“Effectively kill piracy” - Sure guys, this time it’ll work.
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.
Same tbh. I like having a hard data copy of the things I enjoy, and have pride in my offline music library, which has been neatly filed with all the proper metadata tagged on. Now I can boot up Audacious (Linux) or MusicBee (Windows) and pick the genre I’m feeling that day. Or I can go out for a walk with one of the iPods I’ve restored and leave my phone at home.
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.
Just a subscription that had most of the things and wasn’t a straight up abusive experience would be worth a hell of a lot more than $5. Too bad it will never happen.
I gind it kind of ironic that if the streaming services were federated and your subscription applied proportionally to the services where you watched different shows this problem would solve itself
Video services involve bigger files, subtitles availability, streaming load less evenly spread over hours.
But I personally think there are ways involving chunk encryption (one key for many users for the same chunk, but not the same key for everyone ; obviously in the end it’s decrypted and decoded at user’s machine, so opportunity for piracy is not avoidable) and something like bittorrent to make commercial video streaming both convenient for users and not such a technical challenge for distributors.
I would still pirate — but most normie pirates wouldn’t.
…but why?
Why would I spend money on proprietary software that tracks me and sells my data when it’s trivially easy for me to set up a FOSS alternative and actually own the video files myself.
I’m not rich, in fact I’m under the poverty line, even 5$ a month adds up for me. I see no reason to pay to be tracked.
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.
They could take it a step further and threaten penalties for doing illegal things.
Brb connecting to a Chinese VPN so I can access content outside of the US Firewall.
It’ll be super duper illegal
Yeah because pirates are notorious for giving up immediately when you make their jobs a little harder.
Make something people want to buy. That will help more.
EDIT On the anime and manga. Quite a few Japanese companies don’t or refuse to officially release stuff in the west. Most of the ones who do, get fucked with by bad localizers.
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…
But they can make up excuses for their arsenal for whenever they want to ban a site they don’t like from common eyes.
“It was banned because it was pornography”
“It was banned because it was displaying pirated content”
“It was banned because it harmed the public good”
They want control over what the common people can see, hear, say, and think.
Yeah, but for every dictator there’s countless intelligent revolutionaries. Especially when it comes to the internet.
They’re really shooting themselves in the foot trying to deny us/force overcharge the very thing they use to make us complacent in the first place: media.
If they were smart they’d ignore this bill. It would just bring attention to their attempt to essentially seize the internet and for what? For us just to get around it again anyway?
Not to mention if they enforce US VPNs to conform it’ll just result in more currency leaving the country. No wonder this fucking floundering economy is all our fault.
Governing is like holding a marble to the table with your thumb. The more you press down, the more likely that marble is to shoot out and break your shit.
It’s good to know I’m not the only one who thinks this way. That marble analogy is on point. The US is built on mutually beneficial structures. When one cabal of structures starts targeting others, the functionality of the whole country flounders and rebellion is legitimized.
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.
is anime a form of Piracy?! One Piece I guess?!
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.
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?
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.
Not just anime. As a DC comics fan over the last few years, a lot of how WB does business looks pretty fucking stupid to me too. I’m willing to bet that if I visit the DC Universe website right now, it’s still going to say something like “not available in your country but keep checking back because we’re working on it!” just like it did 5+ years ago.
And they’ve been handling (HBO) Max with same sort of ‘urgency’. So we’ll get the movies on the big screen but as far as the tie in series go, maybe they’ll make it to Netflix some time after you’ve already been spoilered everywhere you look online, in the DC fan spaces you visit.
One of the funniest things was when James Gunn shared a clip of some school kids in Philippines (I think) doing the choreographed intro sequence dance for Peacemaker along with the theme song. Before Peacemaker was even legally available there.
crunchyroll is the most infuriating they were a piracy streaming company that went legit
kick the ladder down
This is why you run servers outside of five eye countries
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.
