've solved that but turning my smart TV into a dumb screen and an NVidia Shield TV as its brains (NVidia has so far been exemplary in supporting Shield TVs).
I don't disagree that smart TVs are trash, but this wasn't the TV not keeping up, this was netflix deciding that I couldn't use it anymore.
I give them money, why are they making it hard for me to use their product.
These major corps are pulling some absolute bullshit all the time with this kind of stuff. People are frustrated with the rich in general, but I think they don't even comprehend the amount of fuckery that is pulled on us all.
One example, I have an android phone from 2017 that still works great. Luckily the company that made it doesn't go hard on planned obsolescence seemingly, but I was curious about replacing it, and new comparable phones are more expensive than mine was, have more bloatware preloaded, and lower specs to top it off. To be fair though they do have incredible new cameras.
I wouldn't mind using proprietary apps if they weren't so fucking horrible to use.
Goddammit, if you're going to force me to install your shitty program just because I want to watch a show you own the license to, at least put a semblance of effort into the UI...
I forgot to add
Also wanna add:
As a person who loves watching movies with subtitles, this is why I'm canceling Amazon Prime. The fuckers literally won't offer me English language subtitles for some flicks because I Iive outside the US.
I don't care if the movie itself is in English, why the hell can't I watch with subtitles in the same language as the film itself? Holy fuck.
Probably because the subtitles have their own copyright separate from the film itself and Amazon likely doesn't have the license to the English subtitles outside of the USA. It wouldn't surprise me, music lyrics have their own separate copyright from the recording after all.
The copyright system is the biggest problem here. It simply isn't fit for purpose in the digital age, unless that purpose was to benefit a handful of legacy mega corps while harming independent content creators and stifling culture across the globe.
Had no idea subtitles could be copyrighted separate from the film/media they're subtitling (but, it does make sense when you think about it).
I agree with you completely: the current US copyright system is a joke that serves little purpose (in today's media scape).
And rip watching a Christopher Nolan Movie without subtitles nowadays
Yep, exactly.
Fuck you - if I'm paying to watch, I should get the very basic of features. Piracy is literally a better user experience right now.
And don't forget about the ads.
You forgot about stuff that just gets taken down one day.
Edit: oh you added it in a comment.
There are a few what I'll term magnet shows on each streaming service. They want you to pay for the service for the magnet shows and then stick around and watch other half-baked filler garbage or a seasons of a show they cancelled before giving them any hope of finishing their story arc.
Most streaming networks have abundant garbage content I'd never want to watch, knockoffs of other shows, and global content that's often of soap opera quality with subtitles.
They also (on purpose) often offer no way to filter to the things you want to see other than search, and search is often misleading or terrible too.
It's basically a race to the bottom just like Amazon. Junk programs created for pennies pretending to match your results.
The whole thing is a crap fest that's quickly becoming worse than the cable network structure it replaced.
No, thank you.
True I start a new movie or a series but can't see it past a few minutes.
If you go through the front page, there is usually only 100 shows the platform is pushing, ad nauseam. Like the algorithm is maybe some shows it thinks youll like, or shows they want to astroturf. I would really like a way to go into the dregs, the shit, the stuff netflix thinks is at the bottom of my metrics. Granted, piracy doesn't do this either (lol how would that even work? I put everything on that server myself) but I would have considered keeping my subscription if they did.
I can't be bothered to pull back all the layers of naive optimism in just these two sentences.
Yep. Stop making shit deals and 100 different services to subscribe to and people will go back to paying for things. Gaben is the only smart one.
Until this month I paid more than $100 for multiple streaming services. I finally got pissed off when something I wanted to watch was no longer available. Instead I went and torrented it and canceled 90% of the services. It’s time to go back to self streaming everything.
Welcome back
Hmmmmm. Let's see here.
People don't like cable, because it's too expensive and inconvenient
People start pirating
People like having 2-3 streaming services that show everything, without ads, for much cheaper even combined than cable. They stop pirating.
People don't like having 20-30 streaming services that show only a little in each service, NOW WITH ADS!?!?! and that become MUCH more expensive than cable ever was.
People start pirating again......
I wonder what happened?!?!
"The more you tighten your grip big tech, the more users will slip through your fingers"
Not after we demonstrate the power of raising prices princess!
Yeah, it's reall not even about the prices. It's just so inconvenient to go between all those apps, and then login forgot your password, rest, 2FA so i have to get up from my couch and grab my phone.
All these paid services could be totally free from a monetary perspective and I still wouldn't sign back up for them. It's a worse service than cable TV used to be at this point.
The thing that is killing me is Netflixs attempt to crack down on password sharing.
I share an account with a few family members. If I want to watch a program on Netflix, which my brother pays for, I have to call him up to get the unlock code. He has a newborn and sleeps weird hours.
I end up just pirating it myself.
It's almost like making it nearly impossible to watch what we want and, at the same time, octupling our bills, while also increasing the cost of each would, somehow, force people into the desperation of piracy. Huh. Who woulda thunk it.
Let's not forget random pulling of content so that you can never tell if what you want is actually on any given service at any given time. This was the final straw that led me to rebuilding my own media collection.
I 100% believe this. The video streamers are getting too greedy and pushing out too much subpar content. When it was affordable and easy to find what you want streaming was great. Now it's expensive and stuff in on 12 different platforms.
Also most of what I watch is older so everyone on the creative and production side has been paid the only ones making money at this point are the studio fat cats.
Ads. It's all because of ads. There is a low tolerance by way more people now, and piracy is more convenient than putting up with platforms that can't build a UX to save their lives, and then put in ads. Fuck em, let them die.
I disagree in that I don’t necessarily think all of the content is subpar. But making everything on a different service and each service continues to jack up its prices makes it very difficult to justify subscribing to any one of them. Like, I’m never gonna subscribe to peacock even though it has a few things I’d watch on it, that’s ridiculous.
Everything doesn’t have to be a different service, studios are just being extraordinarily greedy.
There's a bizarre parallel to picking a hospital in America while you're unconscious in a merc ambulance.
Imagine country where whereever ambulance brings you everything will be 100% covered by national insurance.
Wow that wording, trying to make pirating sound like an evil crime lol. I feel no moral negativity pirating. In fact, my conscience is clean and I feel morally obligated to, considering how expensive they are making services.
I think reading between the lines is the real story: when they get greedy, pirating puts them I check and causes pricing to become affordable and people stop pirating. Once people are not pirating, greed increases and pirates have to return to put them in place again.
In conclusion... we need pirates to balance things out, this pirating is a necessity in our modern age..
You are welcome everyone, I am doing my part for myself and I am doing my part for you.
Another reason why piracy is needed is to prevent pieces of culture from being erased from history to satisfy some perverse corporate accounting requirements.
Fucking rights
They call "refusing to be exploited" piracy. Generally industries where there are huge monopolies like media, groceries, and other such thing are most sensitive to this because they lack the ability to deal with outside pressures any more.
Vilifying people fighting back is the cheapest way to manage this.
I'm kinda looking forward to seeing what replaces things like Netflix and Spotify
Yeah it should be interesting. I'm also looking forward to see what new trackers come into relevance as the userbase increases.
Redacted as the only viable music tracker is a real shame. Just like everything else, we need more options not less.
I really felt like all the good stuff was only on private trackers the last few years. A few of the biggest public trackers also went down, that certainly didn't help, but even before that I had a hard time finding some older, rarer things. If piracy gets bigger, I hope to see more reliable public trackers again with bigger catalogues.
My 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️ brother
I have subscriptions (and shared subscriptions) to... seven services that I can think of in 20 seconds.
Yet, time and time again, I try to figure out if what I want to watch is covered by one of them (not trivial to figure out), and end up falling back on piracy probably around 50% of the time.
Now that every fucking content owner has its own subscription plan, it makes subscriptions pointless because it's spread so damn thin.
Justwatch.com, my dude.
Doesn't always work. I'm not in the US. So shows that it says are on a service, aren't in my country, or if it's on a service, it doesn't know because it's on that service in my country and not the us. For me, Justwatch.com, has been more miss than hit. Sometimes, asking google works, but some services that are available in my country won't integrate with Google in my country, but if use a VPN for the us on my Android TV it loads all the US features and the integration starts working and everything is correct. So yeah, unless you're in the US, the experience of figuring out where it is what you want to watch is more miss than hit.
Oh yes this is so true. I have stopped trying to research where each is that I want to watch; if it's not on netflix or prime video I just download it.
Justwatch has localised results for me in Australia. If your browser is anonymized it may default to US listings. You can change it in the URL path using your country code, e.g. instead of justwatch.com/us/ I go to justwatch.com/au/ and it's been totally accurate
I use the mobile and tv app.
Cancel all those subs man. They are eating your money without return. It's better to download the specific show you want to watch.
I believe it was Gabe Newell who said the best way to avoid piracy is by making legitimate purchasing easier and/or better.
In the early history of streaming services, you could get access to a lot of content in a straightforward way for not much money. People started doing that instead of pirating. The corporations got greedy, they made the services worse and increased the price to the point that piracy is preferable again.
And I don't have the least amount of sympathy. Yarr matey.
And Steam is a show of success
With the advent of self hosted streaming services and the arr services the option is even easier now. If 1 in 20 ppl are motivated/tech savvy that's 20 streaming products not being paid for.
What would be the technology behind my own streaming platform?
So far I do it very old school with data on my Nas and a software that catalogs and plays over Lan only.
I thought, im the only one left using this method. Not anymore
Look into the arr suite of apps, radarr + sonarr + prowlarr to manage your library and jellyfin/PleX to play it. Get overseer for request management. You can set it up for remote access from anywhere, have people make requests on overseer and have the data available a few mins later. It's amazing when it's set up.
what a shitty take. Well, anyone who has better memory than only one month back can realize that the reason the people turned to piracy was that they raised their prices. There is no loss caused by piracy. They only missed potential gains. And the reason they raised their prices were not because they were loosing money. Was because they needed to "grow infinitely". If the free market evangelists are right, the free market will self regulate and the prices will go down in order to attract back the lost customers lol
Guess what’s also been increasing? Prices.
Guess what also has refused to go up? Wages
Guess what also been increasing? The number of streaming platforms trying to out bid their competitors. You know what else is increasing? The number of streaming platforms going after account sharing and they wonder why people are going back to piracy. Piracy is king and no one will be able to stop it.
That’s what I’m worried about….billionaires will convince governments (who haven’t banned them yet) a “think of the children act” which will ban VPNs
VPN is basically just a encrypted channel between 2 systems, while one of them forward traffic to the internet and unless they block/filter every encrypted connection, there is no way to block it at mass...
Way too many businesses rely on VPNs to ban them.
Oh you sweet child. They only need to ban them for citizens, not for business / shareholders.
Well….how does China and Russia and other authoritarian shitholes that have banned them operate?
I don't know about China, but Russia has not banned VPNs. They banned specific VPN services. I'm guessing it's similar in China. And there are plenty of grey and black market VPN services for people in those countries to use. And they use them.
Well, at some point people will remember that it's possible to share things via USB stick or a drive.
Man, those were the times... Borrowing hard drives from friends, burning CDs, sharing lists of who has what...
Yeah, it's scary. France and the UK are already well on their way to heading down that path.
I just cancelled my Netflix that I had for like 10 years. Total shit nothing to watch.
Now there’s a million services, everything is plus. Paramount+, Disney+, Nutsack+
Even if I wanted to pay for all that shit, everyone has their own shitty app I have to install and configure and have a login and fuck you.
It’s just easier for me to torrent what I want.
Thing is, I’m not averse to paying for good content, I like to support the creators. But
When every show is on a different app and they’re all $15 a month…buying a couple hard drives and saving every show just makes more financial sense and I don’t need 15 different login credentials so fuck off yarrr
I think the + is to streaming services what the i prefix was to electronic junk.
Nutsack+ 🤣🤣
I pay for them still. But still download and watch on Plex. Oh shit I meant a friend of mine does this.
Services get worse so piracy gets more popular.
Yeah. 2 things stop piracy, a fair price and quality content. We don't have either.
We had it, then the corporate greed came in. But hey Netflix subscribers have risen again.....fun...
Yup. The enshitification of .. everything.
This is a crazy thing to write. Every streaming service already has their prices set at whatever they think will maximize profit. If they raise prices in response to piracy, they'll push even more people away.
If anything, piracy will serve as competition, and it will cause the streaming services to lower prices.
for shows sold exclusively to one streaming service then piracy is indeed the only competition
Wow they're just straight up calling it theft now. They can't even pretend to understand the difference.
Piracy doesn't compete on price. Maintaining a server, Internet, and VPN access has a cost beyond the technical knowledge needed to set it all up.
Piracy competes on service. Sick of ads? Sick of your favorite shows disappearing from your services? Tired of the Disney vault (they have the content but won't let you stream it any more) problem? Can't find the thing on any service? Like obscure and rare content? Like fan edits? Like to curate collections and playlists? Like HD on any and every device you own? Like easy offline content syncning for when you're traveling to a spot with spotty Internet? Like sharing your library with friends and family? Tired managing multiple streaming subscriptions and navigating the content to find what you really want to watch? Your friendly neighborhood pirate community has a solution for you. Lower prices aren't even in the top ten reasons lots of people pirate.
It's not just streaming services that have turned to shit. Society as a whole has been enshittified because shareholders and directors are chasing the dollar.
Reddit started charging out of their butt for API access, and had killed off 95% of third party apps in the process.
YouTube is downright unusable without a Premium subscription or uBlock Origin. Every content creator meanwhile risks demonetization if their videos are too kid-friendly or too inappropriate, and now have to fill half their videos with endorsements for shitty mobile games like Raid: Shadow Legends if they want to break even.
Porn sites are now astroturfed by e-girls shilling their $20/month OnlyFans pages.
Online dating apps are now a carbon copy of one another, are owned by an oligopoly of big corporations and charge you the same price of four WoW subscriptions for basic features like unlimited swipes, seeing who liked you, etc.
Even real life sucks now. Enjoy paying 70% of your monthly income to pay off some filthy rich landlord's mortgage while the rich continue to snap up properties, all while the wealthy continue to brainwash sheep into voting against their best interests.
It was a veritable new Dark Age for humanity.
A symptom's a symptom.
I don't think sex workers being paid better is comparable to what megacorporations have been doing to the internet for the past 10 years.
Porn sites offer the best free user service on the Internet with the exception of Wikipedia. I don't know what you mean with that point, honestly.
Xnxx has 1 uhm... YouTube would call it shelf... with egirl ads on the first page of your search and that's it. If you proceed directly to page 2, you will never see it. I don't even block that element, it's easy to ignore.
It's tot BUY SOME SHIT! ally nothi BUY SOME SHIT! ng to do BUY SOME SHIT! with th BUY SOME SHIT! ere be BUY SOME SHIT! ing way to BUY SOME SHIT! o many a BUY SOME SHIT! ds to ma BUY SOME SHIT! ke stuff wa BUY SOME SHIT! tc BUY SOME SHIT! ha BUY SOME SHIT! bl BUY SOME SHIT! e.
I wish I could up AND downvote this, as it gets the point across well, but MAN do I hate that point. Also, the fact that EVERYTHING has its own streaming service now... No, I'm not paying you a subscription to watch 1 show. If you dont want to give the main streaming players a cut, just sell each season as a oje time purchase
Pirate's all predicted this. It was inevitable that streaming services would turn into Cable TV. The only plus side aside from prime is lack of advertising. Yet here we are again. "I am inevitable."
Yeah. It was nice having a period of time where obtaining things legitimately wasnt a pain or felt like you were being milked for all you were worth though... Oh well, yo ho it is!
Man was this very hard for me to read. Still up voting it, though
what a ride
Is a lobotomy needed to become a lobbyist?
1.) Article claims w/o any kind of source/data, that people cannot afford subscriptions 2.) Article warns that the big services have to raise their prices soon, because of losses made by piracy, which according to 1.) is caused by people not having enough money for the subscriptions
The article doesn't mention the shareholders, which get billions of wins by milking the subscribers stupid enough to sign up for the bullshit. ... oh, but the article mentions the poor artists/working people, which loose money because of online piracy. I almost forgot about the recent strikes, because the people actually producing the content don't get shit from the companies/shareholders.
Seriously, I'll cancel my last subscription right now, because I am feed up giving my money to shareholders, companies and lobbies who buy politicians and laws.
Seriously... This told me all I needed to know about how objective this article was going to be. Stopped reading right there.
Absolutely. Spotify doesn't exactly pay artists very well. It's better than nothing, but Spotify is wealthier than the vast majority of artists it profits from.
Who is Panda Security?
Panda Security is a Antivirus company.
They are owned by Watchguard which sells physical firewalls, MFA and Endpoint Security (which includes technologies like EDPR or Endpoint Detection and Response)
Wiki page for them. Pretty sure all you need to read is the warnings at the top of the page to know all you need about who they are.
They really should make those warnings expanded by default on mobile. And the last one should be first.
It's like no longer having one cheap and convinient way of seeing content makes people rather pirate things than paying 7 different platforms each one more expensive than the next and all of them trying to mess with you and your wallet in new and unexpected ways.
I'm literally paying money to pirate content. $20 a year and I can stream anything from Netflix, apple, Disney, HBO, etc through a single app. So much less hassle.
Oh? What are you paying for?
HD, free version tops out at 720
I think they were wondering what service you use
Ah, yes that would make sense lol
Don't like to mention it in comments in case it gets too much attention and shut down. I can pm people if interested.
I would like that PM if possible. Just got 3 emails in the last 2 weeks about various services raising their pricing
I'm interested! Can you PM me? I currently use an IPTV service that's just okay.
Streaming services are becoming increasingly fragmented, prices are increasing admist an inflationary environment, their service sucks.
But hey, online piracy is increasing, what a surprise!
The real conclusion they are pushing is "blame the rising costs on your friends that download the stuff you pay for." For a propaganda piece, that's not a bad angle to go for.
The convenience of streaming services disappeared, this is just a natural consequence.
Nice
Can I get a 🧲 in the comments
I would spend 300$ supporting piracy services before giving 20$ to Netflix
🧲
That's the funny thing, isn't it? Some people (not me, of course) probably spend a good chunk of change on seedboxes, hosting, Plex/Emby, etc., more than the cost of single subscription. But they get so much more for that money.
Plus, at this point it's archival, as there's no legit way to get tons of media now. Even if you "own" something digitally, companies can zap it from your library.
I see piracy as a great benevolence on the internet. There is one person who I've gotten dozens of Jeopardy episodes from, no one else really uploads them much. They are great quality, with subtitles, posted day of release sometimes. What does the poster get from this in return?
Yup. If I wanna watch the dub of From The New World, I can buy it secondhand for like $70 on Amazon, because nobody streams it. If it weren't for the sketchy but not technically illegal sites I use to watch anime, I'd have never seen one of the best ones. I'd be stuck watching shonen trash, because that's all that these sites seem to have in stock
Hmm, wonder why. Couldn't be price increases on everything in existence.
And password share cracking on Netflix
This is what happens when you increase pricing, add advertising on top of increased pricing, remove your content from competitors and create your own additional platform, all while decreasing the quality and amount of content.
Speedrunning the demise of cable tv!
Often, piracy genuinely gives you a superior experience to the regular paid method. Lots of big service providers have been fucking us over in the past few years as well. So it's no surprise.
Glory to the piracy community!
Piracy is a service problem.
What service is $SHOW on? Doesn't matter, it's already in your favorite piracy site.
All I need is one VPN subscription.
The cost of rent/mortgages is going up, the cost of power is now higher than ever, and the cost of essentials (such as food and medication) is nearly double.
People are ditching streaming services because they can no longer afford them, and with price increases there it only makes things worse.
Piracy is the natural fallback, especially in a market where ownership has degenerated into rental. At this point, streaming might follow cable as folks lose access and realise the folly of rental over ownership. Piracy offers a superior service with a superior experience, and the rhetoric of "tHinK oF THe cREatIVes" is wearing thin in the public eye.
No, robbery is theft under the threat of violence. Theft requires an intent to deprive the owner of their possession. Copyright infringement is not theft.
Businesses do not have a right to peoples' money.
Criminal copyright infringement might attract prison time, but that has a fairly high bar, and is typically focused on profiting from piracy. Most copyright infringement is not a crime, but a civil offense - and it's only because of extensive lobbying by greedy businesses that crimes have been established on the books.
Outside of the US, copyright infringement can only attract actual damages, ie the proveable loss in income. Given that you can't easily prove that someone would've paid for the things they pirate, outside of the US there never really have been big cases of people downloading things being charged and facing significant fines.
Of course, it has nothing to do with the quality of these services going down as their prices go up...
It was simple for me, two things:
Not to mention services like Netflix cracking down on account sharing. I will keep it if I can share it with my parents and they can buy a streaming service and share it with me. But if it's just for me, it's not worth spending the money on. I'd rather just pirate the one or two shows I want to watch on Netflix, or sign up for a month, watch something that looks interesting then unsubscribe.
This actually mattered to me too. Plus, my parents were still using and enjoying the recently-cancelled DVD program so that was just another nail in the coffin.
Not even that, I remember 15 years ago universities saying that people had 3 devices on average, yet today Netflix only allows you 2 on their basic package. Now, people almost certainly use more than that. If I can't move from one device to another conveniently, then what's the point of paying?
By all means, limit simultaneous access between devices, but locking me to so few is just punitive. Who wants to pay for punishment?
I've started to pirate games again, which I never saw a reason to in 15 years. Simply because 2 hours refund window isn't enough for the crap they sell now. Performance from hell and half assed story after you left the tutorial.
Gamepass kind of stopped me a bit on that, but it's a subscription and only a matter of time till there's competition with exclusives and increased price.
Games also got too expensive, there's more competition than ever and I earn less money than my parents used to, I simply can't pay that much, yet the games start to cost 90€ upwards. So even if I buy a key, it's still 65€ or more, for an often broken game. No thank you.
Not to mention cracked games let you avoid the company's terrible launcher (looking at you uplay). Steaming pile of unnecessary garbage. I have cracked copies of a lot of the games I own for reasons like that, Pirated games just have a better offline experience in my opinion. Online games are another story.
Tried crusader kings 3 on game pass, I liked the game but every tube after 30min or an hour, the windows drm would have a hiccup and close the game, ended up getting a cracked version, while still paying for the subscription, never had a crash again... fuck this shitty drm.
Crusader kings 3 (just like all other Paradox Games) doesn't even have DRM. You can start the whole game without steam or the shitty PDX launcher, so no idea what you are on about. A "cracked" version is the exact same piece of software.
I just keep playing the same game I've played since 2004 and I'm fine with that.
2015: Share your Netflix between four people, everyone pays $4 per month, have access to 80% of all online content. The interface is shit but you keep up with it because it is cheap.
2023: You pay $20 for Netflix, pay $15 for Disney, pay $15 for Hulu, pay $10 for Amazon Prime, $15 for Discovery, $15 for Paramount, $15 for Youtube, have access to 50% of all online content. The interface is still shit and you wonder why you pay for that shit.
Joe Average: 🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️ and the interface is easier than ever.
My 2013 Highest-End Smart-TV barely works with Youtube and no longer with anything else. But Burning Series still works marvellous. Another thing: "Consuming" pirated content is not "illegal" in Germany. It is a violation of private property which the rights owner can sue in a civil court. But as long as you don't use P2P services where you also upload - which would indeed be a fellony - he can not detect what you do and can not take any action against you - so One-Click-Hosters and Warez-Streaming is totally safe. And if the rights owner could find out about you he could at most send you a cease-and-desist-order with a one-time-fee of at max $100 because it is a minor incident. As far as I know there was never a user of Warez-Streaming who paid anything.
The only bad thing: DNS is nowadays filtered at the big Telcos and Providers which means I have to change the DNS inside my Routers to Cloudflare and Google. Which are a lot faster anyway.
I was always wondering why so few people don't complain about the interface. It's abysmal. An absolute minimum of functionality in an unintuitive layout that's always changing. What the absolute fuck. And all streaming services adopted it.
I watch streaming stuff on my CRT TV from back in the 90s. Fire stick + HDMI to RCA. I'm not really sure why you bring up old smart TVs. You can do most anything with a Fire stick, or similar.
True, but it's annoying my old smart TV isn't smart anymore. It's just a regular TV with a chromecast now.
I've never wanted a smart TV to begin with. I basically stopped having a choice in the matter if I wanted an HDTV though.
I mean, if people can't afford to get the content they want, and you make shitty products with limited content, then piracy is the only way to get some of the content. So why not just get all of it that way, especially since the services are more user unfriendly than pirating is inconvenient.
Stremio isn't perfect, but with the Torrentio plugin it has been going great. I also sometimes find content with qBitorrent and the Search plugin. It's just so easy to find what I want at the quality I want to watch.
I get movies and TV shows from the digital high seas because it’s easier, and I openly admit this with my real name on my Lemmy profile.
Currently, I'm subscribed to four streaming platforms: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Crunchyroll, and Disney+. Despite this, I resort to pirating every piece of content I watch.
The simplicity of searching a title on Radarr or Sonarr and clicking 'add' vastly outshines the cumbersome process on legal platforms.
These sites are all flawed, tend to harbor more spyware than Windows and present a usability nightmare compared to the streamlined interface of Jellyfin.
In terms of ethics, my conscience is clear. If a movie or TV show isn't available on the platforms I subscribe to, it's a clear sign they aren't interested in my money.
I see absolutely no problem with paying for what I watch; financial constraints aren't the issue. The crux of the matter lies in the user experience, which is undeniably superior and hassle-free on the open waves of the digital ocean.
That's always been my validation for pirating stuff that isn't available in my region.
I'm old school and just use a private tracker... then plex everything to my TV. I tried using sonar but my dumb ass couldn't set it up...
It's awesome that so many people are using things like the services you mention, but even in the most basic old-school way that I dl things to watch I find it monumentally better than trying to deal with Netflix or whatever other service. I can have the full file, no buffering or compression, with all the settings of VLC no matter what the media is. And with my internet speed I can download things more quickly than I can even get snacks ready.
If executives were hurting financially like everyone else, we would be more sympathetic. Pirate everything! Yes, if I could download a car, I would.
For me it's a price and convenience if we talk about media streaming.
If we talk about games - I am playing on Linux and Alan Wake 2, which I recently pirated, is selling on Epic Games and this store has no Linux support at all. Steam has, but this game is not on Steam. If it were on Steam I'd have probably bought it.
I quit pirating games ages ago primarily because I’ll never play anything if everything is endlessly available to me.
That said, I have a Steam Deck and if I want to play a game that is playable but isn’t available to me. Yarrrrrr.
The older I get, the more I think so too.
I don't really understand. The devs built a version of their game for Linux, but don't actually provide any legal way of playing the game on Linux?
Steam has proton which lets you play Windows games on Linux.
You can use Lutris, Heroic Launcher, Bottles, or just plain WINE as well but for a lot of people the easiest way they know is to just add a non-steam game to steam.
Probably just using proton
Lutris?
Just wanna throw in heroic games launcher. Epic, GoG, and Amazon.
When the world is either ad-supported or locked behind a paywall or, worse, both, this is what will happen.
Adds would be fine if they were unobtrusive, sidebar adds or hell those little bars that scroll across the bottom 10th of the screen like a news headline I'd be fine with those things. Its when the adds actually obstruct my ability to enjoy the product that I take issue.
I'm planning to make a seedbox with AirVPN running 24/7 on a Pi. I've been a big leecher for a while now and I want to give back to the community. Fuck streaming services, if I can't own the product after I bought then it's not worth buying.
If you already have a Linux/BSD server, say Nextcloud, HomeAssistant, etc, you could just use a container instead of a Pi.
Dont use VPNs where you provide personal information as ISPs and law enforcement can and do request data from those VPN services. Use something like Mullvad (and pay with XMR if you are paranoid :)
I already use Mullvad, but I doesn't allow portforwarding anymore, sadly. So my uploads speeds are pitiful. As much as I enjoy Mullvad's simplicity when it comes to accounts, I'll have to pass. The point of the seedbox is to make the files that I download widely available. I don't download a whole lot, and it's usually files with very few seeders. It's often stuff that you can't find on streaming sites.
Is paid ProtonVPN good for this? It's got port forwarding and is apparently private, but I can't tell how willing they would be to provide details to others in a bad scenario.
Source form the EUIPO since it is not linked in the article: https://www.euipo.europa.eu/en/publications/online-copyright-infringement-in-eu-2023
Yeah, because it's easier and cheaper to open up the stream.io app and watch whatever I want whenever I want, than to subscribe to multitudes of platforms of which the majority of the content is garbage.
You probably meant strem.io
Because if there was even one large streaming service that wasn't going through shitification for profit I wouldn't turn to the high seas.
Just one. Untill then I'll pay creators directly and pirate the rest.
Yeah increase prices due to piracy losses, I'm sure that won't cause even more people to pirate
We paid for streaming networks but our rural internet was too shitty to stream, so I'd torrent everything instead. Now we have good internet but all the streaming services are too expensive to sign up for. Just like the old days, the only available solution to see what you want at a fair price is piracy.
Hoist the colors!
Or lack of...
I don't understand the term either when the Jolly Roger is black and white, but the phrase is what was used when talking about raising your real flag (instead of a fake while you got close enough to the other ship to attack).
I downloaded new content for the first time in a while, recently. It's on a streaming service that I don't want (I pay for several).
I'd only been downloading things that I couldn't stream (* Cannibal Holocaust*, for example) for a long time. I stopped downloading for a number of years. Guess what? My bittorrent client still works. After a number of years buying everything on blu-ray discs (and ripping to Plex) and renting from streaming services, I'm on my way to where I was. I'll still pay for convenience. I'm done fucking around with complications.
what a trash article, that honestly sounded AI generated. depriving humans of their journalists income.
Also piracy isn't illegal in many countries. for example in Australia it's a civil offence that must be persued in the courts by the company that alleged the offence occurred.
6$ month newsgroups access, 2$ index access a month, 200$ used tiny pc, jellybin, radarr, sonnarr, subnzbd, prowlar, Jellyseer. 4k on demand stream anything to multiple clients.
I downscaled from a 12u rack and went with a $1600 synology with $230 ram upgrade, $600 in wd red pros and a $450 Intel nuc10 with quicksync and ill still come out ahead in a few years (~30 months) compared to what it would cost to access all streaming content ad free ($95/mo for netflix, prime, dnsp+Hulu bundle, max, paramount, peacock, and appleTV by my count)
Add in sharing with a small group of friends who pitch in small amounts and the convenience of not needing to juggle 8 logins or figure out where a particular piece of content currently lives and piracy really does win.
And that's still a very capable setup. A much more modest Synology can smoothly stream 4k and run *arr app with 2/4gb of RAM.
also, this gives you waaay higher quality than streaming
I haven't had Netflix for a while and was recently shocked at just how awful the quality was. (this was with decent internet + "full HD" subscription)
Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free! Yarr harr fiddle dee dee!
MULLVAD! WIREGUARD! QUANTUM SECURE ENCRYPTION!
Sorry I have Tourette's syndrome.
QBITTORRENT!
ADNAUSEAM! AVAILABLE FOR CHROMIUM BASED BROWSERS TOO!
No more port forwarding with Mullvad. You'll have to use another.
Port forwarding is a security hole.
Torrenting works without it just fine.
Not that I would ever pirate anything. That's would be immoral! After all...Billionaires schemed, lied and stepped on SO MANY people to get to be where they are!
How are billionaires supposed to afford their giant palace-sized mansions or their diamond-dusted platinum-plated Ferraris with ivory interiors if we pirate things?
LOLLIMEWIRE
Man, I forgot how old that was. RIP to the guy as well, such a genuine bloke, IRL moreso than the Sportacus character.
Not for me :)
It's not illegal if you don't get caught
Oh no :c online piracy! ARR BITCH
being a pirate is allright to be
After reading this and some comments, what I've gleaned is that the article is bullshit and piracy truly acts as a competitor in 2 areas - service and content. Many shows are exclusive to a particular platform and therefore the platforms do not need to compete in that area. For the service side of things, I think there has been genuine innovation but it has become stagnant in the last few years and they are referring to old bad practices.
It feels like there is active collusion but perhaps it's just a result of a poorly regulated industry which allows for pseudo-monopolies. My hope would be for regulation mandating that all content must have a second provider, i.e. no more exclusive shows. Give me stranger things on Amazon prime as well. This would force each streaming company to complete for users and still allow the creators to get paid appropriately. I don't know if this would end up making streaming services unviable but it's certainly a lot faster and more consumer friendly.
Would love to hear about the potential downside to this proposal.
The downside would be getting less content and perhaps worse content, as the platforms would not spend the exorbitant levels on content anymore.
Only thing I've been paying for since 2012 has been a VPN. Problem solved.
I’m shocked! Shocked, I tell ya!
really imagine that, services splitting combined prices rising leads to increased piracy. Shocker
we will never be defeated
Never left
Same. I stopped pirating music and games because Deezer and Steam are so convenient, but as long as there isn't a way to watch most movies and shows on a single service, I won't stop torrenting them. The music industry figured it out and all music streaming services have more or less the same catalog; why can't movie studios do the same?
Maybe because producing music costs pennies compared to producing movies and then people are much likely to listen to the same few tracks for days on end, than they are to watch the same movie for days on end. Music studios may not be too jealous about access because they want to let people listen to their essentially free library in as many places as possible. Movie studios are tens of millions in the red for their big productions and don't want to share incomes too widely.
I feel partially responsible for this, and I’m not complaining
Back? From where? looks around to make sure that in same place
Define stealing digital content.
As I heard someone else put it once, "If paying for it doesn't confer ownership, how can pirating it be theft?"
They've confused ownership with renting at some point and just stuck with it
That's perfect. There was a thread not too long ago discussing how Amazon Prime removed am item from someone's media library and gave them $5 as "compensation". Imagine someone coming into your house and taking something they don't sell anymore and leaving 5 bucks on your kitchen counter for your troubles. So many people in this world want their cake and eat it too, you can't have it both ways. If it was agreed that buying a digital asset conferred some type of ownership, they might have an argument now. They made their bed, now they can piss off and do what they want with it, it's theirs to do with as they please because we can never own a part of it.
More like left on the nightstand, because that's getting fucked.
When need to anthropomorphize the shit these companies do more, your example is great. People have 'brand loyalty', but if their favorite brand was an average person in their life 99% would be a massive asshole that kicks sand in people's eyes.
Copying is not theft 🎵
The comments: "Wow this article is trash dont they know [reason] is why I'm back to piracy?"
Me: You do realize what EUIPO does, right? That maybe their paper has a very obvious bias?
Who knew that that whole time, "that" place was the internet.
I'm surprised that so few people decide to follow the spirit of the law and, just, boycott media instead.
Bread and circuses, and peer pressure means you can't just settle for the free circus material you can get at the library or even just for free online.
Im not. Relative poverty nor some moralist rational won't stop most of us from experiencing culture and media we are interested in.
TPB + VPN for many years now, just make sure that killswitch is on, got nabbed once by HBO, fortunately only got a nasty letter, nothing more
Set qbittorrent (i hope that's what you're using) to only use your VPN network interface and there is no need for a killswitch
It makes me sad when I see people are still using TPB. It's worth the extra effort to get into private trackers.
What's wrong with TPB?
:)
Glad to hear this classic may make a comeback
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVXCr6upWUo